#163

11 February 2026

Well hello fine The Index readers. I’m Scott Riley and I’m delighted to guest curate this week’s issue, where (so I am told) we bring you several absolute banger links for your — I am sure, finely pruned — reading list.

In case you don’t know me (and seriously, why would you?) I am predominantly a designer, so we’ve got a bit more of a design-centric twist this week.

Thanks for having me!

Starting off with a wonderful suite of disparate, hand-crafted, single-(or very-limited-)purpose tools from the fabulous Ruby Morgan Voigt. These are straight-to-the-point, super simple, and convenient. We’ve got stuff like image cropping, colour palette and gradient generators, typography tools, a regex tester. All beautiful. None hidden behind login-walls or newsletter signups. All running locally in the browser like how things should be too.

Custom select styling is (while still definitely a bit janky) one of my favourite features of modern CSS. Seeing example after example of absolute hell-code creating inconsistent, inaccessible messes in the name of [checks notes] making the clicky rectangle more round and shadowy has, much like every CEO, been a persistent annoyance throughout my career.

In this fantastic deep-dive, Adam Argyle shows us how we can make the clicky rectangles more round and shadowy without absolutely bastardising our markup in the name of modern visuals.

The indelible, inimitable Pavel Samsonov produces yet another banger in an ongoing series of bangers. Product Picnic contains some of the most insightful, eloquent, and thought-provoking words you could ever do yourself the favour of smushing into your brain.

This is one of my favourite issues from recent weeks, and it dives into what a good environment for design should look like, and how AI prototypes often work to the detriment of that. The ‘irresistible bait’, as Pavel puts it, of vibe-coded prototypes — something that I’m sure many of us have witnessed ensnare folks who we once thought of as serious and scrupulous humans — is having a real impact on how well we can maintain systems and environments where professional work is respected.

Shocker here: the US Government is full of shit. Amongst the many, many examples of that gang of shrimp-brained shills slapping the presidential seal on a massive sack-load of misinformation, the ‘misunderstanding autism as a personal brand’ thing comes up time and time again. D*n*ld Tr*mp audio clip jump-scare and Extraordinarily American Speaking Disorder™ aside, this is a good listen from NPR, provided you can get over the liberal throwing-around of interneuron.

Hey babe are you okay? You’ve barely touched your YOB - Adrift in the Ocean - Woods Stage @Pickathon 2019, the greatest live performance in the history of heavy music.

Thanks for tolerating me in your inbox for this special guest appearance in The Index. You can get future updates by subscribing.

If you liked these words, you can get thousands more words just like them beamed into your brains via the Mindful Design course.

Love ya, bye x