Why is he so against phones? “Partly because I know I’d become horribly addicted to them if I had one. I’d spend all my time looking things up. And I find I’m only able to advance my thinking on projects in those pockets of time where everybody usually jumps on their phone – waiting for [ ]
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler, long I stoodAnd looked down one as far as I couldTo where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair,And having perhaps the better claim,Because it was grassy and wanted wear;Though as for that [ ]
A combination of nostalgia and curiosity led me to pick up an old Olympus OM10 film camera. I last shot film 20 something years ago. I have no idea what I’m doing.
Scott Berkun recently appeared on the Design Better podcast to chat about the frustrations that designers have working in big companies and how to solve them. I certainly relate to a lot of those frustrations, so picked up Scott and Bryan Zug’s new book Why Design is Hard and devoured it in a couple sittings. [ ]
I shared some thoughts over on automattic.design about how I use sketching to communicate ideas in my day job working on WordPress.com.
I haven’t been able to ride recently due to some health issues. I miss the escape.
I recently came across an old speech in the rams foundation archive where Dieter Rams talks about how designers contribute to the success of a company. I’m not sure if this speech came before or after Rams formulated his famous Ten Principles of Good Design, but you see many of the same themes coming through [ ]
I love bookshops. The old kind are the best. Packed with books in every available nook. Floor to ceiling stacks of all the genres you could imagine. I can lose hours browsing the shelves. Sometimes I don’t have the time to spare though. I just want to pop in and pick up something quickly, but [ ]
I came across this passage from an interview with the writer Andrew O’Hagan in the FT last weekend. What a beautiful outlook on life. I do not believe in life after death because the earth is all of heaven that we shall ever know. That is why we should try to be tremendous with each [ ]
I was in the capital for the start of the London Design Festival yesterday. As I walked up Princes Gate from the V A I realised how many different typefaces I was surround by. These images capture some of the typefaces I came across as I moved through the city.
The past few weeks I’ve been working on a project that just didn’t seem to turn out right. Despite three major design iterations and a thousand smaller explorations, I wasn’t happy with the result. Sometimes this happens. It would be oh so easy to draw a line under it and move on. There’s always more [ ]
This week we launched Studio, a local development app that makes it super easy to spin up WordPress websites locally. Under the hood Studio is using WordPress Playground to run sites without the need to install a bunch of other dependencies (no Docker!). The app is free to use and open source. Studio was one [ ]
From an interview in The Observer back in 2021: Each year, he says, seems to slip away that little bit faster than the last, something that always puts him in mind of the turning wheel of an audio tape. “When you’re young,” he says, “you have a big old reel of that tape left, right? [ ]
It’s been a while since I last did a workspace post. I love seeing where other people work, so figured it’s time to share an update of my current setup.
On February 14th, 1990, the Voyager 1 space probe turned its camera to Earth and took a photograph from 3.7 billion miles away.