(This is a meta post about this very blog. If that’s not interesting to you, skip to the next one!) I thought I’d share a few of the small design details I am proud of for this small blog! 1. After years of being annoyed at Slack for mishandling image sizes, it was important for me to show the screenshots (at least...

(This is a meta post about this very blog. If that’s not interesting to you, skip to the next one!) At Unsung’s 250-postiversary, if I reflect on where this blog has been, and where it might be going, this is what comes to my mind. I didn’t start the project by writing all this down, but I held a lot of this in my...

What Version History, a YouTube show from The Verge, does really well is revisiting older tech products from today’s perspective without allowing nostalgia to take over. This episode about the Western Electric 500 – the canonical American landline rotary phone – is worth watching by all UX designers. There is no...

The 2021 revision of the Mini Cooper ramped up its Britishness by introducing Union Jack flag-inspired turn signals. They looked okay when stationary: But when actually indicating an intention to turn, people started realizing what happens when you have two types of mapping fight each other: On one hand, the...

Wakamaifondue is a web tool to inspect font contents, and it starts by you dropping a font file (.ttf, .otf, or .woff) into a browser. It handles file dropping so thoughtfully, it’s worth pausing and recognizing it: Here’s what’s great about it: You can drop the file anywhere. There is no designated small drop area...

A fun 16-minute video from outsidexbox with 7 examples of videogame bugs where the game creators not only owned up to their mistakes, but creatively acknowledged or remixed those bugs in subsequent versions: I didn’t know about most of these, so I did some googling and created a list for reference: Mortal Kombat:...

Right next to the generic function to delete photos by going through them one by one, my camera has a specific version – Delete All With This Date: Below the actions to close the tab, and close all other tabs, Chrome has a specific version called Close Tabs To The Right: In After Effects, next to typical save...

A fun 24-minute video from Technology Connections about designed sounds in real life: elevator dings, airplane chimes, railway crossing dings, and so on. While I am sympathetic to the notion that sound pollution is a thing we need to be concerned with, the choice between silence and sound pollution is a false...

One of the casualties of Apple’s otherwise brilliantly executed transition to retina pixels has been the mouse pointer, which remains aligned to what “traditional pixels” used to be, rather than the retina/​physical/smaller pixels. Turn on the zoom gesture from a few weeks ago, and you can see the challenge. The...

Cory Doctorow, in 2022, wrote an essay about how John Deere – a farm tractor manufacturer – restrict repairs by owners or third-parties: Deere is one of many companies that practice “VIN-locking,” a practice that comes from the automotive industry (“VIN” stands for “vehicle identification number,” the unique serial...

Found in an archive of font design (for Olivetti typewriters) and smiled: Handoff problems were there before us and will remain after we’re gone. This, too: #history #process #typography

From 2010 to 2021, Justin O’Beirne had been writing about online cartography, specifically in Google Maps and Apple Maps. While both of these services changed a lot since the essays, they are still worth reading. They might be the closest to modern reviews of software as I can think of, and the way the essays are...