Daniël van der Winden • All posts

Writing the NoGood book

2026-07-09T00:00:00Z

Some twenty-odd years ago I’d spend hours on end in my bedroom, in the attic of our house, my big, boxy, self-built computer humming reassuringly on the floor beside my feet. I hung out on forums, wrote reviews about music, and built little websites about everything that interested me—chucking them out after two weeks to pursue new ways of building things, writing things. I’d spend evenings scrolling other people’s sites too, clicking my way from one to the next and inspecting the code to work out how its creators had pulled something off: the typographic details, the shadows and gradients, the textures. I loved that version of the web, and my time on it.

The NoGood book. All photography by Lilia Luganskaia-Kuilder.

The illustrations by my friend Thomas are reminiscent of those days. They’re rooted in a world of rickety hardware, flickering lights, and precariously wired contraptions. They have a tactile quality, and carry the same mindset I felt back then: of independence, and a novel kind of community. A kinship with those building things out in the open.

When he told me he was designing a book of his work and asked me to write it, I was immediately excited, and looked forward to putting the story behind his work to paper. The assignment seemed simple enough: here are hundreds of pages of visual work, let’s introduce them to the world. But initially, every sentence I added got in the way of the images. Slowly, the writing became a study in what not to say.

Thomas is a humble fellow and doesn’t feel the need to speak to his work all that much, so working together meant first building an all-encompassing outline, then taking away as much as we possibly could. Through hours of conversation, many texts, and shared references, we inched closer to what drives him, and what he’d like to get across to his readers.

What’s left, I think, is a gentle introduction to his moniker, NoGood: a foreword and a few chapters covering how it came to be, why it’s the perfect place for him to experiment and grow his practice, and where it might be headed next.

I loved doing this—the whole thing was an exercise in restraint, which turned out to be the truest way to introduce someone who lets the work speak for itself. Many thanks to Thomas for trusting me with it.

You can buy the book now, over on the NoGood website.

If you’re sitting on a body of work that’s looking for writing to accompany it, I’d love to hear from you.

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McLaren M6GT

2026-07-06T20:58:00Z

Link: https://www.mclaren.com/cars/gl_en/m6gt-mclaren-special-operations?ref=daniel.pizza

The Special Operations team at McLaren restored the McLaren M6GT, a car designed in 1967 by Bruce McLaren, yet never made it past the prototype phase.

Details of the McLaren M6GT.

This was never going to be a simple rebuild. We took it as an act of custodianship, with an immense responsibility to stay true to the original vision. The goal wasn’t merely to imitate the M6GT, but to bring it back. Honestly. Faithfully. With the same obsession that Bruce channelled into the original.

There’s a short video of it on YouTube, too. Gorgeous machinery.

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How Japan’s railways stayed one while splitting apart

2026-06-24T13:17:10Z

Link: https://arun.is/blog/jr-logo/?ref=daniel.pizza

Arun Venkatesan outlines how Japan’s railway companies all carry one logo across thousands of vehicles, maintaining a distinct, shared visual identity for what is actually eight different organisations.

[...] the new corporate identity was commissioned as a single system that would apply across all the companies. In just 124 days — beginning with the passing of railway reform bills — the new JR companies launched across Japan, with new branding applied to every vehicle. The brief was minimal. The designers were given full control, told only that the group had to be called either “Japan Railways” or “Nippon Railways”. It was up to them to find a solution that worked aesthetically and within the constraints.

Workers applying the JR branding. Image courtesy of NDC.

Great story for a great brand identity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, its design process is reminiscent of Studio Ghibli’s, in that an older man struggled to delegate the design work to a younger team, and pulled all-nighters to deliver it.

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Michael Palmisano and Radiohead’s Weird Fishes/Arpeggi

2026-06-12T21:46:00Z

Link: https://youtu.be/9FKzTblm37g?si=TqFa0f3uEWduK3NH

The strangest thing happened in my brain today, where SpaceX’s IPO reminded me of this guitar teacher, who hears Radiohead’s Weird Fishes/Arpeggi for the first time, tries to deconstruct it on the fly, falls for it, and is especially taken by Phil Selway’s drumming like a metronome.

