I’m redesigning the homepage right now (it’s so dang hard introducing yourself on the web!) and I’m bumping into tons of weird, old decisions I made whilst writing the CSS maybe four or five years ago. I try hard not to rewrite things from scratch when it comes to my personal site but the styles are starting to...

A few months ago I couldn't stop looking at a photograph. It was taken at Fort Riley in Kansas around 1918 and shows an enormous, cavernous room stacked full of patients lying on beds; soldiers stricken with the Spanish Flu. Hats, masks, no phones. Doctors and nurses make their rounds. In the center of the...

This is something I have to keep reminding myself when it comes to design: don't think like a database. If the data or the back-end requires you to do something, it doesn't mean that's how users should think about a problem. It's a common mistake in UI design: revealing the database in a form or the navigation. But...

I wrote an email to Lucy over the weekend all about, well, email and the web: Anyway, I see HTML and CSS as a bridge—a set of languages and agreements between browsers that give us access to nigh-on everyone in the world. (And I think that’s a neat way to see publishing in general, actually. Publish a thing and...

Here’s some nifty new fonts from Bold Monday: Puffin and Puffin Arcade, designed by Pieter van Rosmalen. I particularly like the Arcade variant since it’s not often that a font elicits a loud oooooo! when I see it for the first time. Puffin Arcade is a bitmap font with variants like those found in classic arcade...

“Dealing with fascism is an inevitable part of living alongside other people,” Carlos Maza argues in this excellent video called How To Be Hopeless. Maza compares fascism to a plague: This is what it means to fight a plague: it's rage, exhaustion, and more often than not, it's mourning. Not just for the way things...

Katy wrote about how to detect 404s with Sentry: her team set up an alert to shout at them when more than 10 users see the same 404 path in a week. That's pretty neat! Katy writes: Since introducing Sentry to our 404 page, nearly two years ago, we have caught issues before users and our team members. But, more...

I loved this episode of the Rework podcast about the release of HEY World. Here’s how it works: once you've signed up for a HEY email account you can then send an email to world@hey.com. Your message will become a webpage (like a blog post) which people can then sign up to and receive notifications via RSS or email...

Louche is a striking typeface and John Boardley has the scoop: In 2019, Joona graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in Den Haag with a Masters in Type Design. It was during the course that the idea for Louche was born. Joona wondered how a typeface might feel like an italic while remaining upright in stance. At...

I’m obsessed with work. It’s the first thing I wake up with in the morning and it’s the last thing I think of before I fall asleep. Well, “sleep” wouldn’t be fair because it’s a shattered, partial, broken half-trance that I slip into these days. Throughout the night I’ll wake up with my jaw clamped down as if a wire...

So I was wrong about that piece by Jason Farago — it's definitely not inspired by Newsletters at all. Just a quick search for his other pieces show one from November 2020 and earlier. So I'm not an inspiration, huh? Outrageous! Jokin’ aside, it's neat that we came to the same conclusion though. I've never seen this...

Fuck