Journal
2024
2023
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Mixed Messages Last week’s episode of Ted Lasso resurfaced a 51-year-old Italian pop song that’s the perfect anthem for the generative AI boom. read more
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Click to Cancel If you’ve ever tried to cancel a newspaper or magazine subscription, you likely… read more
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RIP, DPReview Well, this sucks. After almost 25 years, DPReview is shutting down. read more
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Getty Sues Stability AI More legal shots fired in the AI world, this time by a heavyweight. read more
2022
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Anywhere But Here
Brief remarks on the death of Twitter as we knew it, and my digital whereabouts thereafter.
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Creepy Houses To me, nothing says “haunted” like a tumbledown house with a mansard roof. Turns… read more
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2021
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How the Ultra-Wealthy Dodge U.S. Taxes
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Social Media Theme Parks Perfect shade from The Verge about Florida’s new, and almost certainly… read more
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“Another Pipes Company That Had the Bright Idea of Buying Into Media”
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Junk in the (Space) Trunk Some ominous news from the crowded sky above our heads. read more
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The Sound of Mars The Perseverance rover has returned the first-ever audio recordings from the… read more
2020
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The Markup Releases Blacklight Blacklight is a new tool that lets anyone examine the user-tracking… read more
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Redesigning Stuntbox, COVID-19 Edition
Reconfiguring 15 years of old-school blogging.
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Facebook: The Bug Is the Feature “This fall’s election promises to be chaotic, nerve-wracking, and potentially calamitous. Lies will be flying everywhere, and Facebook will distribute many of them. And in response, Facebook plans to do… not that much.” read more
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Freedom House and the Birth of the Paramedic I knew plenty of folks who worked in… read more
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How to Group Posts by Year With Jekyll Archives
A quick walkthrough, with a tip for dealing with Jekyll post properties.
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The Visual Storytelling of Run The Jewels Fun interview over at The Verge about the… read more
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The Clock Is Ticking for Quibi A couple months in, Quibi still looks like the answer… read more
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The Party of the First Part In a win for user privacy, the New York Times… read more
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ProPublica and Local Reporting Partner Win Two Pulitzers
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Coronavirus and Climate Change The Roosevelt Institute’s director of climate policy, writing in the New… read more
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“There’s No Truth in the Light I Recorded” I’m linking to this one not because… read more
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Hacking Design Language With Funsize and ProPublica
Last summer, the team at Funsize invited ProPublica down to Austin for a studio tradition they call Method Week.
2019
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Facebook and the “Free Speech” Excuse Andrew Marantz, writing for the New Yorker about Facebook’s… read more
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Slow Pipes I missed this stat when it published last month, but it’s worth noting.… read more
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Setting Fire to All the Ladders Laura González’s post “The Web Without the Web” captures… read more
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Unbelievable
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What is Art Direction for the Web?
Andy Clarke has written a wonderful new book about art direction for the web, and I got to play a little part in it.
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Insufferable CAPTCHAs Will Keep Being Insufferable CAPTCHAs are a terrible experience for users and a nightmare… read more
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ProPublica’s Year in (Mostly) Visual Journalism
2018
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Train Daddy New York City’s mass transit system is one of the biggest, busiest, and best… read more
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The Unfinished Business Podcast: Art Directing for the Web
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Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Understand Journalism Adrienne LaFrance, writing for The Atlantic on the fundamental incompatibility… read more
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What Happens to Feeds as They Scale Benedict Evans has written a terrific piece walking… read more
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Twitter API Changes Likely to Hobble Third-Party Apps
Several app makers have banded together to protest the shutdown of Twitter’s streaming APIs.
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The Big Web Show: Design That’s Fast and Design That’s Slow
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Meet Column Setter
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Facebook’s News Feed Update Relies on Unreliable Signals
Like pretty much everyone else in journalism I’ve been thinking a lot about Facebook’s big News Feed announcement.
