All Posts
2023
-
Prisencolinensinainciusol, All Right
-
FTC Proposes “Click to Cancel”
-
RIP, DPReview
-
Getty Sues AI Toolmaker for Copyright Infringement
2022
-
Anywhere But Here
Brief remarks on the death of Twitter as we knew it, and my digital whereabouts thereafter.
-
Why Victorian Houses Are So Damn Creepy
2021
-
How the Ultra-Wealthy Dodge U.S. Taxes
-
Social Media Theme Park Ideas
-
“Another Pipes Company That Had the Bright Idea of Buying Into Media”
-
Space Junk Hits a Tipping Point
-
The Sound of Mars
2020
-
The Markup Releases Blacklight
-
Redesigning Stuntbox, COVID-19 Edition
Reconfiguring 15 years of old-school blogging.
-
Facebook: The Bug Is the Feature
-
Freedom House and the Birth of the Paramedic
-
How to Group Posts by Year With Jekyll Archives
A quick walkthrough, with a tip for dealing with Jekyll post properties.
-
The Visual Storytelling of Run The Jewels
-
The Clock Is Ticking for Quibi
-
New York Times to Drop Third-Party Ad Targeting Data
-
ProPublica and Local Reporting Partner Win Two Pulitzers
-
Coronavirus and Addressing Climate Change
-
“There’s No Truth in the Light I Recorded”
-
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
-
Facebook and the “Free Speech” Excuse
-
U.S. Ranks 40th in Mobile Download Speed
-
Setting Fire to All the Ladders
-
Unbelievable
-
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.
-
Insufferable CAPTCHAs Will Keep Being Insufferable
-
ProPublica’s Year in (Mostly) Visual Journalism
2018
-
Saving New York City’s Subways
-
The Unfinished Business Podcast: Art Directing for the Web
-
Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Understand Journalism
-
What Happens to Feeds as They Scale
-
Twitter API Changes Likely to Hobble Third-Party Apps
Several app makers have banded together to protest the shutdown of Twitter’s streaming APIs.
-
The Big Web Show: Design That’s Fast and Design That’s Slow
-
Meet Column Setter
-
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
-
A List Apart Revamps, Moves to Patronage Model
-
“I Already Had a Stomachache and Then You Mentioned Google AMP”
-
We’re Not Shutting Up
-
Google Now Demoting Mobile Sites With Obtrusive Interstitials
2016
-
ProPublica’s Year in Visual Storytelling
-
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.
-
How Russia Invaded the U.S. Election
-
American Illustration 35
-
Washington Post Interviews Tim Cook on Fifth Anniversary as Apple CEO
-
Flash is Done and Dusted
-
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.
-
U.S. Web Design Style Guide by 18F
-
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.
-
Bad Doors
2015
-
On the ProPublica Podcast With Khoi Vinh
-
Gateway Drug to Empathy
-
Baltimore Unrest in Photos
-
It Is, in Fact, Rocket Science
-
From Design to Meta-design
On the changing nature of the professional design practice, and shifting to a broader point of view.
-
Roommates on Mars
-
Fifteen Years of Dao
2014
-
Mixed Company
-
Educated vs “Industry-ready”
-
Direct From the Storage Closet Studio
-
Designing the Editorial Experience
-
Nieman Lab Interview: What Does a Design Director at ProPublica Do?
-
Don’t Bury the URL
-
Back to the Newsroom
I’m very excited to announce I’m joining ProPublica as their first design director this coming May.
-
Fitting Design to the News
Because it’s often tangled up with personal taste, conversations about news design can get very messy, very fast.
-
A Town Called Agloe
-
Interview With the Attacker
-
The Glomar Response
-
Keeping an Eye on Ezra Klein’s “Project X”
2013
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
He Ain’t Snowfalling, He’s My Brother
-
Building Digital Literacy in the Newsroom
-
Third-Party Tracking and the Cookie Clearinghouse
-
Chrome’s Lax Password Storage
-
Pale Blue Dot Revisited
-
Combining to Yield Intuition
-
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.
-
Considering the Visual Future of iOS
Jason Santa Maria captures something about the “flat vs skeuomorphic” debate that’s been bugging me, especially when it comes to iOS.
-
Easier Fluid Layouts Using Justified Alignment
A great fluid layout technique that doesn’t require hard-coding horizontal margins.
-
State of Transition
Yesterday was my birthday, so I gave myself the gift of a redesign.
-
The New Yorker Launches Strongbox
-
The End of the Blink Tag
-
Manifesto of the PRKA
-
Go Indy
Video of my talk about digital publishing at the re:build conference in Indianapolis.
