Hamburg's Stadtpark: A Park Built to Be Used
In 1914 Hamburg built a park for people to use rather than admire, and more than a century later that is still what it is.
NeXTSpirit: high-res NeXTSTEP Icons for macOS
I’ve always liked icons, make some occasionally for my personal use. I like especially old systems ones, from Mac OS Classic of course, but others too, Like BeOS, NeXTSTEP. Always found NeXTSTEP to have the most elegant interface of all, with that very sober windows and buttons style, yet beautifully detailed icons…
Making a Menger sponge in stained glass
Over the course of six weeks in January and February 2019, I took an introduction to stained glass course from Olivia Vavroch at Vavroch Glass Studio in north Portland, OR.
Principles of UI design
A list of important principles of user interface design.
Two perspectives on a designer who Steve Jobs could not hire
Richard Sapper may not be a household name, but he's on the same level of greats like Dieter Rams and Jonathan Ive.
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…
Simple Does Not Mean Ugly
Hi, my name is Adam Ramirez. I am a UX Designer who focuses on Design Facilitation and Product Analytics with 10 years of experience under my belt. In the past 5 years, I have been working to deliver the best possible user experience to my clients and their users.
Smallest Typeface
Anders de Flon. Type design information compiled and maintained by Luc Devroye.
CSS solves auto-expanding textareas (probably, eventually)
I’ll cut to the chase before I type too many more words: textarea { field-sizing: content; /* used to be `form-sizing` but changed to this */ } I came across it via an Amit Merchant blog post…
From web dev to 3D: Learning 3D modeling
A few months ago I set myself the challenge to recreate this photo (shot by Masashi Wakui) By modeling it in 3d! At the end I had this (I promise no IRL cats w…
Understanding the iPhone 6 Plus Screen
An experiment to understand how the discrepancy between logical and native screen dimensions on the iPhone 6 Plus affects rendering quality.
Non-blocking UI's with interface previews
Improving the perceived speed of interfaces using skeleton loading screens plus other front-end/UX performance gains.
What else do people draw on gradient.horse?
Since gradient.horse went online in January 2026, six months have passed, and more than 600 000 horses (and non-horses) were drawn. There are now more horses on gradient.horse than in the wild. The image model I trained to filter out vandalism works very well, but it also hides a lot of ingenious drawings. You could…
The album art of Phil Hartmann (2022)
You might remember him from such roles as Troy McClure or Lionel Hutz, but in the years before legendary comic Phil Hartman shaved the second ‘n’ from his name, he was designing album art for some West Coast rock bands.
Please do not A/B test my workflow
Anthropic is silently A/B testing Claude Code's plan mode on paying users. This isn't a consumer app. Stop treating it like one.
Designing furniture using the CSS grid (2023)
The story of why and how I developed a tool for designing MDF furniture by writing my own little language that transpiles into a CSS grid layout.
Notes on Software Quality
“The absence of problems” is the best definition I can come up with for quality.
Flat design is great for mediocre designers like me
Lost amidst the hubbub around flat design is the fact that the flat trend makes it really easy for mediocre designers to do merely passable work.
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.
Should you add screenshots to documentation?
Screenshots in documentation can be a contentious topic — some people really like them and think they add a lot of value, while others dislike them due to the maintenance burden and accessibility issues. So what should you do?