No matter how fancy your Figma file is or how beautiful and lovingly well organized that Storybook documentation is; the front-end is always your source of truth. You can hate it as much as you like—all those weird buttons, variables, inaccessible form inputs—but that right there is your design system. You can’t...

Was it three years or four? It feels like a decade since I was last here. But today, here I am. Here we are. The UK. We are sniffly and dry and exhausted. Neither of us slept on the plane and I made the mistake of watching Dead Poet’s Society and weeping for the last hour of the flight. God that film rules. If ever...

After reading James’ rant about dictionaries yesterday it was clear that Webster’s is the best of the lot; poetic, romantic, playful. It’s more than a dictionary, really. But after looking for an old copy I just couldn’t find a half decent one anywhere. That is, until Lucy found Webster’s 1913 and sent it my way...

Back in ye olde 2014, James Somers wrote about dictionaries and his particular fancy for Webster’s. However! James argues that dictionaries are not tools for showing you what words mean, but instead can be used as prompts for better writing: Notice, too, how much less certain the Webster definition seems about...

“So I sat there,” he said. “And I thought to myself, ya know, ‘ruthless honesty’ and all that. This guy sold me a terrible sandwich and I’m going to tell him just how terrible it was. But then he was upset when I told him! He made this shitty, awful sandwich—which I paid money for—and when he asked me how it was,...

Last week I was promoted to Senior Product Designer and so I should feel safe in the knowledge that, yes, I am doing good work. I am on track. Success. Next. But I can’t celebrate just yet because all I see are my flaws; the half-baked ideas and sketches, the designs that went nowhere, the rambling and incoherent...

Tell the stars I’m coming, Make them leave a space for me.

When it comes to drawing a design system in Figma or Sketch or what have you, there’s a question we have to ask ourselves all the time: what should we document? And what should we leave out? So we want to have our icons and colors in there, right? We don’t want to keep remaking those over and over again. Oh and we...

A clock arrived one day at our door. A special clock. But the mechanism inside had failed in some way. We checked the batteries, examined the little gears, everything looked fine. But no tick, no tock. The clock was busted. After ten minutes trying to figure the dumb thing out, I left. But returning to the living...

My goodness, what a website this is: All 2,242 illustrations from James Sowerby’s compendium of knowledge about mineralogy in Great Britain and beyond, drawn 1802–1817 and arranged by color. I’m unfamiliar with Nicholas Rougeaux’s work but this is truly a lovely website. He reconstructed the source material from the...

The light is perfect today; the sky a glacial blue, the sun setting off to the left. On the hill just over there, layers upon layers of houses like a great slanting and disorganized cake. I watch them everyday. When I wake up they’re quiet, hazy, somewhat-blue, and then at night they’re buzzing with electricity....

Monica Byrne made an anti-resume way back in 2013—it’s a spreadsheet that lists all her publishing failures and puts her success into context. This is a cool and punk-rock idea! It reminds me of Kat Huang’s Failure Resume that I spotted just earlier today. Anyway, the conclusion Monica gets to is what’s the most...