2017
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A List Apart Revamps A List Apart helped spark the Web Standards movement and introduced an… read more
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“I Already Had a Stomachache and Then You Mentioned Google AMP”
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We’re Not Shutting Up
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Stop the Pop Widely reported last year, Google’s move to demote websites with “intrusive interstitials” is… read more
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2016
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ProPublica’s Year in Visual Storytelling Over at the day job we’ve published our very own
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Photojournalists Call on Camera Manufacturers to Add Encryption The Freedom of the Press Foundation has published an open letter signed by over 150 photojournalists and documentary filmmakers. read more
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How Russia Invaded the U.S. Election Blockbuster reporting from the New York Times paints the fullest… read more
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American Illustration 35
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Tim Cook’s Fifth Anniversary Longer public interviews with Apple’s top leadership are less rare these days,… read more
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Flash Is Done and Dusted With its next major release, Chrome will start blocking Flash… read more
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Recommended Web Geek Reading: ABA’s “Practical SVG”
The latest installment in the A Book Apart series if a great way to get up to speed on SVG.
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U.S. Web Design Style Guide by 18F The 18F team continues to impress, this time… read more
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Dropbox’s Exodus From (And To) the Cloud Interesting piece from Wired about Dropbox’s shift away from Amazon’s cloud and onto one of their own devising. read more
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Bad Doors Pretty cute video from Vox about user-centered—ahem, human-centered, pardon me—design. This might be… read more
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2015
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Gateway Drug to Empathy
Bringing lighweight UX research to the newsroom.
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Baltimore Unrest in Photos
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It Is, in Fact, Rocket Science The New York Times Opinion Pages on the myth… read more
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From Design to Meta-design On the changing nature of the professional design practice, and shifting to a broader point of view. read more
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Roommates on Mars Fun New Yorker article on efforts to simulate group living conditions for… read more
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Fifteen Years of Dao A List Apart is celebrating the fifteenth (!) anniversary of John… read more
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2014
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Mixed Company Three photo essays by acclaimed photographer Ashley Gilbertson for ProPublica and Frontline’s “Firestone… read more
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Educated vs “Industry-ready” Some candid observations from Dan Saffer on the current state of design… read more
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Direct From the Storage Closet Studio
My first staff appearance on the ProPublica podcast. Our topic? What design can do for investigative journalism.
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Designing the Editorial Experience
A new book from Sue Apfelbaum and Juliette Cezzar, aimed at designers and students who, “would like to move toward shaping editorial content.”
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NiemanLab Interview: What Does a Design Director at ProPublica Do? Last week Joseph Lichterman of
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Don’t Bury the URL Addressable URLS are the essential building blocks of the web. Completely obscuring… read more
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Back to the Newsroom
I’m very excited to announce I’m joining ProPublica as their first design director this coming May.
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Fitting Design to the News
Because it’s often tangled up with personal taste, conversations about news design can get very messy, very fast.
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A Town Called Agloe A fictional town disappears from Google Maps, nearly a century after mapmakers slipped it into their work to guard against copycats. read more
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Interview With the Attacker Chris Coyier interviews the attacker who used social engineering techniques to… read more
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The Glomar Response A lost Russian submarine, the CIA, and a Howard Hughes cover story. Radiolab explores the covert origins and Kafkaesque legal underpinnings of the classic “non-denial denial.” read more
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Keeping an Eye on “Project X” A great checklist of questions for journalism projects in general, not just Ezra Klein’s new venture at Vox Media. read more
2013
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Turning Against “Streams” as a Media Design Principle
Taken at its most literal, the “streams” mindset has resulted in news designs optimized almost exclusively around reverse chronological lists.
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You Had Me at Version 3.2
CSS maestro Dan Cederholm returns to the A Book Apart series with the release of Sass for Web Designers.
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Print to Screen, Static to Dynamic
When comparing digital systems and legacy artifacts, it’s important to remember digital systems aren’t fully realized until they’re interacted with.
