The five best design links, every weekday

Date: 2021/09/14

smashingmagazine.com

Orchestrating Complexity With Web Animations API

Diving into the Web Animations API: let's see how timing works and how to control the playback of several animations at once.

thisiscolossal.com

Nikon’s 2021 Photomicrography Competition

Unless they're under a microscope, it's difficult to see the shimmery barbs of a louse claw or cracks running through a single piece of salt.

uxdesign.cc

How to optimize button microcopy

Microcopy is the small, informative, or instructional text on forms, fields, labels, pop-ups, buttons, search prompts, etc.

css-tricks.com

Grainy Gradients

Browse through Dribbble or Behance, and you’ll find designers using a simple technique to add texture to an image: noise.

joshwcomeau.com

Designing Beautiful Shadows in CSS

When I look around the web, most of the shadows I see are fuzzy grey boxes. It doesn’t have to be this way, though!