Who’s out there making new plans and trying new things based on hard-earned experience of life and work in the debris of the internet dream? Can their approaches and countermoves jostle us out of lazy assumptions?
The networks we use to communicate across fields and distances, to find our friends and learn from people unlike ourselves—and to organize ourselves to respond to acute crises and long, grinding institutional failures—are the same networks that are making so many of us miserable and/or deranged.
Traditional media makes lists because platforms don’t, and we need some semblance of cultural map by which to navigate. There are too many lists, but at the same time not enough. I’m afraid that we consume too many of other people’s lists and don’t keep enough of our own.
Because here’s what I’ve learned: if you give your fucks to the unliving—if you plant those fucks in institutions or systems or platforms or, gods forbid, interest rates—you will run out of fucks. One day you will reach into that bag and your hand will meet nothing but air and you will be bereft. You will realize the loss of something you did not know you ever had. But if you give a fuck about the living, about all your living kin in all the kingdoms, they will give a fuck right back.
And yet: as much as the Fediverse is different (the governing structures, the incentives, the moderation, the absence of ads and engagement tricks), so much of it is also unsettlingly familiar—the same small boxes, the same few buttons, the same mechanics of following and being followed. The same babbling, tumbling, rushing stream of thoughts. I can’t tell if we’re stuck with this design because it’s familiar, or if it’s familiar because we’re stuck. Very likely it’s me that’s stuck, fixed in place while everything rushes around me, hoping for a gap, a break, a warm rock to rest awhile on. Longing for a mode of communication that lifts me up instead of wiping me out.
What is the experience of asking for something to appear and then instantly receiving it? What changes between the thought and the manifestation? I fear that nothing changes, that nothing is changed in such a making, least of all ourselves. But then, what does it mean to be unchanged, for your feet to pass so lightly over the ground they don’t so much as disturb the sand? Even the dead make change in the world, as their bodies decay and and are transformed into food for beasts and bugs and trees. But in eliminating the effort, in refusing the temporality of making, the outcome of an “AI”-driven creative process is a phantasm, an unsubstantiality, something that passes through the world without leaving any trace. A root that twists back upon itself and tries to suck the water from its own desiccated veins.
A website is, among other things, a container. The shape of that container both constrains and makes possible what goes within it. This is, I think, one of the primary justifications for having your own website. Not just so you can own your stuff (for some meaning of “ownership,” in a culture in which any billionaire can scrape your work without permission and copyright only protects the rich). Not just so you have a home base among the shifting winds of the various platforms, which rise and fall like brush before the fire. Not just so you can avoid setting up camp in a Nazi bar. But also so that you can shape the work—so that you can give shape to it, and in that shaping make possible work that couldn’t arise elsewhere.
To step into the stream of any social network, to become immersed in the news, reactions, rage and hopes, the marketing and psyops, the funny jokes and clever memes, the earnest requests for mutual aid, for sign ups, for jobs, the clap backs and the call outs, the warnings and invitations—it can feel like a kind of madness. It’s unsettling, in the way that sediment is unsettled by water, lifted up and tossed around, scattered about. A pebble goes wherever the river sends it, worn down and smoothed day after day until all that’s left is sand.
Riley Walz hid a solar powered Android phone in the Mission and set it to run Shazan all day, every day. The result is Bop Spotter, a site listing all of the songs that have been detected.
This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it’s not about catching criminals. It’s about catching vibes. A constant feed of what’s popping off in real-time.
Culture Surveillance is a newsletter to which I would happily subscribe.
Throughout my career as a designer, I’ve experienced a recurring struggle with the concept of process.
I used to look at process as something sacred: a holy calculus through which I could find the right answer to a problem every time. All I needed to do was remember the steps and apply them in just the right way. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Maybe this idea stems from my background in programming, or maybe it’s just an attempt to comfort my own fears and insecurities, but I wanted my work to follow a clearly defined algorithm.
The way I’ve seen great work made isn’t using any sort of design process. It’s skipping steps when we deem them unnecessary. It’s doing them out of order just for the heck of it. It’s backtracking when we’re unsatisfied. It’s changing things after we’ve handed off the design. It’s starting from the solution first. It’s operating on vibes and intuition. It’s making something just for the sake of making people smile. It’s a feeling that we nailed it.
For me, overly relying on process might also have been borne out of a distaste for what I perceive to be the opposite of process: vision. Blue sky design visions, if not done with care, can turn into uninformed expressions of ego and hubris.
If you’ve worked within a large design organization, you’ve probably seen this play out. A designer, usually one with lots of tenure or clout, goes heads down to produce a north star for the design direction of a product that is usually impressive but disconnected from both the needs of users and the realities of building real software.
