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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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.
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
“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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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, ...
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...
It is 1995. A 13-year old boy in Germany is playing basketball in his room. The walls are plastered with posters. Michael Jordan (life-sized), Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Shaq, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Sean Kemp, David Robinson, and many more are all watching him p...
Ask any business owner or manager what could be improved about the operations of their company and they will very likely tell you that they are working on “improving efficiency”. They are switching from waterfall to agile to improve efficiency. They are tracking tasks and me...
