2026 refresh

It’s been about 18 months since this site’s last design refresh, and I found a few hours this weekend to iterate again. This is far from perfect, but it’s let me tick off a few things I’ve wanted to do for a while:

1. Rejig the home page to give the newsletter more prominence
2. Better signpost my projects, particularly the Design Process Interviews
3. Migrate the newsletter archive to this site from Buttondown
4. Convert my blog post on various design courses to its own page
5. Generally bring a little more personality to the site, and a few other visual refinements along the way

Under the hood, I took the opportunity to rip out some unused legacy legendary CSS, and add grid to some places. I also stripped out CodeKit and went vanilla CSS for the first time in years.

Removing CodeKit took live refresh with it, so I took the opportunity to try Polypane. The live reloading works super well, but it was also great to see the site at various breakpoints simultaneously. I’m pretty sure that helped me catch more visual issues, and it certainly made that side of things easier.

The refresh features a new serif typeface: Equity from Matthew Butterick. I gave Butterick’s typography license a shout in my last newsletter as a great example of simplicity and clarity.

Thanks to Rob, Marc and Adam for their feedback.