Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,346 posts.
This month I decided to learn how to make a font to use in my comic hakum . Previously, I was drawing the text digitally with my pen tablet. The result was fine, but sometimes difficult to read(the text would grow and shrink often in one page). I didn't want to use an existing font, so I decided to make one based on…
Recently there were a couple of threads on Twitter discussing the difficulties associated with learning d3.js. I’ve also seen this come up…
I have a thing for lamps. Especially designer lamps from the past. I occasionally share them on X and Instagram, and people always ask me about the brands and models. I love lamps so much that I designed one myself. So I decided to give a tour of the lamps
Jimmy Koppel's in-depth review of John Ousterhout's A Philosophy of Software Design, with case studies on specs, simple APIs, names, and types.
The internet has ingrained itself into every aspect of our lives, but there’s one aspect of the digital world that I bet you take for granted. Did you ev
There’s a lot of fantastic research into 2D graphics rendering these days. Petr Kobalicek and Fabian Yzerman have been working on Blend2D , one of the fastest and most accurate CPU rasterizers on the market, with a novel JIT approach. Patrick Walton of Mozilla has explored not just one, but three separate approaches…
SVGs are pretty cool - vector graphics in a simple XML format. They are supported on just about every device and platform, are crisp on every display, and can have embedded scripts in to make them interactive. They're way more capable than many people realise, and I think we can capitalise on some of that unrealised…
Different weights are cool, but the real question is whether your font can swash.
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...
PLEASE, if you do use Bootstrap for just about everything be courteous to your audience and change up some of the basic variables so it doesn’t look all…
2015/03/12: Back online after Reddit and Slashdot killed my bandwidth with 30,000 visits in the last hours. Followed by HN. 2015/03/11: Update with …
What happens if you take motion blur past its logical extreme? Here are some fun observations and ideas I encountered while trying to answer this question, with an attempt to apply the results in a procedural animation.
Recently, people have been asking me why I’m pausing Boo to work on a programming language. I think it would actually be cool to write down how I feel.
Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) is always exploring new optical architectures to improve form factor, comfort, and optical performance. Last fall,...
An interactive demonstration of the “Pigeon Neck” Illusion
An interactive guide to understanding SVG paths and path commands.
Technical taste is different from technical skill. You can be technically strong but have bad taste, or technically weak with good taste. Like taste in general…
When a user moves their mouse from the middle of the page toward the navigation bar — presumably to abandon the page — there are technologies which can track this behavior and trigger a “mouse-out” alert. While this UX element (from companies such as Crazy Egg and Rooster) has great potential, I’ve found it far too…
Hidden features, reduced discoverability, cognitive overhead from dual environments, and reduced power from a single-window UI and low information density. Too bad.
I have often been asked to distill the vast corpus of user interface design into a few key principles. While I was reluctant to do this, it turned out to be a good exercise to write “Golden Rules,” that are applicable in most interactive systems. These principles, derived from experience and refined over three…
In our last article " Why Love Generative Art ?" we had a blast putting the genre into the context of modern art history. In this article we interview contemporary generative art prodigy (my words, not his) Manolo Gamboa Naon from Argentina. Manolo's work feels like it is the re
An alternative to pprint for generically visualizing heterogeneous, hierarchical data
Using Stable Diffusion techniques to create 2D game environments
The best part of digital video disc isn't the video.
As designers in open source, we’re constantly looking for opportunities to bring the principles of universal access and redistribution to new areas. While the term “open source” may still be mainly associated with code, the value in free collaboration benefits every discipline – particularly design.
Learn how psychological biases are used to trick players into gambling money in the new Mario Kart Tour game, raising ethical questions.
