1. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
  2. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
  3. Abo, Akinori 9
  4. aesthetics 19
  5. agile 30
  6. Albers, Josef 17
  7. Alexander, Christopher 135
  8. Alexander, Scott 5
  9. Allsopp, John 4
  10. Ammer, Ralph 6
  11. Anderson, Gretchen 7
  12. anxiety 9
  13. Appleton, Maggie 5
  14. Aptekar-Cassels, Wesley 5
  15. Arango, Jorge 4
  16. architecture 110
  17. art 86
  18. Asimov, Isaac 5
  19. attention 17
  20. Auping, Michael 6
  21. Aurelius, Marcus 14
  22. Bachelard, Gaston 12
  23. Baker, Nicholson 10
  24. beauty 59
  25. Behrensmeyer, Anna K. 7
  26. Bjarnason, Baldur 8
  27. Blake, William 5
  28. blogging 23
  29. body 11
  30. Boeing, Geoff 7
  31. books 6
  32. boredom 9
  33. Botton, Alain de 38
  34. Brand, Stewart 4
  35. Bringhurst, Robert 16
  36. Brooks, Frederick P. 22
  37. Broskoski, Charles 6
  38. brutalism 7
  39. building 16
  40. bureaucracy 12
  41. Burnham, Bo 9
  42. business 15
  43. Byron, Lord 14
  44. Cagan, Marty 8
  45. Calvino, Italo 21
  46. Camus, Albert 13
  47. Carruth, Shane 15
  48. Cegłowski, Maciej 6
  49. Cervantes, Miguel de 7
  50. chance 11
  51. change 17
  52. Chiang, Ted 4
  53. childhood 6
  54. Chimero, Frank 17
  55. choice 8
  56. cities 51
  57. Cleary, Thomas 8
  58. Cleary, J.C. 8
  59. code 20
  60. Coelho, Paulo 31
  61. collaboration 18
  62. collections 31
  63. color 23
  64. commonplace 11
  65. communication 31
  66. community 7
  67. complexity 11
  68. connection 24
  69. constraints 25
  70. construction 9
  71. content 9
  72. Corbusier, Le 13
  73. Coyier, Chris 4
  74. craft 67
  75. creativity 59
  76. crime 9
  77. Critchlow, Tom 5
  78. critique 10
  79. Cross, Nigel 12
  80. Cross, Anita Clayburn 10
  81. css 11
  82. culture 13
  83. curiosity 11
  84. cycles 7
  85. Danielewski, Mark Z. 4
  86. darkness 28
  87. Darwin, Will 10
  88. data 8
  89. death 38
  90. Debord, Guy 6
  91. decisions 10
  92. design 132
  93. desire 6
  94. destiny 6
  95. details 31
  96. Dickinson, Emily 9
  97. Dieste, Eladio 4
  98. discovery 9
  99. doors 7
  100. Dorn, Brandon 11
  101. drawing 23
  102. dreams 8
  103. Drucker, Peter F. 15
  104. Duany, Andres 18
  105. Eatock, Daniel 4
  106. economics 13
  107. efficiency 7
  108. Eisenman, Peter 8
  109. Eliot, T.S. 14
  110. emotion 8
  111. ending 14
  112. engineering 12
  113. Eno, Brian 4
  114. ethics 14
  115. euphony 38
  116. Evans, Benedict 4
  117. evolution 9
  118. experience 14
  119. exploration 6
  120. farming 8
  121. fashion 11
  122. fear 7
  123. features 25
  124. flaws 10
  125. Flexner, Abraham 8
  126. food 16
  127. form 19
  128. Fowler, Martin 4
  129. Franklin, Ursula M. 30
  130. fun 7
  131. function 31
  132. games 13
  133. gardens 26
  134. Garfield, Emily 4
  135. Garfunkel, Art 6
  136. geography 8
  137. geometry 18
  138. goals 9
  139. Gombrich, E. H. 4
  140. goodness 13
  141. Graham, Paul 37
