Words that would otherwise be coming out of my mouth

At the heart of a good design system is a set of solid, flexible components that can be arranged to create cohesive, delightful user interfaces. There’s an oft-repeated misconception that pattern-driven design and development forces teams to use a finite, […]

This article reenters to my consciousness almost daily. I can’t debate someone into caring about what happens to their fellow human beings. The fact that such detached cruelty is so normalized in a certain party’s political discourse is at once […]

Ian wrote about our experience launching a site for Brian Forde’s congressional campaign. One of the reasons we took the project on was that I thought it would be good for Ian to get a dose of how fast-paced the […]

I had the opportunity to make a website for Brian Forde, who is running for Congress in Orange County, California. Brian got in touch after reading my Designing an Effective Donation Form blog post, and wanted to bring that thinking to […]

I had the great pleasure of chatting with  my pal Sophie Shepherd and Aquent Gymnasium’s‘s Jeremy Osborn about all things design systems. As the title suggests, we ended up talking quite a bit about a common gripe about pattern-based design and […]

This is a fantastic site that helps designers consider users who experience our creations in much different ways. It rounds up a lot of helpful tools and techniques to help you design more thoughtful, empathetic, and accessible experiences.

Incredible. Via Dave

“it isn’t your fault, but it is your problem” That’s a brilliant line, and as Rachel points out in this great post on using CSS grid layout, that line can be used for a whole host of things.

Dave shared some battle-earned insights about working in a pattern-driven manner and creating pattern libraries. I love his thoughts on the topic, and since I’ve seen this play out in my own work I thought I’d share my own thoughts […]

Sophie wrote a great post about a pretty major source of stress: context switching. Having a lot of work on my plate is fine. Meeting deadlines is fine. Planning long term projects is fine. Debugging code is fine. Writing detailed […]

I recently got an email from a student who’s about to graduate with a degree in web development. They asked some really great questions, including “Is it still worth pursuing a job as a web developer?” I am planning to […]

I had the (very surreal, very strange) honor of traveling to my hometown of Oil City, Pennsylvania to give the commencement speech at Oil City Senior High School, the school I graduated from in 2003. This was a very different […]

There’s a tinge of clickbait-slash-unnecessary controversy in this post, but it’s a great analysis of design principles nonetheless. The gist is that design principles should go beyond basic good design practices (“Make it clean and simple!”) and help differentiate organizations and clearly steer them in […]

I wrote a post called The Workshop and The Storefront that describes the difference between a design system design/development environment (worksshop) and style guide (storefront). These metaphors was born of the client projects I’ve been fortunate to work on with […]

Pittsburgh is a poster city for how to recover after coal and steel and manufacturing have fucked everything up.  

I absolutely love this article, and I’ve found myself revisiting it in my head over the last few weeks every time I encounter every new thinkpiece about god knows what. There are many very real, very terrible, and very important things […]

I love this post from Bruce. It’s an acknowledgement that things change, and in order to help others avoid the mistakes of the past you have to know which tools the industry is presently reaching for. I’m also currently in […]

This post from Jeremy only just now crossed my path, but I love it. My latest talk discusses how important it is to have a shared set of principles that help people understand what they should do (and not do) […]

I’ve been listening on repeat to the outtakes, instrumentals, and unfinished tracks from the Sgt. Peppers recording sessions. I absolutely love hearing the rawness of the song ideas come through, and it’s so much fun imagining what conversations they had […]

My wife is a jewelry designer. She has a workshop where she spends much of her time hammering, soldering, tinkering, shaping, sawing, buffing, polishing, experimenting, and iterating in order to produce gorgeous designs from a slew of shiny metal materials. Her […]