In Letter from a Drowned Canyon Rebecca Solnit marks a super interesting distinction between being a conservationist and being an environmentalist: In the late 1950s, the news about radioactive fallout across the United States from the aboveground nuclear tests at the Nevada site was one reminder of systemic...

I’ve been reading a lot of great things via the magic of hyperlinks lately and just wanted to quickly jot down everything as best I could. I hope you enjoy reading this lot as much as I did. Here’s a great post by Tim Carmody on how Blue-America should treat Red-America now after the election: In America — whether...

Considering I’m from the UK there were a few peculiar obstacles I had to circumnavigate before I could get back to riding a motorcycle, hence I thought it might be helpful for others if I jotted that whole process down. At the beginning it was pretty complicated and strange because I simply couldn’t find any info...

For a good long while I’ve been helping out with the CSS-Tricks newsletter every week(ish). Each issue is jam packed with our thoughts about front-end development and design. We try pretty hard to make sure there’s something interesting going on and even though we talk about the latest news we hope to deliver...

I think about pain by separating it into two categories; High and Low. High-level pain is the sort that we feel on a daily basis. It’s the emotional tide that we’re riding at this very moment. When someone makes us angry or upset, when we’re annoyed by the weather or when we hear bad news from afar, those are all...

Darkness has trickled in over the hills across the runway and I’m left wondering whether I’m running away from a city once again. This time it’s San Francisco. And this time it’s in December. I remember only a few months ago returning to SF from a short holiday — hands and legs all curled up around anothers’. I...

Jeremy’s post about his first decade with Twitter made for interesting reading, particularly in how he compares the use of that service to the longevity of his website: I’m not sure if my Twitter account will still exist ten years from now. But I’m pretty certain that my website will still be around. Alternatively,...

I’ve been a big fan of David Jonathan Ross’ Gimlet for the past couple of months and from time to time I find myself picking a character at random and poking at it. Look at that capital Q! Or the & symbol! Gimlet tempts us to sit back and zoom in, with each and every character begging to be used in large sizes....

The scene opens onto a gloriously dark and grimy café where my father and I have taken refuge from the storm that hovers above; clouds snap and crackle, a gale shudders along the windows whilst trees distort themselves into torturous yoga poses across the street. Inside the café, we’re welcomed with bad coffee and...

My greatest failure as a designer is asking the wrong question at the wrong time. I often jump ahead too quickly and make a string of assumptions because I want to skip to the fun part of designing an interface; fooling around with graphic elements. Everything else in the design process feels like annoying busywork...

I’m moving to San Francisco. After months of waiting, hoping, with fingers-crossed, the stars in the constellation of American bureaucracy aligned themselves this morning as I stood in the queue at the U.S. Embassy in London. But there was no certificate or handshake once my visa was approved, there were no...

I often forget which landmass I should attribute my birth right to. I mean, what are the differences between the English and the Scots again? Are the Welsh English? How can one half of Ireland not be in the same country? Should I call myself English, or Great British, or a citizen of the United Kingdom? It’s...