Category: Design
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Better Day, Sunshine
I haven’t driven a car in decades (New Yorker). But from my pre-New York life, I remember how sun glare could turn a pleasant road trip into a blinding gauntlet. Enter “Sunward,” a uniquely specific…
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The Day the Focus Died
If we failed to do this, I feared, we would stop leading the industry and turn into “merely the CSS trick of the week.”
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Figma Tips and Shortcuts
℅ Automattic Design:
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Remembrance of Websites Past
2000 was the peak year for Adobe’s website. It was a content site filled with creative how-to articles, opinion pieces, and artist interviews where you could also, if you wished, buy or get info on…
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AI, Disruption, and Standards
Individually, we have very little power, but together we have a great deal of power. In response to a series of Medium articles by Patrick Neeman—like this one that addressed issues of AI governance, fairness,…
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The Most Important Industrial Designer of All Time
One Frenchman can’t be wrong. Push to the edge of what people will accept. Stop there. Raymond Loewy called it MAYA, and used it to design the modern world. The most important industrial designer you’ve…
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Ebb, Meet Flow: Intrinsic Design in a Nutshell
In 2020, the gifted makers of websites at Clearleft shared methods to achieve fluid responsive design. “Utopian” web design was (and still is) their half-kidding name for this approach, which Apple’s Jen Simmons, working indendently,…
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You lost me at “infielder.”
The instant a business guy uses a sports metaphor to make his most important strategic point, I am lost. If you want me to understand your business idea, try wrapping it in Wendy Carlos’s secrets…
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The Secret
If I learned one thing in 25 years of running design and education companies, it’s that idealism isn’t a business strategy. If you wonder why my partners and I had to shut down organizations we…
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Memories Can’t Wait—or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying About the Web
The web is still the best hope we have for a durable, shared memory. But it requires us to be gardeners, not merely tenants.
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Remembrance of zeldman.coms past
Look back in anchor tags: a partial review of my site’s 31-year visual history before diving into the new design.
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Required reading: “The Interracial Cuck Porn Theory of Everything”
Cameron Cummins-Smith’s grand unifying theory connects the far right’s seemingly disparate obsessions—from trans panic and great replacement theory to anti-feminism and white birth-rate anxiety—into a single ideological system fueled by pornographic narratives: In physics there…
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The Courage to Stop
Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement.
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Handwritten notes in the time of AI note takers
The best project management tool is still a pen, plus the discipline to notice what the machine cannot. Wisdom from Lucas Radke.
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A die-cut above
Cover art for the 1971 prog-rock LP “Fearless,” by British band Family features a distinctive, die-cut cover design depicting the five band members gradually morphing into a single entity combining features of them all. Tom…