Today I Learned

I did not love this book as a total product, but it has transformed what I view as my (and other design leader's) superpower: creativity.

My ceremony for setting up my week.

The most important thing I learned leading a 45+ person team was the role of shared talking points.

I'm trying this daily planner app out to help plan my days.

I love this approach to working: breaking up big tasks into smaller ones, knocking them out quickly, and returning to refine them when the MVP is done.

Breaks down how Jira and Figma can work together to facilitate production.

Shows more about creating the environment for great products.

A neat tool for screenshot inventories of apps/websites. Helpful for quickly critiquing particular flows, like onboarding.

On the value of friction in discovering information - the drawer without a handle metaphor.

When showing default initials in an avatar, there are some small and big decisions when it comes to different names and titles.

A few navigation patterns in mobile based on different objectives and outcomes.

Breaking down V for Wikipedia's typography-driven approach to a more readable article experience.

Multi-select in Figma now grabs similar layers based on name and allows you to apply the same edits across multiple frames.

A guide to building trustworthy products.

An excellent breakdown of air travel design decisions, like how baggage tags are designed.

The half life of designed things.

Practical, compact principles - and it's also important to break them.

A brief history to the Swiss post-war design movement.

Deep dive into information architecture for mobile contexts.

I'm a huge fan of Jessica Hische - the Periodic Table of Branding and detail in lettering/logotypes is incredible.

The role of copying in design and art.

An interesting dive into how culture impacts UI design.

The ubiquitous tech style of flat geometric illustrations.

An interesting alternative to personas.

CSS is evolving to do some cool things!

Cool paper on designing engaging communities.

An interesting set of words that can be used to describe software, modular for testing responsiveness and aesthetic.

Using SVG filters to create the liquid glass effect using pure CSS.

Vercel's AGENTS.md for agentic coding of web interfaces.

Scott Jensen on desktop UX stalling out.

The processes for assessing performance are rife with bias and fundamentally broken.

The bar to get promoted is very, very high, but the bar to get fired is very, very low.

12 'I' statements that allow them to fulfill their service promise and create an elevated experience.

Great distinctions between leaning on collaboration when faster decision making is needed.

Explores the religious and patriarchal roots of Servant Leadership through a feminist/gender neutral lens.

Examining the false narrative of leadership meaning you leave design behind.

Includes interesting content like their Definition of Done with details like 'Smallest possible DOM hierarchy.'

Perez-Cruz proposes flexible design systems that are 'expressive,' allowing them to be bent and broken where needed to evolve.

Great designs never start with the system.

One of my favorite new UI libraries, might be a good post-Tailwind solution for modern websites.

I've used OKRs extensively in my career and find them challenging as a framework due to their universality.

Valve is one of the rare modern companies that seems to learn and adapt over major generations of change.

Getting past the laziness of chatbots and into the real power of LLMs.

Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit.

Where does hype end and utility begin?

An integrated, web-based IDE with agentic coding built in. I've already edited code on the train, while I was on a trip, and other random contexts.

Natural language instructions create challenges for LLMs. To have more command over how LLMs work, we have to be more verbose, descriptive, and directive.

Claimify helps detect and verify claims generated by LLMs to ensure they're accurate and disambiguated.

Chomsky's 2023 read of ChatGPT calls upon unique human faculties that cannot be replicated by AI.

A hierarchy of harm where the question isn't who's good - it's who sucks least.

The UK government's guide to responsible use in public services.

OpenAI is trying to do too much, and it's critically unsafe.

How agents can be exploited and compromised.

What am I playing?

Pinhole light into water casts the caustic effect against walls with movement creating the texture.

Beautiful 16mm-esque behind-the-scenes about the production of Do The Right Thing.

Mostly because I'm guilty of too much bokeh.

An interview with Stephen Shore about how his photography has changed over the years, bridging multiple eras and technologies.

I'm bad at stats.

Qualifying SUM with threshold selection for subjective ratings.

Did you know that you can format output into columns using git?

Takes key-pair values and objects and prints them in other extensions like yaml or json. Way more portable.

This article changed my perspective and challenged my knowledge model sourced from pop-science books.

Analysis of why the Humane Pin failed so spectacularly.

Shows how handwriting is taught in countries around the world. I'm in a handwriting phase.

Tyler, the Creator explains why you need to stand on your art proudly.

A framework for evaluating new technology: What problem does it solve? Whose problem? What new problems does it create?

Hold down any piece of text and drag it to your desktop to create a 'scratch' file very quickly.