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My UX Superpower: Nothing Works!
Maybe I’m special. Or unlucky. But things that supposedly work intuitively for most users tend to fail spectacularly for me. After mastering academia and enjoying some early success in journalism, advertising, and music composition and production, I poured myself into web design in early 1995, understood it in a way most designers didn’t, and enjoyed…
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Pete’s Presence
It was a spring that felt more like winter last week in New York; suddenly it feels like summer. After my air-conditioned bedroom, the living room and kitchen was like a walk-in oven. A weirdly…
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The Courage to Stop
Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement.
Design
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Handwritten notes in the time of AI note takers
The best project management tool is still a pen, plus the discipline to notice what the machine cannot. Wisdom from Lucas Radke.
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A die-cut above
Cover art for the 1971 prog-rock LP “Fearless,” by British band Family features a distinctive, die-cut cover design depicting the five band members gradually morphing into a single entity combining features of them all. Tom Brigham, a high school student and friend of mine the year the LP was released, had not yet invented morphing…
My Glamorous Life
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Too Many Notes
Lately, in work conversations, I find myself fighting a lifelong tendency to provide way more context than is absolutely required. If you ask me to okay your work, for example, I may respond with an…
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My brother, the rhythmic conceptualist
Remembrance of beats passed.
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American healthcare
Cooling my heels at the drugstore.
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Cold Storage
Good UX is what companies do when they have to. A company that has your stuff locked away doesn’t have to.
the Daily Report
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Jimmy Carter was right
What Carter did in his speech was something rare in the annals of democratic government: he confronted the people with the truth—about his own failings, about the reality of the world around them, and most…
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Dine ’n em-dash
The best defense is to write humanly.
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RSS creator on Bluesky & AT Proto
Bluesky can’t abandon the developers who made a bet on AT Proto, so they should give the protocol to a standards body while catching up on UX.—Dave Winer
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What a year that was.
Know your web design history.
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Advice for job seekers
Pitching isn’t bragging.
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The salad bar theory of UX professionalism
Less, but better? Not this week.
Cornerstone content
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