Here’s a fun thing: the other day Matthias linked to an old essay of mine—please do not read it because yikes—but I noticed that it looks very different now; the layout is busted in a few places, the animations have stopped altogether, and Nocturno has been replaced with sturdy, reliable, good-ol’ Georgia. What...

The other day Amy Wibowo wrote this wondrous, illustrated essay about personal websites where she describes her growing up with the early web and how she got started: I want my website to be interesting and useful, but how? How indeed! Amy’s enthusiasm for everything about the web, including simple ol’ HTML itself,...

A while back I read Russell Davies’s excellent Everything I Know About Life I Learned from Powerpoint. It’s not really _just_ about learning how to make slide decks because extreme yawn. Instead, it’s a book about how to write well, how to structure your ideas, how to edit, and how to be light on your feet. It’s...

I see this all the time in design circles: a lot of folks tend to think their work must be vital in order for it to be good. Their ego demands that they wake up every day and change the world before lunch. (Hello, it is me). I feel like this is why designers and engineers constantly feel burnt out. They’re putting...

I’m obsessed with this documentary about Black Mesa, a game developed by the Crowbar Collective which is a HD copy of, and a lover letter to, Half Life. It’s a fascinating series of interviews because even if you don’t give two hoots about that videogame series, everyone on the team is clearly in love with the...

A couple of months back, Craig mentioned in a video that he has a doc filled to the brim with snippets of text—nice words, compliments, and thanks that had been sent his way for his work. Whenever someone says something nice he just copy/pastes it into that doc. It sounds silly at first and perhaps a little...

Big news! Hot off the press, Chris writes: CSS-Tricks, this very website you’re looking at, has been acquired by DigitalOcean! [...] I will be working with the DigitalOcean team as an advisor as we transition CSS-Tricks to DigitalOcean’s management, and will then step back to focus on my other projects. [...] The...

Lovely work from Alisa Burzic here called 36 Days of Type; once a day she makes a beautiful letter and although right now it’s just a bunch of tweets, it would be so cool to see each of these in a big scrolly website. Each of these letterforms are weird alien fun. Oh! I didn’t realize that this was like the 100 day...

The British countryside is all violins and pianos and I have my proof; just look out there. The train from Plymouth to Paddington is quiet but then I have two more trains—those completely unfamiliar to me—before reaching my top secret, undisclosed location. For now we’re zipping along the hedgerows as we speed out...

John McPhee on writer’s block: You are writing, say, about a grizzly bear. No words are forthcoming. For six, seven, ten hours no words have been forthcoming. You are blocked, frustrated, in despair. You are nowhere, and that’s where you’ve been getting. What do you do? You write, ‘Dear Mother.’ And then you tell...

Rutherford Craze breaks down the last two years of Mass-Driver, the type foundry he started back in 2020: When I started Mass-Driver, I wasn’t certain whether the studio would still be around in 2022. I was hopeful, perhaps even confident, but still not completely sure I’d be able to make it work — so I’m extremely...

Today we saw the Parthenon Sculptures in the British Museum in London. They are beautiful; 6000 year old marble panels which tell a comic book story of a Greek mythological war between Centaurs and Lapiths, with the gods watching from the stands. The British Museum is a difficult place to be, this room especially....