A thoughtful approach from Sam:
- Use AI only for tasks you already know how to do, on occasions when the time that would be spent completing the task can be better spent on other problems.
- When using AI, provide the chosen tool with something you’ve made as an input along with a specific prompt.
- Always comprehensively review the output from an AI tool for quality.
Not long now ’till Web Day Out — just three weeks!
It’s also not that long until the start of a new financial year so if you’ve got training budget that needs to be used this year, send your team to Web Day Out. Not only is it excellent value for money, it’s also going to have an incredibly high density of knowledge bombs per talk.
CSS! Progressive web apps! Web typography! Browser support! And much more.
If you like the sound of Web Day Out, you’ll also like State Of The Browser, which is just ten days away. In-person tickets for that event are now sold out, but online streaming tickets are still available.
Better yet, if you buy a ticket to Web Day Out, you automatically get a free online streaming ticket for State Of The Browser!
So get your ticket in the next ten days, enjoy State Of The Browser from the comfort of your own home, and then enjoy a trip to Brighton for Web Day Out on Thursday, 12 March. See you there!
There have been so many advances in HTML, CSS and browser support over the past few years. These are enabling phenomenal creativity and refinement in web typography, and I’ve got a mere 28 minutes to tell you all about it.
I’ve been talking to Rich about his Web Day Out talk, and let me tell you, you don’t want to miss it!
It’s gonna be a wild ride! Join me at Web Day Out in Brighton on 12 March 2026. Use JOIN_RICH to get 10% off and you’ll also get a free online ticket for State of the Browser.
I really enjoyed this chat with Marc:
I recently sat down with Jeremy Keith for a spontaneous conversation that quickly turned into a deep dive into something we both care a lot about: events, community, and why we keep putting ourselves through the joy and pain of running conferences.
If you’re the kind of person who likes Web Day Out, you’re probably also the kind of person who likes State Of The Browser.
Web Day Out is all about what you can in web browsers right now, with an emphasis on immediately practical techniques and technologies. State Of The Browser is similar, but with room for fun demos that push the boundaries.
State Of The Browser is on Saturday, 28 February.
Web Day Out is on Thursday, 12 March.
It would be a shame if you had to choose between these two excellent events.
Well, you don’t have to!
If you buy a ticket for Web Day Out you can get a whopping 50% off the ticket price for State Of The Browser. Or if you can’t make it in person, your Web Day Out ticket gets you a free online ticket!
You might be thinking, “Well, much as I’d love to go to both events, I don’t think I can convince my boss to give me two conference days.” Worry ye not! State Of The Browser is on a Saturday, so unless you’re working an extremely extended work week, you still only need to take one day away from your desk to go to two events.
So don’t delay: get your ticket for Web Day Out. Then you’ll get an email with details on how to get your 50% discount for State Of The Browser (or your free online ticket, whichever you prefer).
But wait! What if you already bought a ticket for State Of The Browser? Check your email. You’ve been sent a very, very generous discount code for Web Day Out to thank you for getting your ticket nice and early.
I’ll see you at State Of The Browser in London …and then I’ll see you at Web Day Out in Brighton!
Stop me if this sounds familiar to you…
There’s a conference you heard about it. It sounded really good but you never got ’round to getting a ticket. You were too busy thinking about work stuff. It was just one of those things that remained in the idle thought stage.
Then the day of the conference rolls around. You’re sitting in front of your computer seeing the social media posts from people at the event who are having a ball. The talks sound really good and you wish you could be there. You wonder why you never got ’round to getting that ticket.
Maybe you’ve experienced that when FFconf is happening and people like me are in the audience posting about some revelatory insight we’ve just received. Or maybe you see the blog posts and pictures from an event like dConstruct and you realise that you missed your chance to experience something special.
I’ve certainly experienced it when I’m not in Düsseldorf or Berlin for Beyond Tellerrand and all my friends are posting about how excellent it is.
It’s kind of like FOMO but instead of fear of missing out, it’s more like regret at missing out: RAMO.
I’m giving you advance warning. If you have anything at all to do with front-end development and you don’t come to Web Day Out, you are definitely going to experience RAMO.
Seriously, it is shaping up to be something very special indeed. Check out the schedule to see what I mean:
select and the friends we made along the wayTickets are just £225+VAT. Now is the time to get yours. It’s the second week of the new year. You’ve settled back into work. Now in the depths of Winter, you need something to look forward to, something that’s going to get you excited about making websites. That’s Web Day Out.
And if you need to convince your boss, I’ve got you covered.
Toward the end of 2021, I wrote about working a four-day week. It really suited me. So much so that I’ve gone one further. For the past year or so I’ve been working a three-day week.
I work on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. From Friday to Monday, my days are my own.
This really changes the dynamic of the week. It no longer feels like an extended weekend. What I mean is that usually we think about the working week as the default and the weekend as the exception. That’s been flipped on its head for me. The three days I spend working feel like the exception.
Once again, this decision meant earning less money. But I’ve decided that I value time more than money. I know that’s a privileged position to be in. Many people have to expend all their time in order to make just enough money.
I’ve made some choices along the way that certainly help. I don’t have children. I don’t have a car. I live in a modest flat and I’ve paid off the mortgage. I live in a country where healthcare is free.
So I don’t have too many expenses. My biggest expenses are travel-related; getting to the States to see family, or travelling to Irish music festivals wherever they may be.
But still, working a three-day week means I can make enough to cover my expenses and still put some money aside for the future.
Now, this wouldn’t work for everyone. My work tends to be the kind that doesn’t require much direct collaboration (which is also why I mostly work from home). I imagine it could get frustrating being on a team of people working different numbers of days.
I’m also really lucky to have the choice to do this. I know that many workplaces wouldn’t allow this kind of lifestyle. Clearleft is different.
In my last conference talk, I touched on this:
I think you could you could divide management into two categories like you can do with programming languages. There is a very imperative school of management where it’s all about measurements, it’s all about those performance reports, it’s all about metrics, time tracking. Maybe they install software on your machine to track how long you’ve been working. It’s all about measuring those outputs.
That’s one approach to management. Then there’s a more declarative approach, where you just care about the work getting done and you don’t care how people do it. So if they want to work from home, let them work from home. If they want to work strange hours, let them work strange hours. What do you care as long as the work gets done? This is more about giving people autonomy and trust.
I’m very happy that Clearleft takes the declarative approach.
And I can reiterate what I said when I stopped working on Fridays:
I haven’t experienced any reduction in productivity. Quite the opposite. There may be a corollary to Parkinson’s Law: work contracts to fill the time available.
Now that I don’t work on Mondays, bank holiday weekends don’t mean much to me anymore. Or to put it another way, every weekend is like a bank holiday weekend. If I want to travel somewhere on a Friday and come back on a Monday, I don’t need to book any time off. That’s really nice.
I’ve got four days in a row to do with as I wish. I had to fight the urge to immediately launch into some new project or side-hustle to fill the time. I’m savouring it instead.
I’ve got time to take care of The Session. I’ve got time to read. I’ve got time to cook. I’ve got time to spend learning Irish. Mostly I’ve got time to just be.
The core idea of the event is to get you up to speed on the most powerful web platform features that you can use right now. I love that because it aligns perfectly with what I’ve been working on over the last couple of years: finding ways to break old habits to get the most out of CSS.
Here’s the schedule for Web Day Out—what a fantastic collection of talks!
| 10:00 – 10:30 | I can’t believe it’s not JavaScript | Jemima Abu |
|---|---|---|
| 10:30 – 11:00 | A pragmatic guide to browser support | Rachel Andrew |
| 11:30 – 12:00 | Progressive web apps from the trenches | Aleth Gueguen |
| 12:00 – 12:30 | Build for the web, build on the web, build with the web | Harry Roberts |
| 14:00 – 14:30 | Breaking with habits | Manuel Matuzovič |
| 14:30 – 15:00 | What’s new in web typography? | Richard Rutter |
| 15:30 – 16:00 | Customisable <select> and the friends we made along the way | Jake Archibald |
| 16:00 – 16:30 | The browser is the playground | Lola Odelola |
Seeing all of those talk titles in a row is getting me very, very excited for this day!
