Essays and Articles
Latest posts
The Arc of Design
Do no harm. Make things clear. Show us the future.
Dartmoor, Death Stranding, and me
This place is not in favor of you.
Systems, Mistakes, and the Sea
A note about design systems, boats, and hyperobjects.
The Futures of Typography
What are the skills we need to contribute to the future of typography? And what do two ghostly figures from the 15th century have to do with that future?
In Search of the Long Wow
Where was our literary and technological revolution? Where was the future book?
The New Web Typography
How should we go about making rules for typesetting on the web?
A Visual Lexicon
For the past six months I’ve been taking a good look at how designers and developers communicate with one another, jotting down the problems as I go. The systems that have cropped up in between are fascinating but I believe they could be better if we examine our use of language.
The Other Interface
The directories, files and partials, as well as all of the code and documentation that makes up our front-end development system, is an interface. It’s high time we started thinking about its usability – for the sake of developers and users alike.
Bookmarking
When we read books they leave traces of our reading and these traces are often used as marks of ownership. So should websites be so squeaky clean when we revisit them? Is there some other form of trace that can be left other than the snarky comments left hidden in their depths?
Call Me Interactivity
What do we want from storytelling machines? And when publishers use terms such as ‘interactivity’ or ‘immersion’, what do they really mean? These terms either describe a genuine glimpse of the future, or a new form of commercial and technological chutzpah. But what is it that we’re really hunting here? What’s our digital Moby Dick?
Book design and emotional information
The journey from reader to writer is a perilous one, and bad design affects all of this information on transit as we read.