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Design Thinking Books (2024)
An updated list of design thinking books and papers to understand the principles underpinning the design thinking process and its practice.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 181 posts.
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The user is visibly frustrated
In this article, I try to understand why coding agents can be infuriating to use. I think the problem is their conversational UX: they behave enough like helpful colleagues to trigger our social instincts, but they don't learn, adapt, or take responsibility the way people do, which makes their repeated mistakes feel…
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You can't unit test for taste
I’m building In the Long Run where runners do virtual runs on famous routes around the world. The app tallies up your Strava mileage and plots your total distance as progress against country- or continent-spanning routes. The intention is to provide long-term inspiration and motivation; life is a marathon, not a…
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Before pixels: Modular industrial dashboards
A blog about software craft and quality
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The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility
The mythical, it's text, so it's accessible There is a persistent misconception among sighted developers: if an application runs in a te...
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A compelling title that is cryptic enough to get you to take action on it
An enticing social media preview summary.
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The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt
Once upon a time, a frontend ticket landed on my queue which was not properly mine, but the only other Arabic reader on the team was on leave. It went roughly as follows; a block of mixed-content Arabic prose on the …
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Design is compromise
Compromise is neither good nor bad, it’s something we do every day. It’s decision making. Prioritizing. It’s finding the right balance between two competing ...
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I use Excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog
TL;DR I use an Excalidraw, wrap the elements of interest with a frame, name it with export_ prefix, my forked excalidraw extension automatically generates SVGs for light and dark mode.
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Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?
If vibecoding is what people say it is, the world should be drowning in vibecoded artifacts right now. Two years of access. Millions of people with the tools. The barrier supposedly fell, right? RIGHT? So where is everything?
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The pleasures of poor product design
A brilliant project cleverly sabotages everyday objects to reveal how much we take for granted about them — and about the design process.
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Your website is not for you
A note from a developer who keeps watching good design die in boardrooms.
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Notes on Apple's Nano Texture (2025)
2024 Nano Texture Macbook Pro on the left; 2021 Glossy Macbook Pro on the right TLDR: the Nano Texture performs wonderfully anywhere where light used to be a factor and used to force me to shade my screen or avoid the place entirely. I’m less concerned with where I sit indoors. Coffee shops / offices with skylights or…
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Dithering – Part 2: The Ordered Dithering
Understanding Threshold Map in Ordered Dithering.
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Ryanair dark UX patterns summer 2026 refresher
Ryanair are Europe’s most profitable airline and they are masters of this noble form.
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Okmain: How to pick an OK main colour of an image
You have an image but you want a colour
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Reimagining the mouse pointer for the AI era
Google DeepMind is transforming the mouse pointer into a context-aware AI partner. Move beyond the friction of traditional prompting with intuitive AI collaboration in Chrome and beyond.
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How My Images Are Dithered
Hello there! This is my personal website and it is allergic to SEO.
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More common mistakes to avoid when creating system architecture diagrams
A rundown of seven more common mistakes is system architecture diagrams and how to fix them
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If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe
A concrete example of why using native HTML as much as possible is better than slapping ARIA on top of things.
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3D-Knitting: The Ultimate Guide
3D-knitting makes a whole sweater in one piece on a four-bed machine: no seams, no cutting, and 99% of the material ends up in the finished garment.
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A Lament for Aperture
I'm an old Mac-head at heart, and I've been using Macs since the mid 1990s (the first Mac I used was an LC II with System 7.1 installed on it). I don't tend to think that the computing experience was better in the olden days — sure, there's a thing to be said about the simplicity of older software, but most of my…
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Spreading Liquid with Three.js
We create beautiful expressions through programming and deliver the best possible experiences.
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Buttered Crumpet, a custom typeface for Wallace and Gromit
I was thrilled to be selected to design a custom typeface for Wallace & Gromit – Aardman’s most beloved and recognisable characters.
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What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000
I liked the UIs of the entire era from 3.0 to 2000, really. I'm mostly using Windows 2000 as an example here because it runs so well in QEMU/KVM and that allows me to easily take screenshots.
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Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it
Thinking about UX, a slight delay on a simple tooltip can be nice so that mousing over something quickly doesn't trigger it, but if there are related tooltips nearby, maybe we don't need to wait.
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Generative art over the years
I’ve been making generative art on and off since 2016. It started as a programming exercise and slowly turned into something more personal as I discovered…
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The 'Hidden' Costs of Great Abstractions
In the world of computing, we tend to abstract away complexity. Doing so seems liberating. It enables us to focus on the bigger picture. Unfortunately, in doing so, the fidelity of our understanding often decreases. We sometimes end up blinding ourselves.
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Light Mode InFFFFFFlation
Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were, we didn’t really think about turning everything light or dark. Sure, some applications were often dark (photo editors, IDEs, terminals) but everything else was light, and that was fine. What we didn’t notice is that light…