Andy Bell
Andy Bell — Designer, developer, founder of Set Studio and Piccalilli
CSS expert and design systems advocate focused on progressive enhancement.
bell.bzAndy Bell writes about building websites the way they should be built — accessible, resilient, and grounded in web standards rather than the framework of the month. As the founder of Set Studio and the educational platform Piccalilli, he practices what he preaches: progressive enhancement, thoughtful CSS, and design systems that actually hold up. His posts are practical and direct, written for people who want to get better at the craft of front-end development.
Written by Andy Bell.
Regular
Publishes weekly or bi-weekly
27
Independent Blog
English
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In response to “The death of web development education”
I read Mathias Schäfer’s excellent post, titled The death of web development education. I was thinking about how I can contribute to the conversation and really struggled to articulate the problem. The most effective way I can contribute, in my opinion, is a crude sketch I just did of Piccalilli‘s Stripe chart for all time sales: That’s a whopping 67.5% reduction since 2025… Pretty bleak, huh? Something really does have to change or you’ll miss publishers when they’re gone.
You’ll miss publishers when they’re gone
Ever since Piccalilli started to get traction, I’ve always seen CSS-Tricks, Smashing Magazine and A List Apart (among others) as peers. We all help each other behind the scenes and importantly, back each other. When CSS-Tricks was initially acquired by DigitalOcean, I was really happy for Chris. The work that he’d put into that publication was unreal with thousands of articles published along with elevating writers (including me) to building audiences of their own. It’s certainly something I...
An RSS feed for a daily album recommendation
My music collection is ever-growing and I have a habit of listening to the same stuff on repeat. Mostly, it’s overwhelm-related because as you can see by this album covers view, there’s a lot to choose from. I thought RSS could be useful here, so I wrote a little feed that picks a random album, each day, then serves that as the single RSS item. This works great because my RSS reader, Feedbin will happily build those up if I don’t get around to checking. Try it for yourself. You might disco...
Removing algorithmic feed slop from my life
Recently, during a very relaxing holiday in Cyprus, I had a revelation of sorts: my brain was rotting. I know this because I read a lot of books on holiday. It’s the only time I do read books! Well, I did read a lot on holiday, but the last couple of years I really struggled to focus. I used to put it down to “I’m just super tired, man, I don’t have the mental strength to concentrate” but that was probably only a part of it. I struggle to concentrate all the time — brains, innit — but it l...
You’ll miss the soul when it’s gone
Pretty grim day of news in the industry today, with Salma Alam-Naylor stepping away from developer relations work permanently, Josh Comeau taking a sabbatical from making courses and GSAP’s once-vibrant forums descending into a ghost town. The reason your token guzzler “produces” anything that could be described as “good” is because of the years of hard work from people that actually care deeply. The reason what we do was fun was because of the soul that these great people — along with many,...
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If you want to build websites that work for everyone — not just the latest Chrome on a fast connection — Andy Bell is one of the best voices in the space.