Words that would otherwise be coming out of my mouth
-
01 Mar, 2021
Notion Habit Tracking: Update 2
I wrote about how much I love Notion and I’ve been keeping track of my healthy habits using the tool. Keeping up with new years resolutions and forming new habits requires consistency above all else. When things start slipping, it’s […]
-
24 Feb, 2021
Material Design Text Fields Are Badly Designed
saving space at the cost of clarity, ease of use and accessibility is a bad tradeoff to make. Source: Material Design Text Fields Are Badly Designed — Smashing Magazine
-
16 Feb, 2021
Front-of-the-front-end and back-of-the-front-end web development
The Great Divide is real, and I’m pleased that the terms “front-of-the-front-end” and “back-of-the-front-end” have gained traction ever since I quipped about them on the Shop Talk Show. A few of my clients have actually moved away from a culture […]
-
15 Feb, 2021
The Never-Ending Job of Selling Design Systems
This image is fantastic: This is a great read from Ben: The Never-Ending Job of Selling Design Systems – A List Apart
-
12 Feb, 2021
Building better products with a design token pipeline
This is a good deep dive into setting up design token architecture. It largely maps to how we tend to structure things, with some slight language and architectural differences: They use “Option design tokens”; we call them “Tier 1” or […]
-
04 Feb, 2021
Notion Habit Tracking: Update 1
I recently wrote about how much I love Notion and have been using it to stay on top of my personal and professional life. One of the things I’ve been using Notion for is to track my progress on healthy […]
-
03 Feb, 2021
Design system components, recipes, and snowflakes
“When should we make something a component?” is a question I’ve been fielding for years. My strong answer: right from the start. Creating things with a component-based mindset right out the gate saves countless hours and wailing and gnashing of […]
-
31 Jan, 2021
The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML – Terence Eden’s Blog
The PSP’s web browser is – charitably – pathetic. It is slow, frequently runs out of memory, and can only open 3 tabs at a time. But the GOV.UK pages are written in simple HTML. They are designed to be […]
-
31 Jan, 2021
The context dilemma: design tokens and components
Source: The context dilemma: design tokens and components | Frontside
-
14 Jan, 2021
Squarknote #5 – Squarknotes
This is a super impressive productivity workflow from Susan Fowler, and it’s amazing to see how being thorough and disciplined can yield big results. I have a far less thorough version of this that I’d like to write up. Some […]
-
14 Jan, 2021
The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists
Source: The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists – Scientific American
-
14 Jan, 2021
The Only Strategy Left for Democrats
Source: The Only Strategy Left for Democrats Democrats have been presented a mandate to govern aggressively on behalf of the people and the nation, and in the face of a violently unspooling and destructive right-wing party. Democrats have won the […]
-
13 Jan, 2021
Fear and Loathing in The United States of America
This is the first post I’ve ever written with the mindset of “I’m going to revisit this post 1, 5, 10, 20, 40 years down the road and either laugh or cry at how accurate or off the mark I […]
-
06 Jan, 2021
Slowly Falling In Love With Notion
This post is a long time coming. I’ve been using Notion since 2017, but it’s been a slow journey to get to a point where I can say that our relationship is official. Notion is now an invaluable tool for […]
-
21 Dec, 2020
2020
It’s difficult to put into words just how terrible 2020 has been. It’s been utterly devastating at a macro level, and at a personal level it’s proven to be the most brutal year of my life, shattering me physically, mentally, […]
-
12 Oct, 2020
Cheating Entropy with Native Web Technologies
The more I author code as it will be run by the browser the easier it will be to maintain that code over time Source: Cheating Entropy with Native Web Technologies – Jim Nielsen’s Weblog
-
05 Oct, 2020
Design Systems For Figma: Bringing Context To Design Systems
The products we design are always influenced by the users’ world where they are situated. By bringing context into design systems first, before building the components which result from it, we enable teams to make more confident decisions and deliver […]
-
24 Sep, 2020
Color within Constraints by Linzi Berry
Fantastic article by Linzi Berry about creating a smart, accessible color system to power a design system. Source: Color within Constraints. A scalable color system for digital… | by Linzi Berry | Tap to Dismiss
-
21 Sep, 2020
An Introduction to Multi-Platform Design Systems
This is a fantastic article about supporting multiple platforms with a design system. It maps very well to my experience helping organizations create and maintain technology-agnostic design systems. Ultimately, these efforts are way more a people thing than a technology […]
-
07 Sep, 2020
The American Death Cult
This is an important article that finally captures a source of frustration I have with right-wing politics. There is no rational, logical reason for not responding with all of our hearts and minds to save lives in this pandemic. But […]