“Individually, we have very little power, but together we have a great deal of power.” Tired of hearing about AI? Join the club. But distaste is not a business strategy. And we are not without power. In response to a series of Medium articles by Patrick Neeman like this one that addressed issues of AI […]

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Why first impressions are often correct. Today’s jerk is tomorrow’s techno-fascist.

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The start of a beautiful weekend.

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Snow White—17 years old—didn’t come meowing for food when I entered the kitchen at 6 a.m. An hour later I found her lying motionless on the sofa. I stared until she moved, slightly, nestling her face more deeply between her back paws. 

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One Frenchman can’t be wrong. Push to the edge of what people will accept. Stop there. Raymond Loewy called it MAYA, and used it to design the modern world. The most important industrial designer you've never heard of.

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In 2020, the gifted makers of websites at Clearleft shared methods to achieve fluid responsive design. “Utopian” web design was (and still is) their half-kidding name for this approach, which Apple’s Jen Simmons, working indendently, called “intrinsic design.” Instead of chasing an ever-changing number of fixed breakpoints, utopian or intrinsic design follows the web’s intrinsic […]

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Meet WordPress.com Education, a new, free product for teachers and students.

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Your writing needs a permanent home—a domain that you own and control. Every few years, the internet convinces writers that a new digital paradise has arrived. First, it was social media like Facebook. Then blogging networks like Tumblr. Then it was Medium. More recently, it’s been Substack. Platforms promise us an eager audience, built-in monetization, a smooth […]

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The instant a business guy uses a sports metaphor to make his most important strategic point, I am lost. If you want me to understand your business idea, try wrapping it in Wendy Carlos’s secrets of synthesis or quotations by Orson Welles or the punchline to an old joke.

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On Sunday, I published Side One of my album on Bandcamp. The name of the album is also “Side One.” It is instrumental music with roots in Soundtrack, hip-hop, funk, jazz, 19th Century Romantic classical, ambient, electronic, and art rock. You might wonder if those divergent genres belong together, but the proof is in the […]

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What happens when leaders choose political expediency over science?

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If I learned one thing in 25 years of running design and education companies, it’s that idealism isn’t a business strategy. If you wonder why my partners and I had to shut down organizations we and lots of you loved, refer to the previous sentence.

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The web is still the best hope we have for a durable, shared memory. But it requires us to be gardeners, not merely tenants.

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ON THIS DAY in 1971, Pamela Courson found Doors frontman Jim Morrison dead in the bathtub of their Paris apartment. The cause of death was heart failure. No autopsy was performed. Morrison was 27. A year before, a teenaged me had watched the Doors play live at Pittsburgh Civic Arena. Tension at the concert was […]

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STOP ME if you’ve heard this one: The members of an extended family spend years curating a shared online photo album. Then the website they posted on vanishes, flushing their collective memories away forever.

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When my brother Pete and I were kids, and our parents were out of town, we ditched school for a week and cut an “album” by recording backing tracks to my dad’s reel-to-reel, then live overdubbing on different instruments and capturing the whole mess on a cassette recorder. We didn’t know what we were doing, […]

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Look back in anchor tags: a partial review of my site’s 31-year visual history before diving into the new design.

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She is not here to eat. She is here to ensure my compliance.

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Cameron Cummins-Smith’s grand unifying theory connects the far right’s seemingly disparate obsessions—from trans panic and great replacement theory to anti-feminism and white birth-rate anxiety—into a single ideological system fueled by pornographic narratives: In physics there is this idea of a theory of everything: a single, unified model that can describe all physical phenomena in the […]

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“GIs in Paris” by Floyd Davis. Davis served as a Life Magazine artist during WWII, where he was stationed in Paris, France.

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Maybe I’m special. Or unlucky. But things that supposedly work intuitively for most users tend to fail spectacularly for me.  After mastering academia and enjoying some early success in journalism, advertising, and music composition and production, I poured myself into web design in early 1995, understood it in a way most designers didn’t, and enjoyed […]

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It was a spring that felt more like winter last week in New York; suddenly it feels like summer. After my air-conditioned bedroom, the living room and kitchen felt like a walk-in oven. Our weirdly yellow back wall light lit the kitchen. The kids must have left it on when they went to bed. I […]

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Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement.

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What Carter did in his speech was something rare in the annals of democratic government: he confronted the people with the truth—about his own failings, about the reality of the world around them, and most importantly about themselves. Even as Americans grow, for the second time, disillusioned with a Trump presidency, we have put drapes […]

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The best project management tool is still a pen, plus the discipline to notice what the machine cannot. Wisdom from Lucas Radke.

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The best defense is to write humanly.

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Bluesky can't abandon the developers who made a bet on AT Proto, so they should give the protocol to a standards body while catching up on UX.—Dave Winer

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Lately, in work conversations, I find myself fighting a lifelong tendency to provide way more context than is absolutely required. If you ask me to okay your work, for example, I may respond with an essay on what delighted me about it. The teaching gene, plus the exuberance of writing and thinking clearly, compel me […]

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Cover art for the 1971 prog-rock LP “Fearless,” by British band Family features a distinctive, die-cut cover design depicting the five band members gradually morphing into a single entity combining features of them all. Tom Brigham, a high school student and friend of mine the year the LP was released, had not yet invented morphing […]

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Remembrance of beats passed.

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