Links

A regularly updated collection of things I find worth reading, watching, or listening to. Subscribe via RSS.

  • Into The Personal Website Verse

     № 60
    Illustration based on photographs of the Apple Lisa by Victor R. Ruiz and the Apple Lisa mouse by Marcin Wichary, both released under a Creative Commons license (Attribution 2.0 Generic, CC BY 2.0).

    From 2019, but as relevant as ever. Matthias Ott on why carving out your own place on the internet is so important.

    Building things for your own site is so worthwhile because you are allowed to make mistakes and learn without pressure. If it doesn’t work today, well, maybe it’ll work tomorrow.

    I’ve yet to look into and implement Webmentions and Webrings, and I need to submit my site to a few more directories, but the barriers for me to continue building my own place on the web have definitely been lifted.

  • Quality is a trap

     № 59

    Eric W. Bailey explains why the term “quality” keeps popping up in the design industry and shows how malleable and variable a term it is.

    “Pride in craft is always important. Just be sure that the craft is serving objective and constructive concerns.”

  • Elsewhere, walking in the peatlands

     № 58

    A special episode where Charlie Jermyn recites an essay he wrote for the first issue of TRANSCRIPT Magazine.

    The reading is a written documentation of a ten hour experiment conducted in August 2021: a walk from Leiden to Amsterdam in search of creative enlightenment. Each hour is interspersed with music that reflects the landscape and circumstance he found himself in.

  • Typography is the foundation of any design system

     № 57

    Elliott Jay Stocks, who I’ve followed ever since he did 8 Faces, shared a great few nerdy typographic nuggets in his talk at Config 2025. Product Designers, take note.

  • Looking elsewhere

     № 56

    Many great thoughts in this article by Robb Owen about craft, intentionality, standards and hype.

  • Taste at speed

     № 55

    As I was finishing up writing a talk for Adyen’s Studio Day (on designing and writing with attention and intention, on quality and craft, on taste, and on AI tooling), an email arrived in my inbox. In it was the latest post by Carly Ayres, writer, and previous co-founder of HAWRAF, and it reinforced the line of thinking I’d been on.

    She writes about taste, speed and AI and how, while AI may lower the bar to get to a decent first draft of whatever it is you’re creating, speed doesn’t always indicate progress. Progress may just be movement.

    Tools produce polish, but not perspective.

    I see many people writing about this at the moment. About how perspective and taste are what can set a good designer apart. About how creative constraints and thoughtful revision are key to an outcome that’s good, and not just finished.

  • Against The Dark Forest

     № 54

    Erin Kissane writes about online spaces and what makes them unbearable and joyful. The post is under her wreckage/salvage moniker, a “tiny studio and display case for small research projects and long-form explorations.”

  • Stone Skipping Is a Lost Art. Kurt Steiner Wants the World to Find It.

     № 53
    Photos: Caroline Tompkins

    An essay I wrote recently led me down a rabbit hole on stone skipping, culminating in this read on Kurt Steiner, a man who "has dedicated his entire adult life to stone skipping, sacrificing everything to produce world-record throws that defy the laws of physics."

  • Shelf Space

     № 52
    Photo: Ana Skobe

    For the 100th post on Frontier Magazine, Brian Sholis—self-proclaimed library devotee—indulges in sharing recently built libraries around the world.

    Congratulations on 100 posts, Brian!

  • How Agnès Varda Became an Icon of Cinema

     № 51
    Photograph by Bob Berg

    Richard Brody on the life and work of French filmmaker Agnès Varda. I’m looking forward to reading the upcoming biography, and I’ve quite a few of her films to catch up on.