Un Swissroll

I was sitting in a showroom, testing chairs for a new office. The salesperson had already shown me the ergonomic models with adjustable lumbar supports and synchronized tilts. They were comfortable, but they all felt like variations of the same idea: support the spine, reduce pressure, encourage good posture. Then I sat in a chair …

“The hardest thing about being alive is that we exist as accidents of chance, and the universe does not hand us meaning. Nobody and nothing will give us meaning. We have to make it. And I think love is an instrument for how to do that.” — Maria Popova From a beautiful conversation between Debbie …

Loving these illustrations by artist Guridi. (Whispers: Makes me miss Tattly, the temporary tattoo company I once ran and is now defunct.)

“It’s possible that you were undermined, endangered, cut off or disrespected. But if we begin with that, then the relationship gets shaky. Perhaps the other person simply didn’t understand. It might be that they are focused on their issues, not yours. It could be that they’re dealing with something you don’t see. And most likely, …

Here’s a minimal-more-analog phone that got my attention: Dumb.co

It was a simple card. A single line of text on the front, centered, with generous margins. The paper was thick, the ink was dark, and the empty space around the words was vast. The card did not try to fill every corner. It did not add a border, a pattern, or a secondary message. …

It is a scene that plays out in design studios everywhere. A designer loads a page, it feels quick, they declare it done. But ask three different people when a page is “loaded,” and you will get four different answers. The browser, on the other hand, is painfully precise. It tracks everything: navigation start, response …

The newspaper is one of the oldest and most refined information design systems in existence. It has survived radio, television, and the internet. It has adapted to changing formats, audiences, and technologies. And through all of this, it has maintained a remarkably consistent approach to hierarchy. The newspaper knows something about how to guide the …

Design is not a neutral activity. The time of day you work shapes the quality of your ideas, the energy of your execution, and the nature of your decisions. Morning people and night owls operate with fundamentally different cognitive states, and these states produce fundamentally different design outcomes. The Morning Mind Morning people design with …

Beautiful video does not always require expensive footage, complex animation, or a professional production team. Sometimes the original material is surprisingly simple: a photograph, a flat illustration, a product image, a few lines of text, or a character with very little movement. What makes the final result look polished is often the way those simple …