The biggest threat to great design is bias. For example: at Sentry I’m on the Workflow team. We work on the error monitoring side of things, such as Alerts and Issues. These features notify you when a user experiences a problem with your app—we can send you a notification to say “hey! your app exploded at this point...

Just look at this enormous woodblock illustration by Albrecht Dürer made in 1515. From The Met archives: The Arch of Honor is the artistic summation of Emperor Maximilian I’s ambitions. Combining elements from many of his other commissions, it shows his ancestry, territories, extended kinship, predecessors as...

I imagine reading the blog of my grandmother: What did she do on her thirtieth birthday? How did she feel when she met my mom? What did she struggle with? Who did she love? What did her voice sound like? The other day Donny Trương asked what would happen to his website in the future: What will I leave my children...

On the subject of design engineers that’s been getting some attention in the front-end community lately (yes I am quoting myself, shut up): The problem (which I didn’t realize at the time) was that the organization I worked for was ignoring this front-of-the-front-end work and painted everything with the same...

Austin riffed on that bit I wrote about how blogging is pointing at things and falling in love—but!—he takes it one step further when he writes what good writing is: Point at things, say, “whoa,” and elaborate. Gosh I love that. And I think I’ve been darting around this question for a while now: ...I think we’ve all...

Lewis Mcguffie, the designer of Columba, wrote this piece about designing with scale in mind: Something will always be in the shadows, or even behind a hill, we may be colour-blind, or a thing may simply be too small to see (the list is endless). To put it another way — things change depending on how big they are....

Marc wrote about why he still uses RSS: I've already spoken before about my general disinterest with Social Media but it wasn't until somewhat recently that I decided to really start looking for alternatives - searching for a better way to interact with the Internet. I found my answer in RSS. I enjoyed the freedom...

Someone sent me an email the other week and wrote this line that I’ve been thinking about ever since: How to talk deeply about a subject but carry yourself lightly? I have no idea how to do this—to talk about Big and Serious things whilst also not letting it all get to your head. And I find that there are certain...

This post from John Boardley called Inventing Posters is worth every minute of your time. He looks at the history of engraving, drypoint, and etching illustrations: Just as the printing press brought knowledge and books to the entire world, so printmaking introduced the broader world to art. These days, when we’re...

Tom MacWright writes about the current landscape of reading on the web today: Books are amazing, but the options we have to buy books and track our reading are terrible. A lot of us are locked into the Amazon ecosystem - buying books on Amazon.com, reading them on Kindles. Sites like AbeBooks and Goodreads were...

Derek Thompson: But the costs of hygiene theater are greater than dry hands for paranoid people. First, it’s absorbing precious resources. Urban-transit authorities have spent hundreds of millions of dollars blasting their subways and buses with antimicrobial weaponry, even as they discuss the need to cut essential...

The other day I linked to Maciej Cegłowski’s talk about success and remarkably it’s not filled with stuff like “just wake up earlier, you poor idiots” which so many self-help talks are really saying. There’s a point in the talk I haven’t been able to stop thinking about though where Maciej says “if you just care...