  142. graphics 13
  143. Greene, Erick 6
  144. Hamming, Richard 45
  145. happiness 18
  146. Harford, Tim 4
  147. Harper, Thomas J. 15
  148. Hayes, Brian 28
  149. heat 7
  150. Heinrich, Bernd 7
  151. Herbert, Frank 4
  152. Heschong, Lisa 27
  153. Hesse, Herman 6
  154. history 14
  155. Hoffman, Yoel 10
  156. Hofstadter, Douglas 6
  157. home 15
  158. Hoy, Amy 4
  159. Hoyt, Ben 5
  160. html 11
  161. Hudlow, Gandalf 4
  162. humanity 16
  163. Huxley, Aldous 7
  164. hypermedia 22
  165. i 18
  166. ideas 21
  167. identity 33
  168. images 10
  169. industry 9
  170. information 42
  171. infrastructure 17
  172. innovation 15
  173. interaction 10
  174. interest 10
  175. interfaces 37
  176. intuition 9
  177. invention 10
  178. Irwin, Robert 65
  179. Isaacson, Walter 28
  180. Ishikawa, Sara 33
  181. iteration 13
  182. Ive, Jonathan 6
  183. Jackson, Steven J. 14
  184. Jacobs, Jane 54
  185. Jacobs, Alan 5
  186. Jobs, Steve 20
  187. Jones, Nick 5
  188. Kahn, Louis 4
  189. Kakuzō, Okakura 23
  190. Kaufman, Kenn 4
  191. Keith, Jeremy 6
  192. Keller, Jenny 10
  193. Keqin, Yuanwu 8
  194. Ketheswaran, Pirijan 6
  195. Kingdon, Jonathan 5
  196. Kitching, Roger 7
  197. Klein, Laura 4
  198. Kleon, Austin 13
  199. Klinkenborg, Verlyn 24
  200. Klyn, Dan 20
  201. knowledge 29
  202. Kohlstedt, Kurt 12
  203. Kramer, Karen L. 10
  204. Krishna, Golden 10
  205. Kuma, Kengo 18
  206. language 21
  207. learning 31
  208. life 60
  209. light 32
  210. loneliness 12
  211. love 29
  212. Lovell, Sophie 16
  213. Lupton, Ellen 11
  214. Luu, Dan 8
  215. Lynch, Kevin 12
  216. MacIver, David R. 8
  217. MacWright, Tom 5
  218. Magnus, Margaret 12
  219. making 77
  220. management 14
  221. Manaugh, Geoff 27
  222. Markson, David 16
  223. Mars, Roman 13
  224. material 39
  225. math 16
  226. McCarter, Robert 21
  227. meaning 33
  228. media 16
  229. melancholy 53
  230. memory 29
  231. metaphor 10
  232. metrics 19
  233. microsites 49
  234. Miller, J. Abbott 10
  235. Mills, C. Wright 9
  236. minimalism 10
  237. Miyazaki, Hayao 30
  238. Mod, Craig 15
  239. modularity 6
  240. Mollison, Bill 31
  241. morality 8
  242. Murakami, Haruki 21
  243. music 16
  244. Müller, Boris 7
  245. Naka, Toshiharu 8
  246. names 11
  247. Naskrecki, Piotr 5
  248. nature 51
  249. networks 15
  250. Neustadter, Scott 3
  251. Noessel, Christopher 7
  252. notetaking 35
  253. novelty 11
  254. objects 16
  255. order 10
  256. ornament 9
  257. Orwell, George 7
  258. Ott, Matthias 4
  259. ownership 7
  260. Pallasmaa, Juhani 41
  261. Palmer, John 8
  262. patterns 11
  263. Patton, James L. 9
  264. Pawson, John 21
  265. perception 22
  266. perfection 7
  267. performance 17
  268. Perrine, John D. 9
  269. Petroski, Henry 24
  270. photography 20
  271. Pinker, Steven 8
  272. place 14
  273. planning 15
  274. Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth 18
  275. poetry 13
  276. politics 9
