Yet much as it longs for an earlier era of America, A Billion Little Lights’ greatest nostalgia is for a more recent past, the indie-rock boom years of the late ’00s and early ’10s, when the genre looked as if it could still be a big tent. “Track...

This was an excellent listen of a conversation with Adam Argyle, co-host of The CSS Podcast, on The Design Systems Podcast.

Well worth your time.

These rules for writing found via Austin Kleon are aimed at writing, but could easily be applied to design.

Some pretty good advice on how Basecamp keeps UIs simple:

1. Always choosing clarity over being slick or fancy. Internally we call this “Fisher Price” design. We aim to make the UI totally obvious and self explanatory, by keeping individual screens...

This is a great post about keeping systems simple. It’s aimed at startups, but could easily be applied to design systems.

Ships contain simple systems that are easy to operate and easy to understand, which makes them easy to fix, which means they...

Jumping on Jeremy Keith’s Architects, gardeners, and design systems, which itself is a response to Frank Chimero’s Gardening vs. Architecture post, Dave Rupert opines on the maintenance aspect of design systems, but laments how design systems could...

The term “no code” has increasingly been popping up in my RSS reader and its frequency is starting to seem like a trend is forming. No code is a term for writing an application’s entire business logic without any work from a software developer. You...

This is an oldie but a goodie from Alla Kholmatova about how to start thinking in a modular mindset when designing and building applications.

…if an object in the interface doesn’t have a name—a name that makes sense to your team, and is known...

Being on an in-house team creating a design system and wrestling with many of the politics and ups and downs that brings, I can’t fathom how a design system built in isolation by outside agency could be successful.

Organization Y hears about design...

There’s been a lot of activity lately around where a designer’s place is in AI and machine learning and this post from Amandas Linden is a good jumping off point to where things are headed.

I also have been kicking around this idea a lot in my head...

Here’s an interesting read on the past, current, and future state of collaboration.

Slack was supposed to be the app that became the OS, the end of the cycle on productivity. But that hasn’t happened. How should we understand what’s happening...

I read a number of articles every day, but often find myself forgetting what I read and not putting the ideas in the articles into practice. To remedy that I’m going to start an experiment where I’ll take a more considered approach to the articles...

I recently finished Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull and in it he relayed a few interesting ideas that directors at Pixar use to construct mental models for creating movies. One of my favorites was from Andrew Stanton:

Andrew likens the director...

I recently started a new project at work of leading a team to build a design system for all of our products. In addition to wearing the front-end designer and developer hats, I’m also tasked as the defacto Product Owner whose responsibilities include...

Interesting oral history of the hamburger menu from the designers of the Xerox Star.

I don’t understand the fascination with the hamburger menu symbol, because it’s not even an icon—it’s just a symbol. Icons had both visual and machine semantics...

I don’t often find myself needing to do this, but when I do this looks like a handy tool to convert rich text to Markdown.

Like Zeldman had read my mind:

With every new discovery I made and shared, I felt a sense of mastery and control, and a tingling certainty that I was physically contributing to a better world of the near-future. A world forged in the best tech...

This isn’t in my line of work, but shit, Basecamp knows how to write a job description:

What we’re not looking for is a superhero who might be able to put out five fires burning at once by working 80+ hours/week, but a candidate who avoids the...

There’s an awful lot I could quote in this excellent piece by Paul Ford in Wired, but this part really got me:

Everyone living has spent the majority of their existence in the shadow of automated computation. It has been a story of joy, of mostly...

I’ve always balked at the “modular” approach to UX that Ryan writes about in this article and instead favored an integrated effort. His thoughts on domain specific vs. independent UX are interesting as well.

But the company I’m at now has very and...

I thoroughly enjoyed this post from Jeremy Keith about the split between the front of the front-end vs. the back of front-end and how to weigh developer convenience against the user’s experience.

As a user-centred developer, my priority is doing...

I was playing around with Airtable, a visual database/spreadsheet, the other day and came across how WeWork organizes their UX research using it. One thing I have been noticing at work is we spend a lot of time writing up notes in a central location...

Stumbled across this essay from Mitchell Kapor published in Terry Winograd’s Bringing Design to Software. Despite being nearly 30 years old, it’s crazy how relevant it still is.

Despite the enormous outward success of personal computers,...

It’s fall, which means the heady summer days of listening almost nonstop to the Grateful Dead are slowing down only to be supplanted with artists who are a bit more melancholy.

The complicated Warren Zevon is an artist who is near the top of this...

Event though I’m not doing any iOS design these days, I still try to keep up with what’s happening at Apple’s WWDC. Each year they tend to create more and more design related sessions and this year is no different.

Here are a few that caught my eye...

It’s common to think that web accessibility only applies to screen readers and blind users, but the reality is much larger and more nuanced. With close to 25 percent of adults in the United States having some sort of disability, it’s something too...

I recently took a job at 84.51°, which means I’m no longer working remotely. The three years I did at Food52 were great, but it was time for a change. I wrote-up some notes about how to help make things easier when working remotely.

Communication...

There was a debate at work the other day concerning where to place a class on a given snippet of HTML. The HTML was used to markup a linked profile photo and the disagreement was whether or not to place the class on the anchor or the image tag. The...