I hope that you’re excited too, and I hope you’ve got your ticket already.
If you need to convince your boss to send you (and your team) to Web Day Out I’ve put together some reasons to attend along with an email template that you can use as a starting point.
Also, if your company is sending a group of people anyway, consider sponsoring Web Day Out. You get a bunch of conference tickets as part of the sponsorship deal.
Hope to see you in Brighton on Thursday, 12 March 2026!
The line-up for Web Day Out is now complete! The final speaker to be added to the line-up is the one and only Manuel Matuzovič.
You may know Manuel from his superb Web Accessibility Cookbook (full disclosure: I had the honour of writing the foreword to that book). Or perhaps you’re familiar with the crimes against markup that he documents at HTMHell. But at Web Day Out, he’s going to be talking about CSS.
The past few years have seen a veritable explosion in CSS capabilities. It’s one thing to hear about all the new stuff in CSS, but how do you actually start using it?
You may need to unlearn what you have previously learned. That’s what Manuel’s talk will be covering:
Manuel built a new project from scratch with modern CSS and questioned every line of code he wrote.
In this talk, he presents what he has learned and encourages you to review your best practices.
You can see why I’m so excited about this—it’s perfect for the agenda of Web Day Out:
Do you feel like you’re missing out on some of the latest advances in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript APIs? Web Day Out is your chance to get up to speed on what matters.
There’ll be eight brilliant speakers for your entertainment:
You won’t want to miss this, so get your ticket now for the ludicrously reasonable price of just £225+VAT!
See you in Brighton on 12 March 2026!
UX London will be back in 2026. It’s on June 2nd, 3rd, and 4th:
Each day features a morning packed with inspiring talks followed by an afternoon of practical hands-on workshops. It’s the perfect blend!
As with last year, each day will be themed:
You can come for a single day, but for best value, you should come for all three days.
I’m starting to put the line-up together now—hoping to match the excellence of last year’s event—and I’ll start announcing speakers early in the new year.
But if you trust me, then I highly recommend getting a super-early bird ticket now. They’ll only be available for another couple of weeks. You get a significant discount if you buy now.
Oh, and while I’m in the process of putting the line-up together, you should know that you can submit a talk or workshop proposal:
We always pay ALL our speakers for their time as well as covering the cost of accommodation and economy travel.
Don’t be shy! Pitch early, pitch often.
(That said, I wouldn’t recommend pitching a talk that focuses on “AI”. It’s not just that the bubble will probably have burst by the time UX London rolls around, it’s also that UX London doesn’t tend to focus on tools, whether they’re graphic design tools like Figma or generative tools like whatever people are using to turbo-charge their output of slop. If you’ve got a case study you want to talk about that happened to use some “AI” tool, great! But don’t make that the focus of the talk. Tell me about the problem and the solution.)
Almost two months ago, I put out the call for speaker suggestions for Web Day Out. I got some good responses—thank you to everyone who took the time to get in touch.
The response that really piqued my interest was from Aleth Gueguen. She proposed a talk on progressive web apps, backed up with plenty of experience. The more I thought about it, the more I realised how perfect it would be for Web Day Out.
So I’m very pleased to announce that Aleth will be speaking at Web Day Out about progressive web apps from the trenches:
Find out about the most important capabilities in progressive web apps and how to put them to work.
I’m really excited about this line-up! This is going to be a day out that you won’t want to miss. Get your ticket for a mere £225+VAT if you haven’t already!
I’m very happy to announce that the one and only Jake Jaffa-The-Cake Archibald will be speaking at Web Day Out!
Given the agenda for this event, I think you’ll agree that Jake is a perfect fit. He’s been at the forefront of championing user-centred web standards, writing specs and shipping features in browsers.