  277. Pollan, Michael 6
  278. practice 10
  279. problems 31
  280. process 22
  281. production 7
  282. productivity 12
  283. products 21
  284. programming 9
  285. progress 16
  286. Pye, David 42
  287. quality 26
  288. questions 8
  289. Radić, Smiljan 20
  290. Rams, Dieter 16
  291. Rao, Venkatesh 14
  292. reading 17
  293. reality 13
  294. Reichenstein, Oliver 5
  295. religion 12
  296. Rendle, Robin 12
  297. repair 28
  298. research 17
  299. Reveal, James L. 4
  300. Richards, Melanie 3
  301. Richie, Donald 10
  302. Rougeux, Nicholas 4
  303. Rowe, Peter G. 10
  304. Rupert, Dave 4
  305. Ruskin, John 5
  306. Satyal, Parimal 9
  307. Saval, Nikil 13
  308. Sayers, Dorothy 32
  309. Schaller, George B. 7
  310. Schwulst, Laurel 5
  311. science 17
  312. seeing 36
  313. Sennett, Richard 45
  314. senses 11
  315. Seuss, Dr. 14
  316. Shakespeare, William 4
  317. Shorin, Toby 8
  318. silence 9
  319. Silverstein, Murray 33
  320. Simms, Matthew 19
  321. Simon, Paul 6
  322. simplicity 14
  323. Singer, Ryan 12
  324. skill 17
  325. Sloan, Robin 5
  326. Smith, Cyril Stanley 29
  327. Smith, Justin E. H. 6
  328. Smith, Rach 4
  329. socializing 7
  330. society 23
  331. software 69
  332. solitude 12
  333. Somers, James 8
  334. Sorkin, Michael 56
  335. sound 14
  336. space 20
  337. Speck, Jeff 18
  338. spirit 10
  339. streets 10
  340. structure 13
  341. Strunk, William 15
  342. Ström, Matthew 13
  343. style 30
  344. Sun, Chuánqí 15
  345. symbols 12
  346. systems 18
  347. Sōetsu, Yanagi 34
  348. Sōseki, Natsume 8
  349. Tanaka, Tomoyuki 9
  350. Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō 15
  351. taste 10
  352. Taylor, Dorian 16
  353. teaching 21
  354. teamwork 17
  355. technology 41
  356. texture 7
  357. thinking 31
  358. Thoreau, Henry David 8
  359. time 55
  360. Tolkien, J.R.R. 6
  361. tools 32
  362. touch 8
  363. transportation 16
  364. Trombley, Nick 45
  365. truth 15
  366. Tufte, Edward 31
  367. Turrell, James 6
  368. typography 25
  369. understanding 33
  370. urbanism 68
  371. ux 100
  372. Victor, Bret 9
  373. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 4
  374. vision 7
  375. visualization 34
  376. Voltaire 4
  377. wabi-sabi 8
  378. walking 23
  379. Wallace, David Foster 33
  380. Wang, Shawn 6
  381. war 7
  382. waste 12
  383. Watterson, Bill 4
  384. Webb, Matt 14
  385. Webb, Marc 3
  386. Weber, Michael H. 3
  387. Wechler, Lawrence 37
  388. whimsy 11
  389. White, E.B. 15
  390. Wirth, Niklaus 6
  391. wisdom 21
  392. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 7
  393. Woolf, Virginia 11
  394. words 35
  395. work 81
  396. writing 55
  397. Wurman, Richard Saul 18
  398. www 89
  399. Yamada, Kōun 5
  400. Yamashita, Yuhki 4
  401. Yudkowsky, Eliezer 17
  402. zen 39
  403. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
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The World Wide Web

