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Her Glamorous Life
Snow White—17 years old—didn’t come meowing for food when I entered the kitchen at 6 a.m. An hour later I found her lying motionless on the sofa. I stared until she moved, slightly, nestling her…
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The Most Important Industrial Designer of All Time
One Frenchman can’t be wrong. Push to the edge of what people will accept. Stop there. Raymond Loewy called it MAYA, and used it to design the modern world. The most important industrial designer you’ve…
Design
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Ebb, Meet Flow: Intrinsic Design in a Nutshell
In 2020, the gifted makers of websites at Clearleft shared methods to achieve fluid responsive design. “Utopian” web design was (and still is) their half-kidding name for this approach, which Apple’s Jen Simmons, working indendently, called “intrinsic design.” Instead of chasing an ever-changing number of fixed breakpoints, utopian or intrinsic design follows the web’s intrinsic…
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You lost me at “infielder.”
The instant a business guy uses a sports metaphor to make his most important strategic point, I am lost. If you want me to understand your business idea, try wrapping it in Wendy Carlos’s secrets of synthesis or quotations by Orson Welles or the punchline to an old joke.
My Glamorous Life
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The End
ON THIS DAY in 1971, Pamela Courson found Doors frontman Jim Morrison dead in the bathtub of their Paris apartment. The cause of death was heart failure. No autopsy was performed. Morrison was 27. A…
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Underdubbed
When my brother Pete and I were kids, and our parents were out of town, we ditched school for a week and cut an “album” by recording backing tracks to my dad’s reel-to-reel, then live…
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She’s the Boss.
She is not here to eat. She is here to ensure my compliance.
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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 stints in academia, journalism, advertising, and music, I poured myself into web design in…
the Daily Report
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For students who make websites
Meet WordPress.com Education, a new, free product for teachers and students.
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A Permanent Home
Your writing needs a permanent home—a domain that you own and control. Every few years, the internet convinces writers that a new digital paradise has arrived. First, it was social media like Facebook. Then blogging networks like…
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The name of this LP is “Side One.”
On Sunday, I published Side One of my album on Bandcamp. The name of the album is also “Side One.” It is instrumental music with roots in Soundtrack, hip-hop, funk, jazz, 19th Century Romantic classical,…
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Stalin decided what was good science. Millions starved.
What happens when leaders choose political expediency over science?
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The Secret
If I learned one thing in 25 years of running design and education companies, it’s that idealism isn’t a business strategy. If you wonder why my partners and I had to shut down organizations we…
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Memories Can’t Wait—or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying About the Web
The web is still the best hope we have for a durable, shared memory. But it requires us to be gardeners, not merely tenants.
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