121
H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright typographic mystery
The famed architect made a surprising error on one of his most notable buildings — or did he? A deep dive to uncover the truth.
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When transit passes were designed by hand (2022)
In the 1930s–60s, Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Company offered trolley and bus riders a weekly burst of color and hand lettering. About 300 of these tickets are now in our collection.
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Pangram Image 1.0
Introducing Pangram Image 1.0, our AI image and video detector.
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Fable created novel 4D splat format
A streamable 4D gaussian splat format with tunable error bounds. 16–58× smaller than raw; streams and seeks over plain HTTP Range requests.
125
The C64 Dead Test Font
A deep dive into the font of the “Dead Test” diagnostic cartridge of the C64, including an Easter egg, a look into the implementation, and, finally, some Commodore 8-bit character ROMs for download.
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CSS-Native Parallax Effect
A parallax effect built entirely in CSS with scroll-driven animations, no scroll listeners required.
128
An autopsy of AI-generated 3D slop
Thinking of using AI for your Shopify 3D models? Read this first. We compare AI-generated 3D 'slop' vs. handcrafted models to show why the human touch is very much required to attain positive ROI.
129
Too Much Color
I spent too much time looking at too many colo(u)rs to try and optimise them for csskit. Here are some interesting findings.
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Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file
(I don't plan on doing lots more of these Windows UI blog posts. I just happened to come across this and found it interesting. Besides, it's super hot where I live and I can't do anything meaningful anyway, so here we go.)
131
CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts
An ersatz CSS tutorial for people who need to style a web page, but aren't web developers. I am a wrong person to write this kind of thing, as I have neither the time, nor experience. I'd much rather read a book about this. Alas, I had to learn all this stuff from trawling MDN, so perhaps it is valuable to document…
132
Remarkable Pro Colors
I was happy with the Remarkable 2 and when the Remarkable Pro came out I decided to go with a second one in order to be able to see two pages at once : one as a reference for reading and one for writing, as one would normally do with paper. Expensive approach, I know.
133
A 3D Body from Eight Questions – No Photo, No GPU
We trained an MLP that predicts 58 body shape parameters from 8 questionnaire inputs. The trick: a differentiable physics loss. Mass accuracy: 0.3 kg mean vs 3.9 kg for Ridge. No GPU at inference.
134
Map Clustering Is Not My Favorite
Friends, this post has been in the making for maybe, 20 years.
135
How our vibe coded website looks like a designer made it
A tale about how coding agents are actually making me more and more interested in design
136
A Pokémon of a Different Color
Do you notice a difference? The image on the right appears “yellower” than the image on the left, which looks more goldenrod by comparison.
137
State of the Windows: What is going on with Windows 11?
Hi! Long time no see, huh? :) It’s been three years since my last State of the Windows article, which was about the inconsistencies in the Windows 11 user experience. Since then, Microsoft (a…
138
How video games inspire great UX (2019)
This quote is meaningful to me as I’ve often struggled with a problem until an insight from a user test “changed my perspective”.
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Crafting QR Codes: A deep dive into QR code art (2024)
An interactive explaination of how QR codes work and techniques for rendering artistic QR codes
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CSS Web Components for marketing sites (2024)
The truly No JavaScript web component.
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CSS properties you should know for better text designs
Includes background-clip for masking backgrounds, vertical-align for aligning elements, box-decoration-mode for consistent edge styling, letter-spacing for spacing control, and text-combine-upright for vertical text layouts.
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Shades of Halftone
An interactive deep dive into building halftone shaders in GLSL, covering everything from classic dot patterns and CMYK color separation to Moiré interference, gooey effects, and animated displacement.
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Creating a Color Palette from an Image
This Spectrimage palette extractor started as a sidecar to image color analysis, but grew into its own feature.
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"Just a little detail that wouldn't sell anything"
A blog about software craft and quality
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Composition shouldn't be this hard
Fragmented systems are brittle. Coherent systems are special-purpose. We need a new, general-purpose model so we can build coherent, multi-domain applications.
146
An interview with an Apple emoji designer
It was impossible, I found, when writing Face with Tears of Joy , to get a response to questions or interview requests out of Google, Apple, Meta and the other big emoji vendors. (A lone author writing a book on a twenty-year-old technology probably doesn’t move the PR needle a great deal for companies like these. In…
147
Some Words on WigglyPaint
In early December 2023, I wrote a drawing program called WigglyPaint and published it on Itch.io.
148
The HTML-in-Canvas API origin trial
Learn about the HTML-in-Canvas origin trial in Chrome, and how it can help bring the DOM to your Canvas-driven applications.
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Stop using icons in data tables
We have been sold a lie that icons are the universal language of the modern interface.
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Writing a Guide to SDF Fonts
(TL;DR: this is a blog post about the process of writing my guide to SDF fonts .)