When I’m uncertain about my career or my personal life, books have always shown me the way. A dazzling novel about bread or a non-fiction tome all about nuclear physics will never fail to soothe me, even when it feels like my career has gone sideways or my love life has exploded into a million irreparable pieces. It...

Here’s Edward Dolnick in his lovely book The Writing of the Gods: The crucial point is that though speaking comes naturally, writing had to be invented. Speech is part of our biological heritage, like crawling and walking. Writing is a product of human ingenuity, like the telephone or the airplane. Thinking of a...

Building a great product is a matter of two questions: How should we measure progress? And what should we build next? That first question is the most important because how you collect data and what you count as success influences everything else; if your organization is measuring shit then they’ll build nothing but...

Austin Kleon: In my work, problems of output are problems of input. If my work sucks, it’s usually because I’m not being a good enough fan. I need to read, and read voraciously, searching for that thing that’s going to get me back on track. Read books, write books, repeat. That’s the deal. I remember sitting in the...

I couldn’t agree more with Chris here when he asks if it’s really necessary to show hundreds of junk fonts in macOS Ventura: That’s 567!!!! Fonts!!!! Automatically installed that you cannot remove or deactivate on macOS Ventura. What in the absolute heck. And for the record my preferred font management tool Typeface...

We used to write CSS like this: a { color: blue;}a:hover { color: lightblue;} This kinda sucked for a lot of reasons. First, it means that our code is split up and disassociated from itself a bit. Second, because it gets harder to read larger chunks of code. So languages like Sass and Less came out which allowed us...

Lucy and I chatted the other day about prototypes, the projects we’re workin’ on, and how to blog on the world wide web. My favorite bit is when Lucy shows the prototype she made for Seacritters!, her upcoming graphic novel about capybara pirates.

Jim Nielsen: That is why owning a domain (and publishing your content there) is like planting a tree: it’s value that starts small and grows. The best time to own a domain and publish your content there was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.

Mark your calendars: next week on Tuesday Feb 7th, I’ll be chatting with Marcin Wichary in a livestream about his book, Shift Happens, which beautifully details the history of keyboards from punch cards and typewriters to the rectangles in our pockets. Earlier that morning Marcin’s Kickstarter for the book opens up...

Okay, here’s a great chat with Nadia Asparouhova and Kicks Condor about writing mighty fine hypertext: Someone (I think Eugene Wei?) once tweeted that all Twitter accounts eventually sound like fortune cookies. I don’t want to become a fortune cookie. So I like things like newsletters, and my notes page, which are...

Back in 2013 when I started my career there were a few big problems with CSS: We had to rely on Sass to get variables which made everything a lot more complicated than necessary (build environments and the like). We had to rely on a complex series of display:floats and there were endless books and tools and blog...

The Book Cover Review is a great project by David Pearson; it’s a website with quick, 500-word reviews of book covers from guest designers, typographers, and writers. It all looks lovely! Fine typesetting, cute and slightly odd navigation, and gorgeous pictures to boot. There’s only one unforgiveable flaw with this...