In this 7-minute video, kaptainkristian talks about the fascinating process of making Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the pre-CGI hybrid animation/​live action movie from 1988: This is called “bumping the lamp” – a phrase coined by Disney during the production of Roger Rabbit to describe going above and beyond what was...

If you want to record the screen from your iPhone on your Mac, open the QuickTime Player app but ignore New Screen Recording, and click on New Movie Recording instead. This instruction is a fever dream of three weird things in sequence: What on earth is “QuickTime”? I am recording with a player? Why can’t I choose...

This is a design joke that always makes me laugh: This was made by… someone, a while back, I believe in response to the Twitter logo redesign of 2012, which showed the new logomark as composed of exclusively circles: Now, to be clear: that Twitter logo redesign was gorgeous, and I do not particularly care if it was...

Immich is a self-hosted photo/​video app, and one of their side pages is Cursed Knowledge: Cursed knowledge we have learned as a result of building Immich that we wish we never knew. There is something about this format that I really enjoyed as a reflection but also as a way to share with others – simple one...

Over on Bluesky, Melanie Walsh asks: Favorite and least favorite file formats? I’ll start. Favorite: TXT Least favorite: HEIC The answers – both replies and quote posts – are really interesting because most of the time they’re not about inherent capabilities of each format, but: how well supported it is in the...

I’m endlessly confounded (as a user) and fascinated (as a designer) when it comes the shortcut conventions in Google’s professional web apps. They seem… bad, but bad in a strange, inexplicable, enthralling way. Previously, we encountered this: The lessons there were, primarily: don’t… do this, and also maybe don’t...

Somewhere next to optimistic loading and optimistic saving exists another technique to make apps feel faster: optimistic committing. Flickr is a great example. After navigating to photo upload, you enter a sort of a foyer where you can drag in the photos, reorder them, name and tag them, and otherwise prepare them...

When I was at Medium, over a decade ago, I really enjoyed going deep on typography. People seemed to generally enjoy what we did. Writers really loved automatic em dashes and range dashes, discovered the beauty of hanging punctuation, and as funny as it might sound today, the smart quotes were a huge hit, too. I was...

From Jakub Krehel, a new blog post about self constraint in the era when AI makes it easy to ignore constraints altogether. My caveat is that the post doesn’t fully come together for me – jumping from AI to animations and then back to AI the way the author did does not feel cohesive. At the same time, in the middle...

Perhaps ironically given the subject matter, I found this 34-minute video by Razbuten a bit intense, but I would still recommend it to people who work on onboarding, settings, etc.: In the video, the author tries to answer the question: how to make any given game a challenge, given there is no universal standard of...

I like Angela Collier’s videos about physics and I was delighted to discover this 18-minute one… …because it’s a great continuation to the thread about the complexity of Microsoft Office I shared recently. Collier talks about why physicists prefer LaTeX to Word. LaTeX is sort of a nerdy HTML that predates HTML. It...

My arch nemesis lives only about 1.5 blocks away from me. It’s a coffee shop door. More specifically, it’s a sign on that door: This is what happens with embarrassing regularity: I am inside, about to step out, my brain reads PUSH from the other side – and so of course, like an idiot, I push the door instead of...