We don’t publish a big ol’ bunch of links pushing products and whatnot around here. But I do like sharing a good resource when it’s available and that’s what I’m doing here with Andy Clarke’s upcoming Practical Layout Workshop.

Brad Frost introduced the “Atomic Design” concept wayyyy back in 2013. He even wrote a book on it. And we all took notice, because that term has been part of our lexicon ever since.

Layout. It’s one of those easy-to-learn, difficult-to-master things, like they say about playing bass. Not because it’s innately difficult to, say, place two elements next to each other, but because there are many, many ways to tackle it. And layout is one area of CSS that seems to evolve more than others, as we’ve seen in the past 10-ish years with the Flexbox, CSS Grid, Subgrid, and now Masonry to name but a few. May as well toss in Container Queries while we’re at it. And reading flow. And…

That’s a good way to start talking about a new online course that Ahmad Shadeed is planning to release called The Layout Maestro. I love that name, by the way. It captures exactly how I think about working with layouts: orchestrating how and where things are arranged on a page. Layouts are rarely static these days. They are expected to adapt to the user’s context, not totally unlike a song changing keys.

KelpUI is new library that Chris Ferdinandi is developing, designed to leverage newer CSS features and Web Components. I’ve enjoyed following Chris as he’s published an ongoing series of articles detailing his thought process behind the library, getting deep into his approach. You really get a clear picture of his strategy and I love it.

The State of CSS 2025 Survey dropped a few days ago, and besides waiting for the results, it’s exciting to see a lot of the new things shipped to CSS over the past year reflected in the questions. To be specific, the next survey covers the following features:

Shape master Temani Afif has what might be the largest collection of CSS shapes on the planet with all the tools to generate them on the fly. There’s a mix of clever techniques he’s typically used to make those shapes, many of which he’s covered here at CSS-Tricks over the years.

Some of the more complex shapes were commonly clipped with the path() function. That makes a lot of sense because it literally accepts SVG path coordinates that you can draw in an app like Figma and export.

But Temani has gone all-in on the newly-released shape() function which recently rolled out in both Chromium browsers and Safari. That includes a brand-new generator that converts path() shapes in shape() commands instead.

Some weekend reading on the heels of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAADM), which took place yesterday. The Email Markup Consortium (EMC) released its 2025 study on the accessibility in HTML emails, and the TL;DR is not totally dissimilar from what we heard from WebAIM’s annual web report:

This is the third full year for this report and we are disappointed to see the same issues as we have in previous years. The top 10 issues haven’t changed order since last year, apart from the addition of color contrast, which can be put down to a change in the testing and reporting.

Back in October, the folks behind the GreenSock Animation Platform (GSAP) joined forces with Webflow, the visual website builder. Now, the team’s back with another announcement: Along with the version 3.13 release, GSAP, and all its awesome plugins, are now freely available to everyone.

Brad Frost is running this new little podcast called Open Up. Folks write in with questions about the “other” side of web design and front-end development — not so much about tools and best practices as it is about the things that surround the work we do, like what happens if you get laid off, or AI takes your job, or something along those lines. You know, the human side of what we do in web design and development.

If I were starting with CSS today for the very first time, I would first want to spend time understanding writing modes because that’s a great place to wrap your head around direction and document flow. But right after that, and even more excitedly so, I would jump right into display and get a firm grasp on layout strategies.

And where would I learn that? There are lots of great resources out there. I mean, I have a full course called The Basics that gets into all that. I’d say you’d do yourself justice getting that from Andy Bell’s Complete CSS course as well.