Micah Lee on his work regarding the Snowden revelations: Working in Tails to remain anonymous while I developed the site, however, meant that this would be trickier than the web development I’d done in the past. I didn’t have access to the latest browsers I was used to, and I didn’t dare test the mobile version of...

Over on CSS-Tricks I've written an intro to font loading and discussed the problems with the Flash of Unstyled Text approach that many designers today still prefer: Several years ago the consensus on font loading in the community was that, as a website loads, all fonts should be hidden until the correct resources...

This year’s Ampersand was a perfect cavalcade of typographic misadventures which has left me buzzing with ideas. First up was Indra Kupferschmid’s fascinating talk about web typography and I jotted down a couple of useful points she made that I often tend to ignore when designing an interface: We shouldn’t justify...

I keep returning to Craig Mod’s fervent, potent ideas on what it means to be a part of the web, both as a citizen and as a large publisher: All I know is the more I read digitally, the more this feeling — the strange joy of adding to the corpus and seeing where it takes us — grows inside me, and I can't be the only...

An alluring, essential talk called Big data, no thanks from James Bridle: This is the first electronic general-purpose computer, the ENIAC, which was built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1941 and 1946. It was used extensively for Edward Teller’s early work on hydrogen bombs. The size of a couple of rooms,...

(One remembers involuntarily and with goosebumps that in 1876–78, Edward Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, First Earl of Lytton GCB GCSI GCIE PC (to whom, incidentally, Lady Windermere’s Fan was dedicated), serving as the Viceroy of India, considered himself to be doing well and doing good when he exported a record crop...

William Zinsser's classic On Writing Well contains outstanding advice for writers, but the part I constantly think about is the section on editing: Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don't like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an...

I'm in love with this short story by Borges: No, he replied. Then, as if confiding a secret, he lowered his voice. “I acquired the book in a town out on the plain in exchange for a handful of rupees and a Bible. Its owner did not know how to read. I suspect that he saw the Book of Books as a talisman. He was of the...

When an alcoholic describes their inexorable lust I realise it's precisely how I would describe my relationship with Food. Unlike drinking or smoking however, I still have to eat Food everyday. And not as a guilty compulsion, but as a necessity. This means that the temptation to gorge myself stupid, to destroy my...

A while back I had the pleasure of joining Charles Peters and Tom Carmony on a special episode of Viewsources all about typography and design. We talked about our favourite type systems, how to get started in the industry and how to make websites have great typography whilst still thinking about performance. So...

It’s the final day of XOXO and I’m sat under a canopy watching the prolonged withdrawal of a beautiful evening — shadows flitter their way across skin left bare by shorts and dresses as everyone has now gathered outside after the talks. They slowly form clusters and talk giddily amongst friends at the open bar....

In Making charts with CSS over on CSS-Tricks I take a look at a few interesting ways to make bar charts, sparklines and pie charts without resorting to a JavaScript framework. Using JS isn’t necessarily a problem here but sometimes we don’t need extra resources and a lot of the time we can handle things with CSS....