Ethan Marcotte’s redesign
My good friend and web design hero Ethan Marcotte has redesigned his personal site for the second time in a little over a year, and it’s a thing of beauty. Every last bit of it is thoughtfully considered without being overworked, from the simple structure, to the inventive grid, to the elegant typography, to the subtle textural motifs. And that joyful splash of watercolor at the top! For the nerds, there are some clever implementations of relatively uncommon CSS, like background-position: fixed, background-blend-mode: saturation, the old-school a:visited, and some snazzy view transitions that I initially missed because they’re not supported in Firefox yet (they degrade gracefully, of course). And it’s all an excellent visual partner to Ethan’s humane writing. Just a master class in web design from a guy with an earned understanding of the form’s past, present, and future.