https://reef.alohapixel.app/ Every post published on Reef Notes, newest first: build logs, performance work, typography, and the business of a small studio. en-us Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://reef.alohapixel.app/blog/a-type-scale-you-can-defend/ https://reef.alohapixel.app/blog/a-type-scale-you-can-defend/ Ratios are easy to pick and mostly wrong. A scale earns its place when every step has a job on a real page: five sizes, a measure that holds at 320 and at 1440 pixels, and clamp() written so a designer can read it out loud. Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Typography Tomas Abaroa https://reef.alohapixel.app/blog/measuring-what-the-reader-feels/ https://reef.alohapixel.app/blog/measuring-what-the-reader-feels/ Lab tools measure a robot on fibre. Field data measures your readers on a bus. Here is the smallest honest setup we could build: three metrics, one endpoint, no third party script, and the week our two sets of numbers disagreed by two and a half seconds. Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Performance Noor Benali https://reef.alohapixel.app/blog/what-a-good-brief-looks-like/ https://reef.alohapixel.app/blog/what-a-good-brief-looks-like/ Most projects that went wrong were already wrong on page one. This is the brief we now refuse to start without: who decides, what already exists, what counts as done, and the three questions that reveal a budget before anyone has to say a number. Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Studio Mara Lindqvist https://reef.alohapixel.app/blog/dark-mode-is-a-content-problem/ https://reef.alohapixel.app/blog/dark-mode-is-a-content-problem/ Inverting a palette is an afternoon of work. The hard part is everything the palette does not control: photographs, screenshots, charts, embedded video, and the one brand colour that stops meaning anything once the background goes dark. Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT Design Tomas Abaroa https://reef.alohapixel.app/blog/content-collections-are-a-contract/ https://reef.alohapixel.app/blog/content-collections-are-a-contract/ A schema that fails the build is worth more than a CMS that lets anyone publish a broken page. What we validate in Astro, what we deliberately leave alone, and the three rules that keep a Zod schema from slowly turning into a second CMS. Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT Craft Mara Lindqvist https://reef.alohapixel.app/blog/the-real-cost-of-a-web-font/ https://reef.alohapixel.app/blog/the-real-cost-of-a-web-font/ A variable font is not automatically cheaper than two static weights, subsetting saves less than people think, and the expensive part is usually the fallback nobody designed. What a typeface actually costs, measured in bytes, requests and reflow. Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Typography Tomas Abaroa https://reef.alohapixel.app/blog/a-performance-budget-that-survives-contact/ https://reef.alohapixel.app/blog/a-performance-budget-that-survives-contact/ A budget is not a Lighthouse score and it is not a Slack message. Here is the one we now write into the contract: four numbers, the device they are measured on, and the sentence that decides what happens when someone asks for a video header in week nine. Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT Performance Noor Benali https://reef.alohapixel.app/blog/writing-html-that-ages-well/ https://reef.alohapixel.app/blog/writing-html-that-ages-well/ We rebuilt a site we first shipped in 2016, and the markup that survived was never the clever markup. What holds up: elements chosen for meaning, state left where the browser can see it, and a hard limit on what a class name is allowed to know. Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT Craft Mara Lindqvist