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Blog Archive

  • Ian Harry Rutter 1942 – 2026

    It was Dad’s funeral yesterday. I delivered a eulogy, somehow keeping it together. I wanted to recognise Dad here, so this is the speech I gave, remembering him as a wonderful father to my brother and me.

  • What’s new in web typography?

    This is a question I’ll be answering on 12 March at this year’s Web Day Out conference. I’ll be clinging on to the coat-tails of a host of brilliant people who’ll be answering the wider question “what you can do in web browsers today?”

  • Helpful rather than hurtful to the interests of mankind

    In the early 1940s, Directors General of the BBC Cecil Graves and William Haley spoke about the revolutionary technology of radio and television broadcasting. Read what they said and contrast with the opposite approach currently taken by the tech giants.

  • My requests for Interop 2026

    It’s the time of year again when browser makers ask which shiny new features they should implement in preference to fixing outstanding bugs. Despite my cynicism, I’m trying again with these submissions. They’re mostly typographic but in some cases important.

  • Critical questions for design leaders working with AI

    Earlier this year Clearleft brought 40 design leaders together in New York to shape a shared vision for the future of design leadership in a world of AI. The output was a series of critical questions to ask of ourselves and our organisations.

  • I have Unfinished Business

    My good friend Andy Clarke, and I have decided to host a podcast. To be more precise, Andy is resurrecting a podcast and I’m joining him. It’ll be about design, business and agency life. Better than that, though, is our plan for splendid guests.

  • Opening up ‘Unoffice hours’

    I’m now around every Friday morning for a 30 minute chat about anything you like. Book a time slot that works for you.

  • In defence of fluid typography

    This is a response to Miriam Suzanne’s excellent post on Reimagining Fluid Typography. She poses lots of really interesting questions, some of which I disagree with, but most of all they got me thinking… and writing.

  • Another uncalled-for blog post about the ethics of using AI

    I read a couple of posts about AI recently, which seemed to hold opposing ideas, but I agreed with them both to some extent. I’m conflicted, but what I do know is that I find LLMs useful on occasion, but every time I use one I die a little inside.

  • The web on mobile (a response)

    In Jeremy’s recent post, “The web on mobile”, he bemoans the mobile web experience. I had some further thoughts, including: if web apps are to compete with native apps in the affections of users, then they need to be equivalent.

  • Beware the faux bold (and how to fix it)

    I don’t know if it’s just me, or if something’s happened in the last few months, but I keep seeing faux bolds everywhere. The fix is tiny and simple, although frankly the mistake is pretty basic – there’s no excuse for it being so prevalent.

  • What I learned by creating a dark mode toggle

    The short answer is: quite a lot. The long answer covers some accessibility issues, some new CSS, some slightly older CSS, some high level colour theory, a bit about SVGs, and some typography finessing; all of which I’ll cover in this post.

  • Highlighting code syntax in Keynote

    How to quickly get code syntax highlighting in Keynote without having to select each bit of code and changing the colour manually.

  • On the road to recovery

    I was back in hospital today. I needed an echocardiogram to check my heart was OK and that my lungs were clear of blood clots. It was, and they are, so all good. This is the account – primarily for future me – of how I ended up there.

  • The problem with superscripts and subscripts

    A bug in Chromium and Safari makes support of proper superscript and subscript characters problematic. See exactly why, and what you might be able to do about it.

  • A modern approach to browser support

    Recently we realised Clearleft didn’t have a written browser support policy. Rather than fixating on specific browsers, we needed to a policy that considered capabilities and outcomes for users. It turns out there’s an initiative for that.

  • Dao Day 2024 – a regression in the making

    It’s twenty four years to the day since A List Part published John Allsopp’s seminal treatise A Dao of Web Design. But all this time on, we’re still making the same mistakes.

  • Design does not mean innovation

    Design has nothing to do with innovation and little to do with creativity. For the most part it’s there to help de-risk your business, but we tend not to talk about it like that.