Location: Edinburgh, UK and remote (I’m used to time zone differences)
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I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes websites, landing pages, screenshots and copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background as a startup founder and full stack developer helps me create practical design solutions that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort and performance. I work to fixed price quotes when projects are self-contained.
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The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://www.checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO, speed and performance problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), website copy, and website articles on web best practices.
[ Rated 4.9/5, 50K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]
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I have 10+ years of experience, including a PhD in software verification and 5+ years working for myself helping over 20 companies including Just Eat, Triumph Motorcycles and Fogbender (YC W22). See my website for testimonials, portfolio and more:
Note: For larger projects, I usually have my partner assist alongside me in the background to speed things up and I’m working towards starting a design studio with her in the future.
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Email [email protected] with a short description of 1) your project 2) how you think I can help 3) the business outcome you’re looking for and 4) any deadlines. I can get back to you within one working day to arrange a call to discuss a quote and how we can work together.
> The important metric: how long does your entire development feedback cycle take, and what portion of that time is spent waiting on your compiler?
> So far, we haven’t lost much in the switch. The type safety we gave up hasn’t been noticeable in any concrete way yet, especially considering our test coverage has never been better.
Moving to Python means you'll have quicker compile times but now you'll need a bigger test suite which will take longer to run to get feedback after code edits? In TypeScript, you can compile and execute without waiting on type checking, an option like that would help?
> In people with normal vision (or corrected-to-normal vision), visual performance tends to be better with light mode, whereas some people with cataract and related disorders may perform better with dark mode. On the flip side, long-term reading in light mode may be associated with myopia.
> we strongly recommend that designers allow users to switch to dark mode if they want to — for three reasons: (1) there may be long-term effects associated with light mode; (2) some people with visual impairments will do better with dark mode; and (3) some users simply like dark mode better.
I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes web apps, websites, landing pages, copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background of launching my own products and being a full stack developer helps me create practical designs that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort, and performance. I work to fixed price quotes for self-contained projects.
---
The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO/speed/security problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), marketing, website copy, and website articles on web best practices.
[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]
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I have 10+ years of experience, including a PhD in software verification and 5+ years working for myself helping over 25 companies including Just Eat, Triumph Motorcycles and Fogbender (YC W22). See my website for testimonials, portfolio and more: https://seanw.org
Most tools only let you enter a single color and then attempt to autogenerate or use AI to create the other tints/shades, which often don't do a great job and are really limiting when you're creating branded palettes.
The focus on this tool is to let you tweak every tint/shade while keeping an eye on accessible contrast. The curve based editor shows you how the H/S/L values of your colors vary across a color scale and is meant to make the editing process quick and intuitive enough that you won't want to give up control to autogeneration.
This is still adding wrapper elements to get the layout you want. Even if you can force yourself to come up with some vague semantics behind the wrapper elements (that you wouldn't have otherwise added), I don't see how it's much better than using a generic tag and it shows you need to modify HTML to modify the presentation in practice.
Visual design involves a lot of grouping and aligning elements, and there isn't always semantic reasons for it. Grouping is usually best done in the HTML, so it's hard keep this part of the visual design out of your HTML.
I was thinking more of a document with multiple paragraphs and images, where some paragraphs are grouped with images and some aren't.
In the code from the link, the <body> element is serving as the wrapper element, that gives you a hook to get the layout you want. But when you're not lucky enough to have a semantic wrapper tag like that, you've usually got to add a generic tag help. Or write CSS that's closely coupled with the HTML, so they aren't really separate anyway.
The concept makes more sense for styling simple document style pages from 20 years ago, but it hasn't scaled to modern designs, complex web UIs and responsive pages that we want to code now, which isn't that surprising.
> we would all be writing purely semantic html with completely orthogonal and swappable css. And today literally no one designs web sites that way - html today is mostly specific to presentation
I think of HTML + CSS as the presentation layer now, and the data lives in your e.g. database and Markdown files, so the data and its presentation are still separate enough.
The idea of just swapping out the CSS to completely restyle a complex site is nice, but people need to accept this hasn't worked out (and not because devs are bad at CSS) and move on.
> If you “View Source” on any “real” website, you’ll notice that everything has layers and layers of wrapper elements, so you might be tricked into thinking that wrappers are how you solve layout problems. I can’t really agree or disagree here, as I never wrote “production” CSS, but, in my experience, it’s much easier to understand if you do the opposite — restrict yourself to using only markup-meaningful semantic tags, and then figure out CSS which works with the markup you have.
