Notes from the field.
I spotted this quote by Shirley Hibberd on the side of an enormous glass case, just outside the departures gate at SFO: Let us not despise the day of small things. A windowsill garden is better than no garden, and the dark area where cats quarrel and damp makes patches of unsightly mould, may be made bright with healthy vegetation that shall be worth a little care and very much love. This lovely…
Mandy Brown : ...reading isn’t about reaching empathic dead ends, or recruiting platitudes about how we must understand each other [...] To reduce reading to the practice of empathy is to divorce it of its real power and pleasure: to enjoy the fruits of another person’s creative effort, to think with the writer and their characters, not becoming them, but becoming more fully yourself .
Whenever someone tries to impress me with a job title I feel sorry for them. Like when a child tries to impress me by explaining that “Wolverine is cool.” Look, kid: I basically invented Wolverine. I’ve been thinking about Wolverine since before you were born. Wolverine and me are best buds how dare you come to me with these childish facts. Have you seen my t-shirt? My Wolverine-themed chain…
There’s a line from Rutherford Craze’s latest note that hit me like a piano tumbling out of a six story building: When we ask Midjourney to draw an ox, it does not think of home. ChatGPT will never invent a new calligraphy technique , because it has no wrists to feel uncomfortable. That link points to Phaedra Charles’s Undercase Type and a beautiful thing she printed called A Guide to Sinistral…
Last week I picked up the EP-1320 Medieval and I’ve been tinkering with it all weekend. Besides it’s buck-wild look, it comes with a bunch of expertly recorded medieval samples: flutes, bowed harps, gitterns, reeds, trumpets, bells, battle toms, rowdy peasants, and coconut horse hooves. This makes it sound like a joke, a musical toy that immediately finds itself in the back of your closet, but…
This is the sort of book I usually hate. By law books about writing are so desperate to explain the world to me that I struggle to keep my eyes open. I don’t have much patience when I feel someone’s talking down to me, with them having figured the universe out already. Isn’t it always more exciting when a writer is on the tip of their toes just a half step ahead of you? When you’re invited to…
This morning was a total stinker. I woke up with a dull headache, teeth grinding, fists clenched. Sometimes my body becomes haunted, a vessel for a thing ; total and all consuming. It could be a conversation the day before or a problem I’m trying to solve, it doesn’t really matter what that the thing is. These moments suck because it feels like I’m trapped inside my body with no way out but it’s…
I have a terrible admission to make and you may never forgive me. It’s taken far too long, so please don’t be mean about this. Look, I’m already on my knees apologizing and you don’t have to make this weird, okay? But this weekend I finally got my copy of Indian Street Lettering by Pooja Saxena. I know! I’m sorry! I should have known sooner! I apologized already! Jeez! Pooja’s fantastic book and…
Huh : FragCoord is a real-time GLSL fragment shader editor. Write shader code on the left, see the result rendered instantly on the right. No setup required — just start typing. That’s from the docs that explains how this website is Codepen but for shaders. Each example is hypnotic and fun but from a totally different universe where math and art were always the same class in high school. There’s a…
Alessandra Ram : Every major technological boom has produced the same figure, the person who gives everything to the wave...