Close
  • To do some more pushups on the internet

    There may be a lot of things that have to be studied, but there is also what I call "occupational therapy for the opposition" that says, send them off to do some more pushups on the internet. You need to be mindful that it is possible to use information, and the need for information, as a delay for the call for action.

    Ursula M. Franklin, Every Tool Shapes the Task
    • information
    • ethics
    • www
    • justice
  • It leaves no sign of its past self behind

    When buildings are torn down and rebuilt, the ghost of the old building is often visible in the new one — strangely angled walls and rooms, which make sense only in the context of the space as a living organism. On the web, there are no such restrictions: when a website dies, it leaves no sign of its past self behind.

    Wesley Aptekar-Cassels, How Websites Die
    • death
    • www
    • architecture
    • building
  • The problem with trees

    Many systems are organized hierarchically. The CERNDOC documentation system is an example, as is the Unix file system, and the VMS/HELP system. A tree has the practical advantage of giving every node a unique name. However, it does not allow the system to model the real world. For example, in a hierarchical HELP system such as VMS/HELP, one often gets to a lead on a tree such as:

    HELP COMPILER SOURCE_FORMAT PRAGMAS DEFAULTS

    only to find a reference to another leaf: Please see

    HELP COMPILER COMMAND OPTIONS DEFAULTS PRAGMAS

    and it is necessary to leave the system and re-enter it. What was needed was a link from one node to another, because in this case the information was not naturally organized into a tree.

    Tim Berners-Lee, Seeing With Fresh Eyes
    1. ​​A City Is Not a Tree​​
    • hierarchy
    • www

    Tufte: "Some models are supremely better than others: A web of links replaces a hierarchy of nouns, creates a universal architecture for sharing information."

  • The business case for craft

    macOS software that adheres to craft — Things or Carbon Copy Cloner or BBEdit or Sublime Text (which, despite not being “native native” feels so solid and so responsive you’re willing to overlook its quirks) or Bear or Alfred or iA Writer or Keynote (arguably one of the best pieces of macOS software of all time) or anything by Panic, heck, even Terminal or Quicken (which, against all rational expectations is just a joy to use)5 — exists in troves, the existence of such proves to the Slacks or Twitters or Adobes of the world that it’s not impossible nor rare to produce craft-oriented software in service to user fluency, and still make a profit.

    In fact, there’s a business case to be made for being craft- and fluency-focused. We’ve seen entire companies with business models that could be summarized as “Bloat-Free X” emerge in recent years. Affinity is bloat-free Adobe. Install Adobe Creative Cloud on your laptop and marvel at the no fewer than a dozen processes whirling around in the background for unknown purposes. It’s no surprise Affinity Photo and Publisher and Designer have taken off. Sketch’s main feature for many years was simply: Not Adobe.

    And the web! When you care — when you really give a shit — the web is awe inspiring. I still can’t believe Figma is web-native (also born from the Not Adobe camp). That an application can feel so powerful, so fast, so well-crafted and be fully web-based should be a kind of lighthouse-archetype for all other sites lost in a sea of complexity and muck and unnecessary frameworks.

    Craig Mod, Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump
    1. ​​More profitable and a better buy​​
    • craft
    • business
    • www
  • Growing in the correct way

    It often feels like Are.na itself has its own needs and desires—that Are.na has its own personal intuition. And that we (you and I) are figuring out what it wants to be together. We (the organization that works on Are.na) have a very defined sense of how things should be done and why building Are.na is important, but we try not to be overly dogmatic about what exactly it should evolve into.

    …We’ve long had the sense that it’s possible to cultivate an experience on the Internet that is more calm, thoughtful, and introspective. And we’ve long had the view that this is possible not from a technology-oriented approach, but from an approach that is more soft, more personal, and more intuitive.

    …If we are the blade, what is the shield? I think it’s speed: The dominant model for online platforms (especially social platforms) is speed and scale at all costs. But to us, growing Are.na in the correct way is more important than growing it quickly.

