The Collective #824

No. 824, Monday, March 18, 2024 View in browser

In our latest issue, we explore the finesse of CSS, exploring approaches to animate borders and streamline styling with variable groups as proposed by Lea Verou.

We’re also stepping into the AI frontier with a look at Grok-1, and taking a look at the impact of web bloat on slower devices.

Wishing you a great week!

From pixels to perfection — A new era of UI development

This blog post explores a designer’s experience with Codux, a game-changer for visual editors in React projects. It lets designers visually tweak the code, reducing the back-and-forth with developers. Discover how Codux puts you in control of your designs in production.

💫 Astro DB: A Deep Dive

Learn about the fully managed SQL database service tailored for the Astro web framework, named Astro DB, featuring a focus on content-driven websites and leveraging libSQL for compatibility and efficiency in data handling.

🤖 Open Release of Grok-1

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence enterprise, xAI, has made the foundational model weights and structure of Grok-1 publicly available. Grok-1, which powers the Grok chatbot on X, is detailed on xAI’s blog as a pre-training model with 314 billion parameters, designed without specific optimizations for any singular task.

🥁 Can you feel the rhythm‽

Andy Bell discusses the importance of rhythm in web design, highlighting how consistent spacing and alignment can improve user experience and visual appeal.

🐡 How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

This analysis indicates that although the exponential increase in bandwidth has somewhat mitigated web bloat issues since 2017, the slow progression of CPU performance relative to bandwidth has made modern web increasingly inaccessible on low-end devices.

💅 Proposal: CSS Variable Groups

Lea Verou proposes a method to group CSS variables for better maintainability and readability, showcasing how structured variables can enhance styling strategies in web development.

A place to find all those lost pages worthing finding.

🧑🏽‍💻 thismanslife/archive

James Mellers created this archive of his website and shows the design (and monitor) evolution over time with the power of CSS.

Trangram is a free one-stop platform to create, and share motion graphics and svg animations with a free built-in powerful editor which is a fusion of Adobe Illustrator and animation tools.

Curated, vetted resources designed to enhance productivity, creativity, and knowledge in various domains, including AI, design, video editing, and more.

…before the World Wide Web became ubiquitous, Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) were the primary means of digital communication and file sharing among computer enthusiasts? These early online communities, flourishing in the 1980s and early 1990s, were hosted on personal computers and users dialed in via modems. Interestingly, many of the features we associate with modern internet forums and social media, like private messaging and online games, originated in the BBS era.

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