Category: The Essentials
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Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Medium?
Why are independent content creators afraid of Medium.com?
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Blue Beanie Day is Coming!
ALL IT TAKES is a toque and a dream. Join your fellow web designers and developers around the world on Saturday, 30 November 2013, as we march in virtual solidarity in support of web standards.…
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The Lords of Vendorbation
Vendorbatory product “design” decisions stem purely from contingencies and conveniences in the code framework, which itself is almost always an undocumented archipelago of spaghetti, spit, and duct tape started by one team and continued by…
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My mind and welcome to it
IN MY DREAM I was designing sublime new publishing and social platforms, incandescent with features no one had ever thought of, but everybody wanted. One of my platforms generated pages that were like a strangely…
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Divorce never sleeps
SO THE EX just moved to Manhattan’s most iconic private housing community. It is a large residential complex of oversized, renovated apartments set in an 80-acre private park. The sprawling collection of red brick buildings…
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Readlists: behind the scenes
FROM THE HOME PAGE of today’s newly announced, totally disruptive, completely free product powered by Readability: “What’s a Readlist? A group of web pages—articles, recipes, course materials, anything—bundled into an e-book you can send to…
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Web Design Manifesto 2012
THANK YOU for the screen shot. I was actually already aware that the type on my site is big. I designed it that way. And while I’m grateful for your kind desire to help me,…
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My Glamorous Life: The Power Compels You
I DREAMED that my friend Jason Santa Maria took a job at a popular new startup that had exploded onto the world scene seemingly overnight. A fascinating visual interface was largely responsible for the popularity…
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A plane crash in slow-mo
I WAS SOBER SIX MONTHS when my Uncle George took me to lunch and told me he believed his sister, my mother, had Alzheimers. She was 60. Via frequent short visits to Pittsburgh and more…
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Why I am letting my Google IO invitation expire
HI, [REDACTED]. Thanks for writing to express your concern about my failure to redeem my Google IO promo code. It’s kind of a funny story. I received a Google IO invitation (copied and pasted below)…
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Replacing the -9999px hack (new image replacement)
IN THE BEGINNING was FIR, AKA Fahrner Image Replacement (note that one of the following links returns a 404): The Daily Report’s 2003 redesign uses (and our book explained) an image replacement technique intended to…
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Ding dong, SOPA is dead.
DING DONG, THE WITCH IS DEAD. For now, at least, the “ill-conceived lobbyist-driven piece of legislation” known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is no more: Misguided efforts to combat online privacy have been…
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Selling Design – an online reading list
TOMORROW, WHICH IS also my birthday, I begin teaching “Selling Design” to second-year students in the MFA Interaction Design program at School of Visual Arts, New York. Liz Danzico and Steve Heller created and direct…
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The maker makes: on design, community, and personal empowerment
THE FIRST THING I got about the web was its ability to empower the maker. The year was 1995, and I was tinkering at my first website. The medium was raw and ugly, like a…
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State of the web: of apps, devices, and breakpoints
IN The ‘trouble’ with Android, Stephanie Rieger points out the ludicrous number of Android screen sizes on a typical UK client’s website and comes to this conclusion: If … you have built your mobile site…