The Collective

Hand-picked interesting links for
web creators, updated daily.

Prefer a weekly digest?

You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown

Christopher Butler's essay explores the idea that true design greatness isn't measured by fame or visibility, but by creating work that seamlessly serves human needs and becomes invisible in its functionality.

Arcade car physics

A playful physics demo blending car dynamics and arcade vibes—customize traction, speed, and more in-browser.

Shipixen

Website, blog, or product boilerplates. One-click deploy to Vercel. SEO-ready MDX blog with Next.js 14, TypeScript, TailwindCSS, and Shadcn UI.

Easier layout with margin-trim

Jen Simmons introduces margin-trim, a new CSS property that simplifies layout by automatically trimming child element margins at container edges.

Functional HTML

Dan Abramov reimagines HTML as a functional, JSON-first language with full-stack tags and client/server boundaries shaped like components.

Anchors for Tailwind CSS

Bran McConnell releases Anchors for Tailwind CSS, a plugin for declarative anchor positioning with full CSS API and View Transition support.

Revisiting Image Maps

Andy Clarke revisits image maps while designing a retro-style site, ultimately favoring inline SVG for expressive, modern interactivity.

The canvas element

Heydon Pickering critiques the <canvas> element with wit, arguing it's often misused where semantic, accessible HTML would be better.

GSAP is now 100% FREE!

GSAP is now fully free, with a revamped SplitText plugin and new features like animating to CSS variables, plus simpler Webflow integration.

Build a Product Card with Tailwind CSS

Discover intermediate and advanced styling techniques using Tailwind CSS and craft a fully responsive, professional product card for a web store in this Scrimba course. Codrops readers get 20% off Pro plans!

tsdown

A TypeScript library bundler built on Rolldown and Oxc, designed to generate declaration files quickly and support popular plugin ecosystems with minimal configuration.

Magnitude

An open-source, AI-native testing framework that uses visual agents and natural language to create adaptive, end-to-end tests for web apps with minimal setup and high reliability.

The AI Quality Coup

Julie Zhuo examines how AI’s ability to replicate artistic styles challenges traditional notions of quality, arguing that true excellence still lies in original narrative, craftsmanship, and emotional depth.

MiNi PhotoEditor

A WebGL-based online photo editor with filters, effects, and cropping. Source here.

Sim

An open-source platform to build, deploy, and self-host agentic LLM workflows easily via Docker or dev containers.

generative.graphics

Mihael Miklosic made a fun little Perlin noise graphics tool with p5.js—customizable, creative, and a joy to play with.

Open Codex CLI

Local, open-source AI CLI that converts natural language to shell commands using models like phi-4-mini. No API key needed.

CSS Hell

CSS Hell is a delightfully cursed set of 15 torturous CSS layout puzzles designed to challenge your styling skills and punish your past CSS sins — all in good fun.

How to Build an Agent

Thorsten Ball shows how to build a functioning, code-editing AI agent with just a loop, an LLM, and a few tools — in under 400 lines of Go.

Impossible Components

Dan Abramov explains how to create "impossible components" that span backend and frontend logic by splitting React components into server and client parts.

Creating CSS Theme Variables from a JS file

Michelle Barker shares a script for converting nested JS theme objects into CSS variables, eliminating the need to maintain styles in two places.

Aurel’s Grand Theater‪

Step into Aurel’s Grand Theater—a portfolio like no other. Solve mysteries, smash props, and uncover hidden gems about Aurelien Vigne’s creative world.

So you want to use Object Storage

Tips and lessons learned from building systems using object storage, focusing on strategies to manage latency, improve performance, and optimize costs in cloud-based systems.

Sidekick-CLI

An open-source, agentic command-line interface AI tool that allows users to integrate various LLM providers and customize workflows.

tweakcn

A visual theme editor that allows users to easily customize shadcn/ui components with real-time previews.

5 Ways to Reduce HTML File Size on Your Website

Anna Monus provides five best practices for reducing HTML file size on websites to improve web performance, including minification, compression, breaking up long pages and more.

Japanese Gradients

Nuevo.Tokyo™ is offering a free version of their JAPANESE GRADIENTS [FOR UI]™ design pack on Figma, part of their ongoing project blending traditional Japanese color aesthetics with modern UI design.

React miami

A browser-based multiplayer game made for React Miami Conf by Matias Fernandez using PartyKit and PeerJS. Everyone joins the same room — madness guaranteed. Source code here.

Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?

Radek Sienkiewicz roasts the AI industry’s logo obsession with circular, gradient-filled “butthole” designs—and yes, there’s a serious design critique too.

1 2 3 4 5 12