Lynn Fisher’s Thoughts on Design and the Web
Image and link syntax in Markdown are pretty similar and it can be hard to remember which text goes where. To help me, I have a few handy mnemonics. As a reminder, here is the syntax for a link: [link text](https://website.com) And here is the syntax for an image:  To remember what goes in the square bracket vs. the parentheses, I use alliteration: “Put…
I had kind of a weird 2025 health-wise , so when portfolio refresh season rolled around I knew I wanted to keep things simple and avoid stressing during holiday time. So what might be fun and not too complicated? I usually start by thinking about responsive design and the physical act of resizing the browser. In 2024 , I played around with stretching text; maybe I could expand on that and think…
I was tagged to answer these questions by Zach Leatherman as part of the larger Blog Questions Challenge originally started by ava . I’ll pass the baton to you, dear reader (if you haven’t already done it)! 1. Why did you start blogging? I think I got a taste with LiveJournal in the early ’00s and then around 2007-2010, the best stuff was being shared via personal blogs, so I started one . It…
On 22 May 2019, I write about five years of A Single Div , my favorite little side project. I participate in #inktober but with single div illustrations. I call it #divtober . I have so much fun with the challenge. My enthusiasm for the process grows even more. I get nerd sniped and draw a Tesla Cybertruck with one div which becomes one of my most popular pens on CodePen. I fall in love with conic…
Edit : I let the expensive oss.love domain expire and moved the site to oss.cards The web is always changing and that’s one of my favorite things about it. But there’s a unique sadness in visiting a URL and seeing a 404 where your work once was. I make websites for a living and most of the time it’s for companies. I don’t have any delusion about who owns that work. Don Draper voice : “That’s what…
I finally made an archive of my Twitter feed. It lives at twitter.lynnandtonic.com . I built it with 11ty after processing my downloaded archive into markdown with Tim Hutton’s Twitter Archive Parser . To get things looking and behaving the way I wanted, it ended up being a pretty manual process. It was a bit tedious, but I only planned to do this once. I figured if it was worth archiving, it was…
Another long one, so here’s some jump links if you’re looking for something specific: Concept and inspiration Growing/shrinking Color themes Walking animation Transitions and performance Concept and inspiration For 2023 I was hoping to do some experimenting with view transitions, but they didn’t seem quite ready for me yet. So the ol’ thinking cap went back on. I’ve had a couple responsive ideas…
As of this month, I’ve been working remotely for ten years. My overall opinion is that it is good and I like it! Here are some random thoughts: It’s just really cool to have worked with people from so many different cities and countries. Honestly, I don’t particularly care about cost savings or productivity. Sometimes remote work is slower and more expensive… and it’s still worth doing. I don’t…
Lately for work and for my portfolio, I’ve been making complex SVG illustrations that require a lot of fine-grained control once implemented. Colors change, layers show and hide, and animations run based on various user input. A tedious part of that process has been prepping the SVG after exporting it from Illustrator. Some things are updated manually, some with the RegReplace plugin in Sublime…
I’d been meaning to migrate my blog off wordpress.com for a long time. I set it up in 2009 and while I still love the ease of not having to maintain a Wordpress install, lots of little things were nudging me to move to something else. I didn’t have much control over the code, which became less of a positive the more my skills and competing tech advanced. To make the changes I could, I had to pay…
This 2012 post by Brad Frost was making the rounds and got me thinking about personal branding. I’m someone who gets pretty anxious thinking about how others P E R C E I V E me, so it’s been difficult to follow advice on this topic. The thing that worked pretty well for me was this little bit of direction: Put your name on it. A small question to ask myself whenever I decide to work on a project…
In the last three years I’ve worked for three very different companies. This year the tech industry is laying off thousands. I’ve been thinking a lot about jobs. In rougher times it feels risky to ask a lot from your job, but we should. Especially now. So here’s an unordered, incomplete list of things I want from a job. Work that benefits from my specific skills and ideas. Work that benefits the…
For a bit there I wasn’t sure if the refresh was going to happen. Honestly things just weren’t flowing for me and every idea I tried fell flat. Feeling stuck is just the worst, but a nice thing about a deadline is it forces me to make decisions. So I decided to pick a couple new CSS features I’ve been meaning to try and focus on those. It feels like we’ve been wanting container queries forever and…
I worked at Netlify for just over a year. I had a pretty unique role on the brand team: making creative web projects developers will love. That part was a lot of fun. Netlify ended up not being the place for me longterm, but it was a privilege to work with many talented and caring people there. With my memory and Twitter getting worse by the day, I wanted to keep a record here of some Netlify…
Last week my team launched a li’l project called Matterday . Turns out switching to Netlify saves development teams one day a week per developer . That’s a lot of time! And we hope folks can spend that time on things that matter to them. The narrative portion of the site encourages folks to imagine what they could do with that time — whether it be small changes to daily routines or taking big…
For this year’s refresh, I really wanted to tackle an idea I’ve been trying to do for years. In my 2018 and 2019 case studies, I talked about an experience that feels like you’re traveling through physical space. I imagined a mix between walking forward in a first person video game and the layered, parallax effect Disney innovated (as seen in the intro of Beauty and Beast ). And as with years…