Visions too often fall out of a coconut tree, not existing within the context of the current product or what came before it. (Sorry, I had to.)
Of course, vision work can be useful as an instigating factor: to excite stakeholders, secure funding, or drive alignment by raising key questions. But too often these visions are taken more seriously than they should, and they get handed down to other teams in place of an actual roadmap.
I think that the act of designing and shipping real solutions happens somewhere in between process and vision. It’s not a carefully defined algorithm, and it’s not a moonshot.
If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is.
Click through for a more details explanation of how unfolding works.
Henrik goes on to say that unfolding is the opposite of vision, but I like to think of vision and rigidly defined process as two ends of a spectrum, with unfolding sitting somewhere in the middle.
The opposite of an unfolding is a vision. A vision springs, not from a careful understanding of a context, but from a fantasy: if you could just make it into another context your problems will go away.
None of this is to say that there is no place for more formal processes. When unfolding a problem we need to establish feedback loops and respond to those in a way that resembles improv, but the act of responding may itself leverage repeatable processes.
We might choose to think about these recurring patterns in our work as frameworks, which are applied to solve specific problems or answer certain questions.
For example: unfolding a problem might present a difficult decision that needs to be made, and that’s when leveraging a decision making framework might be useful.
Should every decision that needs to be made have that framework applied to it? Absolutely not! And it’s our job as designers to know what parts of our work should be scripted and what parts should be improvised.
I’m trying to let go of my conditioning to attack every problem with process, and these ideas are helping me frame my work in a way that invites spontaneity and is less concerned with artifacts of the work that aren’t actual software. Because at the end of the day, any artifact that isn’t the product itself should be in service of the product, not any one person’s process.
I stumbled upon a great site which acts as an explainer for vanilla web development techniques called, well, Plain Vanilla.
When I was starting out as a developer I had a hard time learning the basics of the web platform because so many resources and examples used a framework. It was mostly jQuery at the time, and today I’d assume React and Tailwind are the most common starting points for new developers.
But the web has come a long way! A framework might not be necessary for lots of projects, and going as far as you can with the grain of the web comes with lots of benefits. I’m happy to see a high quality resource like this that can help folks avoid complexity and start simple.
If you don’t tell the story of your life, someone else will do it for you. Google, Instagram, and the sketchy recollections of strangers can offer fragments of a mirrored self. You can dress up in the identities that others draw; you can outsource your memory and legacy to the highest corporate bidder. You can look back through your Oura ring, your credit score, your likes. From Charlie Squire again: “There is museum upon museum dedicated to myself within the geography of my phone, and like all museums they are fallible to misrepresentation and selective curation, and like most museum-goers I choose to believe they are peddling me an objective truth.”
I’m fascinated by the way that CSS, as it becomes more powerful, can be used as a visual language for representing the physical world. Combined with the longevity of the web, which strives to never break backwards compatibility, it’s a powerful tool for sending information into the future.
I grew up dreaming about the esoteric user interfaces seen in science fiction films, many of which featured circular screens, control panels, and UIs. Now we can achieve those with CSS!
I also love the whimsical nature of Orbit’s API, which requires a single “big bang” element on the page, and uses a “gravity-spot” class for creating an area with a radial layout. The library comes with support for adding orbits, slices, satellites, capsules, and more around user-defined gravity spots.
Most importantly, a mountain’s currency is physical labor. I need to hike a lot to get to the vast part. Social media’s currency is time. I don’t need to do much to get there.
My hope is that this is a move to my forever domain, but if someone at JPMorgan Chase wants to chat about donating a better domain, they can find me (and so can you) at [email protected]
I recently showed a few friends around Chicago, and as we passed by the Art Institute and the two lions guarding the entrance, I wondered if they had names like the lion sculptures outside the New York Public Library.
New York’s lions have had several nicknames throughout their lives, but received their current names from Mayor LaGuardia in the 1930s based on the qualities he thought New Yorkers would need to have to survive the depression.
So what about the lions in the second city? Strangely enough, they were also created by a sculptor named Edward.
Edward Kemeys didn’t names to these lions, which took their places in 1894, but did assign them unofficial designations based on their poses. The lion on the north pedestal is “on the prowl,” while the one to the south is “in an attitude of defiance.”
We don’t seem to assign names to the objects around us as much as we used to, but I think it’s an important part of creating meaning and connecting to our environment and our history.
Next time you’re in downtown Chicago, don’t forget to say hi to Prowl and Defiance.
This is how we restore the old internet — not in its original form, but in its glorious, fragmented essence. People call Twitter an indispensable public space because it’s the “town square”, but in the real world there isn’t just one town square, because there isn’t just one town. There are many.
