Design

A great post from @owltastic outlining the decision-making process behind her new site design: medium.com/@owltastic/new…

And heeeerre comes the @naconf FOMO. 😕

A lot of good advice in here for designers of all experience levels. twitter.com/astahearts/sta…

We updated our Cabinet Cards to mark two years of the Trump administration, and it got pretty messy pretty quickly. features.propublica.org/cabinet-cards/…

Be generous with praise. Kind words from people we look up to mean a lot. Love this post (and new site!) from @jina: sushiandrobots.com/journal/aw-shu…

George Bush, Who Steered Nation in Tumultuous Times, Is Dead at 94

I like this Bush obit as a crash course on the political forces that shaped the world during my formative years.

24 Ways

Always delighted to see this advent calendar of web design articles light up my RSS feed every December.

The Fun Is Back in Social Media…Again!

TikTok probably feels a lot like Flickr or Twitter in the early days, where everyone… See more →

I’m so into @CarniDC’s “Visualizing the History of Fugazi.” I wish every band could be this well documented. carniklirs.com/project/fugazi

I often wonder if the laborious passion project I’m working on is a waste of time, but projects like @lynnandtonic’s push me to keep going.

This makes my brain hurt so good. A thoroughly inspiring peek behind the curtain of @lynnandtonic’s genius. twitter.com/lynnandtonic/s…

I like this idea. Lately I’ve been moving my Sass math into calc/variable configurations like the ones @chriscoyier describes here. twitter.com/css/status/107…

Opened Photoshop. Discovered that proportional scaling with the Shift key is broken. Closed Photoshop.

🎶 It’s the mooooost wonderful tiiiiiime of the yeeeeeaarrrrr twitter.com/lynnandtonic/s…

Delighted to see @24ways lighting up in my RSS reader again. 24ways.org

Hello, dear reader!

November is gone, but its links remain.

I published a couple of nerdy blog posts in November: one about how I’m using my Letterboxd data to address my cinematic blindspots, and one about a common convention of editorial design that’s currently incompatible with CSS Grid.

Lots of interesting stuff in the links this month; for what it’s worth, my favorites are Earworm’s series of videos about jazz.

As usual, you can get many… See more →

I’ve been making websites for 20 years. I read a bunch about how to set up webmentions and gave up before I started. 🤷🏻‍♂️ twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Good food for thought in this post from @paulrobertlloyd about barriers to entry that impede the web’s potential. paulrobertlloyd.com/2018/11/warp_a…

Great read from @iamrumz investigating the prevalence of Choc, a French typeface from the 1950s, on NYC storefronts. nyti.ms/2zkVp47

I love the Dieter Rams exhibit at @philamuseum, but presenting his work in a rarefied art context is disorienting. I wanna touch everything!

Congrats to @beep and @voxmediainc! twitter.com/beep/status/10…

2. A Visual History of Computing 1945–1979, by @Docubyte (via @kottke) docubyte.com/works/guide-to…

I’ve been getting my feet wet with CSS Grid this year. The new possibilities it introduces for page layout on the web are exciting, but before venturing too far into those waters, I wanted to see how it handles the kind of layouts I’m already designing. Most of the work I do on the web—at ProPublica and here on my site—is editorial design, so I was keen to learn how Grid accommodates the conventions of… See more →

Just when you thought there was no room for innovation in Norman doors

Hello, dear reader!

October is gone, but its links remain.

I was mired in personal matters throughout October, so there wasn’t any activity on my site apart from the horror extravaganza that is Robtober, which was thankfully not disrupted. I finally finished a project that had been in the works for a few months: a custom-designed story with ProPublica Illinois about a family’s heartbreaking experience with an ill-conceived psychiatric clinical trial.