Micah Nathan : Writing, I told them, isn’t supposed to be easy, and of course it can be tedious but that doesn’t make it rote. Writing isn’t just the production of sentences – it’s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention. It’s a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it. An LLM can reproduce the appearance of that activity, but it can’t replace it, because the value…
I might be botching a Hank Green quote with the title of this post but I’ve noticed how it’s increasingly difficult to stay buoyant, to keep light on my toes, to feel optimistic about the future. In Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium , lightness is the first quality he notes for aspiring writers but I’ve always taken it one step further: I believe that lightness is an essential…
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake is a fantastic book all about mushrooms and fungi but what made it a breezy read for me was how weird they are. It’s like Merlin got his hands on creatures from another dimension where the rules of biology simply don’t apply. First: Merlin goes into great depth about genes and how they don’t have to be passed on from parent to child. Some organisms can inherit…
I made a few updates over the weekend! All the images in /photos are smartly resized and they also load as you scroll so I’m not sending you 700GB of data down the wire. I have a lot of ideas about what I’d like to turn /photos into but either way it’s amazing how little work is required to build your own personal Flickr with a bit of CSS and hooking up a folder of images to 11ty (now Build…
Erin Kissane : There is a lot—like a lot a lot—of research suggesting that using social media to keep up with news does not actually inform us but does makes us feel more informed. Many studies of many populations have found for knowledge about what’s happening to us, social media essentially magnifies the Dunning-Kruger effect. When we talk about brainrot, we’re not wrong. This mirrors how I’ve…
Mass-Driver just released MD UI , a neo-grotesque type family that’s been designed to compliment Rutherford Craze and Co.’s already excellent mono-space . And just as the name implies, MD UI is designed for a different kind of reading : When we think about reading, we tend to picture books, or magazines, or business reports. Blocks of text, traversed from beginning to end. There’s another kind of…
I strain to use my eye as an investigatory tool—as a pencil, with my mind the sketch pad. That’s Patrick Bringley in All the Beauty in the World , a great little book about his experience as a guard at the Met but it’s also a book about loss, art, and looking intensely at things you don’t understand for long periods of time. I particularly like this bit: On and off, I have been reading a book…
Here’s how writing works today. First, a tiny thing. Then: a follow-up. And then a sentence with a strangely condescending tone! The real information is right here though. Not in this sentence. Or this one. Could it be here? Nope! After a few short, vague, and mysterious sentences now you get to read a much longer one that’s supposed to explain a big brain thought but we both know I’m going…
This weekend we’re in Napa for C’s birthday. We lounged by a river and a fire pit, binoculars in hand, listening and waiting for the birds to show themselves. Earlier that morning we had a falconry lesson with Daisy, a large, powerful peregrine; Kirby, a dainty Harris’s hawk; Hermes, another peregrine but loud as hell; and Hubert, aka Hoops, a spectacled owl who loves the couch and daytime TV more…
It all began with the nav. Notice how in the sidebar of this here blog where you can open and close folders to reveal more entries? Well, the tappable area of the arrow was way too small and I kept miss-clicking and selecting folders instead. So, I tried to fix it and realized the only way to do so was by tweaking the element like this: .list-group-item::before { padding : 1rem ; } Alas! This…
Uketsu’s Strange Pictures is real good. It’s one of those rare books that make you realize that a novel is a game, not just a bunch of text printed on a page. And the way that Uketsu reimagines their novel is with drawings and diagrams, making what might be a simple murder mystery thriller feel like you’re a detective rummaging through documents and timetables. It reminds me of all the other…
I can’t stop thinking about a series of blog posts by Eleanor Janega I read a couple of months ago. The first is called There’s no such thing as the ‘Dark Ages’, but OK , where she writes: The medieval period was not a period of stagnation, it was a time of progress. Wait, what? That’s not what I thought! This is novel information! Tell me more... The actual phrase ‘Dark Ages’ itself derives from…
Watch out: a new website appears! Yesterday I published the ninenteeth official version of this website and this time round it’s inspired by the work I’ve done on developer tools these last few years. It’s my own personal IDE: you can navigate files, open up folders, and see how I’d organize an operating system. My favorite bit of the new update is what I’ve done with Photos. For a good long while…
