Hi, I’m Lea! 👋🏼 I make things for making things. I’m an award-winning web standards leader, and have designed several web technologies implemented in your browser. I have launched open source dev tools used by millions, and consult on my areas of expertise. I hold a PhD in usability & innovation from MIT — but chose product over research.
Blog
I love sharing knowledge and speak, teach, write, and blog about product design, web technologies, usability, and their intersection.
- The best way to use icons in Web UIs
- The best dark mode toggle is probably none
- Dark mode toggles: two states are enough
- In defense of polyfills
- External import maps, today!
- Web dependencies are broken. Can we fix them?
- In the economy of user effort, be a bargain
- State of HTML 2025 now open!
- Influence the State of HTML 2025 Survey!
- The Hovercar Framework for Deliberate Product Design
- Bluesky Likes Web Components
- Construction Lines
- Style-observer: JS to observe CSS property changes, for reals
- Context Chips in Survey Design: “Okay, but how does it feel?”
- Web Components are not Framework Components — and That’s Okay
- Making the Web more Awesome — for everyone
- Forget “show, don’t tell”. Engage, don’t show!
- Inline conditionals in CSS, now?
- Inline conditionals in CSS?
- On compliance vs readability: Generating text colors with CSS
- Eigensolutions: composability as the antidote to overfit
- Minimalist Affordances: Making the right tradeoffs
- State of HTML 2023 now open!
- Numbers or Brackets for numeric questions?
- Help Design the Inaugural State of HTML Survey!
- Going Lean
- Rethinking Categorization
- 11ty: Index ALL the things!
- Migrating Disqus from WP to 11ty
- JS private class fields considered harmful