Listeners become alienated from their own tastes; when you never encounter things you don’t like, it’s harder to know what you really do.
Rather than optimizing for the user’s experience, it optimizes for the extraction of profit. If Spotify succeeds at turning us all into passive listeners, then it doesn’t really matter which content the platform licenses. As Fuller put it, “It’s about ‘How do you get through as much music as you can so you keep paying for it?’ ”
Life is not something you perform for the benefit of other people. When you perform for other people, you rob yourself of the chance to relate to them in a real way. Everything collapses inwards, becomes solipsistic: you and the camera, you and the mirror, you and the void. But we need the Other in order to feel real. People are doorways out of solipsism.
The way I’ve seen great work made isn’t using any sort of design process. It’s skipping steps when we deem them unnecessary. It’s doing them out of order just for the heck of it. It’s backtracking when we’re unsatisfied. It’s changing things after we’ve handed off the design. It’s starting from the solution first. It’s operating on vibes and intuition. It’s making something just for the sake of making people smile. It’s a feeling that we nailed it.
Figma announced a host of new AI-powered features this week at their annual conference, and they have been received by designers with both cheer and dismay.
Tools like the ones that were announced are showing up across the industry, but as the most popular tool for modern product design, Figma will make them commonplace, and we’ll soon be taking them for granted just like any other advancement in design tools over the past several decades.
Some folks are panicked, some are excited, and some are indifferent. I’m somewhere in the middle, but I do have concerns that are exacerbated by these new tools and capabilities.
To explain those concerns, I’ll draw a distinction between two types of AI-powered features that Figma announced this week:
Using AI to eliminate or reduce the time spent on constructing designs and prototypes in Figma.
Generating UI designs from scratch, based on a text prompt, using models trained on common product interfaces (and, in the future, the work created by Figma users, unless they opt out).
I’m excited for and have very few concerns about type #1, because the job of product designers is not to create Figma mockups—it’s to solve problems and ship software.
To the degree that new features allow us to spend less time creating ephemeral artifacts that are merely a stop on the way to a final destination, I’m sold.
Those features involve things like automatically wiring up prototypes, filling in a mockup with fake data, translating strings into other languages, automatic layer naming, generating placeholder images, etc. These are all good and helpful, and are geared towards saving designers time to spend on things that they are uniquely positioned poised to do.
But what about type #2, the feature that Figma labels in its UI as “Make designs”? This allows anyone to enter a prompt and have Figma create a mockup from scratch. In the future, the company plans to train their models on designs created by users.
Some are concerned that this type of feature might take jobs away from product designers, and some see it as simply another way to automate away the tedious parts of a designer’s job in order to give them more time to do what they do best.
I think it’s both, and/but I don’t think it’s because of AI.
There are many companies, and the number seems to be increasing, that are more than happy to turn the jobs of designers over to folks who are able to wield tools to produce a facsimile of what a designer is actually capable of.
For those that see the primary value of designers as producing interface mockups, the advent of new AI tools in the vein of Figma’s “make designs” button will absolutely seem like a viable replacement for the work of a designer. And this isn’t limited to AI—as design tools become more accessible and approachable to everyone (which I consider a net positive on the whole), the barrier to creating something that looks, on the surface, like the work of a designer is lowered.
Canva is an excellent example of how this is not strictly because of AI, but might certainly be accelerated by it. The commodification of design as a practice began long before the widespread availability of generative AI.
Product managers, engineers, and others are now able to produce designerly artifacts easier than ever before, and too many companies are willing to accept the sub-par solutions that result in order to cut costs and move faster.
Machines will not make our jobs obsolete, but corporations will, and they’ll use smarter and smarter machines as an excuse to do so.
It would take a lot of thought to detail my research techniques but they include the following imperatives: write early in the morning, cultivate memory, reread core books, take detailed reading notes, work on several projects at once, maintain a thick archive, rotate crops, take a weekly Sabbath, go to bed at the same time, exercise so hard you can’t think during it, talk to different kinds of people including the very young and very old, take words and their histories seriously (i.e., read dictionaries), step outside of the empire of the English language regularly, look for vocabulary from other fields, love the basic, keep your antennae tuned, and seek out contexts of understanding quickly (i.e., use guides, encyclopedias, and Wikipedia without guilt).
Many applications (including Chrome and Firefox) use a font rendering engine called HarfBuzz, and HarfBuzz recently added support for running arbitrary WebAssemply code in order to “shape” the pixels that are drawn onscreen when rendering a font.
You can see the font, llama.ttf, in action in this video.
