It comes down to this annoying, upsetting, stupid fact: the only way to build a great product is to use it every day, to stare at it, to hold it in your hands to feel its lumps. The data and customers will lie to you but the product never will. And most product orgs suck because they simply don’t use the products that they’re building; they ship incremental nothings without direction because they’re looking at spreadsheets all day long filled with junk data nothings.
I’ve been using Obsidian to write a story, partly for fun, partly as a de-stresser, but also to try my hand at a different form of writing. And one feature that I adore is the graph view which shows the relationships between your documents.
...Each character should have some connection to every other in some form and this is a quick way to notice storytelling gaps. But this view is also helpful for me to not just write the story from start to finish, get mad, then bail. I feel like this story is now more like a codebase, where I can pop open one section of it and tinker and tweak it. Poke it until it’s connected to the rest of the code. I can refactor this one page, this scene, this weapon, this location—without having to worry about writing everything sequentially in chapters and without having to worry about writing high fiction where everything has to be beautiful.
Many moons ago I was experimenting with blend modes in CSS, working on a hacky demo where the text color of an element would adapt to its background....But I dropped the idea and never investigated further.
That is, until today when I spotted a fantastic demo by miunau where he figured it all out.
...Notice how the text color changes as the background gets lighter or darker? That’s context-aware colors!
CSS Grid has made me lazy. Whenever I start a new project I tend to pick a 12 column grid and move on to other things...it’s almost too easy! This is probably also out of laziness in the design, too. I’d often pickup the Bootstrap grid and after years of use I began to see every page built out of 12 columns. So layouts, and the grid systems they’re built out of, felt like a solved problem to me.
...[But] CSS grid is just a tool and it doesn’t have to be perfect or simple or make everything line up in equal measure. But I also realized here that the grid should always be subservient to the content.
Or: content first, grid last.
The ugliest part about tech is the lingo, the language, the words that we use to describe our work and each other.
...For example, the way we describe the different kinds of work. In this world there are managers and “ICs”—individual contributors. Those are the folks who, ya know, get stuff done. They build stuff. They draw the mocks, write the code. To me, calling these folks “ICs” has always been dehumanizing, lazy, and sloppy. It makes it sound like we’re all parts in a giant machine that can be easily replaced with the flick of a switch.
...But besides the tone and feeling of this cruel abbreviation, there’s two reasons why I hate calling people who work this whole dumb “IC” thing.
First, it’s buck wild to me that managers don’t need an abbreviation or shorthand. This tells you something about how they think about the labor of employees, that they can be so easily abbreviated.
Second, there’s no such thing as “individual” contributions! All work, all labor—regardless of job or industry—is a collective. The problem here really starts at school, as they set you up in competition with your classmates and you have to see yourself as the hero that has to do everything for yourself. But actual, real work outside of school requires collective effort to get anything meaningful done.
My own time in a Silicon Valley startup has proved this much to be true; planning doesn’t make for better software. In fact today our design systems team doesn’t have sprints, we don’t have tickets or a daily standup. Each day we come to work, figure out what’s the most important thing that we could be doing, and then we—gasp!—actually do it.
Watching so many other teams slowly flail about whilst they plan for quarter 3.2 of subplan A, whilst our team produces more work in a week than they all do combined in a quarter has been shocking to me.
After four years of working in a large startup, I know what I always assumed was true: you don’t need a plan to make a beautiful thing. You really don’t. In fact, there’s a point where overplanning can be a signal of inexperience and fear and bullshit. The scrum board and the sprints and the inane meetings each and every day are not how you build another Super Mario 64.
Instead all you have to do is hire smart people, trust them to do their best work, and then get the hell out of their way.
I could have spent three minutes on a sketch or three months designing a new interface from scratch but it’s all the same to me: if it doesn’t ship, then it doesn’t count.
I’m not sure why I feel this way, perhaps because I started my career as a front-end developer and became addicted to the short turn around time of spotting a problem, making a commit, and then playing with the fix live in production. But a lot of design doesn’t work that way. You’re entirely dependent on a team of folks to build what you have in mind. There’s a lot of trust involved because if a project is dashed or someone leaves or things are reorganized then your work was, well, for nothing.
Being on the other side of design systems now as a product designer is super interesting. I kinda hate the rules and regulations and nitpicking! And if I can’t lean into the system then I will fight against it with every fiber of my being.
Although, this wasn’t always the case: in a previous life and as a designer on a design systems team, I would frequently say “you can’t do that” or “that’s a bad pattern” or “that’s inconsistent.” I would talk down to designers as if I was their boss. How dare they ruin my perfect garden! Can’t they see they’re standing on the daffodils?
Now I really don’t care about that system! Which is surprising because this shit would keep me up all night. Now? Nothing. Is the product better with this change? Yes. So screw the maintainability and screw consistency. Sure, I don’t want us to have 5 different search inputs and I’ll do everything I can to improve the system but if the product is better with a one-off thing here then tough luck, chaps. I’m gonna add it.
A couple of months back, Craig mentioned in a video that he has a doc filled to the brim with snippets of text—nice words, compliments, and thanks that had been sent his way for his work. Whenever someone says something nice he just copy/pastes it into that doc.
It sounds silly at first and perhaps a little egotistical. Behold! I have a document that proves how great I am!
