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😶‍🌫️ Blurry UX Wins? + CSS’s Border Magic

March 26, 2025

What makes good digital products work.

A weekly read for people who design, build, lead, and improve digital products. The decisions, details, and trade-offs behind better product work.

unicornclub.dev

Hey folks 👋

This week’s Unicorn Club has a bit of everything.

We’re looking at CSS puzzles like inline background overlaps and giving some overdue attention to tools like border-image. On the UX side, a blurry A/B test has delivered surprising results, and AI is continuing to reshape how we approach design.

For devs, check out document.designMode for a handy browser trick. And in design, Switzerland’s new passport might just be the most beautiful thing you’ll see this week.

That’s all—straight to the good stuff.

Cheers,
Adam 🦄

Sponsored by Bit Composable Software

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🧠 UX
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Weirdest A/B test blew everyone's mind

One blurry background = 94% more conversions (here's the exact test)

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The Evolving Role of UX Designers

The integration of Artificial Intelligence into user experience design is rapidly transforming the field, marking a significant evolution in the role of UX professionals.

📋 CSS
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A Deep Dive into the Inline Background Overlap Problem

How to get a semitransparent background following some inline text with padding, but without the overlap problem.

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Minding the gaps: A new way to draw separators in CSS

Drawing separator lines between various sections of a webpage is a common design technique, which can help to structure the content and make it more readable, as well as more aesthetically pleasing.

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Revisiting CSS border-image

border-image remains one of the most underused CSS tools. Is it possible that people steer clear of border-image because its syntax is awkward and unintuitive?

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A fluid CSS methodology

Fluid CSS methodologies have completely transformed my approach to web integration by improving the responsive aspect and simplifying maintenance.

The First CSS Proposal Had Only 9 Properties 🛠️

When CSS was first proposed in 1994 by Håkon Wium Lie, it consisted of just nine properties, including font, color, and background. Compare that to modern CSS specs, which now include hundreds of properties!

Learn More →

🧑‍💻 Dev
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Previewing Content Changes In Your Work With document.designMode

You probably already know that you can use developer tools in your browser to make on-the-spot changes to a webpage — simply click the node in the Inspector and make your edits. But have you tried document.designMode?

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🎨 Design
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Switzerland’s New Passport Is So Stunning, It Belongs in a Museum

The European country might have the 5th strongest passport in the world, but they also have the most gorgeous passport now, with this new design unveiled by Geneva-based studio RETINAA.

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Design for Real Humans

Mindful Design is the responsible designer’s survival guide. Read the book, grab the toolkit, and take the course.

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Steering a design career (why design goes wrong and how to set it right)

The work of design starts long before you open Figma. We must first seek out – or create – conditions in which good design is even possible, by building our own relational power.

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Thanks for reading ❤️

Adam from Unicorn Club

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