I wonder if, in the years to come, it might be LLMs that get embedded into all the things.
A smart refrigerator that can reason about what’s inside and maintain a grocery list for you? A font that completes your sentences? A doorbell that answers in your voice and tone when you’re not at home? In-flight entertainment that generate content based on your preferences?
Just so it’s said: creating a design system’s assets has never been the end game, but rather an important foundational layer for other important work to stand on. What you do with the design system is where the excitement and focus should be. Whether it’s the ability to blast out higher-quality work faster than ever, explore new technologies, or spend more time building relationships, the opportunities are many.
One of my favorite forms of online content is when someone finds an interesting, obscure story from the past and manages to extract a lesson that’s widely applicable today.
I like to think of it as something like fan fiction: we, as individuals, retcon and re-tell stories from the past to help us make sense of the present.
It features the story of a king in 18th century Spain who ordered a geographer to create a map. The geographer attempted to delegate this work by asking the priests of towns across the country to create maps of their own provinces.
The idea was to put all of the maps together in the end, but because there was no standardization, all of the maps were created in entirely different forms. Those forms are beautiful! But ultimately not useful as an actual map.
Rather than seeing this as a failure, Elan asks us to consider the things we might be losing when we impose structure, standardization, and process. We might have gained a useful map, but we would have lost the creative perspective that each of the pieces represents.
I’m obsessed with this story because it gets at a dynamic embedded within everything designed that we rarely think about. Once you notice it, it is present in almost every conversation, at every aperture and zoom level: modularity is inversely correlated to expressiveness.
This hit me like a rock, in no small part because of my career focus of choice: design systems.
Fortunately, Elan goes on to reassure me:
I am someone that preaches expressiveness to a fault, but the truth is that I make decisions to scale all the time. I don’t necessarily see this as a compromise of values. There is beauty in trying to express something specific; there is beauty too in finding compromises to create something epic and collective.
In order to succeed in a hypercapitalist society, we must focus. And to focus usually means to specialize: acquiring a skill, becoming a special version of ourselves—a person with a “bit” that distinguishes us from the cross section of people who otherwise share our Google AdSense data metrics. It can be hard work to become this particular, outward-facing self.
To get the AI to do unique things, you need to understand parts of culture more deeply than everyone else using the same AI systems. So now, in many ways, humanities majors can produce some of the most interesting “code.”
When you let people inside your head, they come away smarter. When you work in public, you create an emissary (media cyborg style) that then walks the earth, teaching others to do your kind of work as well. And that is transcendently cool.
Teaching a company to value something it doesn’t care about is considerably the hardest sort of work you can do, and it often fails, so you should do as little of it as you can, but no less.
I’ve remarked before on my gratefulness for CSS as the ubiquitous and expressive visual language of our times, a sort of design Esperanto (that is actually widely spoken).
One would struggle to find a more perfect example of this than Scribe, by Stephen Band. Scribe is a custom element (<scribe-music>) which renders responsive music notation in HTML and CSS grid.
Here’s an example, rendered inline via Scribe:
0 meter 4 1
0 chord D maj 4
0 note F#5 0.2 2
1 note A4 0.2 1
4 note D4 0.2 1
It’s remarkable that this is possible using CSS, and even more remarkable that the language itself morphs to become a syntax not for describing elements on a web page, but to describe pitch over time. CSS as interface for the natural world.
Under the hood, Scribe uses markup like this to represent music in time:
Elegant, useful, and thanks to the hard-won stability of the web platform: durable for generations to come.
One might wonder, what other natural or mathematical systems might we be able to represent in CSS? Another example that crossed my feeds recently is time-based CSS animations by Yuan Chuan.
Yuan creates a variable in CSS representing time, and uses keyframe animations to increment the value of the variable by 1 every millisecond. Suddenly CSS has a timer, something powerful for generative art and animation where time itself is used as an input variable.
Yuan has some great examples of how this can be combined with functions in CSS like min(), round(), and newly added trigonometric functioned like sin(), cos(), etc. to create all sorts of useful effects. My favorite example is using all of this to create a clock with a perfectly ticking second hand.
In terms of representing natural systems in CSS, this reminds me of how often I’ve wanted to be able to generate and use random numbers in CSS at runtime. To my delight, it looks like that’s in the works.
I am someone that preaches expressiveness to a fault, but the truth is that I make decisions to scale all the time. I don’t necessarily see this as a compromise of values. There is beauty in trying to express something specific; there is beauty too in finding compromises to create something epic and collective.
There are two new features coming to CSS that will make it much easier to further avoid JavaScript when implementing animations:
Animating to and from display: none; for the sake of enter/exit animations.
