Studio Missive 11: New CSS features, Liquid Glass on the web, and crossing finish lines
Happy Friday, friends! Here are a few cool things from around the web this week, and some BTS at the studio.
What’s inspiring you this week?
- I love it when I stumble on websites with similar aesthetics, and you can trace their inspiration. I don’t mean that sarcastically. It’s cool to see people riffing off of each other. So I was pretty giddy when I stumbled on Kallan & Co, and immediately recognized how similar their site was to Shape. I’m not accusing anybody of ripping off anybody else at all; I don’t even know whose site came first. To be frank, I want to borrow elements from both of these sites. They are rad.
- The inimitable Chris Coyier wrote about new CSS features in 2025 for Frontend Masters. These features are awesome! (Right now, most of them, and their demos, only work in Chrome.) A few new things I’m into: I love the ability to animate the height of a box from 0. Using
if()in CSS is going to be so rad, and I can’t wait to replace a bunch of media queries with it in the future. And custom selects! I’ve been waiting for custom selects for twelve years. Inject all this into my veins right now. (Still waiting on that the masonry layout stuff, and kind of surprised that’s not sorted out yet.) - How often do you see a great website for a zoo? The Chester Zoo website is one of a kind. It’s part of a completely new brand identity by How & How, absolute masters of the craft. I often link to BP&O, but their analysis is excellent (even by their lofty standards). Turns out the “C” in the logo is made to hold the shape of a rhino horn in the negative space, which I didn’t even notice. (This is only the tip of the iceberg with this design.)
- Software engineer Chris Feijoo has figured out how to get Apple’s controversial Liquid Glass design language (previously mentioned out of annoyance) working on the web. It’s a wild bit of engineering with incredible demos. (Again, the demos only work in Chrome.) It’s a great opportunity to find out how much blur and opacity you would add to the Apple Music mini player before you might consider it legible. (I add a lot more than Apple does.)
- Along the same lines, Alastair Coote discovered Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content. (All Feijoo’s work might not be necessary if Apple were to open this up.) Coote asks where Apple might be using this. I discovered last week: put your iPhone (in iOS 26) in Airplane Mode. Head to Settings, then Battery. Tap the
ibutton to view the Info panel. It doesn’t load. I genuinely think all the info/help panels in the Settings app might be webviews. All those views include Liquid Glass buttons, and I wonder if that’s where Apple is using this CSS.
What are you working on this week?
This week, I’ve been crossing the finish line of a few major projects. I finished a giant website for a nonprofit — all that’s left is the go live process. They’re reviewing copy on their end, and I know there will be a few word and image tweaks as they go. That’ll give me an opportunity to work on fine-tuning a few different mobile interactions, finesse a couple details, or add animations where appropriate.
I also finished the designs for Bruce Mayhew’s website (previously mentioned in Missive 9 and Missive 2). I am ready to start digging deep into code.
Finally, I’m on track to finish work on the first step of a pivot for a startup I’m working with. I’ve mentioned this startup before — they launched their big platform a few weeks go — but they immediately called me back to work on a few new directions and ideas. Startups! They’re magical things.
I can’t wait to share all three of these with you.
Oh, and one more thing: I mentioned last week that I intend to start shooting BTS video and a “roast my website” video campaign. I already have the camera gear and some lighting, thanks to my prior work in photography. This week, I ordered all the clamps and a boom mic and some other bits and bobs to make video happen. I hope to dig in over the next couple weeks.
And that’s it. (It’s a lot, but it’s good.) As always, thanks for reading, and I’ll talk to you next week.
– Nathan
P.S. Scheduling note: there will be no studio missive next week (I’m on vacation). See you in two weeks!