Chase McCoy explores, builds, & writes about the web.| Chase McCoy
We all have our own antilibrary, the books we buy with the best intentions of reading but never quite get around to. For architects, a similar concept might be the sketches and plans that never leave the drawing board: antibuildings?| Chase McCoy
Chase McCoy explores, builds, & writes about the web.| Chase McCoy
Chase McCoy explores, builds, & writes about the web.| Chase McCoy
Chase McCoy explores, builds, & writes about the web.| Chase McCoy
Chase McCoy explores, builds, & writes about the web.| Chase McCoy
Chase McCoy explores, builds, & writes about the web.| Chase McCoy
A good day on the web is one where you stumble across a website that makes you go “woah??” and then “huh…?” followed by a wide grin. I have one of those websites to show you!| Chase McCoy
Throughout my career as a designer, I’ve experienced a recurring struggle with the concept of process.| Chase McCoy
Programming note: the domain for this website has changed! chasem.co is out, and chsmc.org is in.| Chase McCoy
I recently showed a few friends around Chicago, and as we passed by the Art Institute and the two lions guarding the entrance, I wondered if they had names like the lion sculptures outside the New York Public Library.| Chase McCoy
Figma announced a host of new AI-powered features this week at their annual conference, and they have been received by designers with both cheer and dismay.| Chase McCoy
I’ve remarked before on my gratefulness for CSS as the ubiquitous and expressive visual language of our times, a sort of design Esperanto (that is actually widely spoken).| Chase McCoy
Many of my online acquaintances know that I live in Chicago, but I suspect they might not know that I’m from a small university town in Mississippi called Starkville.| Chase McCoy
Hearty congrats to Robin Rendle who has turned his wonderful CSS-focused newsletter into a good, old fashioned blog. The Cascade is beautiful, and is already full of great content for CSS nerds like me.| Chase McCoy
Several months ago, in an issue of Spencer Chang’s newsletter, I discovered the 6 hour video review of a game called Boku no Natsuyasumi by Tim Rogers (known as Action Button).| Chase McCoy
Paul has always been my favorite Beatle.| Chase McCoy
For how much software has evolved and matured I find it strange how many tasks remain unaddressed by niche, purpose-built software. I’m always excited to see how novel ideas can come about from focusing in on a narrow domain.| Chase McCoy
Autumn is my favorite time of the year. The trees outside my apartment here in Oak Park are shining gold, and the air is starting to feel crisp and cold. Sweater weather, if you will.| Chase McCoy
It’s hard to keep up with the progress of AI. It seems as though every week there’s a new breakthrough or advancement that seemingly changes the game. Each step forward brings both a sense of wonder and a feeling of dread.| Chase McCoy
Science fiction is one of my favorite genres because of its power to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange.| Chase McCoy
I have a lot of nostalgia for the era of blogging that I grew up with during the first decade or so of the 2000s.| Chase McCoy
The recent fad of the metaverse is all about digitizing the physical world and moving our shared experiences (even more so) onto the internet.| Chase McCoy
I remember the first time I saw a Mac in person. I was in middle school, but on the campus of the nearby college because my dad had a gig as a stand-in drummer for a local band.| Chase McCoy
Since I was a kid the space program has been an object of my fascination, and even as an adult I’ve been captured by the heroics of NASA and other organizations launching probes and telescopes into the far reaches of space.| Chase McCoy
The Browser Company of New York is building a web browser called Arc, and they recently shared a preview of a new feature called “Boosts”.| Chase McCoy
If you read any of my writing you know that Robin Sloan is one of my favorite internet thinkers. He’s just published a spec for a new web protocol he’s designed called Spring ‘83.| Chase McCoy
A few things came across my desk this week that inspired hope about the future of the web and hypermedia as a medium.| Chase McCoy
This week the team behind Stripe’s documentation launched Markdoc, the toolchain used internally to author and manage all of our docs. I’ve had the pleasure of working with this team and Markdoc internally at Stripe for some time, and I wanted to write a bit about why it’s such an exciting tool.| Chase McCoy
This week I finally received my Playdate from the folks over at Panic, and it’s just as delightful as everyone knew it would be. The Playdate account on Twitter recently tweeted:| Chase McCoy
I started my career building iOS apps, and made my way back to the web out of excitement for tools that were emerging at the time around component-based design and development. I remember feeling that the idea of encapsulating markup, styles, and behavior was so obvious, and I couldn’t believe at the time that there was no method for that built directly into the platform. If you wanted to build components for the web you needed to setup a complex toolchain and build process, which is very i...| Chase McCoy