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Jeff Parker ETA IVtet: Happy Today

2026-06-12T12:04:00Z

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUJOKwbhJK8

Over the past few years I’ve grown to appreciate Jeff Parker (virtuoso guitarist from Chicago) very much. The jazzy, improvised nature of his work—best exemplified on a few of his recent albums, like The Way Out of Easy and Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy—is just phenomenal.

The latest album he’s released with his quartet, Happy Today, might be my favourite so far. International Anthem and Nonesuch Records recently uploaded the video of its recording to YouTube, and it is a trip.

Jay Bellerose on drums and percussion, Anna Butterss on acoustic bass, Josh Johnson on alto saxophone—I hope to catch them live all together one day. I can’t believe this has accrued just 14K views so far!

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The old typography is new again

2026-06-08T09:20:00Z

Link: https://adobe.design/ideas/the-old-typography-is-new-again?ref=daniel.pizza

For five centuries, every typeface size was its own unique design. What we now call optical sizing—the practice of adapting a typeface’s design for different sizes to keep it readable—is a modern attempt to preserve that deliberate design choice to honor size-specific type, even though the physical reasons for it no longer apply.

A nice reminder by Elliot Jay Stocks on optical sizing in typography, and how variable fonts quietly restore this craft. Using opsz, the browser already maps font-size to the right optical size for you, but you can take it one step further and tweak it by hand for different resolutions (as Elliot has done on his personal website).

Similar to his, my site uses Oh No Type Co’s Degular too, and I have optical sizing enabled as well. You’ll see it render differently in page titles than it does in the inline opsz here in the body copy.

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Dawn of the Electric World Order

2026-05-25T13:11:00Z

Link: https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/dawn-of-the-electric-world-order?ref=daniel.pizza

Once a climate project, electrification is now a geopolitical insurance policy. Seventy-five percent of the world’s population lives in net fossil fuel importing countries and collectively spends $1.7 trillion a year importing fuels. Many of those governments facing a loss of confidence in global oil and gas markets are expanding clean energy and electrification projects. In April, France announced $10 billion in subsidies for EVs and heat pumps. The month prior, Spain introduced measures to further speed up electrification, renewable generation, and storage. Vietnam is about to ban petrol motorbikes in downtown Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City; the country’s giant conglomerate Vin is abandoning a planned LNG terminal in favor of a renewable project. Nigeria’s solar imports from China in March were more than five times the level of a year earlier. The list is endless.

Two wars in four years, and especially the war on Iran, are accelerating the energy transition. Domestic electrons are starting to look like security.

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The collage work of Mike McQuade

2026-05-25T13:02:00Z

Link: https://mikemcquade.com/?ref=daniel.pizza

The collage work of Mike McQuade.

I’ve been drawn to collages recently. A friend shared an article from The Atlantic, a while back, and it featured the work of Mike McQuade, whose work I was familiar with from the Meet Me In The Bathroom posters, but I’d never dug through his portfolio in detail. Well worth your time.

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Introducing Kendrick Lamar to an Italian poet

2026-05-25T12:54:00Z

Link: https://youtu.be/q5dqCeNEIFU?is=i7S9sKo0g47XVMJ-

A kid introduces his professor, a poet, to Kendrick Lamar. The professor, expertly spinning his pencil, impressively sinks his teeth into Kendrick’s lyric, from across a few albums, and—admiringly—lays out the poetic nature of his work.

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Bibliobus

2026-04-13T07:46:00Z

Link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/25681716@N03/with/3171031441?ref=daniel.pizza

An example of a Bibliobus.

Back in the days, in small villages in the Netherlands like the one I grew up in, there used to be a Bibliobus: a library bus or van that visited the village at set times so the residents could borrow books to read (biblio comes from the Dutch word for library, bibliotheek).