When designing the upcoming (Not)Recipes app for Food52, I often find myself searching for solutions that other apps have figured out previously and working to combine those into our app. At first I felt guilty of not innovating or becoming too mundane...

As we get closer to launching the (Not)Recipes app at Food52 there are a bunch of small details that need to be ironed out. One of these details is the launch screen that users first encounter when launching the app.

According to Apple, the launch...

This site is based on the static-site generator Middleman, which has served me well over the years.

I had the opportunity to work on creating a blog that needed navigation to be built using dynamic category names defined by an author when creating...

There’s no doubt to be a glut of want-to-be iOS developers clamoring for resources to learn Swift after Apple’s announcement of the language last week at WWDC. Count me among them.

As someone who for years wanted to dip their toes into the waters...

I love this idea from the New York Times: > Compendium invites readers of The New York Times like you to use articles, imagery, videos, and quotations to tell your own stories using New York Times content. Each collection has a description that you...

There’s been a number of discussions at Ample lately about whether or not using ems for text sizing is worth the headache. As the one who maintains Ample’s baseline getting-started repo, I figured it’s up to me to figure out what’s what.

A routine...

Some great time-saving tips from Caterina Fake here: > * Eliminate or Reduce Media > * Work Offline > * Do less > * Don’t make appointments or schedule meetings. > * Sleep in two shifts. > * Make time less precious.

Be sure to click through to the...

Adobe recently announced the release of Source Code Pro, a monospaced font adapted from Source Sans Pro.

Looks to be worth a try, at least. Pick up your copy here.

A thoughtful piece from Kontra on how far online technology journalism has fallen.

Shouting sells. We’ve known this for a long time. If companies are daft enough to let their ad buyers talk them into spending money on those who shout the most,...

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve been noticing a lot of buzz lately around how print magazines and their newspaper cousins are slipping further into irrelevancy. Of course none of this is news, but I’ve read some interesting anecdotes the past few days...

I highly recommend this crazy-good interview with the hardest working man in show business, Louis C.K.

On of my favorite quotes: > Money is a resource. It’s an energy that you can inject into things, and it makes stuff happen. This money was like...

This has been passed around the Internet for awhile now, but I think it’s worth sharing here again. Sebastiaan de With shares his experiences designing an alarm clock app for Android.

It sounds like a hellish nightmare to do this, and is probably...

Think the newspaper industry was in trouble a few years ago? Don’t look now but it’s getting a whole lot worse, writes David Carr in The New York Times.

Between operational fiascos and flailing attempts to slash costs on the fly, it’s clear that...

An interesting article in the Atlantic is about the case between Argentinian pop star Virginia Da Cunha and Google about removing racy photos she no longer wants indexed. > … she sued Google and Yahoo, demanding they take the pictures down. An Argentinean...

An interesting take on something I’ve never really considered before: limiting your CSS margin declarations to one horizontal and one vertical direction, like so:

 div {
   margin-left: 1.5em;
   margin-top: 1.5em;
 }

Which is opposed to how I...

I think I just found a replacement to the official Facebook app on my iPhone. It’s the Facebook Camera app.

Released this week, the excellent camera app is one of the best designed mobile app experiences I’ve had. Not surprisingly it was designed...

May 10 - 11, 2012 was the innaugural year for QCMerge, a web conference in Cincinnati, and I couldn’t be more proud of how it went off.

I’ve been involved in QCMerge since it’s initial planning stages thanks to my work at Ample. There’s a ton of people...

Been crazy-busy this week, so I only had a chance to really enjoy four articles. Hope you enjoy them, too.

1. Tomorrow’s Web Type Today

   Elliott Jay Stocks has been on a tear lately publishing three articles about what’s possible on the bleeding...

Intro is a great font family release from the guys behind the popular Museo typeface. Download two styles of it for free here, or buy all 26 font styles here for $99.

More sage advice from Seth Godin: > “Consistently showing up on the radar of the right audience is more highly prized than reaching the masses, once then done. This works for every career…”

Paul Krugman nails it describing the debt conservatives are passing on to the youth of America: > But there’s also a war on the young, which is just as real even if it’s better disguised. And it’s doing immense harm, not just to the young, but to the...

Dustin Curtis nails it describing Google’s social problems: > Google’s current predicament with social is similar to the one Microsoft faced with its tablet PC initiative. Google has about 150 legacy core products which have slowly evolved into great...

I love it when Kottke writes longer posts combining content from multiple sources which all relate to a central point. > Perhaps then the iPhone is an automobile for our mind in that it allows us to go anywhere very quickly but isolates us along the...

I wish I had either of these attention spans.

The first, Robert Caro’s for spending almost 40 years writing a multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson: > Caro is the last of the 19th-century biographers, the kind who believe that the life of a great...

When doing work, you shouldn’t do so just for the outcome of praise alone. And you should never expect applause. Seth Godin writes: > Who decides if your work is good? When you are at your best, you do. If the work doesn’t deliver on its purpose, if...

The Font Bureau put together a nice promo site for Neue Haas Grotesk. > The digital version of Helvetica that everyone knows and uses today is quite different from the typeface’s pre-digital design from 1957. Originally released as Neue Haas Grotesk...

All the cool kids have switched to static sites, so I figured it was my time, too.

I simplified the design some, but kept a lot the same. I’m using Middleman to generate the static site and using Github Pages for hosting. There’s a few things that...