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He Ain’t Snowfalling, He’s My Brother The Guardian helped kick off a fresh round of “snowfalling”… read more
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Digital Literacy in the Newsroom Last week, The Atlantic published a piece by Olga Khazan… read more
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The Cookie Clearinghouse My latest A List Apart column is live. This time around I… read more
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Chrome’s Lax Password Storage Turns out Chrome doesn’t prompt users for verification when it displays… read more
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Pale Blue Dot Revisited Earlier this week NASA released photographs of the Earth as seen… read more
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Combining to Yield Intuition Thoughtful affordances are the linchpins of intuitive interface design. Dan Wineman has… read more
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Making Inline SVG Play Nice in Legacy IE
Last week I was tearing my hair out trying to track down why the latest version of this site was rendering so badly in legacy versions of Internet Explorer. Here’s what I found.
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Flat Design Jason Santa Maria captures something about the “flat vs skeuomorphic” debate that’s been bugging me, especially when it comes to iOS. read more
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Easier Fluid Layouts Using Justified Alignment A great fluid layout technique that doesn’t require hard-coding horizontal margins. read more
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State of Transition
Yesterday was my birthday, so I gave myself the gift of a redesign.
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The New Yorker Launches Strongbox Largely the work of the late Aaron Swartz, The New… read more
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Exit Blink Tag The
<blink>tag will soon be no more, as the number of browsers… read more -
Manifesto of the PRKA George Saunders, reflecting poignantly on human violence in 2004 for Slate:
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Go Indy
Video of my talk about digital publishing at the re:build conference in Indianapolis.
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Let Them Eat Main Elements
So it looks like we’ll be getting a
mainelement in HTML5 after all. Good news. But Jeremy Keith poses a question I’ve been wondering about too.
2012
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News Corp Shutters The Daily The fundamental contradiction at the heart of The Daily was that it aspired to be a mass market newspaper while only pursuing a single delivery channel. read more
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But First, a Little History When it comes to new approaches to publishing, I’ve had more… read more
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On Demonstrating Progress
I’ve been devoting a good chunk of my time lately to documenting progress. Not technical documentation, but acknowledging effort and promoting it where others can see it.
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People Are Squishy
One of the single worst lines you will ever hear in the context of a business environment is, “People are simple.”
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Ze by the Numbers Marked by lightning wit and seemingly endless screwball invention, The Show… read more
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A Content Archipelago
Last week Pew published its annual State of the News Media report, there are lessons aplenty for publishers and content builders of all stripes.
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Saying “Pfft!” to Boundary Conditions
This actually happened…
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On the Big Web Show I’m thrilled and honored (as well as a whole host of… read more
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A Retina Display Reckoning for Magazine Publishers
Because of legacy tools and mindsets, the size of the average “iPad magazine” is about to go through the roof.
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Thieves Are Your Best Customers in Waiting
Wherein I throw my two cents into the latest media piracy kerfuffle.
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Taking It to Eleven A fully fluid redesign. read more
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Responsive Navigation Patterns Roundup Brad Frost has published a damn good read more
2011
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He Noticed, and That Mattered
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Quote of the Day: Mobile-First Edition Reporting on the topic of the applications Amazon will be… read more
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Constricting the Tubes A handy tool for simulating limited bandwidth. read more
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Responsive Web Design From A Book Apart
Every so often something rolls around that makes the field feel new, and for me, this is most definitely it.
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Traditional Publishers vs. Evolving Social (Media) Conventions
So the Editor in Chief of the New York Times went and wrote something that’s irritated a few of us Intertubes Types.
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A Syntax Riddle Wrapped in a Parsing Enigma Puzzling out issues with HTML5 and wrapping block-level content. read more
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Whose Lifestyle, Exactly? Anil Dash has gone and written something rather wonderful about the “lifestyle business” euphemism. read more
2010
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Say Hello to Gridulator
Introducing a new tool for calculating layout grids.
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Evolutionary Biology Hearts Typography
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Of Magic Beans and Tablet Myopia
Here’s a tip. Whenever you hear reports about how something new will “revolutionize” an industry while somehow preserving its previous context and practices, you are entering the realm of magic beans.
2009
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Future(s) of Publishing A quick food-for-thought quote from Clay Shirky’s speech at the Shorenstein Center last week. read more
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The Long Form
Why are we still having the “you can’t do long-form writing online” conversation?