This photo collection on Flickr (found via Daniel Benneworth-Gray) shows a few of them. Different times and, in some cases, tremendous graphic design.

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Current: an RSS reader

2026-03-07T16:08:00Z

Link: https://www.terrygodier.com/current/?ref=daniel.pizza

I linked to Terry Godier’s thoughts on RSS before.

He followed them up by launching his own RSS reader, Current. It has no unread count: new posts arrive, linger for some time, and then quietly fade away.

A lot of deep thought went into its creation and, the occassional UX niggle aside, I find it very pleasing to use.

I’m glad he turned the concept of RSS upside down and gave it a good shake. (I do hope the square-shaped macOS icon will be updated soon!)

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H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery

2026-03-05T17:03:00Z

Link: https://www.inconspicuous.info/p/h-bomb-a-frank-lloyd-wright-typographic?ref=daniel.pizza

Image from The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives.

A geeky typographic deep-dive into upside-down H’s.

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iPad Air with M4

2026-03-05T15:57:00Z

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT5iDm9XRl8

Apple released a few ads this week and, while I haven’t paid very close attention to their advertising output recently, they are... quite great. I liked the one for the Neo, and the ad for the new iPad Air is particularly well executed. It has a lovely light touch, and is somewhat disorienting amd irksome, but in a good way. The horrendous macOS regression aside, it seems they’ve found their mojo on this front.

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AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It

2026-02-12T19:25:00Z

Link: https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it/?ref=daniel.pizza

Research by Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye shows that AI doesn’t reduce one’s workload, but increases it. The summary:

One of the promises of AI is that it can reduce workloads so employees can focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks. But according to new research, AI tools don’t reduce work, they consistently intensify it: In the study, employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so. That may sound like a win, but it’s not quite so simple. These changes can be unsustainable, leading to workload creep, cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making. The productivity surge enjoyed at the beginning can give way to lower quality work, turnover, and other problems. To correct for this, companies need to adopt an “AI practice”, or a set of norms and standards around AI use that can include intentional pauses, sequencing work, and adding more human grounding.

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Phantom Obligation

2026-02-04T13:44:00Z

Link: https://www.terrygodier.com/phantom-obligation/?ref=daniel.pizza

Terry Godier on why RSS readers (still) look like email clients, and why that means the design has guilt built-in.

He asks Brent Simmons, the designer of the first RSS reader, NetNewsWire, who says:

The part I don’t understand and can’t explain is why RSS readers are still mostly following this UI. But every new RSS reader ought to consider not being yet another three-paned-aggregator. There are surely millions of users who might prefer a river of news or other paradigms. Why not have some fun and do something new, or at least different?

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The Winterkeeper

2026-01-19T07:19:35Z

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OwLLNPRbUw

A lifetime spent protecting Yellowstone National Park. Steven Fuller is a winter caretaker of the park, and has lived there for the past fifty years, hunkering down in a remote mountain cabin, and raising his children there, too—a most idyllic upbringing.

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Jonny Greenwood On His Score For One Battle After Another

2026-01-18T14:30:35Z

Link: https://audioboom.com/posts/8806348-jonny-greenwood-on-his-score-for-one-battle-after-another/?ref=daniel.pizza

Edith Bowman interviews Jonny Greenwood about his score for One Battle After Another, the latest film by Paul Thomas Anderson that’s just plain fantastic. They have collaborated on many films now (There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread, Licorice Pizza, Inherent Vice, The Master), and hearing Greenwood explain in detail how he went about creating this latest is a treat.

Apparently, prompted by the fact that one of the musical cues needed to go on for 22 minutes, he built and programmed a mechanical ghost drumband; I’d love to see it in action. Greenwood always speaks with such respect about the musicians he’s worked with, and is so humble about his own musical genius. Always a joy to listen to.