Animating to and from the intrinsic size of an element (such as height: auto;).
Traditionally, animating something into or out of the screen (as opposed to just hiding it visually) required JavaScript to remove the element from the page after waiting for the animation or transition to complete. No longer!
When these new features land in browsers, you’ll be able to animate to display: none like any other property using a keyframe animation:
You can also do the same thing with a CSS transition, but you’ll need to set the new transition-behavior property to allow-discrete for that to work. I can see something like * {transition-behavior: allow-discrete} becoming a part of my CSS reset in the future to enable this behavior by default.
But what about the opposite case? You have an element that’s currently not displayed and you want to animate it as it appears. Again, we typically use JavaScript for this today to ensure the initial styles are set properly and our element doesn’t display visually on the page before it has animated.
The second new feature coming to CSS is the ability to animate to and from an element’s intrinsic size. The most common use case for this is collapsible areas: we want them to be height: 0px when closed, and when opened their height should be automatic based on the contents.
Because CSS has historically not allowed for animating to height: auto;, we’ve had to use JavaScript to measure the height of the contents and animate to that pixel value.
When this feature lands in browsers, we’ll instead be able achieve this like so:
These features are just a few of the many ways that CSS is growing and becoming more powerful and expressive. To learn about all of the other great new things coming, check out this excellent video by Una Kravets from Google I/O.
Una says that we’re in the golden era for web UI, and I couldn’t agree more.
This state of affairs goes beyond compassion fatigue. Our around-the-clock overexposure to global human suffering, our daily feed of what we once considered catastrophic events — political, ecological, cultural — when combined with diminished attention spans, smaller and smaller chunks of content, and baked-in cross-platform imperatives to remain emotionally removed from any given person, place, or event, adds up to a kind of merciless sterility and an impatience with meatspace that we’ve never known before.
That’s the promise: you will live more curiously if you write. You will become a scientist, if not of the natural world than of whatever world you care about. More of that world will pop alive. You will see more when you look at it.
Judging by the discourse, web components seem to be gaining in popularity lately, and I’m very here for it.
Trying to build on the web using a component model was what led me (and others I’m sure) into the arms of React many years ago. While I’m grateful for that journey, and still believe React is the right choice for many projects, it gives me a lot of comfort to know there’s a native tool I can reach for.
The tricky thing with web components, like the web platform in general, is the flexibility. What makes it so powerful can also make it hard to learn, and even harder to know if what you’re learning is the right or recommended path. It takes time for best practices to form and percolate.
Many of my online acquaintances know that I live in Chicago, but I suspect they might not know that I’m from a small university town in Mississippi called Starkville.
Starkville is home to Mississippi State University, where I attended college and studied Computer Science. In 2017 I graduated and moved to Chicago to start my career.
At the time I was excited to escape the place where I spent so many of my formative years, a place which was the symbol of mundanity for me and my youthful ambitions.
Seven years later and I’m having coffee and catching up on my inbox when I happened to find the latest issue of Claire Evans’ newsletter: a delightful story about moon trees—that is, trees grown from seeds that traveled to space and around the moon 34 times during the Apollo 14 mission.
Claire traces the history of the seeds, which were germinated into seedlings and given out to foresters across the country before being largely forgotten about and then eventually rediscovered and catalogued by NASA.
Today less than 100 moon trees remain, but as Claire goes on to describe, there is a second generation of moon trees (so called “half-moons”) grown from the seeds of original trees that remain today.
The location of one of these mother-trees, though, is what caught my attention: it’s on the campus of Mississippi State University, my campus. All the times I walked past this humble tree I had no idea it had been to space.
It’s such a pleasant surprise to have this story appear in my inbox and show me something new about a place where I spent so much time.
While I lived there, I often felt suffocated by the mundanity of my home town. This has reminded me that there are things to appreciate and interesting stories (of perhaps cosmic proportion!) to discover in even the most mundane of places. We just have to keep our eyes open and remember not to take anything for granted.
Hearty congrats to Robin Rendle who has turned his wonderful CSS-focused newsletter into a good, old fashioned blog. The Cascade is beautiful, and is already full of great content for CSS nerds like me.
The site is, generously, free to read, but member supported for $10/year. Subscribing, for me, was an absolute no brainer.
There’s not enough words in the English language to describe how cool it is to build a little publishing machine. That rare, lightning-in-a-bottle feeling of throwing a few services together and building something greater than the sum of its parts.
It’s never been easier to create a website (a publishing machine!) for yourself or your interests. The feeling of ownership you’ll have compared to publishing on someone else’s platform is a powerful force in and of itself.