Tag: essentials
Worth a second look.
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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,…
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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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The Courage to Stop
Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement.
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Behind every successful launch, there are 100 interesting failures.
We must stop thinking of failure as an end of something, and learn to see it as a natural part of progress. The first incarnation of a new idea may die, but the best ideas…
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Of Books and Conferences Past
Of books and conferences past: A maker looks back on things well-made but no longer with us.
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A faster horse
“The user is never wrong” means, when a user snags on a part of your UX that doesn’t work for her, she’s not making a mistake, she’s doing you a favor. To benefit from this…
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My Liz Danzico Joke
I used to tell a joke I made up. An American goes to the Vatican on Easter Sunday, joining a huge crowd of worshippers who gaze up in awe at a raised platform. On the platform…
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My Night With Essl
Herewith, a scene from last night’s interview with legendary web & book designer (and Dean of The Cooper Union School of Art) Mike Essl, who shared his portfolio, career highlights, early web design history, and…
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Fish tacos FTW nom nom nom
If Twitter is a medium for text-messaging, then content such as “Dude, where are you? We’re in the mezzanine” is perfectly appropriate, and “Fish tacos FTW nom nom nom” is practically overachievement. If it’s micro-blogging,…
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Content precedes design
Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.
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Stick out your tongue
While employed at a famous New York advertising agency twenty years ago, a partner and I created a TV commercial touting an over-the-counter medicine client’s revolutionary new cold and flu remedy for young children. Only…
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The vanishing personal site
OUR PERSONAL SITES, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and…
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The SXSW Diet
A minute later she came back, revolving them a few inches from my lips.
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Happy fourth birthday, real world semantics
Four years ago today, Tantek Çelik and Kevin Marks gave a presentation on real-world semantics. Working backwards from HTML extensions like XFN (created by Tantek, Matt Mullenweg, and Eric Meyer), the paper showed how designers…