Words that would otherwise be coming out of my mouth

Subscribe via RSS
  1. 05 Apr, 2019

    The realities of Deep Work: What happened when designer and author Brad Frost scheduled every minute of his day

    The folks over at RescueTime interviewed me about my decision to schedule every minute of my day. I’ve really benefitted from establishing some rigor to my schedule. Here’s what I have to say a few months in: “After playing it […]

  2. 03 Apr, 2019

    Future Ethics with Cennydd Bowles at SustainableUX

    I’ve written about Cennydd’s amazing Future Ethics book, and this talk is a great intro to the contents of the book. Highly recommended viewing/reading.

  3. 03 Apr, 2019

    Dev perception

    When we’re evaluating technologies for appropriateness, I hope that we will do so through the lens of what’s best for users, not what we feel compelled to use based on a gnawing sense of irrelevancy driven by the perceived popularity […]

  4. 31 Mar, 2019

    CVS Receipt Codepen

    This extra-long CVS receipt Codepen makes me incredibly happy since my high school job was working at CVS.

  5. 31 Mar, 2019

    Input Type Sandbox

    Cool little utility from Aaron Ladlage that creates solid form patterns using native HTML5 controls and attributes.

  6. 29 Mar, 2019

    Enforcing Accessibility Best Practices with Automatically-Generated IDs

    One of the best things about design systems is you can create components that have design, development, accessibility, responsive, performance, etc best practices baked right into them. By taking care of the boring stuff, users of the design system don’t […]

  7. 18 Mar, 2019

    You probably don’t need input type=“number”

    Last week I got a call from my bank regarding a wire transfer I had just scheduled. The customer support guy had me repeat everything back to him because there seemed to be a problem with the information. “Hmmmm, everything […]

  8. 10 Mar, 2019

    Best practices: components, styles, and shared libraries

    While I still have plenty of doubts of having to maintain a 1:1 static version of a design system, this rundown of how to create a component library in Figma is a great walkthrough if that’s the path you’re going […]

  9. 28 Feb, 2019

    Write on your own website

    The single best thing I ever did for my career was start a blog on my own website. — Brad Frost (@brad_frost) January 18, 2019 I’ll share two stories. I was speaking at a conference and after my talk I […]

  10. 26 Feb, 2019

    Ceasing Sales of Atomic Design Paperback Version

    Atomic Design has been on sale for about two and half years, and I’m making the decision to stop selling paperback copies of the book. You can still buy the ebook version of the book for 10 bucks in addition […]

  11. 16 Feb, 2019

    Application Holotypes: A Guide to Architecture Decisions

    I love this classification of different kinds of web applications. It takes a more nuanced view of “sites vs apps”. I’d love to see this turned into a full-blown site with additional holotypes (airline, hotel chain, etc).

  12. 14 Feb, 2019

    Don’t Get Clever with Login Forms

    As time goes on I find myself increasingly annoyed with login forms. As password managers like 1Password (which is what I use) and Chrome’s password manager (which I also sorta use) become more popular, it’s important for websites to be aware […]

  13. 13 Feb, 2019

    Time for Happiness

    This article as well as a whole slew of others all seemed to come along at the same time, and they’re all hitting me at a particularly interesting time in my life. I’ve spent the last 6 years grinding really […]

  14. 13 Feb, 2019

    Measuring the Impact of a Design System – Cristiano Rastelli – Medium

    Measuring the Impact of a Design System is a tough topic, as design systems are a bit fuzzy. It’s not as clean cut as a website redesign. This is a fantastic post with some really awesome visualizations that helps put […]

  15. 12 Feb, 2019

    The ineffectiveness of lonely icons

    After more than a year of using her tablet to read Email, my mother had no idea the Gmail application can be used to write an email. Why? Because after more than 12 months of using an application, she still […]

  16. 06 Feb, 2019

    This or that? Component Names: index.js or Component.js

    I’m not sure if you’re aware, but there are sometimes different ways to do the same thing. Crazy, right? As a consultant I get to see a lot of different codebases, and I try study other projects’ architecture in order to […]

  17. 29 Jan, 2019

    My Skillshare Class Is Live!

    I’m thrilled to announce my Skillshare class about creating successful design systems is live! Here’s what the course is about: After working with many organizations to develop customized design systems, Brad saw the need for a straightforward approach that anyone […]

  18. 20 Jan, 2019

    Composing Components

    Good case study for building out a React-powered design system.

  19. 07 Jan, 2019

    Stepping away from Sass

    In this great post, Cathy Dutton explains how she removed Sass from her codebase. Why? She explains how she used to use Sass for layout, variables, and typography, but now native CSS features take care of that for her. I’ll […]

  20. 07 Jan, 2019

    Making Future Interfaces: Algorithmic Layouts

    Well, shit, this was entertaining! Here’s Heydon Pickering with a video explaining how flexbox and CSS Grid can help us make more responsive layouts with less work. While there are a lot of resources out there for learning things like […]