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about design systems documentation, and more importantly how we scale knowledge and best practices across a large team. Looking at most system documentation (including for the design systems I’ve built), you’ll see something that heavily resembles the documentation you might find for a standalone product or software library.| Chase McCoy
This collection was produced during the Small Season known as Rikka, the start of summer:| Chase McCoy
Working on the internet in 2021 is really hard, and it’s getting harder.| Chase McCoy
Design systems are a lot like community gardens. Everything in a system has a natural life cycle that begins with a human need, eventually grows into a fully-formed component or pattern, and (if nurtured) evolves over time.| Chase McCoy
Simple collections of items laid out in rows and columns is perhaps one of the most common UI patterns. Whether you’re showing a literal grid of items, or building the layout of your site, grids are a fundamental element of design on the web (and you could say the same about print, too).| Chase McCoy
In a recent project, I needed a way to create unique identifiers that met these criteria:| Chase McCoy
I really like what the team at Kiwi.com have done with their design system, Orbit. There’s a few details that really stand out.| Chase McCoy
The idea of CSS resets is fascinating to me. There’s something about bringing order to a chaotic system that is really pleasing. And also fine-tuning all of the rules to work just right for a particular project or use case.| Chase McCoy
When I recently redesigned this site, I removed the light/dark mode toggle that I had before. It was difficult to iterate on the new design quickly while supporting both light/dark mode and thinking about both when adding new features to my site was annoying.| Chase McCoy
In JavaScript, you can use the textContent property of a node to get the text representation of the node and all of its descendent nodes. For instance, if your node looked like this:| Chase McCoy
Sprout Social’s design system, Seeds, has done a lot of growing up since it launched in October of last year. When we launched, our system was home to four categories of guidelines and principles: Brand, Visual, Writing, and Product. A healthy showing, for sure, but something was suspiciously missing — components.| Chase McCoy
Today on their blog, Gatsby announced the release of new schema customization APIs in version 2.2.0.| Chase McCoy
I had an idea during a meeting today—what if we had a Slack bot that looked for common key words and phrases and suggested content from our design system? About twenty minutes later I had a prototype of this running and installed in our Slack workspace, and it is all thanks to Botkit and their [botkit-slack](https://glitch.com/~botkit-slack) Glitch project.| Chase McCoy
XOXO is “an experimental festival for independent artists and creators who work on the internet,” which is exactly as amazing as it sounds.| Chase McCoy
It seems as though everything I gravitate towards in life tends to be at an intersection of art and technology. I spend my days building tools for designers, and thinking about how we design things for people but with technology.| Chase McCoy
Invision is writing a piece on the design team at Sprout Social, and they asked us to answer some questions about design and how we work at Sprout. I wanted to post my answers here as well since most of them probably won’t make it into the finished piece.| Chase McCoy
I don’t have the words to describe what we’ve lost in Anthony Bourdain. Instead, I thought I would share some things that I love about him. The first that comes to mind is his first visit to a Waffle House:| Chase McCoy
My bank of choice is Simple. They’re online only, care about design, and make it easy to manage money by building saving & analysis tools on top of the bank itself (instead of a third party tool that connects to a bank).| Chase McCoy
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how to be proactive in the practice of design. It seems as if this is more relevant today than ever, with the increasing responsibility of designers to make things that won’t harm people or their minds.| Chase McCoy
Designers today spend far too much time drawing rectangles and dragging them around the screen. Even designers who don’t know this kind of do know it, I think. Perhaps there is a point in every designer’s career (there certainly was for me) when the idea of design becomes less about aesthetics and more about structure.| Chase McCoy
When developing an iOS app, you often need to adjust constraints in order to make sure that the keyboard doesn’t obscure any of the elements on screen. This is a common problem that is an easy but annoying fix.| Chase McCoy
Chase McCoy explores, builds, & writes about the web.| Chase McCoy
Chase McCoy explores, builds, & writes about the web.| Chase McCoy