    Charles Broskoski, On Motivation
    • software
    • www
  • We are working against the grain of the wood

    A woodworker works along the grain of the wood to prevent splinter. A butcher slices across to the muscle fiber to improve tenderness. A sailor trims the sail to balance the lift and drag from the wind. When we respect the material, the material pays us back in convenience, safety, and efficiency.

    Good web design requires the same understanding of and respect for the materials. And that material is the browser, along with its semantic HTML, default styles, and standard behaviors. But the wide use of design software such as Figma, Sketch, and AdobeXD has trivialized the nuances of such material into “canvases” or “artboards” of pre-defined sizes. The convenient styling and manipulation of pixels and objects have disguised the hierarchy of the DOM, the constraints of the device, and the personal preferences and browser setting from real users. Dishonest tools encourage dishonest design.

    We are working against the grain of the wood.

    Chuánqí Sun, A case against "pixel perfect" design
    1. ​​The Web's Grain​​
    2. ​​What the brick really wants.​​
    3. ​​What the material wants to be​​
    • material
    • www
    • design
  • Shortlist of interesting spaces

    Nick Trombley, barnsworthburning.net
    • craft
    • work
    • walking
    • www
    • notetaking
    • words
    • euphony
    • melancholy
    • zen
    • darkness
    • gardens
  • The internet grew by breaking

    The Internet grew by breaking, bumping up against the limits of existing protocols and practices and working around them, leaving behind almost by accident some of the properties that we now enumerate as key and distinctive virtues of the Internet as infrastructural form. Far from being a generalized cultural tendency or a property of individual minds, innovation in the technology space, as in culture more generally, is therefore organized around problems. This makes innovation simultaneously specific and in some measure collective in nature. And its engine is breakdown and repair.

    Steven J. Jackson, Rethinking Repair
    • www
  • Your new electronic microscope

    Learn what is in this Internet. But then keep your head clear and go back to your goals. What in fact, in the best of all worlds, do you want to do? Do any of the activities with your new electronic microscope bring you closer to that?

    Ursula M. Franklin, Every Tool Shapes the Task
    1. ​​Candide​​
    • goals
    • www
  • More that can be done

    The web is still a very young medium, and it has been influenced more than anything else by print media design. There is so much more that can be done with text on a screen than is being done today. Citations, drawing, chat, speech-to-text. There are opportunities everywhere, and the bar is low! If we are serious about unlocking the value of knowledge we should consider how to improve every part of the knowledge production stack, and that includes reading. As Laurel Schwulst says:

    Imaginative functionality is important, even if it’s only a trace of what was, as it’s still a sketch for a more ideal world.

    Toby Shorin, Open Transclude for Networked Writing
    subpixel.space
    • writing
    • www
    • media
  • Web trails

    breadcrumbs-a72f3abea1438d53861570d32cd85265.png

    There's more room for spatial concepts to become part of our web browsing experience.

    One example is an idea I call "trails." It's based on the story of Hansel and Gretel walking through the forest and leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind them, so that they could find their way back later. What if you could do this on the web?

    A breadcrumb in this case is a single pixel that you can place in a precise location on a webpage. Placing a breadcrumb could be as simple as Option + click. While navigating the web, you could leave breadcrumbs on different pages you find interesting over the course of a browsing session. When you're done, that sequential "trail of breadcrumbs" would be saved. You could then jump back into the trail and navigate "forward" and "backward" through the things you found interesting in that browsing session. Or share the trail with a friend, and they could step through your spatial path of navigating the web.

    John Palmer, Spatial Interfaces
    • interfaces
    • www
  • Microcosm

    Dame Wendy Hall, at the University of Southhampton, sought to extend the life of the link further in her own program, Microcosm. Each link made by the user was stored in a linkbase, a database apart from the main text specifically designed to store metadata about connections. In Microcosm, links could never die, never rot away. If their connection was severed they could point elsewhere since links weren’t directly tied to text. You could even write a bit of text alongside links, expanding a bit on why the link was important, or add to a document separate layers of links, one, for instance, a tailored set of carefully curated references for experts on a given topic, the other a more laid back set of links for the casual audience.

