Words that would otherwise be coming out of my mouth

I chatted with Inez Hernandez on the DesignByTheHive podcast about all sorts of things.

I absolutely love Jonathan Snook‘s thoughts here. He discusses how the Mustache templating engine actually gets quite close to tech-agnostic HTML, and that’s a good thing for systems that need to go to a bunch of places. This legibility becomes important for other […]

Users don’t care that one UI is built by Team A and another is built by Team B. Users don’t care if for one project the team followed a scrum process, while another project followed a kanban process. Users don’t care […]

Josh wrote up some thoughts about the fantastic, previously-shared Full Stack Design System article, which includes a bit where he goes to bat for atomic design. From the original article: Atomic Design will tell you to take some of your […]

Erin Malone, who helped create Yahoo!’s pattern library, gives a fantastic timeline of modular UI design. I especially love her emphasis on people sharing what they know, which is how ideas evolve and take root: It’s important to not forget […]

Cennydd put together a great reading list for designers. I’m currently reading Donella Meadows’s fantastic Thinking in Systems: A Primer, but a lot of these other books probably should be on my radar. After all, Cennydd is intimidatingly smart.

Here’s a very kind book review of Atomic Design from Josh Tuck. I remember talking to him about Bob’s Burgers, so I’m glad that made it into the review 🙂

The folks from The Outline reached out to me to get my thoughts on crufty websites. Of course I have opinions. I saw some people commenting on the irony of a site with a really out-there design critiquing other websites. […]

Emmet Connolly underscores the point that simply having a UI pattern library isn’t enough to create successful work across products at an organization. To return to our Lego analogy, simply having a limited pattern library of bricks to choose from doesn’t […]

My friend and frequent collaborator Dan Mall wrote up a fantastic post about a crucial part of creating design systems: pilot projects. PILOTS ARE ONE OF the best ways to put your design system through its paces, especially before the design […]

I think what Paul Robert Lloyd is saying here is interesting, but I’m not sure it adds up to “we don’t need container queries.” His example shows what layouts are possible with grid and flexbox, all of which I think is awesome. […]

I’ve had the extreme privilege of working with Josh and Dan on many pattern-based websites and design systems. In addition to getting into the weeds with our clients to help design and build the design systems themselves, a big part of our work often […]

The wonderful folks down the road from me at Bearded created a gorgeous-looking website that succinctly explains many things you can do as an individual to combat climate change. It’s well designed and has just the right amount of information […]

In his talk Designing Inspired Style Guides, Andy Clarke discusses the importance of creating digital style guides that go beyond being humble containers for UI assets and instead operate as beautiful vehicles that evoke the essence of the brand. When it comes to the current look of many UI […]

I’m in the process of redoing this site with the intention of ramping up what I share and how often I share things. Jeremy is of course a huge inspiration for me, so his post is serving as a fire under […]

Gina Trapani wrote a fantastic post about diving into the modern JavaScript world after not paying attention to JavaScript for a long time. While I’m not as skilled as her when it comes to backend development, my background is more in […]

Norwegian skateboarders on frozen sand. Beautiful and surreal.

I had a fantastic conversation with Jonathan Cutrell on the Developer Tea podcast. We had such a good conversation the final podcast was chopped into two separate parts.

Ziggy’s been featured in a roundup of amazing studio dogs, and I couldn’t be prouder. Here’s what I have to say: I work from home with my brother and my wife who runs her own business. Ziggy is the glue […]

My friend Andrew Sloan is amazing. Not too long we were at a friend’s wedding and he was talking about how he was creating a fictitious design agency for space companies. He printed some business cards and started chatting with commercial space […]