Ariel Salminen

Design systems architect • Author of various open source tools • Currently working on Nord Design System • Into cycling, music, poems & the web platform.

📮 arielsalminen.com
📌 nordhealth.design
📍 Helsinki, Finland
👩🏻‍🦰 She/her

2025-04-03

Currently working on bringing a new theming architecture and functionality to Nord Design System and this is so much fun to work on. 🥰

2025-03-27

Picking up some cheese before heading to my boyfriend’s place. 🧀🥰

A photograph of a cheese shop at downtown Helsinki. There’s a large window behind shelfs filled with sardines that has a view towards a hill with a church.
2025-03-27

Fairly happy with this new syntax highlighting theme that I created now for the articles in the blog (screenshot from arielsalminen.com/2022/launchi).

A screenshot of the syntax highlighting theme on arielsalminen.com blog posts. The theme uses dark shades of brown and yellow for a nice mellow overall look.
2025-03-26

Working on my @eleventy LinkedIn certification brb

2025-03-26

@elwinvaneede You’ve been doing amazing work! 🧡

2025-03-26

I’ve been now wearing the same pants pretty much two weeks straight because still dealing with the surgery aftermath 🥲

2025-03-25

@mia …or more confusing…

2025-03-25

My new side hobby is confusing people by liking their post on all the platforms

2025-03-25

Dancing and smiling my way through this gloomy city while Curtis Harding’s “Freedom” is playing on my headphones. 🥰

2025-03-25

This is me today learning that there are zero meetings in this organization and everything happens async.

2025-03-25

Anyway, go explore, the website is here: arielsalminen.com ❤️

A screenshot of Ariel Salminen’s new website and its home page at https://arielsalminen.com/A screenshot of Ariel Salminen’s new website and its blog archives page at https://arielsalminen.com/writing/A screenshot of Ariel Salminen’s new website and its contact page at https://arielsalminen.com/contact/
2025-03-25

Other things worth mentioning;

— CSS uses logical properties.
— Uses View Transitions.
— I’ve consolidated posts from various locations onto this platform.
— There’s a Layout Grid mode I’ve used while building this (toggle with ⌥ + A) which reveals how I use and break out of the grid:

A screenshot of Ariel Salminen’s new website with the layout grid toggled on. This and other keyboard only modes can be accessed via the “shortcuts” link in the footer of the website.
2025-03-25

— Left also all the old versions available if you take a peek of the FAQ page (arielsalminen.com/faq/). Technically, these have always been there, but not very visibly:

A screenshot of Ariel Salminen’s new website and its FAQ page that shows a list of old versions of the website from version 1.0 to the current version 10.0 that she just published.
2025-03-25

— I’ve collected various testimonials from past colleagues, clients, and you people on the home page. Something I’ve never had visible on my website before.
— I’ve left some easter eggs on e.g. the “accessibility” page or if you hit ⌥ + L on any page (or find the “shortcuts” link from the footer):

A screenshot of Ariel Salminen’s new website and its “keyboard shortcuts” modal.
2025-03-25

— I built a handy automation to subset the webfonts in the build phase so that the source code contains the original font files, but only subsets get deployed to the CDN. The below screenshot is me nerding about this stuff in an email to the type foundry after I got their permission to do this. 😅

Email from Arielle that says: Hi Hannes, Thank you so much! I actually now went ahead and created a little program that figures out the necessary characters and unicode ranges to keep depending on the content on the site and then subsets the files automatically in build phase. Happy with this solution since the website source still contains the original font files. With this change, l've now managed to get the website weight down from 350.3KB to 150.4KB which also dropped the initial load time from 1.58 seconds to 854 milliseconds. Sorryyy, I get a bit nerdy over this stuff. Thanks again! ❤️ The text is then followed by two screenshots showing the difference in file size and what gets transferred over the network.
2025-03-25

Stuff worth mentioning:

— It’s a Progressive Web App with offline support.
— I’ve tried to make it as accessible as possible and tested with various assistive technologies.
— The search feature pictured below is built with @eleventy and a bit of plain JavaScript:

A screenshot of Ariel Salminen’s new website and its search feature.
2025-03-25

New website launch day! 📮

I handcrafted a super simple new site for myself to better showcase what I do and have a future home for experiments I may want to tinker with.

Designed in the browser using HTML, CSS, and a tiny bit of plain JavaScript. Powered by @eleventy as usual:

arielsalminen.com

2025-03-24

Checkout the latest @shoptalkshow episode where @DavidDarnes shares bits about our past work on Nord Design System: shoptalkshow.com/657/

(…also thanks for the mention & link to my website Dave! 🧡)

2025-03-21

They’ve just installed drying machines downstairs and let me tell you… as someone who suffers with hypersensitivity… I am already trying to find a place to live in the next 4 weeks because already close to a sensory overload after just 1 hour. Not fun combined with all the other stuff going on. 😞

2025-03-21

Ok, sorry, one more. Had to test disabling code minification which technically is only needed for production builds. 0.15 seconds(!!) for the (dev env) build of a fairly decent sized website with bunch of functionality. 🤯

A screenshot of terminal with the following output:

[11ty] Wrote 180 files in 0.15 seconds (0.8ms each, v2.0.1)
[11ty] Watching…

Client Info

Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.04
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst