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
12
Independent Blog
English
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Recent posts from Andy Bell's RSS feed.
I’m unsubscribing from the AI discourse
I’m bored of hearing about it, bored of seeing people I respect(ed) fawn over it and it’s really not doing my mental health any good. I’m going wait for the inevitable bubble burst and then be ready to help people burned by this harmful technology via Set.studio and Piccalilli. We’ve recently made our viewpoint very clear over there anyway. How am I doing it? Filters and mutes in Bluesky and Feedbin will do the job nicely for me I think because I don’t really listen to podcasts, I don...
I listen to a lot of I Prevail
I only discovered them in July 2025 and I’ll let this last.fm chart do the rest to illustrate the point. I think this chart sums me up as: Anyway, I think they rip. They’re a bit cheesy, sure, but this record especially sounds massive, so if you’re into metalcore etc, give ’em a try.
Fun shadow coding challenge
Timehop just reminded me of this prototype I made 8 years ago. Scroll it and you’ll see that the central light source (orange line) affects the shadow. CodePen Embed Fallback CSS has come on a lot in those 8 years, so could you do better? Would love to see it, so let me know if you do.
It really is the year of the website
I keep talking about it so I’m finally doing it. You might be looking at my website right now, thinking “this looks a bit basic m8″ and you’d be right. It’s because I’m building this website in iterations. The version you see now is the “wireframe” shell version and there’s lots more versions to come. Today, I’ve published the first post of a series on Piccalilli where I redesign and re-build this thing in the open. The hope is that it inspires you to build and maintain your own corner of the...
Wrapping up 2025 (sort of)
I’m doing my annual wrap up post early this year because I’m really tired and want to completely switch off for a couple of weeks. It’s time to spend some quality time with my lovely family. This isn’t my usual style of wrap-up. Consider this wrap up more of a call to action than a retrospective. Let’s get stuck in. World events We’ve watched our western legacy media and politicians alike say, “nothing to see here” while Palestinians have been massacred by Israel. In fact, our governmen...
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