CodePen - Instagram.exe

CSS photo effects - a Collection by Lynn Fisher on CodePen

These wonderfully realistic photo effects from Lynn are quite lovely!

Text Effects - a Collection by Mandy Michael on CodePen

Mandy’s experiments with text effects in CSS are kinda mindblowing—I can’t wait to see her at Ampersand at the end of the month!

Design Patterns on CodePen

This ever-growing curated collection of interface patterns on CodePen is a reliable source of inspiration.

CSS only scroll indicator

This is witchcraft. I’ve been deconstructing the CSS to figure out how this works and it’s really clever.

(Hint: try commenting out some of the CSS and see what happens.)

The Great CSS Expansion | Butler’s Log

Web development follows a familiar cycle. First we glue together a solution with whatever we have — JavaScript, image hacks, Flash, anything. Then the platform matures, and CSS or HTML eventually makes that same workaround native. Rounded corners, custom fonts, smooth scrolling, sticky positioning: all of these started as JavaScript-heavy hacks before CSS turned them into a single declaration.

We are in another one of those transition moments. A new wave of long-requested CSS features is finally landing, and many of them are explicitly designed to replace patterns that used to require JavaScript. Not as approximations — as first-class platform primitives that handle the edge cases, run in the right thread, and need zero dependencies.