Along the way he’s also created two valuable performance tools that I use all the time: SVGOMG and Squoosh, which has a permanent place in my dock—if you need to compress images, I highly recommend adding this progressive web app to your desktop.
He’s the man behind service workers and view transitions—two of the most important features for making websites first-class citizens on any device.
So what will he talk about at Web Day Out? Image formats? Offline functionality? Smooth animations? Something else entirely?
All will be revealed soon. In the meantime, grab yourself a ticket to Web Day Out—it’s just £225+VAT—and I’ll see you in Brighton on Thursday, 12 March 2026!
If you work at a clever company, then you should let them know about sponsoring Web Day Out.
All the details are in this PDF sponsorship pack. Basically there are three (and only three) spots available, at three different levels of sponsorship.
One of the best things about the venue for Web Day Out is that always having an excellent auditorium, the Studio Theatre has a really nice space for the breaks. It would be the perfect spot to set up a stand and chat with all the smart attendees.
All the attendees will, by definition, be smart because they got tickets for Web Day Out—a steal at just £225+VAT.
I was going to save this announcement for later, but I’m just too excited: Harry Roberts will be speaking at Web Day Out!
Goddamn, that’s one fine line-up, and it isn’t even complete yet! Get your ticket if you haven’t already.
There’s a bit of a story behind the talk that Harry is going to give…
Earlier this year, Harry posted a most excellent screed in which he said:
The web as a platform is a safe bet. It’s un-versioned by design. That’s the commitment the web makes to you—take advantage of it.
- Opt into web platform features incrementally;
- Embrace progressive enhancement to build fast, reliable applications that adapt to your customers’ context;
- Write code that leans into the browser, not away from it.
Yes! Exactly!
Thing is, Harry posted this on LinkedIn. My indieweb sensibilities were affronted. So I harangued him:
You should blog this, Harry
My pestering paid off with an excellent blog post on Harry’s own site called Build for the Web, Build on the Web, Build with the Web:
The beauty of opting into web platform features as they become available is that your site becomes contextual. The same codebase adapts into its environment, playing to its strengths, rather than trying to build and ship your own environment from the ground up. Meet your users where they are.
That’s a pretty neat summation of the agenda for Web Day Out. So I thought, “Hmm …if I was able to pester Harry to turn a LinkedIn post into a really good blog post, I wonder if I could pester him to turn that blog post into a talk?”
I threw down the gauntlet. Harry accepted the challenge.
I’m sure you’re already familiar with Harry’s excellent work, but if you’re not, he’s basically Mr. Web Performance. That’s why I’m so excited to have him speak at Web Day Out—I want to hear the business case for leaning into what web browsers can do today, and he is most certainly the best person to bring receipts.
You won’t want to miss this, so be sure to get your ticket now; it’s only £225+VAT.
If you’re not ready to commit just yet, but you want to hear about more speaker announcements like this, you can sign up to the mailing list.
Half of the line-up of speakers for Web Day Out is already on the site. One more is already confirmed.
I’m ridiculously excited about the way the line-up is taking shape, and judging by the zippiness of ticket sales, so are lots of my peers. Seriously, don’t wait to get your ticket or you might end up missing out completely.
I’ve already got a shortlist of other people I could imagine on the line-up, but I’m open to more suggestions. If you’d like to speak at Web Day Out—or you know someone you think would be great—send an email to jeremy@clearleft.com
I won’t be checking my work email while I’m away on holiday next week but it would be lovely to come back to an inbox of exciting suggestions.
A couple of pointers…
I’d rather not have too many people like me on the line-up. White dudes are already over-represented in this industry, especially at conferences.
If you’ve never given a talk before, don’t worry. I’d love to help you put your talk together and coach you in presenting it. I have some experience in this area.
No product pitches. That includes JavaScript frameworks and CSS libraries.
If I get even a whiff of “AI”, your proposal doesn’t stand a chance. There are many, many, many other events that are only too happy to have wall-to-wall talks about …that sort of thing.
