A List Apart, for people who make websites

05/19/2026

Part II of my conversation with Eric on WPMinute+ is live. We get into Automattic company culture, what WordPress actually means for the open web, and why AI makes all of it more complicated. 🎙️

This episode of The WP Minute+ podcast features part II of Eric’s conversation with Jeffrey Zeldman. This time around, Jeffrey discusses his transition to working at Automattic. He shares thoughts on company culture, the role of WordPress in maintaining an open web, and the challenges posed by AI ...

05/19/2026

“What Machines Can’t Replace is coming in August 2026. Pre-orders are open, and I’m looking for ARC readers, blurbs, and a long-shot foreword.” – Anna McPhee

What Machines Can't Replace is coming in August 2026. Pre-orders are open, and I'm looking for ARC readers, blurbs, and a long-shot foreword.

05/14/2026

Your sans-serif typeface. It's in everything. Speckyboy collected 40+ worth bookmarking. They’re all free and ready to download.

A collection of free sans-serif fonts for designers. Find fonts for web, UI, branding, and print, with strong readability and flexible styles.

05/13/2026

For your edification and pleasure: 187 in-depth interviews with the people who built the modern web. Publishing, art direction, content strategy, typography, web technology, and more. Hosted by yours truly. It’s everything web that matters.

https://bigwebshow.fireside.fm/

The Big Web Show

04/29/2026

“For years, users have been trained on the buffet model: pay a monthly fee, consume wildly, and assume the robot is basically free. But AI is not free. It is a meter running in a basement full of expensive chips.

“One possible outcome is simple: token billing arrives, users notice the true cost, usage falls, and the valuations start looking less like genius and more like group hypnosis with a term sheet.

“Not because AI is useless. It clearly is not.

“But useful and worth-a-trillion are different things.

“When the bill arrives, the industry may discover that the storm was not intelligence. It was arithmetic.”

https://www.pootlepress.com/2026/04/ai-tokens-and-the-gathering-storm/

There is a possible future in which the AI boom does not end with a robot butler bringing us tea. It ends because somebody asks: “Wait. Why is this worth a trillion dollars?” OpenAI and Anthropic are now discussed less like companies and more like weather systems. Their valuations roll across th...

04/24/2026

Saluting the inimitable genius of Gary Taxali.

https://www.garytaxali.com/

Gary Taxali - contemporary artist and illustrator. Library of Congress collection. Exhibited at the Andy Warhol Museum, the Norman Rockwell Museum, the V&A, the SFMOMA, etc.

04/20/2026

Long before standards bodies agreed on how to encode diverse scripts and symbols, computers used incompatible character sets. Understanding how modern systems evolved from ASCII to Unicode—and what UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 mean—helps any developer, writer, or interested reader grasp the complexity hidden inside what looks like ordinary text.

Ever wondered why “é” sometimes shows up as “é” or why emojis break text? This a short guide to characters, Unicode, encodings, and mojibake—with Python examples you can run.

04/14/2026

“The job of Engineering Management is no longer pushing tickets across the board to make executives clap, it’s helping organizations row in the same direction together. It’s relentlessly focusing on your users over lines of code and cool project codenames.” – Dave Rupert

https://daverupert.com/2026/04/more-talk-less-grok/

03/23/2026

♛ Brilliant. Kyle Van Deusen’s two-layer approach to managing color on your project solves problems you might not even know you have yet.

https://theadminbar.com/semantics-and-primitives-color-system/

Does your system for naming colors always feel like it falls short? This two-layer approach solves so many problems!

03/20/2026

“Fifty years ago this month, March 1976, at 20 years old, is when my interest in type design began.” The great type designer Mark Simonson on … type designer Mark Simonson.

https://www.marksimonson.com/notebook/view/the-day-i-discovered-type-design/

Me, in spring of 1976, about the time I discovered type design, standing outside the art department at NHCC. (Photo by Dan Bagaus)