Posts in ‘post’ Category

FRIENDS! FAMILY! COUNTRYMEN! On Saturday, December 14th I’ll be performing as part of Pittsburgh Plays The Cure at the beautiful Roxian Theatre. Several super groups comprised of Pittsburgh-based musicians will be playing a whole night of music by The Cure. […]

ULTRA PROUD DAD MOMENT: Ella made her first website! Melissa and I woke up on Saturday morning to our goofy 6-year-old daughter entering our bedroom making this obnoxious sound. It was impressively annoying, especially considering she hasn’t seen Dumb and […]

I recently shared that I was diagnosed with ADHD. I write these words 12 days into medication and holy shit I feel totally transformed. The stuck, scrambly feelings and frustration have nearly evaporated. I am firing on all cylinders, which […]

I woke up this morning, took a pill, and proceeded to have one of the most productive writing days I’ve had in perhaps years. The day prior, a doctor diagnosed me with Adult ADHD. I finally drew the unfortunate trauma […]

I recently had the pleasure of doing a Q&A session with Molly Helmuth’s Design System Bootcamp cohort. The questions were great and varied, so I asked Molly if she’d be alright if I shared my answers with you all. Thankfully, […]

I made this sign to try to capture how I’m feeling about everything right now.

Here’s how you can find and follow me: It’s difficult to express just how important and meaningful Twitter was to my life and career. I’m sad to leave it behind, but I have to now. It was always fun when […]

At Big Medium, we’re fans of Web Components, and over the last 6 years have been helping our clients build standards-based, interoperable, design systems with them. The ability to deliver a consistent, cohesive experience to a any web-based technology perfectly […]

When design system users run into issues designing and developing with the system, they often have a hard time distinguishing between a bug, a missing feature, an intentional design deviation, a new pattern they need to create, or something else. […]

When you don’t hear from teams using your design system, we’ve learned over the years that it’s typically not a sign of “everything is going great” but “something is probably wrong.” We teach our client teams to be very skeptical […]

I’m happy to announce that I’ll be playing bass as part of the Pittsburgh Plays concert series on December 14th at The Roxian Theatre. From Pittsburgh Play’s website: Pittsburgh Plays is a semi-annual event that offers music lovers of all […]

You should buy Approachable Open Source by Brian Muenzenmeyer. If you written code before, you should buy this book. If you’ve ever spent any time on GitHub, you should buy this book. If you care about the web, you should […]

I’m extremely excited to be a part of Smashing Conf NYC coming up on October 7-10. I’ll be: If you’re in NYC or able to make it there, I hope you’re able to make it!

I’ve spent pretty much my entire career helping teams design software rather than pictures of software. Development is design. Frontend design. Front-of-front-end code. Front-end workshop environments. Death to the waterfall. The Hot Potato process. Designer/developer collaboration. Pattern Lab. I’ve shared […]

I came across this great post by my friend Cameron Moll on LinkedIn. He says: Telling designers they shouldn’t use high-fidelity designs early in the exploration process can be the equivalent of telling an artist they shouldn’t use paint and […]

FIFTEEN YEARS. That’s how long Melissa and I have been married! And holy shit, what a ride. To say our life together has been an adventure is a supreme understatement. We’ve traveled to over 30 countries across 6 continents, climbed […]

Raw-dogging websites: index.html, styles.css, script.js. No frameworks, no CMSes, no build steps, no nuthin’. Sure, you can call it a static site, but even those tend to be compiled by sophisticated tooling behind the scenes. And also, c’mon, gotta get […]

After over a year of planning, Frostapalooza finally took place on Saturday night at Mr. Smalls Theatre in Pittsburgh. It’s going to take me a really long time to process what transpired and to find the words to properly describe […]

TL;DR: You can submit your Codepen animations to be considered for display at Frostapalooza! Holy smokes, Frostapalooza is happening next Saturday! We’re about to find out what happens when you give 40 musicians a whole year to plan one night […]

Well, holy shit, I’m 40! How do I feel, you ask? Great! Better than great. Fantastic even. Life’s a wild ride; I’ve had many many many utterly amazing experiences as well as some really truly capital-S Shitty experiences. After it’s […]

That one weird trick? TALK. What do you do when someone doesn’t see what component they’re looking for in the design system? TALK. What do you do when someone has questions about what a component does, if it meets their […]

HOLY SHIT! Frostapalooza is happening in exactly one month! I’d really, really, really, truly love for you to come to this one-of-a-kind, one-night-only concert fandango happening on August 17th in Pittsburgh. Here’s 40 reasons why you should come: Sounds pretty […]

If you feel like you’re struggling to keep up with the pace of technological change, you’re certainly not alone. We feel this pressure at an individual level, but also at an organizational level. How do digital organizations establish solid, stable […]

text-decoration-offset is a good use case for em units. Most of the time we favor rems over ems, but in this case we want the text underline offset to proportionally scale with the `font-size` property. Here’s a quick demo: See […]

One day I’ll fulfill my dream of throwing my phone into the ocean*, but for now I’m settling for throwing my phone in my basement. The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt articulates how the potent combination of smartphones and social […]

You Want border-color: transparent, Not border: none by Dave is a great reminder to not remove borders from components for accessibility reasons, especially to better support high contrast mode. border-color: transparent comes in handy for other use cases as well. […]

Every time I read about how is being applied in the world, this graph immediately pops up in my head: As the potential to do harm increases, there must be a corresponding increase in the level of caution, skepticism, and […]

One of my favorite Josh lines that’s really stood the test of time and cuts through a lot of noise in a conversation: Don’t put crap in the design system. Josh Clark What is crap? Crap is rushed work, low-quality […]

Recipes are a critical — and often misunderstood! — layer in the design system ecosystem. First of all, what exactly are recipes? As the name suggests, recipes combine ingredients to create UI experiences that are complex, delicious, nutritious. The design […]

Ah yes, this old chestnut. It pops up as reliably as daffodils in early spring. My perspective has changed very little over the years. Telling web designers they don't need to worry about code is like telling architects they don't […]