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Designing TV titles with Matt Willey

2026-01-17T11:01:35Z

Link: https://vimeo.com/1127617042

I’m a fan of Matt Willey’s work. I found him through INQUE, the large-format annual literary publication he designs, and followed his work since. Here he is speaking at Typographics 2025 about designing TV titles for, among other things, Killing Eve. (He also designed the titles for Landscapers, a great show I had entirely forgotten about.)

Cheers to Charlie for sharing.

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Ten Writing Prompts

2026-01-17T10:48:00Z

Link: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2026/01/14/ten-writing-prompts/?ref=daniel.pizza

Three Six Five by Lucy Ives.

Over on The Paris Review, via Iris, ten writing prompts by Lucy Ives, from her forthcoming book Three Six Five. The Distraction Diary is one I will try and implement as of this week.

If you work at a computer, keep a running account of what you are thinking at moments when, instead of continuing a task, you have a tendency to turn to “frivolous” or “unnecessary” pursuits, such as digging through social media, stalking esoteric DJs, or trawling eBay. Note your thoughts and impulses at these moments. Consider allowing the note-taking to replace the activity you had thought to turn toward. Remain aimless, if possible. Observe, describe; write things you didn’t mean to write and think things you didn’t mean to think.

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The next chapter of my career: advancing the transition to sustainable energy at Enode

2026-01-05T07:20:02Z

2025 was a transitional year in my career. I left my previous role in June, took two weeks off, then built this website. I made myself available for a new role—contract or permanent—and had conversations with quite a few interesting companies. I was fortunate to find that plenty of people, in-house or at design studios, are looking for experienced Software/Product Designers (I may dedicate a post to my learnings in this regard, as well).

I rolled into contracting for Fictive Kin, where I collaborated with a magnificent team on two different projects; one for a Mexican retailer, another for Ladder, which will hopefully see the light of day soon. It was during this time that I got to talking with Enode about replacing one of its two designers, Jens, during his parental leave. This would be an opportunity for me to work with a dear friend, Kristian—with whom I initially set up the Amsterdam office of Bakken & Bæck in 2015—and alongside a few ex-colleagues from my time there. After a few conversations about the work they required, I decided to take on the opportunity, joining them from October onwards.

Enode creates software that helps build a resilient future for energy systems, and more flexibility for consumers. Energy providers can use their API, and a plethora of connected devices, to create an energy grid that can carry the load that all those energy devices (electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, heating systems) require of it, and optimise and balance its usage.

As they put it:

Through technology that automatically optimises energy usage for millions of consumers around the world, we aim to be at the forefront of the energy transition. Our goal is to enable the next frontier of energy apps and services that will play a crucial role in solving the toughest challenge of our time.

My place was on the Experience team, designing software for the people who use Enode to simulate their use cases, collaborating with a handful of engineers and a PM. The welcome was warm, and I enjoyed the collaboration immediately. I was able to get up to speed quickly and contribute meaningfully within a week or two. It’s a very technical product, but translating something so technical to understandable and usable interfaces can be incredibly satisfying.

Examples of the software I work on at Enode.

That second half of 2025 made me consider continuing contracting as a Senior or Staff Product Designer. And while I appreciate the flexibility it could provide, I learned I’m too anxious for a freelance lifestyle. Getting caught up in the forecasting of work and juggling conversations to line up potential projects is something I’ve done in an agency setting for years, and it doesn’t align with what I want to spend my time on. I prefer the idea of building a long-standing relationship with one team, a deep understanding of the challenges we’re solving for, and focusing on designing software to accommodate for that.

After a few conversations with Enode’s leadership team, I’ve decided to join them as a permanent employee. Starting today, I’m dedicating the next chapter in my career to the energy transition. Together with Kristian and Jens I’ll shape the design direction of our products, the visual language of our brand, and how the design team operates within the company.

I’m looking forward to the collaboration, and to taking on the challenges ahead. And, if the company’s mission sounds like your cup of tea: we’re hiring.

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