I love this piece by Steve Klabnik on how to care for an open source community. He writes: ...without someone actively paying attention, it’s only a matter of time before things get unseemly. If you’re looking to help out an open source project, it’s not a glamorous job, but all it takes is a little bit of work, and...

Kyle Chayka on the empty promise of minimalism and our obsession with it all: The iPhone’s function depends on an enormous, complex, ugly superstructure of satellites and undersea cables that certainly are not designed in pristine whiteness. Minimalist design encourages us to forget everything a product relies on...

I reckon every good story begins halfway through. One example is the first scene of Uncharted 2: we don’t see our protagonist Nathan Drake at the train station buying his ticket, grabbing a coffee, hopping on the train, finding his seat, taking off his coat, and then finally settling down for the trip. Instead, the...

Anil Dash writing about how Instagram is controlling behavior by limiting the use of hyperlinks: If anyone on Instagram can just link to any old store on the web, how can Instagram — meaning Facebook, Instagram’s increasingly-overbearing owner — tightly control commerce on its platform? If Instagram users could post...

About a year ago I saw the trailer for The Birth of a Nation and I was, for whatever reason, thoroughly unimpressed with the pacing and structure of it. The music doesn’t make you scared or anxious or provide any of the emotional oomph that’s required of a film about slavery. The trailer certainly has some lovely...

What does success look like? I asked him in the dim light. A jazz band was playing on the mezzanine behind us and I was slumped at the bar in a half-drunken stupor, moaning triumphantly about everything. I whined about how I’d trained myself to see likes, faves, retweets, and hearts as the measure of my life. And...

Robert McFarlane has written an outstanding piece on the dangers and difficulty of disposing with radioactive waste: Deep in the bedrock of Olkiluoto Island in southwest Finland a tomb is under construction. The tomb is intended to outlast not only the people who designed it, but also the species that designed it....

Rachel Andrew has written all about her career helping developers learn CSS: As I started my CSS layout journey with a backdrop of people complaining about Netscape 4, I now continue against a backdrop of people whining about IE11. As our industry grows up, I would love to see us leaving these complaints behind. I...

Earlier this week I flew down to a friend’s home in Anaheim for Thanksgiving and, in between home made apple pies and far too much turkey, I found time to update the design of this ol’ place a bit. Now I’m using Klim Type’s Söhne for headings and the ever-so-lovely Newzald for body copy and blockquotes. The new...

Over on CSS-Tricks, Chris asked a ton of web designers and developers what interested them this year when it comes to building websites and the results are lovely! The overwhelming amount of positivity and charm in these posts reminds me of the Old Web when we all felt like that we were contributing to something...

I could be halfway towards LA or Vegas by now. I could be tearing it through a canyon in Yosemite. Instead, it’s midnight and I’m sat on my bike in front of O’s apartment with the engine rattling beneath me. I’m about to walk through that front door and kiss her and pick her up and yet somehow I will feel lonelier...

In July the design systems team at Gusto shipped a beautiful thing. Over the course of three months we tried our best not just to update the brand assets, such as logos, colors, and fonts—we also felt that this was an opportunity to give every component in our library an upgrade. We hoped to expand the scope of the...