Notes

Collected bits and pieces I’ve noticed this month.

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve compiled one of these, here goes.

First things first – pour one out for Skype, we’ll miss you.

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Some interesting points here about design tokens, and how the wcag/figma/salesforce/design community thinks of them – "Avoiding tokens"

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Sir Ive has been in the news lately, here’s a different kind of interview with him on BBC-s “Desert Island Disks” podcast. Some nuggets that stuck out to me:

• People need time to understand and react to new things, if the rate of change is too fast, it creates problems.
• Products need to be right for the time and market – products can be great, but not right.
• Adding a handle to the iMac made an unfamiliar thing instantly more approachable.

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Linear always publishes thoughtful pieces on their blog, this time about the relationship between AI and UI:

One way I visualize this relationship between the form of traditional UI and the function of AI is through the metaphor of a ‘workbench’. Just as a carpenter's workbench is familiar and purpose-built, providing an organized environment for tools and materials, a well-designed interface can create productive context for AI interactions.
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AI doesn’t replace the workbench, it's a powerful new tool to place on top of it.

“Design for the AI age” by Karri Saarinen

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Also on the topic of UI-s, Sebastiaan de With from Lux (makers of the excellent Halide camera app) imagines what direction the rumoured redesign of Apple's OS interfaces might go.

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Glad to see that Jason Santa Maria is back writing on his blog – welcome back! Instantly added to the blogroll.

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A list of individual dogs on Wikipedia.
via Frank Chimero on Bluesky

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A typeface I’ve been keeping an eye on to possibly use on a project – Atkinson Hyperlegible – has recently been updated.

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For browsing visuals that don’t try to sell you something, here’s public.work from Cosmos
via Sidebar

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I’m not maybe a fan of the roof construction itself, but I do like the idea – a set of buildings under one roof.

Collected bits and pieces I’ve noticed this month.

I enjoyed reading Jeffrey Zeldman ruminate on two beautiful things that grew from the seminal A List Apart web publication – An Event Apart and A Book Apart, both now, sadly, shuttered.
I learned a tremendous amount about web design and development, as well as adjacent topics from A List Apart. Not only was it wonderfully designed, it published a wide range of topics and shaped how I approach design for the web and also design in general. I’m very grateful for that. I was never able to attend An Event Apart, unfortunately, but I was able to acquire books put out by A Book Apart and have a number of them on my bookshelf.

But! All is not lost! Au contraire, A Book Apart gave the publishing rights back to the authors and the books have been slowly republished in various formats and one of those is Pricing Design, by Dan Mall, resurrected as a beautifully designed website.

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With my to-do list(s) approaching bankruptcy territory, this has been following me around for some days now – “What would it mean to be done for the day?”.
via Austin Kleon

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Some mandatory “here’s a number of things” lists – “77 Facts that Blew Our Minds” from The Atlantic, “52 Things I Learned in 2024” from Kent Hendricks, “52 Things I Learned in 2024” from Tom Whitwell.
via kottke.org

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One thing I learned was what the “Send in the Clowns” means. From Wikipedia:
“but it's not supposed to be a circus [...] [I]t's a theatre reference meaning “if the show isn't going well, let's send in the clowns"; in other words, "let's do the jokes.””

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(Re)watching Flaked, this house in Venice, CA, home of photographer Philip Dixon, caught my eye. I love it.

The wonderfully weird estate that belonged to late designer Pierre Cardin and is known as Le Palais Bulles or 'the bubble palace', sits on a mountainside in Cannes overlooking the Mediterranean. Complete with (at least) two pools and an amphitheater it's on the market with a £300 million price tag.
via Home Designing