Here’s some advice for designers that are interested in front-end development, product design and systems design work (or in other words, designers that do design for other designers): Don’t get preachy. No-one likes it when you’re giving a sermon. Team morale can be a huge problem if you keep sounding like a jerk...

I loved one of the recent episodes of the podcast Track Changes about how the web has changed and, namely, how the construction of ideas and work has become a commercialized experienced on the web. Okay, that was a very clunky sentence. But what I mean is that not as many folks are building their own websites...

There’s an unforgettable moment in the novel Tigerman by Nick Harkaway which, even over the course of several years, has been impossible for me to shake. The moment is this one: our protagonist, Sergeant Lester Ferris, is on the brink of finishing a gruelling renovation of his home and at one point in the novel he...

Over the past week or so I’ve been reading Spineless which is a book by Juli Berwald all about jellyfish. I picked it up in the Haight only because of the design of its cover and the random paragraph that I flipped to – but that would be enough. I knew this book was going to be a lovely tale about a topic that I...

I’m not a fan of Wes Anderson movies. I mean I love the style and the songs and the acting of course but the plot always falls a little short. At one point or another in the movie everyone will start talking as if they’re reading the first sentence of a paragraph and hopping over the sentences in between to the...

Last night I watched the new documentary about Garry Shandling by Judd Apatow and I hadn’t quite expected to fall in love with it as much as I did. Quite frankly, it swept me off my feet. There’s so much that I adore about the film – the way they show extracts from Garry’s diaries, to the way the film slowly reveals...

Anil Dash on the early promise of the web: For the first few years of the web, the fundamental way that people learned to build web pages was by using the “View Source” feature in their web browser. You would point your mouse at a menu that said something like “View Source” (nobody was browsing the web on a...

I think, of all things, I miss her voice the most. I've been thinking about this a lot over the last week or so but when we were together I would see her not as a person with a beautiful smile or with any other mesmerizing physical quality, but instead as a sound. Her voice had this dependable, reassuring tone and I...

I first came across this passage in Artful by Ali Smith that I finished just last week and it’s an unforgivably good quote extracted from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. I haven’t read the book yet, but I believe that in this section the writer is describing a relationship that he finds himself haunted by because words...

The night before the breakup, last night actually, I had a dream about our trip to Lake Tahoe. I was stood at the edge of the water, on the pier we had sat on only a few months before, and I was looking over the edge, down into its depths. There was no color in the water, no light at all; inside, the lake was the...

There’s a song by Jonwayne called Green Light where towards the end Anderson Paak takes the reins and sings one of my favorite lines. Well, sort of. In his mild mannered and eloquent style he says that “the stars align and my God...” but whenever I listen to that bit I always hear “the stars align in my garden.”...

In Ali Smith’s Artful there’s this lovely description of what literature and form are capable of (as I understand it, form is how a sentence is structured and how it sounds as you say it out loud): For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left—say we lost...