Words that would otherwise be coming out of my mouth

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 […]

This image is fantastic: This is a great read from Ben: The Never-Ending Job of Selling Design Systems – A List Apart

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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 […]

Source: The context dilemma: design tokens and components | Frontside

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 […]

Source: The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists – Scientific American

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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

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 […]

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

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 […]

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 […]

I’ve always been surprised to see how people interpret/reinterpret atomic design, but I’ll say seeing atomic design mashed up with Stewart Brand was particularly surprising! Source: The onion for Design Systems: atomic design and pace layering

Shift Nudge is a new online course that teaches the intricate skills of designing visually beautiful interfaces, while balancing functionality and accessibility. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Matt on client work and he’s a very very very good […]