But I started doing it just to see what it feels like and…hey…actually? It’s so great! When I’m feeling low (often) or whenever the world feels unstable (extremely often) it’s so very nice to return to a few kind words about my work. It reminds me just how much these words of praise mean, it reminds me that I ought to pass that favor along.
I still believe in a Kindle/Analogue-esque device that, within it, contains an operating system that is half Patreon, half Substack, half Instapaper.
I think of this as the Republic of Newsletters writ large—The OmniBlog—where writers can publish their work and folks can subscribe via RSS but with a Coil-esque payment system built in and preloaded onto a physical e-reader. Writers could blog away, connected to eachother, whilst readers could subscribe to their work and perhaps even fund larger pieces of writing...
Shit, I just described Medium huh.
Whenever I’m in a room without a whiteboard I feel trapped. Perhaps this is just the way I have to think through a problem but I can’t breakdown ideas or solutions without a whiteboard or a glass window to draw on. In fact, I’d say that the most unproductive conversations I’ve had with folks is simply down to the fact that I didn’t sit them in front of a whiteboard, put a pen in their hand, and tell them to draw their argument back to me.
...I reckon the vast majority of design and product problems cannot be solved in a nicely typeset document or simply, calmly talking things out. You need to draw the mess. To share and build complex ideas you need to shape them visually, at lo-fidelity, and have someone poke at every part of it.
I think I’ve been darting around this question for a while now:
...I think we’ve all been taught to write in a style that forgets the reader entirely. My English degree taught me, incentivized me in fact, to write poorly with this sort of obfuscatory language, “nevertheless...”, “in this essay I will set out to...” etc.
All that stuff is me pointing at me, pointing at a thing. But we should just get out of the way of the thing we’re pointing at!
It’s 3am and I can’t sleep. There’s no can of mosquito spray next to me and I’m not cursed by that mean Spanish star but my mind is sizzling with ideas and opportunities and feelings of guilt and loss and unbearable shame. Total and absolute frazzle-dazzle.
I wonder if I get this from my dad? As if it’s genetic, just part of my inheritance somehow. Like I’m never really here, I’m always somewhere else. There is some argument to be had, some deadline looming. Some stupid design to be figured out. Some manager to argue with. Some book to be less than half written. Someone out there left to disappoint in some new, small way.
He never really slept either. Throughout my childhood I just assumed that all men were anxious, all men stressed. Men simply do not sleep, I thought.
No matter how fancy your Figma file is or how beautiful and lovingly well organized that Storybook documentation is; the front-end is always your source of truth. You can hate it as much as you like—all those weird buttons, variables, inaccessible form inputs—but that right there is your design system.
...being honest about this is the first step to fixing it.
A writing tip for myself in the future, if I may (and I do): delete every use of “…for me…,” “in my opinion,” “some might disagree,” “I think,” etc. etc. These snippets are a bad habit and make your writing fragile, lacking any conviction, with one eye always over your shoulder. After a while these self-doubting platitudes become road bumps that get in the way of describing the thing that you love.
Here’s one way to improve the thing you’re writing: cut the intro.
...There’s real pressure to make a big deal out of whatever it is and turn everything we write into a thundering manifesto because we have to set up all this context and history, right? Well – no! We absolutely do not and often when we do our writing will mostly suffer for it.
Popover is real neat because you don’t have to worry about z-index or focus management, and using the API is as simple as writing some good ol’ HTML:
<button popovertarget="mypopover">Toggle the popover</button> <div id="mypopover" popover>Popover content</div>I like this!
A few years ago I walked into a bookstore and noticed something peculiar: I found that every book was okay. In fact, books had gotten pretty damn good! A random book in a random bookstore is likely to have an interesting cover with good typography inside. They’re not beautiful objects or anything and, sure, the paper is ehhhh and okay yes they’re using the same boring book fonts that you’ve seen ten million times but there’s nothing about these books that get in the way of my reading. So the baseline for modern book design is pretty high.
This made me wonder why the same isn’t true for websites.
...And yet! I do truly believe that a website can be as well designed as any book, just as thoughtful, just as brilliant. Yet in 2023 it feels like we’ve let websites be one of two things: either confused, junky bloatware or simple white posters with black text and a big checkout button. But the web can be so much more!
Whenever I’m stuck pondering the question: "How do I make this website better?" I know the answer is always this: Care for the text.
Without great writing, a website is harder to read, extremely difficult to navigate, and impossible to remember. Without great writing, it’s hardly a website at all. But it’s tough to remember this day in and day out—especially when it’s not our job to care about the text—yet each and every <p> tag and <button> element is an opportunity for great writing. It’s a moment to inject some humor or add a considerate note that helps people.
…These are the details that make a good website great.
"Every website that’s made me oooo and aaahhh lately has been of a special kind; they’re written and designed like essays. There’s an argument, a playfulness in the way that they’re not so much selling me something as they are trying to convince me of the thing. They use words and type and color in a way that makes me sit up and listen.
And I think that framing our work in this way lets us web designers explore exciting new possibilities. Instead of throwing a big carousel on the page and being done with it, thinking about making a website like an essay encourages us to focus on the tough questions. We need an introduction, we need to provide evidence for our statements, we need a conclusion, etc. This way we don’t have to get so caught up in the same old patterns that we’ve tried again and again in our work.
And by treating web design like an essay, we can be weird with the design. We can establish a distinct voice and make it sound like an honest-to-goodness human being wrote it, too."