The Space Between the Notes

All signs are pointing to a revamp of iOS being announced at Apple’s WWDC next week, and with it, a lot of speculation around what it might look like. Will iOS 7 be flat instead of…

Are coders worth it?

There’s this great moment in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) when the world’s most celebrated sushi chef turns to his son, who is leaving to start his own restaurant, and…

Why do women try to get ahead by pulling men down? — Thoughts on…

I see comments along these lines pretty much every time the issue of gender inequality in tech comes up. A lot of men (and sometimes women) respond to women suggesting that men have to give up their…

Letter To A Young Programmer Considering A Startup

I regularly get emails from young people, usually those with an interest in programming, who are trying to make decisions about school and/or their professional futures. This post is for those young…

We Need A Standard Layered Image Format

Apr 30, 2013 Last summer, Adobe killed their image exchange format "FXG". The idea was to have a publicly defined XML based image format which could handle vectors, bitmaps, and layers, and could be…

Trello uses an icon font and so can you!

Inspired by Github’s Octicons and a desire to clean up our kludgy icon code, I set out to convert trello.com to use an icon font. Previously, we used a sprite method. We used a single…

5 Things to Know When Designing for iOS

Based on our experience creating great iOS apps, we’ve come up with a list of 5 things we believe designers should keep in mind while conceptualizing interfaces for iOS. While the focus of…

A Box of Puppies

Lamby, the author’s dog, is a mutt who came from a rescue shelter in Brooklyn. Photograph by Robin Schwartz.

No, I'm not going to download your bullshit app

How we used to read the news, back in the era of the Web: Go to newspaper website. Click on story. Read. How we read news in the era of fucking stupid pointless iPhone apps. Go to website. Be told…

Internet Users Demand Less Interactivity

SAN FRANCISCO—Tired of being bombarded with constant requests to share content on social media, bestow ratings, leave comments, and generally “join in on the discussion,” the…

The Quiet Ones

EVER since I quit hanging out in Baltimore dive bars, the only place where I still regularly find myself in hostile confrontations with my fellow man is Amtrak’s Quiet Car. The Quiet Car, in case you…

Alone Together, Again

The following was written in August, 2012. It was published a month ago in the first issue of Marco Arment’s iOS-only publication The Magazine. Marco has generously allowed his contributors to…

A Short Lesson in Perspective

Many years ago, when I first started to work in the advertising industry, we used to have this thing called The Overnight Test. It worked like this: My creative partner Laurence and I would spend…

htmlboy

In the early years, when the smartphones came to Earth, they knew the Internet wasn't prepared for them… so they expected every website to be around 1000px width (980px on the iPhone) and zoom…

On Being A Senior Engineer

I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially about what makes for a productive engineer. But while there are a good deal of books in the management field…

The Joy of Quiet

ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on…

Tauba Auerbach’s RGB Colorspace Atlas Depicts Every Color Imaginable

rhoner comments on Have you ever picked up a hitch-hiker?

Just about every time I see someone I stop. I kind of got out of the habit in the last couple of years, moved to a big city and all that, my girlfriend wasn't too stoked on the practice. Then some…

darthcorvus comments on American Censorship Day - Stand up for ████…

You think that's strange? Back in college my linguistics professor had a long-running, optional assignment in which any student attending the school could participate. We were allowed to work on it…

Come as You Are

There are days when, for no particular reason, I pull out my drop-crotch pants. They are made from an inky black wool crepe, and when laid out flat, have an elegant geometry—like the lower…

How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance

I've had guns pulled on me by four people under Central Mississippi skies — once by a white undercover cop, once by a young brother trying to rob me for the leftovers of a weak work-study check, once…

My Mother, My Daughter

My mother became my daughter when I was nine years old. There had been an accident, a car accident, and it was a bad one, although I didn’t know that yet. My heartbeat quickened when I rounded…

A VERY LARGE PUZZLE: ON ANDREW REYNOLDS

MR. FRONTSIDE FLIP HIMSELF Because many of us are assholes, and because our passion lacks, thank god, any clear, established standards of value, any moment of agreement between skateboarders feels…

Uncle Ray’s Dystopia

IF you’d wanted to know which way the world was headed in the mid-20th century, you wouldn’t have found much indication in any of the day’s literary prizewinners. You’d have been better advised to…

Conditional CSS

I got some great comments on my post about conditionally loading content. Just to recap, I was looking for a way of detecting from JavaScript whether media queries have been executed in CSS without…

What's it like to work at GitHub?

I have been traveling a lot lately, and everywhere I go, I get this question: What’s it like to work at GitHub? The simple answer: it is amazing! Is it true that you work on whatever you want?…

Hillman Curtis, a Pioneer in Web Design, Dies at 51

Hillman Curtis, a former rock musician who became a prominent first-generation Web designer and a visionary figure in the Internet’s evolution from a predominantly text-based medium to the multimedia…

Articles > Guns N’ Roses – Outta Control

It’s late July, and as usual, Guns n' Roses are screwing everything up. They're out on the road with devil-may-care attitudes and no set list, serving up a bunch of unfamiliar songs and saying…

A Real Web Design Application

The web and its related disciplines have grown organically. I think it’s safe to say the web is not the domain of just the geeks anymore—we all live here. And those of us who work here…

Wireless Void

My favorite piece of writing in the last year was “Sad as Hell”, published by n+1. Officially it’s a book review for Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. Unofficially…