If you end up speaking at Web Day Out you will, of course, be paid. We will, of course, cover travel and accommodation too. We can’t afford the travel costs of bringing anyone in from outside Europe though (and we’d like to keep the carbon footprint of the event as small as possible).
Web Day Out has an opinionated agenda all about showing what’s possible in web browsers today. Some potential topics include:
The emphasis should be on using stuff in production rather than theoretical demos.
If you’ve got a case study about using the web platform—perhaps migrating away from a framework-driven approach—that would fit the bill perfectly.
How’s all that sounding? Know someone who could deliver the goods? Let me know!
I’m going to cut right to the chase: Clearleft is putting on a brand new conference in 2026. It’s called Web Day Out. It’ll be on Thursday, March 12th right here in Brighton. Tickets are just £225+VAT. You should be there!
If you’ve ever been to Responsive Day Out or Patterns Day, the format will be familiar to you. There’s going to be eight 30 minute talks. Bam! Bam! Bam!
Like those other one-day conferences, this one has a laser-sharp focus.
Web Day Out is all about what you can do in web browsers today. You can expect talks that showcase hands-on practical uses for the latest advances in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript APIs. There will be no talks about libraries, frameworks or build tools, and I can guarantee there will be absolutely no so-called “AI”.
As you might have gathered, this is an opinionated conference.
If you care about performance, accessibility, and progressive enhancement, Web Day Out is the event for you.
Or if you’ve been living in React-land but starting to feel that maybe you’re missing out on what’s been shipping in web browsers, Web Day Out is the event for you too. And I’m not talking about cute demos here. This is very much about shipping to production.
I’ve got half of the line-up assembled already:
Jemima’s talk gives you a flavour of what to expect at Web Day Out:
In this talk, we’ll take a look at how to use HTML and CSS to build simpler alternatives to popular JavaScript components such as accordions, modals, scroll transitions, carousels etc We’ll also take a look at the performance and accessibility benefits and real-life applications and use-cases of these components.
Web Day Out will be in The Studio Theatre of the Brighton Dome, which is a fantastic intimate venue. That means that places are limited, so get your ticket now!
A bunch of the UX London speakers have been saying very nice things about the event over on LinkedIn. I’m going to quote a few of them for my future self to look at when I’m freaking out about curating the next event…
Still buzzing … UX London smashed all expectations!
Huge shoutout to Jeremy Keith and the entire Clearleft team for their tireless efforts in making this event truly special. Three days packed with inspiration, insights, and true gems – I left feeling inspired, grateful, and already looking forward to next year’s event!
Huge thanks to my fellow speakers for the inspiring talks, and to the team at Clearleft (Jeremy Keith, Louise Ash, and so many more!) for putting together such a brilliant event.
I’ve loved learning and sharing this week! Feeling super inspired and looking forward to building new friendships!
Last week in UX London I got to witness event planning mastery, I was in awe. Things ran smoothly and people were united under a premise: to share knowledge and build community.
This doesn’t happen by chance, it’s the mastery that pros like Jeremy and Louise bring to the table.
Bold, thought-provoking talks. Hands-on workshops that challenged and stretched thinking. And a real sense of community that reminded me why spaces like this matter so much.
The conference was packed with inspiration, thoughtful conversations, and a strong focus on accessibility and inclusivity. Thank you Luke Hay, Jeremy Keith, Louise Ash, and the whole Clearleft team for creating such a welcoming and inspiring space!
Jeremy Keith, Richard Rutter, Louise Ash, Chris How, Sophie Count, Luke Hay and the rest of Clearleft, take a bow! Hands down one of the best conference experiences I’ve had!
The curation was excellent, the talks complimented each other so well, it was almost like we’d all met up and rehearsed it beforehand!
A huge thank you to Jeremy Keith, Louise Ash and the Clearleft team for the opportunity and the brilliant conference you’ve put together.
It’s been inspiring to experience every moment of it.
Shoutout to the organisers for curating such a rich experience—3 themed days focused on Discovery, Design, and Delivery.
