Never finished, rarely simple - Preoccupations

I’m more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I’ve built since | by Mike Hall | Jul, 2025 | Medium

I don’t normally link to articles on Medium—I respect you too much—and I do wish this were written on Mike Hall’s own site, but this is just too good not to share.

And don’t dismiss this as a nostalgiac case study from the past:

At no point did the constraints make the product feel compromised. Users on modern devices got a smooth experience and instant feedback, while those on older devices got fast, reliable functionality. Users on feature phones got the same core experience without the bells and whistles.

The constraints forced us to solve problems in ways we wouldn’t have considered otherwise. Without those constraints, we could have just thrown bytes at the problem, but with them every feature had to justify itself. Core functionality had to work everywhere, and without JavaScript crutches proper markup became essential.

This experience changed how I approach design problems. Constraints aren’t a straitjacket, keeping us from doing our best work; they are the foundation that makes innovation possible. When you have to work within severe limitations, you find elegant solutions that scale beyond those limitations.

Thoughts on Exerting Control With Media Queries - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Some thoughts on CSS, media queries, and fluid type prompted by Utopia:

We say CSS is “declarative”, but the more and more I write breakpoints to accommodate all the different ways a design can change across the viewport spectrum, the more I feel like I’m writing imperative code. At what quantity does a set of declarative rules begin to look like imperative instructions?

In contrast, one of the principles of Utopia is to be declarative and “describe what is to be done rather than command how to do it”. This approach declares a set of rules such that you could pick any viewport width and, using a formula, derive what the type size and spacing would be at that size.

Can we have custom media queries, please?

I knew that custom properties don’t work in media queries but I had no idea that there was such a thing as custom media queries, which effectively do the same thing.

But this is not implemented in any browser. Boo! This would be so useful! If browser makers can overcame the technical hurdles with container queries, I’m sure they can deliver custom media queries.

Meet Utopia: Designing And Building With Fluid Type And Space Scales — Smashing Magazine

An excellent explainer from Trys and James of their supersmart Utopia approach:

Utopia encourages the curation of a system small enough to be held in short-term memory, rather than one so sprawling it must be constantly referred to.

Responsive web design turns ten. — Ethan Marcotte

2010 was quite a year:

And exactly three weeks after Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers was first published, “Responsive Web Design” went live in A List Apart.

Nothing’s been quite the same since.

I remember being at that An Event Apart in Seattle where Ethan first unveiled the phrase and marvelling at how well everything just clicked into place, perfectly capturing the zeitgeist. I was in. 100%.