CSS isn't powerful enough by itself to create any layout you want without modifying the HTML. You almost always need wrapper elements to group elements you want to align together for presentation purposes only (e.g. "a vertically centered row containing one paragraph next to two vertically stacked images"), so there often aren't semantic HTML tags that would make sense.
It's similar to how you use numerous groups/frames in design apps like Inkscape and Figma to help align elements, where nobody would suggest you were a bad designer for using groups that don't have semantic meaning.
You can only really avoid wrapper elements for simple Markdown style pages with simple designs, where the CSS for that is straightforward.
I think in these discussions, it needs to be clearer how complex the page designs being discussed are. The CSS advice that makes sense for simple Markdown style pages is very different to what makes sense for a complex web app UI or a highly designed marketing page.
I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes web apps, websites, landing pages, copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background of launching my own products and being a full stack developer helps me create practical designs that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort, and performance. I work to fixed price quotes for self-contained projects.
---
The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO/speed/security problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), marketing, website copy, and website articles on web best practices.
[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]
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I have 10+ years of experience, including a PhD in software verification and 5+ years working for myself helping over 25 companies including Just Eat, Triumph Motorcycles and Fogbender (YC W22). See my website for testimonials, portfolio and more: https://seanw.org
> I keep seeing programmers say how angry it makes them that people are willing to write detailed CLAUDE.md and PROJECT.md files for Claude to use, but they weren't willing to write them for their coworkers.
Similar for adding static type checking, which makes it easier for AI and coworkers to understand the code, catch mistakes, and to refactor. And now there's coders willing to add static type checking to help AI but didn't see the benefit before for some reason.
I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes web apps, websites, landing pages, copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background of launching my own products and being a full stack developer helps me create practical designs that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort, and performance. I work to fixed price quotes for self-contained projects.
---
The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO/speed/security problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), marketing, website copy, and website articles on web best practices.
[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]
---
I have 10+ years of experience, including a PhD in software verification and 5+ years working for myself helping over 25 companies including Just Eat, Triumph Motorcycles and Fogbender (YC W22). See my website for testimonials, portfolio and more: https://seanw.org
I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes web apps, websites, landing pages, copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background of launching my own products and being a full stack developer helps me create practical designs that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort, and performance. I work to fixed price quotes for self-contained projects.
---
The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO/speed/security problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), marketing, website copy, and website articles on web best practices.
[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]
---
I have 10+ years of experience, including a PhD in software verification and 5+ years working for myself helping over 25 companies including Just Eat, Triumph Motorcycles and Fogbender (YC W22). See my website for testimonials, portfolio and more: https://seanw.org
Note: For large projects, my partner usually assists me in the background (I’m working on starting a design studio with her in the future)
---
Email [email protected] with a short description of 1) your project 2) how you think I can help 3) the business outcome you’re looking for and 4) any deadlines. I can get back to you in one working day to arrange a call to discuss a quote and how we can work together!
Anyone else have CI checks that source map files are missing from the build folder? Another trick is to grep the build folder for several function/variable names that you expect to be minified away.
I like laptop trackpads because it means you're always close to the keyboard, so you can easily switch between cursor and typing without only relying on one. It's good for UI design work for example.
For color deficiencies, different lightnesses are safe e.g. dark for loss and light for gain (could be dark reds for loss and light greens for gain, but don't mix the lightnesses). Other options are icons/shapes (like up/down arrows) or pattern fills (like stripes for loss).
The general trick is you can rely on differences in color lightness, patterns, text and icons, but not differences in color hue. The page should be usable in grayscale.
> It is a bit weird to see LLMs suddenly being presented as the reason to follow what are basically long standing best practices.
Maybe it's the speed of LLM iteration that makes the benefit more immediately obvious, vs seeing it unfold with a team of people over a longer time? It's almost like running a study?
I have a similar reaction to strong static types being advocated to help LLMs understanding/debugging code, catching bugs, refactoring... when it's obvious to me this helps humans as well.
Curious how "this practice helps LLMs be more productive" relates to studies that try to show this with human programmers, where running convincing human studies is really difficult. Besides problems with context sizes, are there best practices that help LLMs a lot but not humans?