We remember through stories. And this event was full of them. Already looking forward to next year.
And I’m just going to quote Rachel Rosenson’s post in its entirety:
Spoke at UXLondon last week—and while the talks were great, it was something off-stage that really stuck with me.
After the Day 1 talks wrapped, a bunch of us speakers grabbed a drink, and someone pointed out: Every single speaker that day—every one—was a woman. 5 talks. 4 workshops. All women.
And it wasn’t a “Women in Tech” day. It was just… the conference.
No one made a fuss. No banners. No “look at us go!”
Just incredible women, giving incredible talks, like it was the most normal thing in the world. (Spoiler: it should be.)
Jeremy Keith mentioned how frustrating it is that all-male line-ups are still so common—and how important it is to actively design for inclusion. Major props to Jeremy and the Clearleft team for curating a line-up that was intentional without performativity.
It was refreshing. No tokenism. No checkbox energy. Just great voices on great stages. And a big honor to be one of them.
Nice to see Clearleft’s browser support policy get a shoutout from Rachel during her Google IO talk.
Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day:
The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than One Billion people with disabilities/impairments.
Awareness is good. It’s necessary. But it’s not sufficient.
Accessibility, like sustainability and equality, is the kind of thing that most businesses will put at the end of sentences that begin “We are committed to…”
It’s what happens next that matters. How does that declared commitment—that awareness—turn into action?
In the worst-case scenario, an organisation might reach for an accessibility overlay. Who can blame them? They care about accessibility. They want to do something. This is something.
Good intentions alone can result in an inaccessible website. That’s why I think there’s another level of awareness that’s equally important. Designers and developers need to be aware of what they can actually do in service of accessibility.
Fortunately that’s not an onerous expectation. It doesn’t take long to grasp the importance of having good colour contrast or using the right HTML elements.
An awareness of HTML is like a superpower when it comes to accessibility. Like I wrote in the foreword to the Web Accessibility Cookbook by O’Reilly:
It’s supposed to be an accessibility cookbook but it’s also one of the best HTML tutorials you’ll ever find. Come for the accessibility recipe; stay for the deep understanding of markup.
The challenge is that HTML is hidden. Like Cassie said in the accessibility episode of The Clearleft Podcast:
You get JavaScript errors if you do that wrong and you can see if your CSS is broken, but you don’t really have that with accessibility. It’s not as obvious when you’ve got something wrong.
We are biased towards what we can see—hierarchy, layout, imagery, widgets. Those are the outputs. When it comes to accessibility, what matters is how those outputs are generated. Is that button actually a button element or is it a div? Is that heading actually an h1 or is it another div?
This isn’t about the semantics of HTML. This is about the UX of HTML:
Instead of explaining the meaning of a certain element, I show them what it does.
That’s the kind of awareness I’m talking about.
One way of gaining this awareness is to get a feel for using a screen reader.
The name is a bit of a misnomer. Reading the text on screen is the least important thing that the software does. The really important thing that a screen reader does is convey the structure of what’s on screen.
Friend of Clearleft, Jamie Knight very generously spent an hour of his time this week showing everyone the basics of using VoiceOver on a Mac (there’s a great short video by Ethan that also covers this).
Using the rotor, everyone was able to explore what’s under the hood of a web page; all the headings, the text of all the links, the different regions of the page.
That’s not going to turn anyone into an accessibility expert overnight, but it gave everyone an awareness of how much the HTML matters.
Mind you, accessibility is a much bigger field than just screen readers.
Fred recently hosted a terrific panel called Is neurodiversity the next frontier of accessibility in UX design?—well worth a watch!
One of those panelists—Craig Abbott—is speaking on day two of UX London next month. His talk has the magnificent title, Accessibility is a design problem:
I spend a bit of time covering some misconceptions about accessibility, who is responsible for it, and why it’s important that we design for it up front. It also includes real-world examples where design has impacted accessibility, before moving onto lots of practical guidance on what to be aware of and how to design for many different accessibility issues.
Get yourself a ticket and get ready for some practical accessibility awareness.