Notes

Collected bits and pieces I’ve noticed this month.

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve compiled one of these, here goes.

First things first – pour one out for Skype, we’ll miss you.

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Some interesting points here about design tokens, and how the wcag/figma/salesforce/design community thinks of them – "Avoiding tokens"

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Sir Ive has been in the news lately, here’s a different kind of interview with him on BBC-s “Desert Island Disks” podcast. Some nuggets that stuck out to me:

• People need time to understand and react to new things, if the rate of change is too fast, it creates problems.
• Products need to be right for the time and market – products can be great, but not right.
• Adding a handle to the iMac made an unfamiliar thing instantly more approachable.

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Linear always publishes thoughtful pieces on their blog, this time about the relationship between AI and UI:

One way I visualize this relationship between the form of traditional UI and the function of AI is through the metaphor of a ‘workbench’. Just as a carpenter's workbench is familiar and purpose-built, providing an organized environment for tools and materials, a well-designed interface can create productive context for AI interactions.
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AI doesn’t replace the workbench, it's a powerful new tool to place on top of it.

“Design for the AI age” by Karri Saarinen

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Also on the topic of UI-s, Sebastiaan de With from Lux (makers of the excellent Halide camera app) imagines what direction the rumoured redesign of Apple's OS interfaces might go.

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Glad to see that Jason Santa Maria is back writing on his blog – welcome back! Instantly added to the blogroll.

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A list of individual dogs on Wikipedia.
via Frank Chimero on Bluesky

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A typeface I’ve been keeping an eye on to possibly use on a project – Atkinson Hyperlegible – has recently been updated.

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For browsing visuals that don’t try to sell you something, here’s public.work from Cosmos
via Sidebar

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I’m not maybe a fan of the roof construction itself, but I do like the idea – a set of buildings under one roof.

A fat stack of snapshots of New York City in 1979 by flickr user Petershagen.

Collected bits and pieces I’ve noticed this month.

I enjoyed reading Jeffrey Zeldman ruminate on two beautiful things that grew from the seminal A List Apart web publication – An Event Apart and A Book Apart, both now, sadly, shuttered.
I learned a tremendous amount about web design and development, as well as adjacent topics from A List Apart. Not only was it wonderfully designed, it published a wide range of topics and shaped how I approach design for the web and also design in general. I’m very grateful for that. I was never able to attend An Event Apart, unfortunately, but I was able to acquire books put out by A Book Apart and have a number of them on my bookshelf.

But! All is not lost! Au contraire, A Book Apart gave the publishing rights back to the authors and the books have been slowly republished in various formats and one of those is Pricing Design, by Dan Mall, resurrected as a beautifully designed website.

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With my to-do list(s) approaching bankruptcy territory, this has been following me around for some days now – “What would it mean to be done for the day?”.
via Austin Kleon

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Some mandatory “here’s a number of things” lists – “77 Facts that Blew Our Minds” from The Atlantic, “52 Things I Learned in 2024” from Kent Hendricks, “52 Things I Learned in 2024” from Tom Whitwell.
via kottke.org

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One thing I learned was what the “Send in the Clowns” means. From Wikipedia:
“but it's not supposed to be a circus [...] [I]t's a theatre reference meaning “if the show isn't going well, let's send in the clowns"; in other words, "let's do the jokes.””

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(Re)watching Flaked, this house in Venice, CA, home of photographer Philip Dixon, caught my eye. I love it.

Collected bits and pieces I’ve noticed this month.

Some podcasts I’ve found interesting lately – firstly, AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky on the Decoder podcast talking about how he runs the company and what founder mode is; and photographer Tyler Stalman on The Talk Show, discussing iPhone photography with some cool tips and thoughts around the colour science and photography, from old film stocks to todays digital camera systems. Check also Tyler’s iPhone 16 camera review (Youtube) and also these by from Austin Mann, and Vjeran Pavic (Youtube).

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From Petapixel – the reason why old sports photos often have a rather pleasing blue background haze.

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A two-part series from Linear on how they approached a recent redesign of their app. It’s always interesting to read and think along with how Liner work.

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iA describe, in length, how they designed and redesigned their app icons.

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Mozilla had their brand redesigned.
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Using Letterboxd? This little tool let’s you find your Letterboxd besties based on what your favourite films are.
via Kottke

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Friend is a new AI gadget, positioned as a, well, friend, who’s always there with positive vibes. I kind of like this application of AI and don’t think a made up friend is a bad thing per se.
via ATP

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In sad news, Sidebar is indefinitely paused.
With “content moving to medium and substack” are we designers enshittificating (enshitdefecating?) our online world too?

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Om Malik on “content”:

“You can tell a lot about a person and how they think about their work based on whether or not they use “content” to describe what they do.”

I 1000% agree.
Also check out this piece by Nick Heer on AI “content” and iA’s well-reasoned approach to writing with AI, or “Why should someone bother to read what you didn’t bother to write?”

Collected bits and pieces I’ve noticed this month.

The Bento method of productivity – pick 3 things, large, medium and small, to work on today, and complete them one by one in whatever order. Done, done, done.

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User Hostile Experience is a bit ranty, perhaps, but who doesn’t feel ranty when slapped in the face with a “subscribe to my newsletter” the first time you meet someone.

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Every day for the past 21 years, photographer Noah Kalina has taken a selfie. He’s compiled them all into a video titled “7777 days” that condenses half of his life into 2 minutes.

via Kottke

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I loved this description how poet Ruth Stone “catches” poems. I remember Rick Rubin talking about a similar thing in his book The Creative Act – how art, be it poetry or music or painting or a photograph, exists in the world and the artist merely captures it.

“As [Stone] was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out, working in the fields and she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. It was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barrelling down at her over the landscape. And when she felt it coming . . . ‘cause it would shake the earth under her feet, she knew she had only one thing to do at that point. That was to, in her words, “run like hell” to the house as she would be chased by this poem.
The whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. Other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she would be running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house, and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it, and it would “continue on across the landscape looking for another poet.”

via Design Matters

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Actually the line that I think was the most telling but that she said like a throw-away qualifier was “I didn’t know anyone in New York when I moved here…”
I think that is such a huge factor. To move to a city where you are not afraid to try something new because all the people that labeled who THEY think you are (parents, childhood friends) are not their to say “that’s not you” or “you’ve changed”. Well, maybe that person didn’t change but finally became who they really are.

The Sartorialist
via Kottke