Pixel of the Week – November 30, 2025 by Stéphanie Walter

Now: what am I doing at the moment

I’m back from a break, having been on sick leave for a few weeks. In the meantime, I’m learning to crochet, it helps me relax. You can see some of the amigurumi I made on Bluesky.

BlackFriday in Stores -20%

Also, a reminder: Black Friday savings for those of you who choose to support small businesses: get your own UX template with your 2025 budget and use it in 2026! Get 20% off everything in my store with this code BF2025 before December 3 (and -30% if you subscribe to the newsletter with other coupons you get in your email).

The most popular content this week

The Anxiety Toolkit is a collection of open source tools and exercises to help you manage anxiety. And friends, do we need it given the current state of our industry. I really like the “5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste” one.

Interesting article that caught my attention

Exposure (8 mins) Great article by Hardik Pandya on how designers need to get exposure from PMs, engineers, sales, users, researchers, to get out of the echo chamber. “Design + more design = pixel perfect but most likely ineffective work. Design + wide exposure = successful effective work”

Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday: why accessibility can be your biggest sales advantage (15 minutes) A ​​little reminder that an inaccessible website means lost customers, and lost revenue. “Research shows that UK businesses collectively lose £17.1 billion a year as shoppers using assistive technology abandon websites that don’t work for them. During BFCM alone, this translates into a loss of revenue of £446 million.” And on the other hand: disabled buyers are loyal customers. And yes, ideally we would make websites accessible because it is the right thing to do and a universal right. But sometimes, reminding people about the business argument can help.

Holes in the web (23 minutes) A ​​great deal of human knowledge is missing from the internet. By definition, generative AI is also very stupid. AI systems rely mostly on English-dominated Western data, excluding spoken, Indigenous, and low-resource languages. Deepak Varuvel Dennison illustrates this with the example of his father’s healing using traditional medicine. And with examples of the strong connection between language and local ecological knowledge (often passed down through oral tradition) and how this has led to the loss of knowledge of local plants, as well as local construction techniques. AI ultimately creates a feedback loop in which dominant ideas are reinforced while specialized knowledge fades from view. I’ll leave you with a quote that really sticks out to me: “The health of a system depends on the existence of all its parts, even the parts that may seem insignificant. The same principle applies to human knowledge. The loss of local knowledge is not a trivial loss. It is a disruption to the broader network of understanding that underpins human and ecological well-being.”

100, 150, or 200? Debunking Alt text character limits (7 minutes) “Alt text should be as long or as short as necessary, concise enough and correct. Alt text isn’t about length. It’s about purpose and context, explaining what the image shows and why it’s important. Some images only need a few words, others require more detail.” Glad this was debunked by Chris Yoong as I’ve seen it again in other “white papers” (maybe written by AI, who knows?)

Cabinet of curiosities: a non-design/technology rabbit hole that I enjoy

Trisolation – N Body Simulator A little gem for physics and celestial mechanics fans that lets you explore how many objects move under gravity, using real physics equations. It visualizes complex orbital paths, such as the well-known three-body problem, and offers different methods for simulating long- or short-term motion in space. Additionally, if you like books, there is a science fiction novel written by Liu Cixin on the topic: The Three-Body Problem, and a TV show.

Inspiration: fun experiments, beautiful art, and great ideas

Samsy Ninja (but warning: it makes noise and may trigger motion sickness and has flashing content) fun portfolio with cats you can control with your keyboard

Useful tools & resources

infini.wtf explore images and videos from Reddit, at your own risk, but you will definitely benefit.

Color Palette: a fun color palette generator, that lets you play with different color spaces, and create different types of palettes, with a look and feel that takes me back to the nostalgia of neumorphism. by Ryan Feigenbaum

Eunoia there are certain words, in different languages, that are full concepts and cannot be translated. For example “Schadenfreude” in German. Eunoia lets you search for 700+ untranslatable words in 80+ languages ​​and 60+ tags. A fun rabbit hole for people who love languages.

3 free tools to create video captions with limitations and how to use them.

Tutorials

Why You Need to Close Open Objects When Users Move Away (5 minutes) short explanation of “how to reset ARIA state, close components, and focus hands neatly” when users close an element.