> The real story is that Python is designed to be maximally dynamic -- you can monkey-patch methods at runtime, replace builtins, change a class's inheritance chain while instances exist -- and that design makes it fundamentally hard to optimize. ...
> 4 bytes of number, 24 bytes of machinery to support dynamism. a + b means: dereference two heap pointers, look up type slots, dispatch to int.__add__, allocate a new PyObject for the result (unless it hits the small-integer cache), update reference counts.
Would Python be a lot less useful without being maximally dynamic everywhere? Are there domains/frameworks/packages that benefit from this where this is a good trade-off?
I can't think of cases in strong statically typed languages where I've wanted something like monkey patching, and when I see monkey patching elsewhere there's often some reasonable alternative or it only needs to be used very rarely.
An accessible color palette editor for creating branded palettes built from the ground up that pass WCAG/APCA contrast rules (which is much quicker and less of a headache compared to doing manual contrast checks and fixes later):
The current web tool lets you export to CSS, Tailwind and Figma, and uses HSLuv for the color picker. HSL color pickers that most design tools like Figma use have the very counterintuitive property that the hue and saturation sliders will change the lightness of a color (which then impacts its WCAG contrast), which HSLuv fixes to make it much easier to find accessible color combinations.
I'm working on a Figma plugin version so you can preview colors directly on a Figma design as you make changes. It's tricky shrinking the UI to work inside a small plugin window!
The colors are all roughly the same lightness? If so, for people with color deficiency, you want the lightnesses to vary because people that can't easily tell certain hues apart should still be able to tell different lightnesses apart (although, if you need a color for lots of different pie slices, the lightnesses you can pick will start getting too close together and you might have to resort to patterns).
I'm a fan of HSLuv (https://www.hsluv.org/comparison/) for design work (when sRGB is fine and you don't need P3 colors). It's perceptual uniformity like Lab, but has familiar looking hue, saturation and lightness sliders instead like you'd see in a regular HSL color picker.
I've used HSLuv for an accessible palette editor (https://www.inclusivecolors.com/), so you get the familiarity of an HSL color picker, but unlike with HSL, when you change hue or saturation, the lightness and WCAG contrast stay the same, which makes HSLuv a great for exploring accessible color combinations without breaking the contrast you've set up already between your existing color pairs.
OKLCH is becoming a popular choice if you need P3 colors and perceptual uniformity because it's built into CSS now, but I find the colors pickers for OKLCH tend to look really complex and unfamiliar to use so I'm skeptical it's going to get popular with designers (it's mostly developers recommending OKLCH that are interested in the technical/coding part rather than the design part?). What are good choices if you want P3, perceptual uniformity, and an intuitive color picker UI?
https://www.checkbot.io/ - Chrome extension that crawls your website checking it follows SEO/speed/security best practices
https://www.inclusivecolors.com/ - Create Tailwind-style color palettes that are WCAG accessible by design
https://seanwilson.itch.io/wordoid - A fast-paced word spelling web game!
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Homepage: https://www.seanw.org
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/seanw.org
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanw-org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/seanw_org
Email: [email protected]
SEEKING CONTRACT WORK | UX/UI & web design
Portfolio: https://www.seanw.org/
Location: Edinburgh, UK and remote (I’m used to time zone differences)
---
I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes websites, landing pages, screenshots and copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background as a startup founder and full stack developer helps me create practical design solutions that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort and performance. I work to fixed price quotes when projects are self-contained.
---
The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://www.checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO, speed and performance problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), website copy, and website articles on web best practices.
[ Rated 4.9/5, 50K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]
---
I have 10+ years of experience, including a PhD in software verification and 5+ years working for myself helping over 20 companies including Just Eat, Triumph Motorcycles and Fogbender (YC W22). See my website for testimonials, portfolio and more:
https://www.seanw.org
Skills: Figma, Sketch, TypeScript, JavaScript, Vue, Hugo, Jekyll, WordPress, HTML/CSS, Bootstrap, Tailwind, OCaml, Java, Python, C, analytics, website SEO and speed optimisation.
Note: For larger projects, I usually have my partner assist alongside me in the background to speed things up and I’m working towards starting a design studio with her in the future.
---
Email [email protected] with a short description of 1) your project 2) how you think I can help 3) the business outcome you’re looking for and 4) any deadlines. I can get back to you within one working day to arrange a call to discuss a quote and how we can work together.