📷 “August 2019” is now up in the Photo Journal: https://photojournal.danielpietzsch.com/2019/August. 📷
Desperately trying to catch up… ;-)
A family gathering near Brussels, commuting photos and the usual documentation.
Feeds from people participating at the IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf, May 2025.
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Their Fault
It is clearly their fault.
The clients just don’t get design.
The designers only care about how it looks.
The developers have no sense for aesthetics.
CSS is broken.
The users are just too stupid.
It is clearly their fault. Is it, though?
Whenever we struggle or ...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Always at Your Service
Jeremy Keith and the team at Clearleft have started a new podcast. In each episode, they are looking at a different theme related to design, development, and beyond. The first episode covered design systems and was already very worthwhile. But I especially enjoyed the latest...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Wicked Design
Problems come in two flavors. There are the problems we know how to solve, or at least know that there is a solution to them. Like mathematical equations, for example, or beating another chess player in five moves. For those problems, the mission is clear. And then, there ar...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Scrolling Elements Into View
Although you should not mess with scrolling unless it is really necessary, scrolling an element into view is something that is needed from time to time. In my case, I recently wanted to scroll to the top of a table after a user clicked on the pagination underneath the table....
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Useless Is Useful
Much like every other weekend, I spent several hours cleaning the apartment this Sunday. Although I enjoyed the result of it, I had always looked at cleaning as a tedious task. Yet, I have come to enjoy it over the last few years. This is because I have started to listen to ...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Fear
I knew it would happen again. The fear. The tunnel vision. The blackout.
Only a few seconds left. I don’t want to be here.
“Next is Matthias, who will play the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11 for us.”
Applause!
I can’t think straight. The tunnel vision is here...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
The New Urgency of Climate Change
The COVID-19 crisis has temporarily shifted our attention away from the most pressing and life-threatening of all challenges: Climate change. But while we – at least in Europe and other parts of the world with responsible leadership – are on a flattening curve, the issue of ...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Don’t Assume, Validate.
As we gain more and more experience in building digital products, we tend to think ever so often that we already know what a good solution looks like and how people will use our design. But that’s not true. Far too often, we are assuming that things work in a certain way or ...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Necessity Is the Ultimate Teacher
Remember that thing you wanted to learn? You know what I mean. That thing that keeps on nagging in the back of your head. That thing that comes to mind now and then and reminds you that there are so many things that you could explore. You know it would be interesting and, al...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
TeamOps
Ethan Marcotte just wrote a great piece about design systems and how the promise that design systems would hugely improve collaboration between designers and developers never really materialized. Many teams are still working in silos, which means there is a clear separation ...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
One Egg
The kids wanted pancakes. But there was only one egg left. Usually, I use four eggs to make pancakes. But the kids wanted pancakes. So I made pancakes. With only one egg.
They turned out delicious.
Sometimes, one egg is enough.
Sometimes, you should just try although the conditions seem less than ideal.
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This is the 32nd post of my 100 days of writing series. You can find a list of all posts here.
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Thoughts on Writing: Read It Out Loud
For me, 2020 started with a few posts about writing. I had read and listened to a lot of material on writing and wanted to share some of the things I had learned about how other writers approach writing as a craft, a process, and a passion. So I wrote posts about shitty firs...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
85 Percent
As a child, teenager, and student, I used to play a lot of football (or soccer, for my American friends). I only played in a club for about two years and had to quit the team because of an injured knee, but I always loved playing with my friends during my leisure time. Spend...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Fussy Web, True Meaning.
Sarah Drasner just published a fabulous article, In Defense of a Fussy Website, in which she makes the case that we should all design and build websites again that are a joy to visit. Sites with those little details that make you smile, with small delights and touches that r...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Milton Glaser – Ten Things I Have Learned
Milton Glaser, one of the greatest graphic designers of our time, passed away this Friday on his 91st birthday in New York City. Well known for his 1977 “I ❤️ NY” logo and his Bob Dylan poster with psychedelic hair, Glaser changed the visual culture in the 1960s and 70s with...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
The Web in the Age of Ubiquity
If you have kids, you think a lot about how the world might look like when they grow up.
At the moment, the world is being transformed on so many levels and so rapidly that, as Seth Godin argues, we might be in the middle of a change that is as big as the change that marked ...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Go Deep
Do you know the feeling when you know an album so well that you always anticipate the next bar of a song and when the song ends, you can already hear the first beats of the next song playing in your head? The best albums are the ones, where it might take quite a while to get...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
What Would This Look Like If It Were Easy?
Tim Ferriss just released the audiobook of his book “Tribe of Mentors”. The book contains the answers to 11 questions he sent out to hundreds of the world’s “top performers” from across all possible fields of expertise. In the introduction, which you can also listen to in Ti...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Debugging HTML With Advanced CSS Selectors
Writing HTML is hard. At least writing semantically sound, valid HTML is. This might come as a surprise to those who only scratch the surface of what HTML really can do. What can be so hard about a few elements, right? At least it isn’t an object-oriented, multi-paradigm pro...