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Too Many Notes
Lately, in work conversations, I find myself fighting a lifelong tendency to provide way more context than is absolutely required. If you ask me to okay your work, for example, I may respond with an essay on what delighted me about it. The teaching gene, plus the exuberance of writing and thinking clearly, compel me…
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A die-cut above
Cover art for the 1971 prog-rock LP “Fearless,” by British band Family features a distinctive, die-cut cover design depicting the five band members gradually morphing into a single entity combining features of them all. Tom…
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My brother, the rhythmic conceptualist
Remembrance of beats passed.
Design
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What a year that was.
Know your web design history.
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The salad bar theory of UX professionalism
Less, but better? Not this week.
My Glamorous Life
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American healthcare
Cooling my heels at the drugstore.
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Cold Storage
Good UX is what companies do when they have to. A company that has your stuff locked away doesn’t have to.
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My Glamorous Life: Entertaining Uncle George
Fam and I are visiting my 96-year-old Uncle George tonight. We love him. His complicated and somewhat meandering stories have been music to my daughter’s ears since she fell asleep in a cab at age…
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My Glamorous Life: Bots, Books, and Betrayal
My father was an engineer who designed robots. When I first learned what he did, I imagined the Robot from “Lost in Space,” and asked him to make me one. When I turned 13, I realized…
the Daily Report
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Advice for job seekers
Pitching isn’t bragging.
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Works in Progress
New tunes from an old maker.
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Claude Code for Designers
FIRST, the disclaimers: Some of my favorite writers—folks who are as anti-fascist and pro-democracy as they come—publish on Substack, but I read and recommend their work less and less frequently, because Substack has a Nazi…
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“A streamlined newspaper for a streamlined era”
Posted today for no particular reason.
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Mark your calendar: Local News Day is 9 April
It’s no secret that newspapers across the country exist in a fragile ecosystem. Automattic has long supported journalism and local media with investments in publications and platforms like Longreads, The Atavist, and Newspack. We believe that local news…
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We named them after the humans they were replacing.
“The word ‘computer’ only really slid over to mean ‘a machine’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, once we started building mechanical and then electronic devices to do that work instead [of people].…
Cornerstone content
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