From the opinion piece “Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good” by Mary Harrington: 
“Long-form literacy is not innate but learned, sometimes laboriously. As Maryanne Wolf, a literacy scholar, has illustrated, acquiring and perfecting a capacity for long-form, “expert reading” is literally mind-altering. It rewires our brains, increasing vocabulary, shifting brain activity toward the analytic left hemisphere and honing our capacity for concentration, linear reasoning and deep thought. The presence of these traits at scale contributed to the emergence of free speech, modern science and liberal democracy, among other things.”

I had already started with this but then came across this article. The author makes a few good points about why you shouldn’t trust Meta, the company behind WhatsApp, with your data and conversations.

According to Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, in the news item on the website of CNN. Analist Allison Morrow is skeptical because ‘AI’ mostly consist of hallucinating, quasi-trustworthy text predictors. 

This quote by Mark Cuban also piqued my interest: “Someone needs to remind the CEO that at one point there were more than (2 million) secretaries. There were also separate employees to do in office dictation,” wrote tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban on Bluesky. “They were the original white collar displacements. New companies with new jobs will come from AI and increase TOTAL employment.”

As Europe we need to break free from our dependency on American digital services. What if Trump decides to use access to these services as a geopolitical chess piece? It can severely hamper a country. Take for example the total integration of Microsoft within the Dutch government. From getting access to cloud work spaces to all the communication within Microsoft Teams.

Time to choose for European alternatives. And even then is not enough for only the data to be hosted in the EU. In his first term as president Trump changed the law which makes all data, even hosted in Europe, subject-able to U.S. legal scrutiny.

David Oliver says following RSS Feeds can be an antidote to the bite-sized fast paced consumption of social media. You need to make time to decide which RSS Feeds you want to follow. This ‘garden’, as he calls it, needs periodic maintenance to prevent from being overwhelmed by all the information.

As a designer you feel the need to put form fields in multiple columns next to each other. It looks clean and you neatly make use of the available space. Adam Silver once again points out that you should avoid this at all cost. Time again research shows that putting the form fields in one column works best for users. And it might not be the prettiest solutions, but that’s something we need to accept as designers.

Austin Kleon shares 100 quotes that can help with writing. Such as this one from Percival Everett: “I’m pretty sure everything I’m writing is s—t. I’m just trying to make the best s—t I can.”

I got this quote from a blog by Ryan Holiday where he shares his favourite books read in 2024. What he wants to say is that it’s important to be selective of which books you pick up (and put down if they are not your cup of tea).

Rigid grid systems have become outdated and unnecessary in a world where the screen widths of our devices are increasingly diverse. The solution is a flexible system that can be applied in any situation.

Adam Silver discusses several complicated technical solutions to finally arrive to a simple, but smart solution: dividing the form into multiple pages.

Working as a designer in a large organization and getting your ‘perfect’ designs actually built can be a challenge. According to Andy Budd this has multiple reasons but it’s important to:

• Embrace the progress even though your design won’t be built pixel perfect.
• Ask the right questions in order to determine where the problem lies with your designs.
• Be tactical on which issues you stand your ground.
• Prototype fast and often so you can determine big problems early in the process.

WebGL is a technique that is available in all the major browser which can be used to make this interactive smoke and light visual.

I always enjoy other people's year-end lists, so that's why I'm sharing which media have occupied my mind in 2024.

Why I don't eat for 16 hours on a day and the positive effect it has on me.

Nikhil Suresh argues in this blog that the simple fact that you are willing to read in a specific domain gives you a head start. Suresh claims this is because few people make the effort to continue reading within their specialization.

A month after I became the proud owner of a sitting/standing desk, I came across this article. It’s about how standing the whole day is just as bad as sitting all day. Luckily, the solution, as always, is variation. It’s especially important to take a walk now and then.

Adam Silver, an expert on UI/UX design, had a discussion with his colleague: should a button that can do harm, such as deleting an item, be hard to find? Eventually, they reached the conclusion that it shouldn’t be hard to find the button, but you have to build in a safety net if a user deletes something accidentally. This way, users who need to delete something can still easily find the button, but unwanted destructive actions are avoided.

In this article the aesthetic-usability effect is explained by the UX experts of the Nielsen Norman Group. This effect makes users believe something (like a website or an app) is easier to use because it looks pretty. A solid argument to pay attention to how something looks besides of just making something user friendly. Author Kate Moran does warn there is a limit to this effect and that, even though a site or app may look pretty, this effect can’t mask big UX problems indefinitely.

A small blog with a big message: Bill Wear argues that everything you do, you have do it with your full attention. This requires practice. Giving your attention to the things that truly matter.

How to strategically make use of the ‘Hemmingway effect’, which basically means to stop in de the middle of a creative endeavour even though you feel you can go on. By doing this it’s easier to get yourself motivated to start up the project the next time you’re having a go.

There is a lot of talk about screen time being bad for kids. But adults are not exempt to the downsides of being glued to a screen all day. It’s bad for your eyes and passive screen time is being compared to sugar for your brain. That’s why scientist advise to avoid screens for the first hour of the day. Instead you can read a book, listen to music or prepare a healthy breakfast.

Hannah Bussey emphasizes that it’s important to go outside as soon as possible after waking. Bathing in the sunlight, even on a cloudy day and before you check your phone, works towards a good cardiac rhythm. Meaning you will sleep better at night.

In this expansive essay Adrian Hanft shows how important UI/UX design can be and why you always have to test your screens/ideas with the user. In 2017 a disastrous event  occurred when a American Navy ship became seemingly uncontrollable because a checkbox was activated but didn’t get noticed by the crew. The ship collided with another ship and as a results there were deaths, injuries and millions of damages. Hanft argues this could all have been avoided if the screens were tested with the end users.

Ryan Holiday explains why he doesn’t have goals. It boils down to just doing the work and not making it dependent on some external factor like a goal. A goal doesn’t say anything about the work you want to do.

Ryan Holiday posts about his hobby: swimming. According to Holiday this is an ideal past-time because when you swim you’re can’t access screens or phones. He also makes it a sport to visit unique swimming spots when he is traveling.

A good form…

I have never known the difference between <a href="#" target=“blank”>Link</a> or <a href="#" target="_blank">Link</a>, so I went looking and came across this Stack Overflow answer. It turns out that if you use ‘blank’ without an underscore, the link always opens in the same new tab or window, but if you use ‘_blank’, a new window or tab is opened each time.

This just goes to show that even after 20 years of building websites, you can still learn something new.

I love train travel, and it seems amazing to travel through Europe by train. This gentleman has apparently mastered train travel, so that’s why I’m sharing this. Mainly as a reference for myself.

Ryan Holiday realizes that it is sometimes worth choosing the difficult path because it allows you to improve yourself. Take the bike instead of the car to get better fitness, or pick up a book instead of your phone to learn something new.

Kyle Chyaka writes that he has stopped using Spotify because it is becoming increasingly difficult for him to find the music he wants. The interface of Spotify is constantly being updated, with a growing focus on algorithms that determine what music you listen to. This is also referred to as ‘corporate-centered’ design, where the interests of the company take precedence over those of the user.