Not only is today my birthday but it also marks the launch of the Gusto brand refresh: we’ve shipped a new website and we’ve redesigned the Gusto web app experience that lets hundreds of thousands of companies run payroll each month. I reckon all this work has led to something...outstanding. Screenshots of the UI...

The first question I ask myself whenever anyone assigns me a project is this: what is the real project though? For some completely idiotic reason I can never seem to work on a project unless I feel like I’m doing something punk and unexpected. Project X might have a rigorous deadline and a clear set of steps to...

I’m hurtling through Northern California up to Oregon. I want to see if I can travel alone out here and I have everything I need; a backpack, a motorcycle, a couple of t-shirts, a book. But do I have the confidence to charm my way through this place? Do I have what it takes to navigate and solve problems on the...

Not only is Vulf Sans by OhNo Type Co a wonderful contribution to my growing list of typefaces that I need to use in a project soon, it also has perhaps the best ad from any type foundry I’ve ever seen. Originally designed for Jack Stratton’s band Vulfpeck, Vulf Sans has now grown into an expansive family with a ton...

In videogame design there’s the concept of ‘the loop’ – a pattern that a game has been designed around. You shoot, you drive, you jump. There’s a finite number of things you can do in a world, and the real videogame design magic is the order in which you let a player experiment with those mechanics. A game isn’t a...

Kelly Sutton has written a heartbreaking piece about empathy in software design that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about for the past couple of days: There might be no reason to build the concept of “grief” into a dorm room assignment system. It likely wasn’t financially viable. It definitely was an edge...

In his most recent newsletter, Robin turned me onto a fascinating blog called Census Stories by the historian Dan Bouk and he recounts tales of how past censuses were made. This particular account of Agnes Parrott though, who happened to work on the census that took place in Alaska in 1940, shook me thoroughly awake...

Andy Bell and Heydon Pickering’s new project, Every Layout, is fascinating as it hopes to document some common layout problems and describe how to build them with CSS. But there’s a post in the depths of the site called Algorithmic Design that I found pretty interesting, too: We make many of our biggest mistakes as...

Maciej Cegłowski on why the surveillance economy should be dismantled by the government: In the eyes of regulators, privacy still means what it did in the eighteenth century—protecting specific categories of personal data, or communications between individuals, from unauthorized disclosure. Third parties that are...

I love this piece by Jonas Downey where he writes for Signal V. Noise: Somewhere along the line I realized and accepted the truth: nobody really owns anything in a product made by a team. Whatever ownership you have over an individual contribution is immediately forfeited the moment you commit the code. At that...

Sinclair Target on what RSS is and where it went: ...two decades later, RSS appears to be a dying technology, now used chiefly by podcasters and programmers with tech blogs. Moreover, among that latter group, RSS is perhaps used as much for its political symbolism as its actual utility. Though of course some people...

For as long as I can remember I’ve been inordinately stressed at work. I jump from problem to problem and work until the middle of the night and it never feels like…enough. I don’t remember the last time I returned home after a day and felt that my time had been particularly well spent. No matter what I do I’m...