Pat Dryburgh
Julia DeWahl Jan 16, 2020 · 14 min read Two Cherubs by Raffaello Sanzio Raphael, 1512 I started angel investing in 2018 and have made 23 investments to date. Here’s an overview of my approach to inves
A hand conversion to HTML of the original MacWord (or Word for Mac?)document written in March 1989 and later redistributed unchanged apart fromthe date added in May 1990. Provided for historical inter
I love staying up late, but I hate struggling through the mornings. Here’s how I adapted, and how you can, too. Credit... Arnaud Aubry The world isn’t made for night owls. You struggle into work in the dark hours before 10 a.m. — or your morning coffee — and you’re greeted by some chipper person who…
Debates continue to rage about the role of UX designers, user research, and how far knowledge about the user should permeate the organization. On one extreme, UX is seen as a specialized pocket of kno
Last time, I laid out some thoughts on how the design of individual letters can accumulate into the feel of a typeface. With all that in mind, let’s take a look through my font collection and make some selections. Sans-serif I introduced Scto Grotesk A and Untitled Sans in my last blog post because…
These questions come up often from junior designers who I meet along the way and I figured it might make sense to keep them here instead of repeatedly typing it out every time. Take this all with a grain of salt. It is based off my personal experience with hiring Designers, teaching Design, and…
Have you ever been told, “ just have some confidence ”? I didn’t question this phrase for a long time. I’ve recently recognized something from my teaching, my career, and my studies: you can’t just have confidence. It’s a prescription without an outcome. The best way to illustrate my point is by…
Writing is meant for reading. Sometimes, the reading doesn’t matter that much. We might dash off a quick text, toss out a laugh line, or send a rote confirmation. Our emoji are leaves on the wind. Other times though, the reading matters a lot. Occasionally we need to write something that must be…
Natasha Jen spoke at 99U Conference in 2017 about design thinking in her talk titled, “Design Thinking is Bullshit,”* and I have thought on and off about this for quite some time. Her title and introduction buries her lead: real designers surround themselves with evidence. We miss this a lot because…
Last month’s “Time Flies” event for the Apple Watch Series 6 and new iPad Air was about an hour long; this week’s “Hi, Speed” event ran just a bit longer at 70 minutes. Perhaps, if 2020 had gone has p
Perhaps you remember Eric S. Raymond from his memorable essay “ The Cathedral and the Bazaar ,” or his advice to programmers on “not reacting like a loser,” or his enthusiasm for guns . Regardless, th
I first got into technology in the 1990s. I started out by writing Windows games in BASIC and C++, which helped me start building a sense for what goes into making software. Then, everything changed. The web overturned the software world. Many of the most important companies and apps of the era were…
Katie Riley Apr 10 · 9 min read Earlier in my career, I led a lot of remote usability tests, which helped me build the ability to take quick, detailed notes while still engaging with my participants. In user research, everything a participant says is a potential business-shaping insight, so taking…
October 19, 2006 , by 95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography. Back in 1969, Emil Ruder, a famous Swiss typographer, wrote on behalf…
Aug 4, 2018 Products are easier to reason about when you think of them as functions. They transform an input situation into an output situation. This lets you describe what the product does as a transformation of the user's circumstance instead of a bundle of features. How a product is like a…
What I Learned Co-Founding Dribbble Dan Cederholm in Dribbble Jun 25 · 16 min read L ast month, I gave a 30-minute talk at the Awwwards conference in San Francisco. I used to give talks fairly often, mostly covering CSS and web design in general, but this one was a bit different. I decided to share…
François Bach 🌞 Nov 20, 2017 How to design a cancellation flow that respects your user while minimizing churn (yes, it’s possible!) Let’s get this out of the way: the goal of this post is to help you mitigate churn (account cancellations) by implementing user-centric yet business-driven design.…
For more than 35 years, Dennis Hope has been selling land on the Moon . Hope registered a claim for the Moon in 1980 and, since the US government & the UN didn’t object, he figures he owns it (along with the other planets and moons in the solar system). “I sent the United Nations a declaration of…
Illustration by Dougal MacPherson
My first contribution to Bootstrap was a tiny line of CSS. It was a no-brainer to merge, but the feeling of seeing that bit of code in the project’s codebase was unreal and addictive.
