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Thoughts on Voice Interfaces
I’ve been working on the Consumer Voice Products team in Mozilla for about a year now. My primary project has been Firefox Voice , but our mandate is larger.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,666 posts.
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The UX of Lego Interface Panels
LEGO interface panels are beautiful, iconic, and great for learning interface design basics. I bought 52 of them from BrickLink to explore the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.
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Autodesk criticised by architects
Architectural unrest about Autodesk and its support for the industry's design businesses is growing. Discontent has been simmering for a decade or more, and has led to calls for EU action.The rece
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Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel
No newsletter next week Running the TLA+ workshop. No way I'm gonna have any brainpower after that. Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel...
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Straightened Trees
Using custom code, the natural curvature of each tree is "corrected." Manufactured objects, i.e. buildings and power lines, twist and contort around the artificially plumbed tree. Each photo is shot on large format film, the only medium that captures enough detail to straighten the tree without pixelly artifacts…
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1:60 scale Boeing 777 made from manila folders
The homepage of the work for which I'm best known — a model Boeing 777, made entirely from manila folders!
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Lights and Shadows
Interactive article explaining how lights and shadows behave.
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Deep Chernoff Faces
One of my favorite ¹ concepts for multi-dimensional data visualization is the Chernoff Face . The idea here is that for a dataset with many...
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Why Figma Wins
Companies are a sequencing of loops. While it’s possible to stumble into an initial core loop that works, the companies that are successful in the long term are the ones that can repeatedly find the next loop. However, this evolution is poorly understood relative to its existential impact on a company’s trajectory…
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Building a Hexagonal Grid in CSS
CSS grid goes hexagonal.
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Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?
I've decided to stop using dark mode across all of my devices, because research suggests that going to the dark side ain't all that.
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Short term usability is not the same as long term usability
When designing almost any piece of code or other functionality, the issue of usability often comes up. Most of the time these discussions go...
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The Al Jaffee / Mad Magazine Fold-In Effect in CSS
After 65 years at Mad Magazine, comic artist Al Jaffee announced his retirement. Jaffee was best known for his Mad Fold-Ins, where folding the page would reveal a hidden message in the artwork. Plenty of examples can be found on the web. The problem is, they all show the before and after statically, side by
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Building the most inaccessible site with a perfect Lighthouse score (2019)
An experiment that proves that automatic accessibility testing is only a first step and that manual testing is vital.
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I made a font based on my handwriting
I wanted to make a font based on my handwriting using only free software. It turns out that FontForge can be scripted with Python. I know just a little about Python and even less about typography, but I managed to hack together something that worked for me. If you're reading this on my blog at…
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Thoughts on cameras in the age of excellent cell phone photos
I noted here, I believe, that recently my dSLR, my Nikon d750, basically crapped itself, most likely from a faulty mirror mechanism. This wasn’t entirely a surprise to me — it had devel…
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Times New Roman alternatives: You can do better (2013)
Butterick’s Practical Typography
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Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS
Since macOS 10.12 there’s a bug in Apple Mail that causes it to randomly become the frontmost application. If you are in full screen mode — like when you are giving a talk or watching a movie — it opens itself up in split view mode where it takes up half the screen while your other main window is being resized. I saw…
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How to Put More “Character” into Your NPCs
Geoffrey Golden explores narrative design and imbuing NPCs with life and personality
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The Kawaiization of Product Design
Over the last year or two, I’ve noticed a certain style emerge in brand and product design. Look at the graphic below and you'll see it. The colors are soft and muted, the shapes rounded and the typography unobtrusive. It’s what you could describe as clean. It’s approachable. It’s inoffensive. It’s almost… cute. Zoom…
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Don’t require a user to be interested twice: lessons on reducing signup friction
I learned the hard way how important a carefully designed sign-up process is. I saw a large percentage of interested people fail to sign up because of easily preventable flaws in the flow.
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Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font
A s*** font that f***ing censors swearing automatically
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How Stripe Designs Websites (2017)
Developer and writer.
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