It’s 4am and I’m waiting for the sunrise. I can’t remember the last time I did this—perhaps back in college after the season finale of Lost? But right now it’s pitch black outside. I can’t sleep thanks to the jet lag and my body’s stubborn inability to sleep on long haul flights so I’m sat in our hotel room that overlooks the ocean. Out there in the dark, buoys are bobbing up and down. Their…
I’ve been thinking about the web and how it’ll change with the increasingly…uh…worrying decline of search. It feels like the order of their results can no longer be trusted, the web no longer reliably scraped. Instead, this essential tool we’ve relied on for more than two decades has halted all progress, reversed course. In a heart beat I would pick the search engine of 2014 over the one I use…
I love this time of year for the satisfying blocks of website tinkering. There are big mornings and long afternoons spent with a new CSS feature. Or a whole weekend rewriting the about page, fixing dark mode, poking, prodding. Every morning I head to a cafe and see what’s possible. Being productive or making something good isn’t really the point. It’s more about experimentation and learning new…
Redesigning this website over the weekend gave me a curious feeling. It was a deeply cozy one, as if my work sits on a continuum of all the other websites and books every made. As if my work is a link in a long chain through time. You’ll likely spot the inspiration right away: this redesign took an LLM copyright approach to Tschichold’s work and his rather beautiful designs for Penguin Books that…
Adventure games had all the best characters growing up: George Stobbart. Nico Collard. Guybrush Threepwood. Elaine Marley. Then a few decades later we got Harry Dubois and Kim Kitsuragi. I love adventure games because they consistently do this magic thing where you enter into the minds of these characters. Just like a novel, you can hear what they want and what they struggle with. You hear them…
Have you played Viewfinder yet? I picked it up last night on a whim and I wasn’t prepared for how brilliantly designed and creative and straight-up weird it all is. Here’s the gist: the game is about solving little puzzles by taking photographs and then “pasting” those objects into the real world. So a photo of a wall, once turned on its side, can be used as a bridge that helps you cross a void.…
Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed that 90% of my design feedback comes down to these three things: Ditch those words! Ditch those words! Ditch those words! It’s the fastest way to make a design more easily understood because almost every interface tries to explain too much at the wrong time and is far too yappy. Modern interface design is made up of sentences and sentences of needless…
There are books and then there are books . The kind where you can’t put down until they’re finished with you. The kind that captures every atom of your attention and changes something deep down. You walk away altered, the words having not really been words or sentences but something else altogether. That’s how I felt reading Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, By America . This is no dreamy communist…
It often feels like optimism is an act of revenge, an act of spite or rebellion, because optimism requires diligence and effort whilst pessimism feels like the default, the thing requiring no energy or effort. Mike Monteiro wrote along similar lines in How to stay hopeful : The problem with dystopias is that dystopias are easy. You simply stop giving a shit about things or people that you should…
Long time, huh? Lately I’ve felt the need to lay low, to hush myself, to be as quiet as a door mouse. Whilst the world feels so very loud and brash and full of words, stepping away from the Infinite Word Machine that is the internet has been helpful to ask some tough questions about my relationship with reading and writing. Here’s my cynical take about the current state of things: when a website…
Here’s an eye-opening snippet from Katie Mack’s excellent book The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) : The expansion of the universe as it is occurring today does more than just stretch out the light of distant galaxies. It also stretches out and dilutes the afterglow of the Big Bang itself. One of the strongest pieces of evidence for the Big Bang [...] is the fact that we can actually…
The Webkit team is pitching a new idea called item-flow : The suggestion isn’t to combine all of Flexbox with all of Grid — but rather to create a new set of properties and values to “replace” specifically the flex-flow and grid-auto-flow properties. (You will always be able to use the older syntax if you prefer.) Think how originally the Alignment properties and the gap property were defined to…
Here’s Johanna Hedva : ...one of the reasons I’m so unabashedly a NIN fan, and have been for so long, is because they’ve never humiliated me as they’ve gone through the years, like nearly every other mainstream band I loved growing up in the 1990s. I can declare my love for them without having to suffer the scorn that so many of those bands now deserve for selling out in various, pathetic ways.…
It’s obnoxiously beautiful right now. It’s a cracking, 10/10 stunner of a California sunset and it’s pouring in through the windows of this empty cafe as I click-clack on my infinite click-clack machine. It’s as if the whole world has become a kaleidoscope of West Coast reds and oranges just for me. But, alas, I don’t feel much of anything. I am, in fact, this: a total and absolute nothing inside.…
