My good friend and web design hero Ethan Marcotte has redesigned his personal site for the second time in a little over a year, and it’s a thing of beauty. Every last bit of it is thoughtfully considered without being overworked, from the simple structure, to the inventive grid, to the elegant typography, to the subtle textural motifs. And that joyful splash of watercolor at the top! For the nerds, there are some clever implementations… See more →

For his 50th birthday, my buddy Chris Shiflett wrote a lovely post chronicling the ups and downs of his life in technology. We participate in tech in different ways but approach it with the same spirit, so I found a lot to identify with, and I enjoyed remembering the euphoria of my own mental growth spurts and moments of discovery like what he describes here:

For a few years, I was learning faster than at… See more →

In its founders’ own words, XOXO was “an experimental festival celebrating independent artists and creators working on the internet,” and its final edition, which included Cabel Sasser’s charming tale of going all the way down the rabbit hole of a painting that caught his attention in a McDonald’s in Washington, took place in 2024. I attended XOXO in 2014 and 2018 and was impressed on both occasions with the extraordinary care that went into the… See more →

Philly being Philly:

Within the first three weeks of the delivery robots’ arrival in Philly, videos emerged of people sitting on them, graffitiing them and eventually kicking one over.

And it’s not just Philly:

A quick web search produces a long list of examples of people being filmed or filming themselves attacking robots.

Buy why?

In Ouellette’s dissertation, “From Fiction to Friction: Abusing Autonomous Mobile Robots,” she created conditions to try and find out what motivated subjects… See more →

Anil Dash makes the case that we’re running out of time to save the last vestiges of the open web from the big-tech robber barons’ multifaceted (but mostly AI-shaped) rampage, which probably isn’t news to anyone who actually understands what’s at stake, but his post does a good job of enumerating and describing the threats for those who don’t.

Creators who fight hard to stay independent are often choosing to make less money, to go… See more →

A watch list for progressive masochists from Becca Rothfeld’s “The MAGA Theory of Art” in Art in America.

Just as Weimar and Nazi films pandered to white-collar workers who refused to confront a new economic reality, evangelical films pander to a rural class that clings to an outmoded notion of small-town affluence—and thereby to a bygone socio-economic order. They present the rural as a refuge from modernity, a realm that economic history has happily bypassed. To… See more →

A project has been in the works for a couple years to replace a number of Notre-Dame’s stained-glass windows with contemporary designs, which has unsurprisingly caused an uproar. While the arguments for and against generally take familiar shapes—whether historic architecture should accommodate modern expression, whether these decisions should be top-down or community-driven—one functional aspect of the kerfuffle caught my attention:

The windows’ light gray, non-figurative glass allows more light to enter the cathedral, achieved via… See more →

I was at a funeral today and felt all the appropriate funeral feelings but I also could not stop thinking about Coffin Flop

Jason Santa Maria’s new independent design practice has a great name and a great logo, befitting the quality and character of his work. And the site, an appropriately simple introduction, sports a fresh, fun, procedurally-generated color scheme every time it loads. Don’t miss his blog post with the backstory!

See the full gallery (36 items) →

How great is this project? Pedro Neves, a professor at UIC’s School of Design, invited 40 designers from around the world to create letterforms out of Lego, which were then made into letterpress prints. Despite working within the same constraints (a set of bricks and up to three colors from a limited palette), the variety of results on display is wild, and I especially love the many ways people made use of overprinting to stretch… See more →