Software engineering has long had a concept of “premature optimization” – overbuilding things too early in anticipation of future that might or might not come. I feel design has a version of that, too. Here’s viewer menu hierarchy in Google Drive: One should always feel very uneasy about a menu with just one item,...

I occasionally move older writing that still feels interesting to my new site, and today I republished the 2015 story about a strange bug that brought back an old pixel font from beyond the grave: Some of the technical details inside are obsolete, but the story might still be fun. (Plus, it seems like at every job I...

I mentioned placeholders before in the context of Dropbox Paper… …and I wanted to share a response by Nikita Prokopov, because he had a great point about those Dropbox Paper placeholders that I didn’t consider: For me it’s […] confusing placement. Like if somebody writes “Have a nice day” on a door instead of “Push”...

A meandering and messy, but otherwise an absolutely worthwhile essay from Shubham Bose about the bloat and hostile behaviours on news sites: I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. […] Almost all modern news websites are guilty of...

I feel like social media and recently the slate of AI-powered “tell me what’s here” features continue to show us the power and longevity of screenshots. After all, nothing beats a more or less approachable shortcut and a file format that works literally everywhere. But screenshots have issues, and I liked how Bear...

To be fair, I am traveling and haven’t looked for solid evidence or citation that this works for people, but I personally like this approach: in lieu of a separate language selector button, each option here itself is both a language selector and a commit button. The labels themselves are not the name of the...

Speaking of fly-by-wire… William Langewiesche is one of my favourite technical writers. He finds a way to explain complex aviation aspects really well, and then add a certain amount of beauty and poetry on top of that. His style was a big influence on my book, and I like him so much I once compiled links to his...

This 9-minute video from PetaPixel probably won’t make much sense for non-photographers, but there is something refreshing about this idea that there are still places where adding software is seen as positive: The video talks about Tamron’s lenses which have their own software (independent of the camera), and even...

It is common knowledge that Luigi is just a palette-swapped Mario, and that the characters facing left are the same characters as those facing right, only rendered mirrored. This interesting 9-minute video from Core-A Gaming explains how this can be kind of tricky for fighting games in particular: Suddenly, a...

This is a typical iOS Gmail dialog that allows you to snooze an email so it resurfaces later: If you invoke that function on an email that’s an order receipt, a new option appears: It’s great to see this clever and thoughtful button which is likely the best option here. But: It reshuffles everything else, preventing...

The search for the strangest Adobe setting continues in Lightroom, where the first option in the Interface section is… end marks: Presently, only one option is there… …but at least back in 2012 there were many more: What does it do? It adds an old-time’y glyph at the end of either left or right panel. The internet...

I linked to this opaquely on Thursday, but it deserves its own entry. Michael Bierut’s 2005 essay called “On (design) bullshit” is one of my favourite design essays: It follows that every design presentation is inevitably, at least in part, an exercise in bullshit. The design process always combines the pursuit of...