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Adapting Designs as Content Evolves How your designs scale with use is one of those things you need to diligently revisit and tweak as products mature. read more
2008
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Interlude
We now pause for a brief interlude.
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A Style of Looking
“I guarantee there’s non-crap out there.”
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BusinessLinked If you’ve been to BusinessWeek.com lately, you may have noticed our article pages sporting some nifty new functionality. read more
2007
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Tell ’Em, Z Jeffrey Zeldman stopped by the office to talk web standards with BusinessWeek’s “Innovation of the Week” podcast. read more
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24 Hour Visual People
“I’m really more of a visual person.”
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The Redesign Response Curve
In every redesign I’ve been involved with, user response has followed a predictable pattern.
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The Other New BusinessWeek
The BusinessWeek redesigns keep on coming. This time it’s our print colleagues taking the wraps off a shiny new package.
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The Uhh Uhh Song Here’s one for all you, uhh, public speakers out there. read more
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On Pushing Back Against Obviously Bad Ideas
In which we recall the tragedy of the CueCat.
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Elevating “Time Spent” Over Pageviews
Nielsen has announced it will begin focusing on “time spent” instead of pageviews as the key measure of website user engagement.
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Control Option Support
Adventures in tech support.
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Lead Electric Triangle My inbox knows how to rock. read more
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My Piece of Apart
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Copper Is the New Black Last week the BusinessWeek crew donned our Sunday best and headed to the National Magazine Awards. And wouldn’t you know, we actually won. read more
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Lemon Trees
“The sweetest fruit available at the time.”
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Roach Clipping
A little slice of NYC life.
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The Devil You Must Live With
Dealing with reality of ads.
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The BW Design Update Rolls On
Rolling out the next phase of a redesign.
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Better Than the SQL If you’ve set up WordPress in a localhost testing environment you may already be familiar with the vagaries of
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Who Moved My Socket? With the release of OS X 10.4.4, the default socket location for PHP and MySQL has been moved. read more
2006
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Squashing Borders on Dynamic iframes Ah, the
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Killing WebMonkey: A Case for the Commons
On losing a piece of web design history.
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The New Look at BusinessWeek.com
Redesigning BusinessWeek’s website.
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The Year in Review The year in review. In June. Seriously? read more
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Test Movie and AS2 Garbage Collection Hilarity Want to scramble the Flash 8 compiler’s brain? (Or more likely your own?) read more
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Fifth Avenue Apple Store Press Event Tagging along with BusinessWeek’s tech reporters at the opening of the Fifth Avenue Apple Store. read more
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You Could Learn a Lot From a Dummy The IIHS Ratings Viewer, one of the projects I’ve been tinkering with at the office, went live this week. read more
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Mac IE: The End Has Come Tomorrow, Internet Explorer for Mac will shuffle off this mortal coil. read more
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Google Maps Is a Cubist Masterpiece Google Maps is messing with my head. read more
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Adobe Unveils Lightroom Looks like the folks at Adobe aren’t about to take Aperture lying down. read more
2005
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Photoshop Inside Stroke Opacity Weirdness It’s nice to know that I’m not the only obsessive compulsive… read more
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Tab Delimited In a post on his Mozilla blog Ben… read more
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The Hidden Depths Like lots of Flash folk, I’ve got a real love/hate relationship going with the V2 components. read more
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Look Ma! I’m on Steve’s Giant Screen!
Holy cow! Steve Jobs featured the BusinessWeek News Widget in his WWDC keynote today.
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Life, Relocated Yikes. Only 6 posts into the existence of this blog and I’m already writing the obligatory “why-I’ve-been-ignoring-my-blog-so-much” entry. read more
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Nikon RAW Metadata Encrypted, Broken Word has gotten around that Nikon is encrypting the white balance metadata in raw files recorded by its high-end digital cameras. read more
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The Acid2 Browser Test The Web Standards Project has posted the read more
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WordPress Permalinks and the OS X Apache Install If you’ve installed WordPress on an OS X system and can’t figure out why your permalinks won’t function, this may help. read more
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How to Manhandle a Disk Image Got an OS X disk image that flat-out refuses to eject? Here’s how to fix it. read more