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GBC Boot Animation 88×31 Web Button
My little corner of the internet.
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Don't disable buttons
One of the most common accessibility issues I find (and fix) on client projects is dynamically disabled form buttons when a form is being submitted. Today I want to talk about why developers do it, why it’s bad, and what you can do instead. Let’s dig in! Why developers disable buttons Typically, I see the pattern used…
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When Interfaces Kill: What Happened to John Denver (1999)
How poor design killed John Denver dead.
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The New York Times uses the dark patterns it derides
New York Times op-ed recently decried tricks websites use to manipulate users… but have you ever tried to cancel your NY Times subscription?
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Logarithmic calendar view
I’ve been sitting on this idea forever, but the chances that I’ll ever do anything with it are close enough to zero that I’m letting it go. (It’s not original, either, but it has yet to make it into a widespread calendar product.)
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Good UX in the Wild: Dropbox's attention to detail on their download page
Sometimes good UX is about being clever. Sometimes it's to make the user happy ...
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1-Bit Pixel Art Emojis
After my first son arrived in 2018, I didn’t have much time to work on the time-intensive Mount Fuji pixel art series any more (again, I hope to get back to this somehow soon).
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A New Car UI: How touch screen controls in cars should really work
A New Car UI - How touch screen controls in cars should really work.
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What design tools get wrong
Modern design tools, of both the vector and code kind, are amazing pieces of software that in recent years have transformed the design profession, but none of them seem to really understand the context that we currently design for. The remnants of fixed-dimensions are still visible in all and the tools are not helping…
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Raster CRT Typography According to DEC
A closer look at the glyphs drawn by the DEC terminals VT100 and VT220.
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Are Designers Crazy?
...or do I just need new glasses? I'm not a graphic designer. I find it hard to get into the mindset of excellence through beauty. I understand user flow, interactions, happy paths, delighting the user, humane design, and so on - but when it comes to the art of making something look nice I'm all at sea. I understand…
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The Design of Software is a Thing Apart
Why code can't replace design docs: three examples (testing, coupling, intent) of design information that cannot be recovered from code alone.
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Monotype font licencing shake-down
tl;dr Don’t try to shake-down a typography nerd with your dubious, automated claims about his employer using unlicensed fonts. How it started It started with a LinkedIn InMail message (sanitised to protect privacy): Subject: [Urgent] Font Software Licensing Review Hi Ameel I hope you
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BioShock Infinite Lighting
Programmers don't generally have reels, but we do have blogs. I've been explaining the rendering work I did on BioShock Infinite quite a b...
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Should we design for iffy internet?
Around 97% of US households have internet access, but bandwidth and latency are likely worse than you expect.
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An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop
I’ve been using Photoshop since the mid-90s. First at school, with Photoshop 3, then through work. I bought my first boxed copy of CS2 in 2005, then upgraded to CS5 in 2010. I subscribed to Photoshop Creative Cloud on day one. Today, I uninstalled it. I hope I never have to use Adobe software ever again.
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SVG favicons have some cool benefits
This article explores the world of SVG favicons. We cover adding them to HTML, using emojis, inlining them as data URIs, supporting dark mode, and animations.
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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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What made World of Warcraft's environments so compelling?
Texts on this and that.
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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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An Ode to Deluxe Paint (2023)
When first seeing an Amiga 500 computer, it wasn't the games but a copy of the painting program Deluxe Paint II that really got me hooked. Since then, computers and visual art have forever been linked in my mind. Apart from dreaming of an Amiga of my own, my boyhood interest in technical marvels was never about…
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The National Design Studio is a scam
Joe Gebbia has no business designing government services.
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How Apple names things
I love the way Apple names things: FireWire, App Nap, iPhone, iPod, EarPod, AirPod, AirPlay, FairPlay etc. It’s playful and there’s a lot of reuse of words and sounds. Having just finished reading the biography of Steve Jobs, I decided to visualize various Apple product and feature names as a network to see this reuse…
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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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Gmail’s fake loading indicator (2020)
Gmail's loading progress bar doesn't *actually* measure the progress of loading.
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Tips for Better Signup / Login UX
Mobile patterns · Form field validation · Autofocus · Microcopy · Error messages · Error prevention
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Labels in input fields aren’t such a good idea
There’s something that’s been bothering me lately. It seems to be some kind of form interface trend where the labels for text inputs are placed inside the fields themselves.