I’ve been tinkering with an iOS app for the last month or so. It’s exciting stuff! Working in Swift and moving away from the web has made my work feel all new and fresh, with so many things to learn. The project codename is Trot (for now!) and here’s some notes about what I’ve learned so far. Leaving VSCode and the browser behind by moving into XCode has made me immediately miss DevTools. It’s so…
The ever-so-great-and-interesting Katherine answered some questions about blogging and tagged me to do the same. Why did you start blogging in the first place? # In my late teens the web wouldn’t let me go. My favorite hobby was staying up until 2am reading smart things from smart people so very far away because it felt like an act of rebellion. Hundreds, thousands of people, writing about the web…
Kelly Sutton on why his team views big front-end frameworks as a liability : Maybe it’s the changing interest rates or political winds, but I think the “fat client” era JS-heavy frontends is on its way out. The hype around edge applications is misplaced and unnecessary for building many different flavors of successful businesses. My translation here: what’s good for business often isn’t what’s…
I love work. It drives me. It’s exciting. Everything about building things with folks is a pure thrill. Like when I crack open a hard design problem and learn something! Or when a test passes on a big refactor! Or when I watch a designer reveal something new about human cognition, about typography, about language, about a silly little bug in SVG! Despite my love for work you’ll never catch me…
Tim Carmody wrote a piece earlier in the week about why HTML is a programming language : Because HTML looks easy and lacks features like formal conditional logic and Turing-completeness, it’s often dismissed as not a programming language. “That’s not real code; it’s just markup” is a common refrain. Now, I’m no stranger to the austere beauty of the command line, from automating scripts to training…
I spotted this post by Chris Armstrong on Digital Gardening the other day and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Chris imagines a personal website being so much more than a humble blog with a series of chronological posts: A blog structure places the highest emphasis on ‘what’s new’… but what’s new has had the least scrutiny and little authority. It also creates a pressure to publish…
Design artifacts are important. Think journey maps, personas, wireframes, user research, written documents, charts, graphs, and everything else. These days they’re often stashed away in Google Docs or Figjam and in my career I’ve used all of these tools to help me understand how folks navigate complex software. But I’ve also seen these design artifacts produced in a way that is bad for designers…
I just hit the publish button on a new story all about technology, e-bikes, and the future. Here, look: https://robinrendle.com/stories/this-glorious-machine/ I got an e-bike about a year ago and made a draft of this story immediately. But boy oh boy did this thing take a long while to get into a readable state. All my feelings were messy and complicated and as I used my e-bike I realized that the…
One thing I get real excited about every year is Colly’s music roundup where he collects his favorite albums and presents them as a gift for all to enjoy. I tend to keep this page in a tab for a month or so, sifting through it slowly one by one and treating it as my guide for finding new stuff I missed throughout the year. I trawled through it quickly this morning with a sturdy coffee in hand and…
I’m real excited about text-box , a new CSS property that helps with text alignment and layout. You might remember whispers about leading-trim from a few years back and this new syntax has replaced all that. I first spotted this bad boy on the Webkit blog the other day: h2 { text-box : trim-start cap ; } This will trim the space above headings so that we no longer have to do any weird margin-top:…
I’m not a programmer. Plug me into a terminal and likely the only thing that you could wrench out of me is hello world . I can hack things together in the browser and I can certainly mask my contempt for Typescript for a day or two but there’s a hard limit for sure. Maybe I’m too scattershot for serious programming, too uninterested in the details of ternary operators or callbacks or how events…
Alex Russell : Frameworkism is now the dominant creed of frontend discourse. It insists that all user problems will be solved if teams just framework hard enough. This is non-sequitur, if not entirely backwards. In practice, the only thing that makes web experiences good is caring about the user experience — specifically, the experience of folks at the margins. Technologies come and go, but what…
I wouldn’t have become a designer if it wasn’t for CSS3 and HTML5. They came together at just the right time and captured everything that was so exciting about publishing and typography on the web. And I was drawn towards the web because of this groundswell of excitement. Now that I think of it, there’s a few reasons why I support big X.X releases for CSS and HTML. First, because it’s a great…