The web as a design medium

A Mozilla Developer video explaining why CSS feels so different from a programming language. It frames CSS as a declarative language for describing layouts that must work in unknown conditions.

Andy Bell's talk on writing CSS that gives the browser sensible rules and lets it make layout decisions, rather than hand-managing every viewport. It focuses on intrinsic sizing and composable layout approaches that need fewer media queries.

Jen Simmons of Mozilla's Layout Land gives a big-picture introduction to CSS Grid, showing what it does and how it changes layout on the web. It is aimed at people who know older layout techniques such as floats.

Jen Simmons of Layout Land compares CSS Flexbox and CSS Grid. She explains what each is built for, where they overlap and how to choose between them.

A Layout Land video by Jen Simmons that walks through nine common mistakes people make when learning CSS Grid. It covers things like treating Grid as the answer to everything, sizing only with percentages, and assuming you still need breakpoints.

A Chrome for Developers video showing ten modern page layouts built with a single line of CSS each. It demonstrates techniques such as grid and flexbox patterns, clamped sizing and aspect ratios.

A conference talk showing how CSS Grid changes the way pages are laid out on the web. It demonstrates defining layouts with named areas and building responsive designs with far less code.

Lea Verou's W3Conf 2013 talk, a follow-up to her earlier CSS Secrets talk, presents ten more lesser-known things you can do with CSS. It is aimed at working front-end developers and designers who code.

Sarah Drasner's talk, hosted by freeCodeCamp, on what SVG can do on the web. She shows techniques for animating and building graphics with SVG.

Pasquale D'Silva speaks at Web Directions on designing with animation, about using animation principles to add meaning to user interfaces. The talk runs about fifty minutes and goes with his essay on transitional interfaces.

Heydon Pickering, a web accessibility and front-end author, asks whether progressive enhancement is dead and argues for building web pages that work from a robust base before layering on extras.

Maciej Ceglowski's keynote at Web Directions 2015 on the growing bloat of web pages. He argues that sites have become far heavier than their content needs and makes the case for restraint and speed.

Harry Roberts's talk Big CSS, about writing and organizing CSS on large projects. Commenters connect it to cutting code bloat and non-semantic classes and avoiding inline styles.

Harry Roberts presents ITCSS, a way of organizing CSS into ordered layers from low-specificity to high-specificity code. He explains the problems of large CSS codebases and how the layered structure keeps them manageable.

Glenn Maddern, co-creator of CSS Modules and styled-components, talks at ColdFront 2016 about how reusable CSS and component libraries should be styled. He covers why existing approaches fall short and where CSS theming might head.

Samuel Richard's CSSconf EU 2019 talk on using CSS Houdini to power design systems. He shows how the Houdini APIs let styling code do things that plain CSS cannot.

Google Design's "Making Material Design", a behind-the-scenes film on how Google's Material Design language was created. It covers the ideas of paper and ink, motion, color and a consistent system across products.

Adam Wathan rebuilds the Netlify interface live with Tailwind CSS, in about an hour and a half and without writing any custom CSS. It is a screencast of utility-first CSS used on a real, polished UI.

A Web Design Museum capture of the 2Advanced Studios Flash intro from 2003, showing the studio's animated, sci-fi style interface work. It is a record of how elaborate Flash-era web design could get.

Dylan Beattie's NDC talk, The Web That Never Was, an entertaining alternate history of the web that imagines how it might have turned out differently. It opens with a poem before the talk proper.