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Matthias Ott

Articles and notes by Matthias Ott, User Experience Designer from Stuttgart, Germany.

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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...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Becoming a Tyrant

It is one of the most emotional and finest moments in “The Last Dance”, Netflix’s documentary series about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls of the Nineties: The interviewer asks Michael Jordan if he thinks that the intensity at which he played the game has come at the ex...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Release

One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is how to know when something is ready. A website, an article, a song, a painting – whatever it is, how do you know that it is ripe for publication? There are many answers to that question and maybe everyone of us has their ow...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Smooth Operations

How many connections are there in a team of two? One, of course. In a team of three? Three, of course. A team of four? Six. A team of five? Ten, already. What about a team of ten people? A team of ten has 66 connections. Yes, sixty-six. This basic concept of network theory ...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Feck Perfuction

There are books that you read once and never open again. There are even more books that you start to read and somehow never finish. I have a lot of them. And there are book with a lot of images in them, so there is not so much to read. I have a lot of them, too. But then, th...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

There Is No Secret Code

Back in design school, I spent days – weeks even – trying to crack the secret code of a given topic. Typography? Once I know all the rules and all the typefaces, I’ll be a well-versed typographer. Logo design? Once I have looked at enough logos to understand what the essence of logo design is, I’ll be able to design great logos myself. Flash? Once I've fully understood all the concepts and methods of ActionScript, I’ll have mastered Flash for good.

Except that there is no secret code. There is only cutting your teeth. There is only doing. There is only practice. There is only learning what you have to learn to get the job done. There is no right or wrong. There is only what works and what doesn’t.

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This is the 19th post of my 100 days of writing series. You can find a list of all posts here.

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Resilient Systems vs Humans

There was this strange sound. Clack, clack, clack! Was it coming from the tires? Clack, clack, clack! Just a few minutes after we hit the Autobahn to drive back home all the way across Germany. Clack, clack, clack! Maybe I’ll better have a look. I pulled over and stopped at ...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

The Web of Privilege

My father likes to say: “Man gewöhnt sich an jeden Scheiß,“ which translates to something along the lines of “eventually, any shit grows on you.“ He often uses it jokingly and with a wink, yet there is much truth to it. As human beings, we are extremely good at growing accus...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

CSS Custom Properties Fail Without Fallback

Today I learned! Jeremy Keith wrote about an interesting detail about CSS custom properties, also known as CSS variables, that he learned from Lea Verou: They don’t support the Cascade when a value is invalid. Or, as Lea writes in her article Hybrid positioning with CSS vari...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Building the Inclusive Web Together

It’s been over a year now that, after reading an article by Ethan Marcotte, I wrote about why we all need to do better to make the Web truly inclusive. Ethan had shared the results of WebAIM’s 2019 study covering the state of accessibility on the Web and the results were dev...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

The Importance of Being Inauthentic

“Just be authentic!” I’m sure you’ve heard that advice before. Maybe you also know some people, who proudly proclaim that they always like to be authentic and always openly tell people what they are thinking. There is only one problem with being authentic: It can be highly d...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Welcome to the 21st Century

My late grandmother was born in 1913. When she was my age, she had already lived through the Great Depression, the Spanish flu pandemic, hyperinflation, the fall of the Weimar Republic, two world wars, and, with the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, the darkest chapter in Germa...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Balancing Risk

Life is full of risks. The risk to make a wrong decision. The risk to lose. The risk to fail. The risk to mention too many risks in the first paragraph of a blog post. There are some risks that most of us understandably want to reduce as much as possible. The risk to die, fo...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes

Joschi Kuphal shared an amazing video on Twitter this morning. It is a documentary about an exercise that the school teacher, lecturer, and diversity trainer Jane Elliot devised in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. The exercise is called “Blue...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Designing and Making

One of the reasons for Apple’s success in the years when they invented breakthrough products like the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, was the way they created their products. At the heart of the design process was the design studio where lots of models and prototypes of ever...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

The Shortcut Boomerang

I love shortcuts. Not only keyboard shortcuts but also those in real life: When there is the opportunity to solve a problem quicker and more easily by taking a different path. Such a shortcut might be a new technique that you discovered or a new tool that makes your life eas...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

World Wide Gamut Web

Color on the Web has seen many iterations. When I started to fall in love with the Web in the late nineties, every self-respecting web designer was using web-safe colors. Although it can be argued that they never really worked, because colors still looked different on differ...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

The Right Way to Use fonts.com Web Fonts

Let’s talk about web fonts. More specifically, about a mistake I have seen developers make in several projects for different agencies: Embedding a web font in the wrong way. In each of the cases, the service they were using was Fonts.com, and given the service’s popularity, ...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Change and the Status Quo

Nature changes. Culture changes. Technologies change. Societies change. Markets change. We change. Change is everywhere around us. All the time. Inevitably. Change is a constant. The only problem with this is that human beings generally don’t like change that m...