Web, design, & web design.
A colleague recently came to me with a question about an existing web project that he had “inherited”. His question was about heading levels. HTML only has six, and this project had way more than six. If you removed the headings, there would be very little content left. Due to various constraints, he had limited […]
People have opinions about everything. You’d think that after almost 30 years in design, I would get used to that fact. But sometimes it’s hard. Many people either forget or don’t realize that design is a legitimate field of study. There are things you can learn and understand about design that others don’t, just like […]
I was reading Joel Hooks’ article on “digital gardens”. He argues: “Chronologically sorted pages of posts aren’t how people actually use the internet.” This may be true (unless you spend most of your time reading mail, news, blog posts, or social media). Even so, dates can provide context. Hooks’ post (which is worth reading, by […]
As design leaders/managers, our tendency during design reviews is to express our opinion of the work. This seems logical enough, as our opinion of the work can be—and for experienced design leaders, often is—relevant, depending on the context and the reviewer’s experience. Even so, it can be helpful to be mindful of this tendency, and […]
or How Copying and Pasting Made Me Question My Use of Complex Blog Software. I use WordPress for this website. But not for long. A few days ago, I published the first blog post I’ve written in two years. But that’s not the only writing I’ve done the past two years. Most of my writing has been notes. I […]
A topic pops up periodically in some of the books I’ve been reading over the past year, grabbing my attention and then disappearing under the surface of my thoughts again, in cycles, like some kind of sea creature of consciousness. Memento Mori. Remember you must die. This is something I would rather not think about, […]
This is the first of two articles about critical thinking in design. In part one, I discuss why I feel there’s so much “design sameness” on the web, and the drawbacks of our tendency to focus on existing solutions. In the upcoming Part 2, I’ll present a model that I’ve found useful in making more […]
Designers love their tools and processes. Many verbal battles have been fought about code or images, Photoshop or Sketch, paper or screen. And these discussions are serious. You’d think they were about whether to kill all kittens in the world. “Why don’t you name your layers?”, asks Designer A, looking in disgust at her coworker’s […]
I co-organize some popular conferences in Amsterdam with a few friends/colleagues. As the resident designer, I’m often tasked with making the name badges that everybody wears. I used to make these in Adobe InDesign, which has a mail merge function that, while kind of weird (I seemed to be required to use UTF-16 CSV files […]
We like to believe that the right framework, method, approach, or conventions will allow us to create perfect projects. Our code will be beautiful, pure, performant, and maintainable. Outside of some developer blogs however, this is often not the case. Reality is messy. Some people are fortunate enough not to have to deal with this […]