Did you catch one interesting bit in the last post? The undo shortcut in Paint and other apps in Windows 1.0 used to be Shift+Esc: This reminded me that the classic Ctrl+Alt+Del shortcut was initially Ctrl+Alt+Esc. Except, people apparently invoked it a bit too often by accident, so it was split to require two hands...

Anyone using old computers for graphics remembers the strangeness of “flood fill”: The 1950s and 1960s computers were so sluggish that their consoles with blinking lights were not just for show; the operations were slow enough that you could still follow the lights in real time. This ceased to be true soon...

The classic – but still important – rule of web design says to avoid labeling links “click here.” It’s one of the oldest web design principles. Tim Berners-Lee wrote about it in 1992; if you visit this link right now, it might be the oldest page you will have ever visited. The gist of it is simple: the mechanics of...

My original idea for Unsung was “a microblog with ~3 posts a week,” which seems like a distant memory. Now that I published 250 posts since early December, what better way to celebrate than to ask for feedback? Do you enjoy specific kinds of content, or missing some topics? How could I make the visuals and...

(This is a meta post about this very blog. If that’s not interesting to you, skip to the next one!) I thought I’d share a few of the small design details I am proud of for this small blog! 1. After years of being annoyed at Slack for mishandling image sizes, it was important for me to show the screenshots (at least...

(This is a meta post about this very blog. If that’s not interesting to you, skip to the next one!) At Unsung’s 250-postiversary, if I reflect on where this blog has been, and where it might be going, this is what comes to my mind. I didn’t start the project by writing all this down, but I held a lot of this in my...

What Version History, a YouTube show from The Verge, does really well is revisiting older tech products from today’s perspective without allowing nostalgia to take over. This episode about the Western Electric 500 – the canonical American landline rotary phone – is worth watching by all UX designers. There is no...

The 2021 revision of the Mini Cooper ramped up its Britishness by introducing Union Jack flag-inspired turn signals. They looked okay when stationary: But when actually indicating an intention to turn, people started realizing what happens when you have two types of mapping fight each other: On one hand, the...

Wakamaifondue is a web tool to inspect font contents, and it starts by you dropping a font file (.ttf, .otf, or .woff) into a browser. It handles file dropping so thoughtfully, it’s worth pausing and recognizing it: Here’s what’s great about it: You can drop the file anywhere. There is no designated small drop area...

A fun 16-minute video from outsidexbox with 7 examples of videogame bugs where the game creators not only owned up to their mistakes, but creatively acknowledged or remixed those bugs in subsequent versions: I didn’t know about most of these, so I did some googling and created a list for reference: Mortal Kombat:...

Right next to the generic function to delete photos by going through them one by one, my camera has a specific version – Delete All With This Date: Below the actions to close the tab, and close all other tabs, Chrome has a specific version called Close Tabs To The Right: In After Effects, next to typical save...

A fun 24-minute video from Technology Connections about designed sounds in real life: elevator dings, airplane chimes, railway crossing dings, and so on. While I am sympathetic to the notion that sound pollution is a thing we need to be concerned with, the choice between silence and sound pollution is a false...