Ste Grainer

@stegrainer
237 Followers
167 Following
1.3K Posts

Designer of various things, sometimes developer, occasional writer. Design system nerd. User researcher.

CIS Ally. Trans rights are human rights. Black Lives Matter.

Personal Sitehttps://stegrainer.com
UXcellencehttps://uxcellence.com
Pronounshe/him
LocationRichmond, VA

🔗 The Great CSS Expansion — A handy intro to new CSS features available now or coming soon and the JavaScript they can replace

https://blog.gitbutler.com/the-great-css-expansion

The Great CSS Expansion

CSS now does what Floating UI, GSAP ScrollTrigger, Framer Motion, and react-select used to require JavaScript for. Here is exactly how much that saves, why these libraries were painful beyond their size, and what the platform still hasn't figured out.

Butler's Log
When I had the idea for Friday Faves, Lord of the Rings was one of the first things that popped into my head. I read the series once a year every year through high school and college. While I haven’t read the full series in almost a decade now, it still holds a very special place in my heart. And maybe I should pick it back up again soon …
https://stegrainer.com/journal/2026/friday-fave-lord-of-the-rings
Friday Fave: Lord of the Rings » SteGrainer.com

On a favorite fantasy series

🔗 My default config for new Craft CMS projects — A great intro to good Craft CMS config settings and the reason behind them

https://moritzlost.dev/articles/default-craft-cms-config/

My default config for new Craft CMS projects

My annotated default configuration for new Craft CMS projects. May include wildly controversial takes.

“The people who cannot sit through novels aren’t broken. They’re adapted to an environment we built. We hand them infinite information and wonder why they drown. We give them tools designed to fracture attention and blame them when their attention fractures. We built a world that profits from distraction and then pathologise the distracted.”

I feel like I could quote almost every in this essay about literacy and design. Well worth the time to read or listen.

https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-think-is-a-decline-in-literacy-is-a-design-problem

To get slightly more context, read also my article on Progressive Web Components (just published!):

https://arielsalminen.com/2026/progressive-web-components/

Progressive Web Components

Introducing Elena, a simple, tiny library for building Progressive Web Components. Unlike most web component libraries, Elena doesn’t force JavaScript for everything. You can load HTML and CSS first, then use JavaScript to progressively add interactivity.

Ariel Salminen

RE: https://front-end.social/@ariel/116288522052192356

This looks really awesome! I need to find a way to work this into a project pronto.

🔗 Stuff Everybody Knows — Great general advice about how to build on the web, agnostic of specific tools

https://stuffeverybodyknows.com

How to be a web developer: Stuff Everybody Knows

A guide to the rest of your web development career, by Laurie Voss

🔗 Elena — A simple, tiny library for building Progressive Web Components.

https://elenajs.com

Elena | Progressive Web Components

Elena is a simple, tiny library for building Progressive Web Components.

Elena

Over the weekend, I sat down to write an essay. I wanted to express some thoughts on our current political, economic, and technological landscape. (Yeah, I know.) Even as I started to write, something changed in the writing. A couple of lines in a rhyming couplet stuck with me, and the more I thought about them, the more a poem evolved around them.

This is what tumbled out:
https://stegrainer.com/journal/2026/what-if

What If » SteGrainer.com

A poem and a prayer for dark times

🔗 Optician Sans — A free font based on the historical eye charts and optotypes used by opticians

https://optician-sans.com

Optician Sans – Free font based on historical optotypes

Optician Sans is a free font based on the historical Snellen and Sloan eye charts and optotypes used by opticians world wide for centuries.

Optician Sans