The Collective #911: Internet roadtrip, Ludo GL and the creative power of contraints

Olá, frontend friends! 👋

Here’s a fresh roundup of the latest frontend news, links, and resources to inspire and inform you. Whether you're looking for new ideas or just something interesting, we hope you'll discover something exciting in this edition!

Happy exploring! 💙

P.S. We've been hosting Codrops with Liquid Web for almost a decade now—super reliable and solid support. Highly recommended.

^{From our sponsor}

Prompt, run, edit & deploy full-stack web & mobile apps with Bolt

Bolt is the AI-powered dev agent that brings full stack coding right to your browser.

Bring your design to life with Bolt.

Try for free

GSAP Site of the Week: Inkwell

GSAP named Inkwell its Site of the Week! This polished scroll-driven experience by SavoirFaire©️ uses GSAP’s ScrollSmoother and WebGL magic.

^{gsap / web-trends}

The creative power of constraints

This article explores how creative constraints—whether imposed or self-chosen—can fuel innovation across design, art, and architecture.

^{article / creativity}

LudoGL

Marco Ludovico Perego built LudoGL, a WebGL2-only renderer from scratch to learn deferred rendering and post-processing techniques.

^{tutorial / webgl}

Zed: The Fastest AI Code Editor

Richard Feldman introduces Zed, an open-source AI code editor with a built-in Agent Panel for interactive coding assistance.

^{ai / code-editors}

Config 2025: Pushing design further

This article updates you on what's new in Figma following Config 2025, including tools like Figma Make, Sites, Grid, Draw, and Buzz that expand its capabilities from design to production.

^{graphic-design / tool}

Clippy

Clippy lets you run LLMs locally with a nostalgic 1990s interface inspired by Microsoft’s original Clippy design.

^{ai / tool}

Guitar Chords in CSS

Mads Stoumann builds a guitar chord visualizer using only CSS, leveraging the new attr() function and grid layout for fretboard rendering.

^{css / music / tutorial}

Making a new form control

Joeri Sebrechts explores building a custom <input> element from scratch with full form support, styling, and validation using only web standards.

^{javascript / tutorial / web-components}

LegoGPT

LegoGPT is an open-source model that generates physically buildable LEGO designs from text prompts, using LLaMA fine-tuning and stability checks.

^{3d / ai}

How Node.js Works Behind the Scenes

A deep dive into how Node.js handles async operations with its event loop, libuv, and phases like timers, poll, check, and process.nextTick().

^{node-js / tutorial}

Exploring CSS3DRenderer in Three.js

Yuri Artiukh shares insights on alternative renderers in Three.js, highlighting CSS3DRenderer’s ability to render HTML in 3D space, and how it enables seamless mixing of WebGL and DOM elements.

^{3d / css / three-js / webgl}

Adventures in Vibe Coding – Really, Really Big Numbers

Raymond Camden explores "vibe coding" with GenAI to build a large-number formatter in JS using K–AAA-style suffixes (yes, even KFC).

^{ai / javascript / opinion}

JavaScript, what is this?

Mat “Wilto” Marquis explains how this works in JavaScript, from global to strict mode, arrow functions, events, and binding nuances.

^{javascript / tutorial}

VERT

VERT is a fast, ad-free, open-source file converter that runs locally for most formats and supports images, audio, video, and documents.

^{productivity / tool}

Rybbit Analytics

Rybbit is a privacy-friendly, open-source alternative to Google Analytics with a clean UI, real-time dashboards, and GDPR-compliant tracking.

^{analytics / privacy / tool}

Critical CSS Generator

Generate and inline Critical CSS for faster load times, improved Core Web Vitals, and better performance with this free tool.

^{css / performance / tool}

The history of album art

The history of album art, from utilitarian sleeves to iconic visual design, driven by pioneers like Steinweiss, Miles, and Fujita.

^{art / design-trends / graphic-design / music}

Are ‘CSS Carousels’ accessible?

Sara Soueidan examines the accessibility pitfalls of experimental CSS Carousels, concluding they're not yet ready for production use.

^{accessibility / css / html / opinion}

Internet roadtrip

Neal Agarwal built a collaborative Street View road trip simulator where users vote every 10 seconds on directions—and on changing the radio station.

^{interactive-games}

All the entries from Gamedev.js Jam 2025

Gamedev.js Jam 2025 saw a record-breaking 420 game submissions on the theme "Balance"; voting is open on Itch.io until May 9th.

^{game-development / interactive-games / javascript}

Using AI to Analyze Chart Images

Raymond Camden tests using Gemini AI to extract structured data and summaries from chart images, finding it reasonably accurate and useful.

^{ai / python / tutorial}

^{From our sponsor}

Start learning AI in 2025

Keeping up with AI is hard – we get it!

That’s why over 1M professionals read Superhuman AI to stay ahead.

• Get daily AI news, tools, and tutorials

• Learn new AI skills you can use at work in 3 mins a day

• Become 10X more productive

Sign up and start mastering AI

Got something you’d like to share? Just reply to this email and let us know!