Unsung
Marcin Wichary
My name is Marcin Wichary. I’ve worked as a UX designer, typographer, front-end person, and manager at Google, Medium, and Figma. I’ve also written a book about keyboards and typing, gave talks, and published essays about design, typography, and technology. Unsung is my blog about software craft and quality.
August 2026
September 2026
October 2026
Top Words
- design
- good
- unsung
- review
- right
- book
- user
- fast
- something
- everything
All posts (536)
On his fascinating and long-running Windows dev blog The Old New Thing, Raymond Chen writes about the story of scrollbar right-click menus: Windows 2000 added a right-click menu to the scroll bar. This menu gave you four options that matched existing mouse operations, two operations that matched existing keyboard...
À propos the previous post, wanted to share a 2019 article by Gregory Travis about the two Boeing 737 Max disasters that shook the world in late 2018 and early 2019. It’s titled How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer, and I found it fascinating, well-written, and filled with great details. The...
From The Verge: Apple has developed an unexpected workaround to prevent the iPhone 18 Pro Max from being hit by shipping restrictions on big batteries. There’s a “battery-firmware solution” in place on the new iPhones, according to Apple’s support page, which keeps capacity below the 20Wh limit for single-cell...
In 1996, Street Fighter Alpha 2 was ported onto Super Nintendo Entertainment System, a 1990 machine on its way out and not really up to the task of running such a modern game. The team put up a hell of a job, involving adding a custom compression chip, with the game being much better than anyone expected – but still...
Here are a few nice and interesting design decisions I spotted on various websites in the last months. The pinball repair forum Pinside shows specifically how much time has passed between posts. This is great for orientation and especially when catching up or revisiting – history always gets flattened, and this...
Designer Reimar Servas goes further than the usual Border Radius Discourse and thinks about the deeper but often ignored questions of border radii as a system, and about the consequences of such a system that go beyond visuals: […] These redesign efforts suggest ignorance of a fundamental problem: rounded forms have...
A fun lil convention from the financial app YNAB’s release notes page – there is always a headlining feature with a hero shot and a long description, but the smaller improvements are still listed as “pocket change”: #release notes
Just as there is a ticking bomb built into cut/⌘X – if you cut something, and then cut something else again without a paste in between, you overwrite the clipboard without any way to bring it back – there is another one that awaits you when you use undo/⌘Z. Here’s a typical undo chain, illustrated using Photoshop’s...
Completely unrelated to software, but sometimes stepping outside is what’s needed to develop perspective and find creative solutions – this is Practical Engineering’s video about the many electrical plugs and sockets in America: There are a lot more socket kinds than I expected, and sprinkled in between are some...
In a recent post, Jim Nielsen used the term “bulldozing of an interface”: I’ve found this to be true a lot as of late. Lots of tiny details that were meticulously crafted over years with specific rationales tied to real-world use cases, all completely bulldozed in a giant refactor. I liked that term and description,...
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