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Remembrance of Websites Past
2000 was the peak year for Adobe’s website. It was a content site filled with creative how-to articles, opinion pieces, and artist interviews where you could also, if you wished, buy or get info on Adobe products. Now this is how you create a product site for a suite of creative products, I told myself…
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My Glamorous Life: A Good Lie
For “My father’s favorite food is,” the kid had written SALAD.
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AI, Disruption, and Standards
Individually, we have very little power, but together we have a great deal of power. In response to a series of Medium articles by Patrick Neeman—like this one that addressed issues of AI governance, fairness,…
Design
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The Most Important Industrial Designer of All Time
One Frenchman can’t be wrong. Push to the edge of what people will accept. Stop there. Raymond Loewy called it MAYA, and used it to design the modern world. The most important industrial designer you’ve never heard of.
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Ebb, Meet Flow: Intrinsic Design in a Nutshell
In 2020, the gifted makers of websites at Clearleft shared methods to achieve fluid responsive design. “Utopian” web design was (and still is) their half-kidding name for this approach, which Apple’s Jen Simmons, working indendently, called “intrinsic design.” Instead of chasing an ever-changing number of fixed breakpoints, utopian or intrinsic design follows the web’s intrinsic…
My Glamorous Life
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Tales o’ Tech: Suffering Fools
Why first impressions are often correct. Today’s jerk is tomorrow’s techno-fascist.
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Mix
The start of a beautiful weekend.
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Her Glamorous Life
Snow White—17 years old—didn’t come meowing for food when I entered the kitchen at 6 a.m. An hour later I found her lying motionless on the sofa. I stared until she moved, slightly, nestling her…
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The End
ON THIS DAY in 1971, Pamela Courson found Doors frontman Jim Morrison dead in the bathtub of their Paris apartment. The cause of death was heart failure. No autopsy was performed. Morrison was 27. A…
the Daily Report
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For students who make websites
Meet WordPress.com Education, a new, free product for teachers and students.
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A Permanent Home
Your writing needs a permanent home—a domain that you own and control. Every few years, the internet convinces writers that a new digital paradise has arrived. First, it was social media like Facebook. Then blogging networks like…
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You lost me at “infielder.”
The instant a business guy uses a sports metaphor to make his most important strategic point, I am lost. If you want me to understand your business idea, try wrapping it in Wendy Carlos’s secrets…
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The name of this LP is “Side One.”
On Sunday, I published Side One of my album on Bandcamp. The name of the album is also “Side One.” It is instrumental music with roots in Soundtrack, hip-hop, funk, jazz, 19th Century Romantic classical,…
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Stalin decided what was good science. Millions starved.
What happens when leaders choose political expediency over science?
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The Secret
If I learned one thing in 25 years of running design and education companies, it’s that idealism isn’t a business strategy. If you wonder why my partners and I had to shut down organizations we…
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