A primer on Bezier curves
A detailed explanation of Bézier curves, and how to do the many things that we commonly want to do with them.
Recreating the Flying Toasters screen saver for the Vision Pro
I recently decided to make an app for the Apple Vision Pro (AVP) during a two-week break between jobs. I wanted to explore its potential and learn some new skills. My day job primarily involves low-level firmware; I hadn’t built a user-facing app in a while–my last iOS app experience was back in high school in 2011!…
Conditional CSS
CSS is condtional in many ways. In this article, I will go over a few CSS features that we use every day, and show you how conditional they are.
Designer News is dead
Designer News is dead. Designer News was an online community for product designers. For years it was the best forum to discuss designing software.
Visualizing binaries with space-filling curves
Edit: Since this post, I've created an interactive tool for binary visualisation - see it at binvis.io
Invisible Details of Interaction Design
Design can feel like there's no science to it — only feel and intuition. Even researchers have trouble grounding interaction design practices in science, inherently treating them as a mysterious black box. 1 While from my own experience that's partly true, I have been trying to deconstruct and dig out the why behind…
Generative eBook Covers
Here at NYPL Labs we’re working on an ebook-borrowing and reading app. This post explores automated ways for creating covers for public-dom…
A Pixel Parable
An imagined town is at least as real as an actual town.
Stop Using Small Font Sizes
TL;DR: 16px minimum font-size for body text, 1.5em line-height for said text; max width should be 60-80 characters == 27-35em.
The CSS Zen Garden dream, finally shipped
Rebuilding Firefox.com with Mozilla and Lincoln Loop on modern, native CSS with no pre-processors, and what that means for design systems today.
Do we need a new heading element in HTML?
There's a proposal to add a new <h> element to the HTML spec . It solves a fairly common use-case. Take this HTML snippet:
Why I'm Done With Social Media Buttons
I removed social media buttons from my site in 2014 after noticing they got near-zero clicks. Here's what I learned—and why the share-button era ended.
What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation
Just intonation (JI) today falls under the umbrella of microtonal music, because it involves playing "between the notes" of the 12-tone scale we're used to. As I type microtonal , my spellchecker decorates it with a sad squiggle, confirming I've drifted (again) into a topic that's not even in its dictionary. But JI is…
Basecamp Next: UI Preview
When we started thinking about the design of the all new Basecamp, we had three key things in mind: Speed Big picture Focus With that in mind, and many experiments later, we came up with a unique interface that is crazy fast, excellent for big picture broad overviews, and perfectly ta…
Why dark and light is complicated in photographs
Choices in photographic tone reproduction
The handshake emoji is more complicated than you might think
The multi-skin toned handshake emoji reveals that it is more than a routine gesture
Berkeley Mono Ligatures Release
Berkeley Mono Ligatures v1.009 release, Chicago Corporate Typeface, Berkeley Graphics identity, Houston Mono™ sneak peek.
Map UI – Ghost in the Shell
Map UI (User Interface) for the film “Ghost in the Shell” Copyright Shirow Masamune / Kodansha • Bandai Visual • Manga Entertainment •
Monster Mash: A Sketch-Based Tool for Casual 3D Modeling and Animation
Posted by Cassidy Curtis, Visual Designer and David Salesin, Principal Scientist, Google Research 3D computer animation is a time-consuming and hig...