The story about the original Macintosh’s built-in font set being named after “world-class cities” is well known and documented by Susan Kare on the Folklore site: The first Macintosh font was designed to be a bold system font with no jagged diagonals, and was originally called “Elefont”. There were going to be lots...

In the Fallout 3: Broken Steel addition, the team wanted to introduce a moving subway train under Washington, D.C.: However, the engine did not have any moving vehicles. Instead of adding a new kind of primitive into the game engine, the creators… made the player character itself become the subway car when in...

A thoughtful 26-minute talk by Imani Joy, the solitary full-time designer on Mastodon, reflecting on her nine months there: It’s an interesting peek behind the curtain at designing for this particular space, and the many unenviable constraints: lack of data, care for privacy, tension between Mastodon’s power-user...

Column view cut its teeth on NeXT computers… …and blossomed on early versions of Mac OS X… …but where I thought it really shone was the first iPods: This was perhaps the most fun you could ever have navigating a hierarchy of things; it made sense what left/​right/up/​down meant in this universe, to a point you could...

An excellent 17-minute video from The Art Of Storytelling that analyzes the now-infamous 2021 Mark Zuckerberg Metaverse introduction video: What I liked about it is that the author goes beyond cheap shots and deeper into both storytelling aspects (drawing from his experience)… Now, as you can tell, the big problem...

Connecting to public wi-fi networks with their captive portals is always a bit of a wonky proposition, and nothing makes public wi-fi wonkier than using it on a plane. I believe that the resurgence of https made things harder – if the captive portal doesn’t kick in, no secure traffic can happen – and over time I...

Not long ago, a blog I otherwise like a lot included this passage: Designers have been saying this for years. Cameras don’t take pictures, photographers do. Tools don’t make you a better designer. Now the PM world is arriving at the same conclusion. I am not linking to the post because I hear this argument from time...

Software engineering has long had a concept of “premature optimization” – overbuilding things too early in anticipation of future that might or might not come. I feel design has a version of that, too. Here’s viewer menu hierarchy in Google Drive: One should always feel very uneasy about a menu with just one item,...

I occasionally move older writing that still feels interesting to my new site, and today I republished the 2015 story about a strange bug that brought back an old pixel font from beyond the grave: Some of the technical details inside are obsolete, but the story might still be fun. (Plus, it seems like at every job I...

I mentioned placeholders before in the context of Dropbox Paper… …and I wanted to share a response by Nikita Prokopov, because he had a great point about those Dropbox Paper placeholders that I didn’t consider: For me it’s […] confusing placement. Like if somebody writes “Have a nice day” on a door instead of “Push”...

A meandering and messy, but otherwise an absolutely worthwhile essay from Shubham Bose about the bloat and hostile behaviours on news sites: I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. […] Almost all modern news websites are guilty of...

I feel like social media and recently the slate of AI-powered “tell me what’s here” features continue to show us the power and longevity of screenshots. After all, nothing beats a more or less approachable shortcut and a file format that works literally everywhere. But screenshots have issues, and I liked how Bear...