Smart idea via Jim Nielsen here: body:has(dialog[open]) { overflow: hidden;} I still haven’t used :has outside of little demos and screwing around in Codepen but there’s been a growing chorus over the last few months about all the tiny yet amazing things that :has can do for us. A few years ago Ahmad Shadeed wrote...

We made a list on my team at Retool the other day of all the things we’ve done, everything we’ve shipped since the team started back in November. And it’s a lot! Plus, I realized that we’d shipped more in the last four months than I had in the prior three years. So what gives? Was it the folks I was working with?...

I don’t know if this is a trend or anything but I like the idea of this: keyboard-first apps. Chris shared Godspeed, a todo list app, that has a “hardcore mode” that disables the mouse so you can get used to the keyboard shortcuts even faster. But the whole product is designed around the keyboard. I also spotted...

That’s the question that PJ Vogt asks Ezra Klein over on Search Engine. It’s a real interesting conversation and there’s a bit where they talk about how the medium you use the most influences the way you think. If you use IG all day long, you’ll see the world in squares and stories. If you use a feed all day long,...

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells is fantastic. I admit that I’m real late to the party here but I can't remember the last time I read anything as effortlessly page-turning as this. The first book, All Systems Red, is a breezy 150 page novella that I finished last night and it’s all about a murderous robot on a...

I’ve sat through a lot of discussions about design principles and they always read like weak sauce to me. They focus on pixels or craft or some other wishy washy hand wavy faffery that I can’t apply to my work. Or they’re so generic that every design team on the planet could apply them and nothing much would change....

It’s been about four months since I joined the product design team at Retool and I’ve noticed something in my work click forward. Just a slight nudge, nothing that anyone else would spot. That’s mostly because progress is never straightforward: there’s baby steps and then one day you notice enormous baby thuds of...

A few months ago I found a ton of old HyperCard assets, along with the illustrations (some from Susan Kare) of the original Mac team, too. I wondered how to repurpose them, how to give them new life. So this mighty fine morning I released an update to my site that’s been cooking for a bit: a new homepage that...

Justin recommended A New Program for Graphic Design and it’s so good that I blitzed my way through it over a weekend. The book began as a course on graphic design by David Reinfurt at Princeton, which was then condensed into a three day talk that was then recorded, edited, and condensed again into a lovely book....

Mandy Brown: This is one of my answers to the question of, why give a fuck about work? Why love your work? It won’t, of course, love you back. It can’t. Work isn’t a thing that can love. It isn’t alive, it isn’t and won’t ever be living. And my answer is: don’t. [...] That’s what work is, after all. Work—the action...

I could have spent three minutes on a sketch or three months designing a new interface from scratch but it’s all the same to me: if it doesn’t ship, then it doesn’t count. I’m not sure why I feel this way, perhaps because I started my career as a front-end developer and became addicted to the short turn around time...

A writing tip for myself in the future, if I may (and I do): delete every use of “…for me…,” “in my opinion,” “some might disagree,” “I think,” etc. etc. These snippets are a bad habit and make your writing fragile, lacking any conviction, with one eye always over your shoulder. After a while these self-doubting...