This round of links… See more →

If you’ve worked on design software and made decisions about how to represent text objects in exported SVG, I have so many questions for you

New work: a mother’s annotated journal of what turned out to be a troubling psychiatric clinical trial. features.propublica.org/uic-journal/un…

RIP @cindyli. I hadn’t seen her in years, but she was a welcome fixture at many events I remember very fondly. Peace to her family. 💔

Reminder: the earliest influential web design teachers were women, specifically greats @jenville and @lyndaweinman. thehistoryoftheweb.com/the-books-that…

Another round of Adobe updates, same bunch of stupid bugs that haven’t been fixed.

This kid and his functional Lego combination safe are making me think that just maybe everything will be okay. youtu.be/OjDKSWCrWeU

My new favorite Tumblr is full of colorful animations of vintage electronics. electronicitems.tumblr.com

Hello, dear reader!

September is gone, but its links remain.

It was a big month for me, as I finally finished the project I was preoccupied with for most of the summer: Incomplete Open Cubes Revisited, inspired by Sol LeWitt. I also wrote about why and how I did it.

This month’s newsletter is a few days late because I wanted to include Robtober 2018, my annual deep dive into horror films which always takes… See more →

What I Did on My Summer Vacation twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Here’s how. v6.robweychert.com/blog/2018/09/r…

Here’s why. cubes-revisited.art/about/

I made something. cubes-revisited.art

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
—Sol LeWitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, 1967

I felt the first rumblings of the obsession a little over a year ago. I’m a big fan of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, and on a pilgrimage to MASS MoCA’s sprawling retrospective exhibition of them, I glimpsed some curious cube structures by LeWitt scattered around the museum. A short while later, in a used bookstore in Philadelphia, I stumbled… See more →

Seeing some interesting assumptions about what I’m asking here. Reading time ≠ progress meter and isn’t necessarily on the article page. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Let’s hear your thoughts on articles including an estimated reading time. Is it helpful?

To clarify, I’m looking for good resources for non-designers who occasionally need to put together a reasonably competent brochure/deck/etc. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Anyone have recommendations for good online crash courses in graphic design fundamentals?

I love love love this peek at some of the visual inspiration for @ustwogames’s stunning Monument Valley games. milanote.com/the-work/the-s…

Hello Portland! I bumped into @kellianderson on my flight so I feel like my @xoxo is off to a really good start.

This has been another episode of Spending Hours Debugging HTML/CSS Before Spotting That Impossibly Subtle, Single-Character Typo.

Hello, dear reader!

August is gone, but its links remain.

My site was quiet in August, as I’ve been heads-down on a project I’m pretty excited about. Its release is just one facet of the ambitious September I have planned, so if all goes well, there will be much to report in next month’s newsletter.

My alter-ego Windhammer recently returned to the competitive air guitar stage for his 10th anniversary, tying for second in the… See more →

Excited to welcome @aggggnessss to the @propublica Design & Production team today!

Hello, dear reader!

July is gone, but its links remain.

Apart from brief musings on films I saw recently, my lone post in July was a recap of my vacation in Brighton, from which I was reluctant to return. The ensuing extended brain vacation kept me from doing as much internetting as usual, so the collection of links is a bit thinner this month, but hopefully you can find something below worth scraping across your… See more →

Leah and I recently returned from a great week in Brighton, England. The impetus for the trip was Ampersand, a one-day typography conference, but since neither Leah nor I had been to the UK before, it made sense to tack on another several days for a vacation.

We rented a decent Airbnb close to the beach near the indistinct border between Brighton and Hove. The first thing I did upon arriving at around 2 a.m.… See more →

This fun @TYPOBER talk by @Tosche_E examines many of the 8×8 pixel fonts developed for old arcade games. typotalks.com/videos/8-pixel…

Something tells me my typesetting is about to get a lot more flexible. @timbrown @abookapart abookapart.com/products/flexi…

New wrinkle: Going to @xoxo would mean missing @thejesuslizard in Philly BUT I’d be able to see @AndrewWk while in Portland… 🤔