You may think that open source is not for you. After all, it has always been a…
“Business with a conscience” is no longer a fringe mentality. Witness top Walmart executives writing for consulting giant McKinsey : “Increasingly, a basic expectation among customers, governments, and communities will be that the companies they do business with provide a significant net positive…
In the years I’ve run a consulting studio, I’ve noticed something odd about consulting studios: they often implode. Big ones, little ones, and ostensibly successful ones all seem have a weird habit of suddenly letting go half their staff. I would very much like to not lose half my staff. To that…
AltConf 2018 I didn’t win a golden ticket to WWDC this year. WWDC last year was a refreshing mid-year break and the energy from Apple and its employees was reinvigorating. Everything is super dialled in and everyone is very enthused to be there. AltConf this year was a close approximation. I also…
Hi, Marc . I grew up using your work. Thanks to one of my parents being employed by a university, I got to use Mosaic to browse the early Web way before most people had even heard of it. My first software development internship was a summer spent using beta versions of Netscape technologies – what…
"There's something in your latest scan that we need to double check." Here's what I've learned about cancer as a survivor: even once you're past it, and despite doctors' reassurances that you should go back to your normal life, it never truly leaves you. It clings to the back of your mind and sits…
When you work for yourself, you get to be in charge of your own daily habits (to some extent of course—it’s hard to monetize eating vegan cheesy chips or hammock sleeping, for example). I had a conversation with my buddy James Clear about this question, for my upcoming book, Company of One. He…
For most of my design life, I’ve worked alone (specifically for myself), so I’ve never had an impressive design workflow. To be completely honest, it’s embarrassing. I wouldn’t wish for even my worst enemy to inherit my design files. Because I mostly hand off design files to myself, I often paste…
Back in spring of 2016 I started writing about traveling light , and chronicling what I had found and tried as better clothing for traveling. I’ve moved to wearing most of this type of clothing full time now, and write about it often at Everyday Wear with my pal Steve. But there’s more to packing…
How to survive air travel Craig Mod Jul 23, 2014 This is how you survive the airport: Arrive early. Arrive early? Sounds simple. It is — let me show you. Arrive so early that a friend will text you, What R U sixty years old? No, you’re not sixty, you’re much older, because the wisdom of the early…
Joshua Blankenship Apr 12, 2018 FADE IN INT. COFFEESHOP — DAY PROSPECTIVE CLIENT We need a new website. GRIZZLED, SEASONED DESIGNER Awesome. We build websites. Why do you think you need one? PROSPECT (confused) Doesn’t everyone need a website? OL’ GRIZZ Maybe, it really depends on what you want to…
Most freelancers burn through clients faster than King Arthur loses knights (especially if you're enjoying the Monty Python version). Note: this article was originally published at the Creative Class freelancing blog . A thriving consulting business needs a constant stream of new clients, after all.…
In 2017 we made web accessibility a priority at Basecamp. It was long overdue. Over the past year, I made it a personal mission to make Basecamp 3 more accessible for people with disabilities that affect how they use the web. It’s something we’d been meaning to focus on at Basecamp for a while. But…
Once, we were Explorers. We used a web browser called Navigator. Alta Vista, Lycos, and Yahoo! were the maps. With these we discovered new worlds and, sometimes, even more about the world we were in. We called it surfing because the web was an ocean; vast and limitless as far as the eye could see…
Jeffrey Zeldman Apr 11, 2017 AS THE HEAD of a newish design studio , I spend a fair amount of time writing proposals. And here’s how I like to do it. I do it like a conversation, and that’s how we start: with phone calls and emails to one or two key decision makers, followed by a research period of…
My wife is a jewelry designer . She has a workshop where she spends much her time hammering, soldering, tinkering, shaping, sawing, buffing, polishing, experimenting, and iterating in order to produce gorgeous designs from a slew of shiny metal materials. Frost Finery’s workshop in Pittsburgh Her…
Canada has a cheese problem. Back in 1970, dairy farmers convinced the Canadian government to enact something called the “National Milk Marketing Plan”. This regime greatly restricted the production and sale of dairy, creating a cartel . The goal was to increase dairy prices in Canada – because who…
I’ve noticed a rhetorical trope in our industry. It’s not, like, widespread , but I see it in enough blog entries and conference talks that I think it’s a pretty common pattern: namely, the author’s sharing some advice with the reader and, if the reader’s boss or stakeholders won’t support a given…
Email is awful. Don’t get me wrong, some specific emails are delightful – who doesn’t love a short, thoughtful note from a friend? An inbox full of noise though? What a drag. So what do? Sure, you can start unsubscribing from mailing lists and notifications – as many as possible, ideally. Still,…
Last week I was in Atlanta visiting some friends and talking about business-y stuff. And I thought it’d be interesting to share a few of the apps and other gear that I take with me when traveling. As far as physical gear goes, my main staples include: iPad Pro (who needs a “real” computer?) Baron…
You’ve just released your latest photo-organizing software. Through some mechanism which will be left as an exercise to the reader, you’ve managed to actually let people know about it. Maybe you have a popular blog or something. Maybe Walt Mossberg wrote a rave review in the Wall Street Journal. One…
A few nights ago, I posted on Micro.blog (which cross posts to Twitter like magic) the following : Taking a break from Twitter for 2018 and such. Micro.blog is much more sane. I had not given it any more thought than that one post. There was no master plan, other than the specific choice of saying…
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