Journal

That means the rest of the design no longer recognizes where those elements are supposed to sit. So as soon as you start previewing or adjusting variants, things will shift unexpectedly.

We built Notarizer to simplify macOS app notarization, automating signing, DMG creation, and error handling into a guided, one-click workflow for developers.

Every Friday at GrandWorks we run a session we call Friyayy Evening. Someone on the team picks something they know well and walks the rest of us through it. A few weeks ago it was my turn, so I took everyone through colour theory: how colour actually works, and how we pick palettes for client projects instead of going on gut feel alone. Here are the parts worth writing down.

A few years ago 'AI for ecommerce' mostly meant a recommendation widget and a chatbot that couldn't answer anything. In 2026 it means something bigger and stranger: software that shops on your customer's behalf. It's worth separating what's genuinely useful today from what's mostly noise, because there's plenty of both.

The hamburger menu is everywhere. Three stacked lines, tucked in a corner, hiding a list of everything else. Designer Norm Cox drew the first one in 1981 for the Xerox Star workstation, as a simple way to show that a button held an expandable list. Then it sat quietly for almost thirty years.

We live surrounded by images, and that makes visual identity one of the most useful things a brand can get right. It's what lets people recognise you before they've read a single word. Think about Apple, Coca-Cola or McDonald's: across packaging, ads, shops and apps, everything looks like it came from the same place. That consistency is the whole point.

Most online carts never turn into orders. By most measures, around seven in ten get abandoned somewhere between 'add to cart' and 'payment confirmed'. Some of that you can't help, because people browse, compare and wander off. But a lot of it is the checkout itself getting in the way.

We wrote recently about how AI agents have started doing the shopping. A customer asks ChatGPT or Gemini for a product, gets a shortlist with a buy button, and never visits your store. That piece was the why. This one is the how: what you actually change so an agent can find you, understand you, and recommend you.

Every year someone publishes a list of ecommerce design trends, and every year half of them are last year's trends with a new screenshot. So instead of chasing novelty, here's what actually moves the needle for an online store in 2026, based on what we keep seeing work for the shops we build.

Clients often ask us to recommend a technology before we've talked about what they're building. It's the wrong order, but it's a fair question, so here's how we actually decide. Most of our work lands on one of three stacks: Framer, WordPress, or React Native. Each is the right answer to a different question.