Design

A blog about software craft and quality

Marcin Wichary at Unsung: I’ve been emulating the Apple Lisa recently, and I was struck by how many of its UI strings were slightly or wholly different than what we’re used to. It makes sense. Lisa came out in 1983 as Mac’s predecessor and really the first GUI that is directly linked to what we’re using today. Even though it borrowed things from work done at Xerox, tons of conventions were not established yet.

Standard.site provides shared lexicons for long-form publishing on AT Protocol. Making content easier to discover, index, and move across the ATmosphere.

Lookin' at you, JSON

I’m still delightfully jet lagged from the France trip meaning, early nights and early mornings, which suits me fine. It gives me time to read and reflect and to walk, this morning taking tim…

Will Manidis argues that the current AI/LLM boom is dominated by 'tool-shaped objects' — systems engineered to produce the feeling of work rather than actual output. His central metaphor is the Chiyozuru kanna: a $3,000 Japanese hand plane that exists for the ritual, not the result. He applies the same logic to the entire AI infrastructure stack — GPU clusters, orchestration layers, agentic dashboards — and concludes that the market for feeling productive reliably dwarfs the market for being productive. Diffusion into the real economy, he argues, will be slower and look structurally different from the consumption-led narrative currently driving institutional AI budgets.

minutes is mostly about walking. Click to read Minutes, by Will Manidis, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

A sparkline is a little line-graph with no axes or other unnecessary details. They're useful for getting quick understanding of what the data is showing. They're also really easy to create programmatically. This uses the SVG "polyline" which takes a list of x,y co-ordinate pairs. But can you spot the small problem? ⧉ SVGsvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 1024 124" …

An OpenType variable font that turns simple text expressions into inline charts. No JavaScript, no images — just type.

Griddy Icons is free open-source icon family with unique utilitarian vibe

A design system document that AI agents read to generate consistent UI across your project.

Some occupations have more turnover than others. See how it varies for your occupation and others.

Milwaukee weekly bus passes between the years of 1930-1979. Collection: Kindra Murphy Follow my findings: from there

Ella Freire

Your devices are all judging you. They’re just too polite to say it directly.

A set of beautifully designed components that you can customize, extend, and build on. Start here then make it your own. Open Source. Open Code.

Beautifully designed components for building ChatGPT apps and agentic UIs. Built on top of shadcn/ui.

Free animated React icons library with 350+ smooth Motion-powered icons based on Lucide. MIT licensed, copy-paste ready.

Sometimes looking less realistic can mean feeling more realistic.

Lynn Fisher is a web designer, CSS developer, and artist from Phoenix, Arizona.

Mobile game UX has changed how people interact with apps at a very basic level. Users now expect fast feedback, low-friction navigation, and clear progress signals from the first tap. That expectation does not stop at puzzle games or strategy titles. Casino and betting apps now borrow many of the same UX patterns because they

Search NYC by what you can see. An open-vocabulary semantic atlas for querying urban elements like scaffolding, murals, awnings, trees, and more. Created by Sean Hardesty Lewis.

Double-sided wall clocks have been the domain of institutions and train stations, particularly in Europe. But Turin-based product brand Goofball reckons they have domestic appeal. Here's their Perch Clock: The clock runs on two AA batteries, so no hardwiring is required. To change the

Create stunning, print-ready map posters for any location in the world — free, open-source, and entirely in your browser.

A look at modern news websites. How programmatic ad-tech, huge payloads and hostile architecture destroyed the reading experience.

A Figma-like visual editor for TUI applications. Drag-and-drop components, edit properties in real-time, and export to 6 frameworks with one click.

I spent too much time looking at too many colo(u)rs to try and optimise them for csskit. Here are some interesting findings.

In game development, it’s common to use spritesheets for animation, but this technique isn’t as widely used on the web. Which is a shame, because we can do some pretty cool stuff with sprites! In this post, we’ll share the niche CSS function you can use to leverage this technique, and explore some of the potential use cases.