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Planetfall
Gentle readers, I have just wrapped up a fun side project that will be of great interest to a very small number of you. The result of one of the most technically demanding efforts of my career, I a…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,666 posts.
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My favourite fonts to use with LaTeX (2022)
TeX and related systems are often associated with their default fonts, Donald Knuth’s Computer Modern (CM) typefaces. While these fonts are excellent, they have become so ubiquitous in the scientific community that many LaTeX users have sought alternative fonts for their documents. As a result, a plethora of font…
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The Barbican
Three years ago, while searching for Vitsoe setups, I stumbled upon Barbican. I delved deeper and discovered a building complex that was beyond my imaginations. Young Fatih would definitely find it ugly; current me finds it beautiful. The estate was built between 1965 and 1976. And, since I first saw
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Mac Themes Garden
A website for old Macintosh themes and some background.
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Pixels in Islamic Art: Square Kufic Calligraphy (2020)
When I was a little kid whenever we drove by mosques, I would be intrigued by the complex motifs they’re decorated by. I always tried to figure out the pattern; to me it was just a pattern, I never…
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Nevermind, an album on major chords
🎵 Back in 1991, Nevermind become an unexpected critical and commercial sensation.
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The History of Album Art
Matt Ström-Awn · Designer, leader, and coach focused on building exceptional products and teams.
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Towards the Cutest Neural Network
I recently needed to use a microcontroller to estimate the pose (translation and orientation) of an object using readings from six different sensors. Since the readings were non-linear and coupled with each other, an explicit analytical solution was out of the question.
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You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown
Design greatness is defined not by fame or recognition, but by how invisibly and effectively it serves human needs.
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HDR‑Infused Emoji
Supercharging Slack’s Reaction Icons
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Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
There's a small house in the moddle of IBM's Code Page 437. Why?
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Nice things with SVG
Exploring SVG and its visual effects applications
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A flowing WebGL gradient, deconstructed
An introduction to writing WebGL shaders using gradient noise and cool math.
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Quality-of-Life in Tetris Games
Last weekend, we participated in the Ludum Dare game jam for the 10th time. It's a worldwide event
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Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece
Craft a mansion and uncover mysteries in this exceptional marriage of storytelling and roguelike mechanics.
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Overengineered Anchor Links
Learn about the overengineered anchoring pattern, a technique to improve the user experience of scrollable content.
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Animals Made from 13 Circles (2016)
Dori | Art Director, Designer, Artist
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The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst
Upon reflection, Myst has long been more analogous to a graph than a traditional linear game, owing to the relative freedom it affords players. This is…
259
The case against conversational interfaces
Conversational interfaces are a bit of a meme. Every couple of years a shiny new AI development emerges and people in tech go "This is it! The next computing paradigm is here! We'll only use natural language going forward!". But then nothing actually changes and we continue using computers the way w
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Minimal CSS-only blurry image placeholders
Here’s a CSS technique that produces blurry image placeholders (LQIPs) without cluttering up your markup — Only a single custom property needed!
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Technicalities of Homeworld 2 Backgrounds
Just kidding. Of course, I have something to say about this. In the company, we look at the art of Homeworld from time to time and bow to the creators of this masterpiece. Once, we talked about how great the background look and how interesting this sketched style is. There is something…some details seem…special to us:
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Past and Present Futures of User Interface Design
In 1968, Douglas Engelbart demonstrated a computer system called the oN-Line System, or NLS. The NLS is the source of a lot of computer firsts. Among other things, Engelbart showed video conferencing, collaborative text editing, embedded graphics, copying and pasting, and hypertext - all of it accessible through a…
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The High Heel Problem
This article looks at how different types of shoes can affect game development and examines how games deal with this in practice.
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Our interfaces have lost their senses
We programmed them by punching cards, plugging in wires, and flipping switches. Programmers walked among banks of switches and cables, physically choreographing their logic. Being on a computer used to be a full-body experience.
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Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
How to figure out what the user experience should be when you don’t have time, budget, or a design team.
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Iconography of the PuTTY tools
In March 2025 I received an email asking about PuTTY’s “logo” – the icon used by the Windows executable. The sender wanted to know where it had come from, and how it had evolved over time.
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What makes code hard to read: Visual patterns of complexity (2023)
Not long ago, I was auditing a codebase for work (looking for bugs) when I realized that despite the quality of the code, I was becoming mentally fatigued extremely quickly and had a hard time working on it for long stretches of time…
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Dithering in Colour
Inspired by multiple posts on dithering, I set out to create a correct implementation of Atkinson dithering with support for RGB colour palettes. The post also outlines implementing linearising the colour-space and correcting for human perception.
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