Shifting left on the hard stuff: what good design is, why you’d write it down, and how I design with AI while keeping the decisions my own.

For the first time in my career we _completed_ a design system migration. The new math on big rewrites tickles my soul.

Finding things, actioning things. Getting on with it.

Spacing is typesetting's job, not the writer's. This blog lets CSS handle the gap between Chinese and English, and now NetNewsWire does too.

I strive to add accessibility descriptions to all images I post online.1 Yet, I do not have any skill whatsoever at writing them, nor do I want to invest time in learning, so I call upon the IMatch…

I set my terminal’s font to Iosevka this morning after skimming this thread on HN. My old terminal font — JetBrains Mono, Ghostty’s default — was good. Now it’s Iosevka. I tried…

Calibrium spol. s r. o. is a construction testing company from central Slovakia. They measure how well embankments, trench backfills, road bases and foundations are compacted, run geotechnical…

“Users want…” Said by someone senior. In a meeting with no users in it.Personas. Made up in a workshop, laminated, never met.Research to validate. The decision’s already…

After inktober last year, I dove into gothicized italics with watercolor and gouache. I still have a pile of construction paper to scan and share. , A light grey on black paper got pushed into a gold…

Summary: If you do accessibility work or talks, stop treating Microsoft’s “temporary disability” as a kind of disability. Microsoft Inclusive Design’s “temporary or situational…

Why assigning trust by action, not by agent, is the design system work nobody's doing yet

https://godobject.dev/blog/10-tells-of-slop/

rejected pill labels from figma, and claude trying to attempt handwriting a new logo.. wip:

The background on this site has a groove now, and you get to pick it: eight genres, from downtempo all the way up to drum'n'bass.

I wanted to experiment with animating a logo using agents I already had. The results surprised me. I’m glad I stuck with it, and I hope sharing the process saves you some time. I’m not an animator,…

A conversation I've had several times this week is around untangling goals, improvements and fixes in digital work, and around understanding how the three get tangled. First of all, a definition:…

In a previous post I wrote about how you can clip one layer to another using blend modes. This kind of works for some things but has some major limitations: You have to put everything in folders so…

https://www.arrowtype.com/articles/kyrios-process

This resource is the text of a 15 minute talk by Lainey Feingold about Digital Accessibility Ethics: Disability Inclusion in All Things Tech. The main message? We've made so much progress in digital…

Hello! I'm over on the Birch Press Design blog today and here is a little peek of what I made. Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful day!

Casual graphic designers creating simple things like sliders or flyers for social media have long since moved to Figma, Canva, or a gazillion other tools. … The post There is no audience for a free…

A concerning new trend

My new dark fantasy cover for the Demon's Peace

Published a new Digital Snippet for AV Club: Human-instrument control surfaces

With product simplification, it’s a battle for hearts and minds. You cannot simply ask the engineering community to design out half the parts because they don’t think it’s possible.…

Use NVIDIA Elements lint rules, MCP tools, and CI checks to catch component and design-token mistakes in AI-generated UI.

I help a lot of people get rid of the “AI-ness” in the UIs of their products. Typically, they try to fix this by doing stuff like: Asking Codex / Claude Code to “improve the…

Today I learned more about fonts and found one great one to replace my current setup and pair with my colour palette. Maple Mono is an excellent monospace font with a rounded design and smart…

A Chrome extension with one a/A switch that renders the site you are on in lowercase. Display-only, saved per site, no network requests.

Your data does not necessarily need to be visualized as a map, even if your dataset includes locations. It can seem like a map is the natural choice for geographic data but there are better options.…

A friend built himself an expense app. He described it as a miniature QuickBooks that he actually likes using. What made it magical was being able to change it while doing his expenses. He wanted a…

What's the "100ms threshold" for AI UX?

What do Jack Daniel’s, Robert Service, and David Ogilvy have to do with founder branding? A conversation with Finn Thormeier about staying in character, staying on message, and building a senior…

My Reading page has been updated, and there isn't too much to say about it, but I'm happy with it. Previously, all three status categories were the same: finished, started, and want-to-read books…

Are we the bad ones? The digital designers, the programmers, the developers, the user experience professionals and content experts? Did we help design this whole digital world of addiction and…

This article explains how to modify the Microsoft 365 Copilot Brand Kit. Because apparently, YES, you DO in fact need an article explaining how to do it! Especially so since Microsoft is retiring…

From the annals of asking for what you want. Read here.

What is Assistive Access, you might ask? It’s an accessibility feature released in iOS 17, to “distill apps and experiences to their essential features in order to lighten cognitive load.” It offers…

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.minimalize { background-color: #fcd709; outline: none; border: none; padding: 10px 20px; font-size: 24px; border-radius: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px; } Every once in awhile, I see a beautiful,…

Summary When a developer can already describe what they want, they simply build it. But often, we don’t know what we want. This essay describes how to use AI to design the thing we want to…

I've recently written a book called The Same Work, Done Properly. I had absolutely no idea how to go about writing and publishing an ebook until recently so I've been on a journey of discovery. There…

I've just completed writing and publishing my first book, The Same Work, Done Properly. It's a guide to web accessibility. I won't talk too much about the content of the book here but thought I'd…

The desktop metaphor gave users a visible model of files, folders, windows, and applications. Modern interfaces increasingly hide that structure in favor of search, cloud storage, and…