He played the piano like no other. Literally. When legendary jazz pianist Thelonious Monk sat down at the piano and started playing, he would hit the keys with his fingers held flat, almost attacking them to produce the ringing, percussive sound he was known for. His composi...
I love to watch my children play.
How they invent things and stories. How they jump into roles and, just as quickly, change roles again. How they interact and react to each other’s ideas and the twists and turns of their play. Let’s cook something! Oh, we are knights now! Ca...
You know that feeling when you are leaving a movie theater after having watched a superhero movie and it almost feels as if you had superpowers yourself?
I just had a similar experience, but this time with a feeling of calmness, focus, and appreciation for my surroundings. ...
It happened again. And I bet this has happened to you before, too. I’m talking of New Year’s resolutions. Every year we make them and tell ourselves that this time, yes, this time it is going to work, for sure. But then, suddenly, it is February, and nothing has changed. (Ex...
Colin Devroe kicked off a series of “My Typical Day” posts. He tagged Dan Mall (and Chris Coyier, Jeremy Keith and others) and Dan tagged Sara Soueidan (and Dave Rupert, Rob Weychert, and others) and Sara tagged me (and Cassie Evans, Anton Sten, and others).
Although I’ve n...
Hip-hop has lost one of its finest artists to ever touch the mic and an MPC. Daniel Dumile, better known by his stage name MF DOOM, passed away on October 31, 2020, at the age of 49.
Dumile, who performed in a metal face mask, was a child of the Golden Era and a master of hi...
So, that was 2020. First of all, I hope that you and your loved-ones are well, that you had something to do this year that brought you fulfillment and a sense of purpose, and that you haven’t been affected too heavily by COVID-19 and the lockdowns that were both financially ...
We all want to make the right decisions. Not only because we want to be successful, but often simply because we want to avoid the negative consequences of making the wrong decision. We are risk-averse beings. So we put a lot of emphasis on the decision itself. We collect inf...
One of the most important features of a website that is built with accessibility in mind is that it can be navigated with a keyboard. Most blind users and many users with motor disabilities rely on keyboard navigation, either with a standard keyboard or with a device that mi...
Ethan Marcotte just gave a fabulous remote talk at SydCSS on the nature of design systems and the challenges of creating and maintaining them over time. Ethan managed to comprise so many of the things I’ve been hearing, noticing, and thinking about in such a concise and clea...
Over 120 years ago, an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, and philosopher named Vilfredo Pareto made an astonishing discovery. He was looking at the distribution of land in Italy, when he observed that approximately 80 % of the land was owned by only 20 % of the popul...
Una Kravets has written an excellent article about a feature that has been released with Chrome 85: The @property syntax of the Properties and Values API. The Properties and Values API is part of CSS Houdini, the next generation of additions to CSS allowing developers to ext...
It doesn’t happen every day that a new image format comes along. So it’s not surprising that people are excited that Chrome 85 has been released with support for the new AVIF format. AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) is an open image format based on the AV1 video format that was ...
Martha Curtis had a dream. She wanted to become a violinist. She had been playing the violin since she was nine and excelled at it. But there was a problem. A huge problem. Martha had begun suffering from seizures at age three and a half. She was diagnosed with epilepsy and ...
Layout on the Web is all about flexibility. That elements adjust their dimensions to the size of their content, be it texts of varying length or images of different sizes, is a welcome feature, especially in times of Responsive Web Design because this flexibility makes build...
The spacing between individual elements of a website and, in particular, the vertical spacing, has been a regular matter of debate between web designers and developers. Designers insist that what they see in the browser doesn’t look at all like the layout they originally des...
The dilemma with debt is that it is easily incurred but, inevitably, there comes a time when you will have to pay it back. The problem with design debt is that it is even easier to amass it. Design debt? Yes, like technical debt but for designers.
Tight deadlines, feature cr...
How do you feel about your work at the moment? Do you enjoy what you are doing? Do you feel excited about it? Does it give you a sense of accomplishment and significance? Do you feel valued and are part of a great team? Do you enjoy your role as a leader or the choices you h...
When it became increasingly clear that running in-person workshops would not be possible for the foreseeable future, the XDI team, which I am a part of, started to work on online versions of our Adobe XD workshops for beginners and advanced users. The resulting workshops are...
When it comes to structuring CSS, there is no shortage of different naming conventions, methodologies, and architectures. Be it BEM, OOCSS, SMACSS, ITCSS, or CUBE CSS – over the last years, many different approaches to managing modular CSS have emerged. Some are offering str...
This is post number 50 of my 100-days-of-writing challenge. It’s halftime! Time for me to look at how this little (?!?) experiment worked out so far and what I might have learned or experienced since I started back in May.
First of all, the obvious: Writing a post every day...
In 1963, the people at NASA needed a building. And not just any building. It had to be large enough to be able to assemble the enormous space vehicles NASA designed as part of their massive effort to send astronauts to the Moon. The building that was completed in 1966 allowe...
According to James P. Carse, there are at least two types of games: Finite games and infinite games. Finite games have a clear beginning and end, a distinct set of rules and boundaries, and we play them for one purpose: to win. Take any match of chess, tennis, football, or S...
What is the right strategy to achieve greatness and succeed in a specific domain? If you believe the predominant narrative in many efficiency-oriented societies today, the answer is clear: Focus on one thing early in life to have a head start and invest at least the famous 1...
One evening in the late 1970s, an engineer from Kyoto was riding home on the Shinkansen, when he recognized the man sitting next to him playing around with his LCD calculator, punching buttons in boredom. The engineer, who worked at a toy and gaming company, had an idea: Wha...
I used to dream of a magical machine. It was about as big as a microwave, all silver metal (with rivets, of course), and it had little knobs, lamps, and indicators everywhere. On the left, there were two buttons: One was green and the other one red. On the right, the machine...
Derek Sivers just published a new book. It is called “HELL YEAH OR NO” and you can get it on Derek’s website. Having enjoyed Derek’s blog articles and podcast a lot, buying his book, which also includes an audio version, was a no-brainer for me. Derek is a musician, producer...
Ethan Marcotte wrote this on Twitter on Monday:
Nostalgia for the heyday of web design has to be balanced with the knowledge that much of what we did “in the old days” was woefully, thoroughly...
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 ...
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