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I always thought the CSS will-change property was only for optimizing on slow computers. Turns out it helps the browser hand the work to the GPU, which renders the first frames of an animation better on any device.

Jakub Krehel writes a lot about animation on his site and shows examples (mostly with the Motion library). Recommend!

An article on cross-reviewing design at Samokat. All feedback falls into categories: must fix, could be better, needs testing (now that’s interesting!) and all good.

Paul McGregor’s site and work

p.cv / works.pm

Website

A great article on why designers should stop doing product managers’ jobs and get back to designing. Be the users’ advocates, make aesthetic and innovative things.

The world doesn’t need another mediocre product manager. It needs an outstanding designer.

More design engineering, this time a post by Marcel Wichmann. Loved the beautiful site and the clearly put thoughts.

Here’s a great lead-in to why design engineers exist at all:

It’s hard to find a developer who appreciates design details. And even if you find one, there’s still a noticeable language barrier that puts a wall between the vision and the result.

He also says designers will code, and there’s no avoiding it.

Flora Guo’s beautiful notes, with some good links on design engineers inside too.

Dump from Cosmos

The gladden studio makes games and apps literally on notepads.

In subpixel fonts, a character can be as narrow as 1 pixel, with the letter’s details drawn by the pixel’s RGB components.

Not sure it passes accessibility standards, but it looks cool. Gleb, thanks for showing me!

A jelly volume slider. Written in TypeScript, rendered on the GPU, and looks super tasty.

Playground — a hub of stuff from the Nothing community (widgets, camera presets, EQ settings).

There’s also a vibe-coding service inside for making your own widgets.

Agent Interaction Guidelines — Linear’s principles for designing and running AI agents.

In short: instant feedback, transparency, working with services through a standard interface, a way to stop them, and a human always has the final say.

I want to call out his Vercel case separately.

First, it’s a really solid, concise write-up that covers the design system, processes, identity and special projects.

Second, it links to lots of cool folks from that strong team, designers and developers alike.

Third, it’s just neat, effective design, served straight, no special effects.

Glenn Hitchcock is a design lead who worked at Sketch and Vercel and is now building the startup poolside.

Emil Kowalski, who specializes in animation and smoothness, says you don’t need animations. And shows exactly when.

A beautiful video on the site of an app for working with design tokens.

You probably won’t have an obvious reason to put a nature video background in your site’s footer. Still, it grabs attention pretty well.

If your camera’s sensor picks up infrared and there’s no IR filter, you can take infrared photos, and they’re gorgeous. IR can take over the photo or complement the usual visible light.

Aerochrome is a lovely name for Kodak’s IR film for aerial photography. It’s also the name of the photo style that looks like it was shot on that film.

The author of Making Software writes about fun stuff where design meets engineering. He explains how Gaussian blur and blend modes work, what all that SVG code is, and what makes Framer components good.

The site for the upcoming Making Software manual. By the way, it uses the Departure Mono font.

(?)

Pretty stuff from Voicu Apostol’s Twitter

Framer can now generate components. With props and interactivity. So when are we switching from Figma?

Microcomputers from Clockwork. You build them yourself: megabytes of RAM, AA batteries and gorgeous cases.