Words that would otherwise be coming out of my mouth

Card grids are definitely a common pattern in almost all my projects, and I’ve run into all of the pitfalls Dave lays out. I’ve been thinking a lot about this post ever since I read it, and I feel I […]

Finally, to repeat one more time: productivity in the wrong direction isn’t worth anything at all.  Think more about what to work on.

The inimitable Ethan Marcotte recently wrote an article about the dangers of advising people to pursue certain actions/techniques even if they don’t have permission from their bosses or stakeholders. I’ve noticed a rhetorical trope in our industry. It’s not, like, widespread, […]

TL;DR: Design systems + CSS Zen Garden = Awesome. Is it possible to create a single design system that powers wildly different-looking brands and experiences? The answer is yes! But why would you want to? Different audiences and contexts – […]

98% of the time I’m all about component reuse. Make components content and context agnostic, make them flexible and versatile, and make them extensible. That’s all great stuff. The big exception for me is a site header (or global header, […]

I love how Jon Gold’s brain works. He expresses the desire to have more systematic designs, but the process of actually making that happen is tedious and manual. But what if we could systematize the way we observe and reason […]

I love this post from Anil Dash, especially the bits about people having their own websites. There are no technical barriers for why we couldn’t share our photos to our own sites instead of to Instagram, or why we couldn’t […]

I had a great time chatting with Sagi and David about a number of topics on the Hacking UI podcast. Give it a listen!

TechCrunch announced they’re redesigning their site, which marks an end of an era at a personal level. Five years ago, myself, Josh Clark, Dan Mall, Jennifer Brook, Kristina Franz, and Jonathan Stark redesigned TechCrunch to be modern and responsive (which […]

I wrote a post where I talk about how a set of components living inside static design tools like Sketch isn’t itself a design system. Pardon my clickbait. Perhaps a better title would have been “Your Sketch library is not a(n […]

I had the good fortune of seeing Frank‘s talk in person at MirrorConf this year, and as with all of Frank’s talks, it’s full of insight and wit. I love his perspective on the web as a medium, and agree […]

Interesting concept describing how Twitter’s UI could differentiate human and bot accounts. And hey, I make an appearance!

This great post by Mike Rivera discusses handling snowflake patterns in a design system in a way that keeps product teams productive yet also maintains the integrity of the system. He describes the possible outcomes for a snowflake: Debate over whether or […]

I love this post from Chris about websites looking the same. What’s the harm in sameness? If a website fails to do do what it sets out to do, that, I care about. Design is failing there. But if a website […]

You can write words explaining how to properly use a toaster, draw pictures of toasters, and even create more efficient ways to draw pictures of toasters. But at the end of the day, if you don’t have a functioning toaster, […]

I remember talking with Vitaly about what I thought would happen with design tools in the next year or two, and I said that we’ll finally get design and dev tools integrated into each other in a way that makes […]

I love this leaderboard ranking the performance of article template across brands. I’m also thrilled that three of the sites I helped the team at DotDash (formerly About.com) create made the Top 10!

Gramps was a force of nature: an entrepreneur, a tinkerer, a devoted husband, a family man, a role model, a doctor, a wannabe musician, a builder, an amazing storyteller, and so much more. He was vulgar and hilarious, and was an […]

There are many facets of a design system initiative, so it can be extremely daunting to figure out where to begin. There are stakeholders to educate, tools to choose, principles to establish, frontend guidelines to settle on, components to build, tokens to […]

Man, this article really hit home. I’ve been thinking about my own optimistic idealism about the web (on full display at the end of this talk), and how the events of the last few years have really knocked that optimism […]