Random thoughts by Mike Mai on design, music, film, gaming, and anime.
I have a ton of side projects—various Slash Pages hosted on my personal website, but side projects are not the same as side quests. Side projects focus on what you are good at, while side quests are defined as doing something you are not good at. A distinction I recently learned from a random YouTube video in my feed.
Now that I am done talking about CSS resets, I want to follow up with CSS foundation—the starter kit for all my web projects. As I mentioned at the end of my last post, there are a lot of other interesting things in my CodePen template—namely the CSS layers and CSS vars. I will walk through those very opinionated things in this post. Friendly reminder that I am a graphic designer, and…
I read this recently on Mastodon, CSS resets with breakdowns are bringing me a lot of joy. says Dave Rupert . Then I suddenly remembered that I had this post in my drafts for quite some time. So now y’all are getting my take on CSS resets. My approach is very minimal, as with anything I have done lately. The resets are set up as a Codepen template. It helps me to kickstart every pen I write.…
The general web accessibility best practice for handling base font-size on a website is to not define it and let the browser do its thing, which means: /* NEVER DO THIS */ html { font-size: 16px; /* or any value for that matter */ } The benefit of not defining base font-size is that it will respect the user’s browser settings and system preferences — I also touched on…
That’s it. That’s the post. Check out my fresh old paint !
Wow, it is Config 2023 this week, and there are a ton of new features coming from our (not mine) favorite design tool Figma. One of them being Figma Variables . It is a big step forward for Figma and the feature looks very promising, but it generated a little bit of grunts among designers, mainly due to why it wasn’t called Design Tokens . What do you think? Let me lay down some facts for…
So what about this number? Well, that is how many days this Google Note named 5 common typographic mistakes to avoid has been sitting in my notes folder. I used to use Google Notes to draft blog posts and this one is probably the oldest. I was half way done with this post before it went on a 11-year hiatus. I cannot remember why I stopped but who cares? Because now I am going to finish this.
I recently had some fun playing around with ChatGPT. My prompts covered a range of topics: anime, rap, basketball, movies, web design, and accessibility. The best responses I got were related to basketball and my favorite player Toni Kukoč. Here are some gems.
Ninety-seven percent of the web is broken. Let that sink in a bit… OK, now that sentence might be an exaggeration but the web is currently in very bad shape. According to an annual web accessibility study , 96.8% of home pages had detected WCAG 2 failures out of the top million home pages that were analyzed. Common issues found on these pages were related to incorrect semantics or the lack…
Recently, I sat down with my ex-intern Guo Chen to talk about design, code, accessibility, and my rap career (LOL!). Here is the transcript for episode seven of Not Just Pixels , available on Spotify , Apple , and Google .
Very frequently, I see young designers (sometimes even seasoned designers) showcasing their design in mobile/tablet/desktop mockups and claim it fully responsive, however, all designers should understand that “responsive” means more than just an opinionated set of breakpoints. The year is 2022, web technologies have advanced so much that designers and developers should be able to…
🤓 Google is my best friend 🧐 wait, it’s Stack Overflow 🤯 actually CSS Tricks 😌 nah, Adrian Roselli’s writings is the truth That is all, folks!
Mao Mao sunbathing. .light { display: grid; } .cat { align-self: center; justify-self: center; }
Recently I saw this cool little challenge @typesetting was doing . Chose two fonts at random, tried to make them work. And I thought well, well, well, I wanna take a crack at this, but in code! because why not? Step by step of what I did next: Go to http://fonts.google.com Focus on search input Randomly bang some keys Press backspace till the results show something Pick the 1st font Repeat for…
NEW YORK — After losing at home to rival Miami Heat the previously night, the New York Knicks (42-14) came back strong in the second game of a back-to-back at home with a big win against west power house Los Angeles Lakers (48-9).
So you hired a web agency to develop a beautiful website design you made. They delivered a staging website for you to review, but you simply do not have the knowledge to review anything other than visual and UX. Fear not, I am going to list all the technical details you should review before writing that big fat check to the web agency.
If you don’t know shit about NFTs, you have come to the right place. Seriously, what the fuck is a NFT? Well, it stands for non-fungible token. It represents a unique digital item. It can be anything you want it to be. For artists and designers, NFT is a great way to sell their digital artwork directly to collectors.
I love math. I was that proud nerd on the Math Team in high school. Competing in state meets was the most thrilling thing back then. Those days are long gone, I am no longer doing any competitive math, but I still apply my math skills on a daily basis. Math makes coding CSS fun. I am able to think more creatively and write less code most of the time. Let’s look at some common use cases using…
After working on a handful of style guides and design systems over the years, I have come to the conclusion that it is extremely important for a team (small or large) to clearly define their own standards and conventions. Standards and conventions are a set of rules agreed upon as a team, it helps to keep the code base consistent and predictable, and it promotes less—but…
By Dieter Rams Good design is innovative. Good design makes a product useful. Good design is aesthetic. Good design makes a product understandable. Good design is unobtrusive. Good design is honest. Good design is long-lasting. Good design is thorough down to the last detail. Good design is environmentally friendly. Good design is as little design as possible. 'nuff said.
I have been designing and building web components for the Bolt Design System and I found myself using this a lot the role attribute.
Either die Goku or live long enough to become a Gohan. That is my motto for life.