Category: Educational
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stripe + pmpro: how we built a membership checkout without a saas platform
Most designers reach for Gumroad or Lemon Squeezy — we went a layer deeper and own the whole checkout. The Design Stack membership runs on Paid Memberships Pro (PMPro) connected directly to Stripe, hosted on WordPress. No platform fees beyond Stripe’s standard 2.9% + 30¢. No third-party dashboard to log into. No lock-in. The tradeoff…
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vercel vs. godaddy: how we decide where to deploy each project
Not every project needs the same infrastructure — and using the wrong one costs you either speed or money. The M4D stack runs two different hosting setups for two different reasons. The projects site (static HTML, design system docs, blog) lives on GoDaddy — it’s a flat file site that deploys via FTP, loads fast,…
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icon systems: the part of your design system everyone assumes is easy
Icons are the last thing you document and the first thing that breaks consistency. Most design systems ship with icons pulled from three different libraries, sized at 16px here and 24px there, with stroke weights that don’t match the UI they sit in. Nobody planned it that way — it just happened one component at…
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type scale
A type scale is a sequence of font sizes built on a single ratio — so every size in your system is mathematically related to every other. Pick a base size (usually 16px) and a ratio (1.25 is modest, 1.5 is expressive) and multiply up and down from there. Token each step by role —…
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i built a design system business in 6 weeks using only claude code
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in AI, Automation, Color, Components, Educational, Illustrations, Images, Sites, Styleguides, Tokens, Typography, UI/UX, Web DesignSix weeks from first commit to a deployed product site, a content pipeline, a Gumroad membership, and a MailerLite funnel — one designer, one tool, no team. On April 25, 2026 I ran git init in a Google Drive folder. On June 5 I had a functioning design system business: a static site deployed to…
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design tokens
A design token is just a named variable that stores a design decision — color, spacing, type size — so your whole system can change from one place. Instead of hardcoding `#0d0d0d` in fifty places, you define `–ink: #0d0d0d` once and reference the name everywhere. When the value changes, everything updates. Tokens create the contract…
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TINYWOW
a popular free, all-in-one online toolkit designed to simplify a wide range of digital tasks from editing PDFs and images to generating content with AI, it’s a web-based platform that requires no software installation or registration for basic use, making it highly accessible for students, professionals, and content creators. https://tinywow.com
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Daily UI
Daily UI is a 100-day series of UI design challenges, sent Monday-Friday, with opportunities to share work and earn rewards.
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Laws of UX
Laws of UX is a collection of best practices that designers can consider when building user interfaces.
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