-
Let Them Eat Main Elements
So it looks like we’ll be getting a
main
element in HTML5 after all. Good news. But Jeremy Keith poses a question I’ve been wondering about too.
2012
-
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.
-
But First, a Little History
-
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.
-
People Are Squishy
One of the single worst lines you will ever hear in the context of a business environment is, “People are simple.”
-
Ze by the Numbers
-
Dead Silos and the Content Archipelago Ascendant
Last week Pew published its annual State of the News Media report, there are lessons aplenty for publishers and content builders of all stripes.
-
Saying ‘Pfft!’ to Boundary Conditions
This actually happened…
-
On the Big Web Show
-
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.
-
Taking It to Eleven
A fully fluid redesign.
-
Thieves Are Your Best Customers in Waiting
Wherein I throw my two cents into the latest media piracy kerfuffle.
-
Responsive Navigation Patterns Roundup
2011
-
Stop SOPA From Destroying the Internet
To repurpose a line a U.S. president: I’m not opposed to laws, I’m opposed to dumb laws. And SOPA is a dangerously dumb law.
-
He Noticed, and That Mattered
-
Quote of the Day: Mobile-First Edition
-
Constricting the Tubes
A handy tool for simulating limited bandwidth.
-
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.
-
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.
-
A Syntax Riddle Wrapped in a Parsing Enigma
Puzzling out issues with HTML5 and wrapping block-level content.
-
Whose Lifestyle, Exactly?
Anil Dash has gone and written something rather wonderful about the “lifestyle business” euphemism.
2010
-
Say Hello to Gridulator
Introducing a new tool for calculating layout grids.
-
Evolutionary Biology Hearts Typography
-
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
-
For the Future of Publishing, Many Will Come From Few
A quick food-for-thought quote from Clay Shirky’s speech at the Shorenstein Center last week.
-
The Long Form
-
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.
2008
-
Interlude
We now pause for a brief interlude.
-
A Style of Looking
“I guarantee there’s non-crap out there.”
-
BusinessLinked
If you’ve been to BusinessWeek.com lately, you may have noticed our article pages sporting some nifty new functionality.
2007
-
Tell ’Em, Z
Jeffrey Zeldman stopped by the office to talk web standards with BusinessWeek’s “Innovation of the Week” podcast.
-
24 Hour Visual People
“I’m really more of a visual person.”
-
The Redesign Response Curve
In every redesign I’ve been involved with, user response has followed a predictable pattern.
-
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.
-
The Uhh Uhh Song
Here’s one for all you public speakers out there.
-
On Pushing Back Against Obviously Bad Ideas
In which we recall the tragedy of the CueCat.
-
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.
-
Control Option Support
Adventures in tech support.
-
Lead Electric Triangle
-
My Little Piece of Apartness
-
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.
-
Lemon Trees
Remembering when all we had were lemons.
-
Roach Clipping
A little slice of NYC life.
-
The Devil You Must Live With
Dealing with reality of ads.
-
The BW Design Update Rolls On
Rolling out the next phase of a redesign.
-
Better Than the SQL
If you’ve set up WordPress in a localhost testing environment you may already be familiar with the vagaries of
site_url
andhome
. -
Who Moved My Socket?
With the release of OS X 10.4.4, the default socket location for PHP and MySQL has been moved.
2006
-
Squashing Borders on Dynamic iframes
Ah, the
iframe
. So we meet again. -
Killing WebMonkey: A Case for the Commons
On losing a piece of web design history.
-
The New Look at BusinessWeek.com
Redesigning BusinessWeek’s website.
-
The Year in Review
-
Test Movie and AS2 Garbage Collection Hilarity
Want to scramble the Flash 8 compiler’s brain? (Or more likely your own?)
-
Fifth Avenue Apple Store Press Event
Tagging along with BusinessWeek’s tech reporters at the opening of the Fifth Avenue Apple Store.
-
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.
-
Mac IE: The End Has Come
Tomorrow, Internet Explorer for Mac will shuffle off this mortal coil.
-
Google Maps Is a Cubist Masterpiece
Google Maps is messing with my head.
-
Adobe Unveils Lightroom Beta
It seems like the folks at Adobe aren’t about to take Aperture lying down.
2005
-
Photoshop Inside Stroke Opacity Weirdness
-
Tab Delimited
-
The Hidden Depths
Like lots of Flash folk, I’ve got a real love/hate relationship going with the V2 components.
-
Look Ma! I’m on Steve’s Giant Screen!
Holy cow! Steve Jobs featured the BusinessWeek News Widget in his WWDC keynote today.
-
Life, Relocated
-
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.
-
The Acid2 Browser Test
-
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.
-
How to Manhandle a Disk Image
Got an OS X disk image that flat-out refuses to eject? Here’s how to fix it.