This is a sharp and brilliant piece by Andrew Flowers. He looks at the current research behind universal basic income, where the government would effectively cut social benefits and replace them with a single wage for both rich and poor alike. He writes: From Switzerland to the Netherlands to Kenya to Silicon...

Chris messed around with a famous essay by Leonard E. Read called I, Pencil and I love it so much: How are these words delivered to you? Massive networks of wires! Fiber-optic undersea cables line all the oceans and seas and grip the Earth like a hairnet. A single cable crossing an ocean costs hundreds of millions...

After a rather unfortunate set of circumstances, which I’ll make sure to write about soon, I’m now available for contract web design and front-end development work. From now until late May 2016 I want to work on as many projects as possible. So I’ve set up a portfolio and written a little bit about how I can...

You might be familiar with the fog of war. This is how designers obscure sections of the video game world until one of the characters has stepped through it. The idea is to build a sense of tension and adventure; the fog supplies the world with mystery. At the beginning of the player’s quest they have no idea about...

Yesterday Adam Morse wrote about webfonts, which, well...the gist is that webfonts are bad for usability and performance so we should effectively ditch them: I’ve heard a lot of arguments about why to use webfonts. In none of those arguments, have I heard about a single problem users have that is solved by using...

In all the excitement of recent months I forgot to mention that a couple of weeks ago we finished work on an update to The Outpost website. Blend modes! Viewport units! object-fit magic! This teaser combines a lot of the techniques that I’ve been learning about into one exciting project. But, after seeing the...

I wrote up a quick overview of two of my favourite CSS properties lately. I’ve found that in general day-to-day interface design that I keep returning to these new methods to manipulate inline images and so I thought someone else might find these tricks useful, too.

Paul Ford describes the early days of the web: Then along came HTML, and what I remember most was that sense of being back inside the file. Sure, HTML was a typographic nightmare, a bunch of unjustified Times New Roman in 12 pt on screens with chiclet-sized pixels, but under the hood you could see all the pieces....

For the past year I’ve been trying to get my freelance business off the ground and thanks to Cushion it’s been an awful lot less stressful and terrifying than it might have been otherwise. Cushion is an app for organising a freelancer’s schedule and income. Currently it’s being designed and developed by Jonnie...

From the archives of iA, Putting Thought Into Things: Listening is a masochist endeavor. To do it right you have to put everything down. Not just your phone, even pen and paper. There is nothing to hold on to when you just listen. You have to use your full attention, registering everything that you see and hear. You...

I’ve been listening to the interviews on Longform over the past week—in between cleaning, working, heading to the gym—and they’ve been so consistently insightful. Here are my favourites so far: George Saunders on ‘the long corridor’ and recognising how difficult and time consuming it is to make something great....

Here’s an article I wrote for CSS-Tricks where I discuss all the benefits and troublesome problems of the new font format that Nick Sherman mentioned at Ampersand: I think there’s huge potential for a new variable font format to become a key part of the designer’s tool belt. It would greatly improve the reading...