    Jay Hoffmann, Web History Chapter 1: Birth
    • www
    • connection
    • hypermedia

    A video on Microcosm can be found on are.na.

  • On Technology

    As we look back 10 years from now, the web is going to be the defining technology, the defining social moment for our generation.

    I think it’s going to be huge.

    Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview
    • www
  • A web of books

    Screenshot of tomcritchlow.com on 2020-04-17 at 11.33.18 AM.png

    A proof of concept for an RSS-like books feed

    Thinking through building some kind of “web of books” I realized that we could use something similar to RSS to build a kind of decentralized GoodReads powered by indie sites and an underlying easy to parse format.

    I created a proof of concept by converting my own bookshelf into a JSON file https://tomcritchlow.com/library.json.

    If you think of several sites publishing their bookshelf as a library.json file you can imagine a bookshelf “feed reader” that let’s you keep track of friends bookshelves

    Tom Critchlow, Library .JSON
    tomcritchlow.com
    • reading
    • content
    • www

    The Airtable database that this website is built on contains an implicit spec for exactly this type of data, plus support for other things besides strictly books. Extracts, works, creators, and spaces all link together to form an ecosystem of content.

  • Eggs, Easter and poached

    When a site is done with care and excitement you can tell. You feel it as you visit, the hum of intention. The craft, the cohesiveness, the attention to detail is obvious. And in turn, you meet them halfway. These are the sites with the low bounce rates, the best engagement metrics, the ones where they get questions like “can I contribute?” No gimmicks needed.

    What if you don’t have the time? Of course, we all have to get things over the line. Perhaps a challenge: what small thing can you incorporate that someone might notice? Can you start with a single detail? I didn’t start with a poached egg in my breakfast, one day I made a goofy scrambled one. It went on from there. Can you challenge yourself to learn one small new technique? Can you outsource one graphic? Can you introduce a tiny easter egg? Say something just a little differently from the typical corporate lingo?

    Sarah Drasner, In Defense of a Fussy Website
    css-tricks.com
    • www
    • details
    • ux
  • The vast open seas

    We didn't have Google in the early days. Other search engines like Lycos, Excite and Northern Lights did exist but were nowhere near as efficient as modern search engines. Finding something you were interested in was not as simple as typing a few words and getting to that information in one click.

    No, the web was much more of an adventure. It was a place that you wandered to discover new areas, like exploring the vast open seas. A new virtual space that lead to all kinds of strange, interesting, exciting places. This is what the web was like, at least, in our collective imagination.

    Parimal Satyal, Rediscovering the Small Web
    • exploration
    • www
  • It can also be art

    It is worth remembering a website does not have to be a product; it can also be art. The web is also a creative and cultural space that need not confine itself to the conventions defined by commercial product design and marketing.

    Parimal Satyal, Rediscovering the Small Web
    • www
    • art
    • ux
  • If you run a website

    If you run a website and you put official share buttons on your website, use intrusive analytics platforms, serve ads through a third-party ad network or use pervasive cookies to share and sell data on your users, you're contributing to a user-hostile web. You're using free and open-source tools created by thousands of collaborators around the world, over an open web and in the spirit of sharing, to subvert users.

    Parimal Satyal, Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
    • www
    • ethics
  • What do we want the web to be?

    Do we want the web to be open, accessible, empowering and collaborative? Free, in the spirit of CERN’s decision in 1993 or the open source tools it's built on? Or do we want it to be just another means of endless consumption, where people become eyeballs, targets and profiles? Where companies use your data to control your behaviour and which enables a surveillance society—what do we want?

    Parimal Satyal, Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
    • www
  • gridless.design

    A Website by Donnie D'Amato
    gridless.design

    get rid of the grid

    Blasphemy, I need structure and order!"

    The web is good at these things, just not in the ways that designers have been accustomed to working. We'll take a look at how we got here and how we might change our perspective. Let's think outside of the grid and allow other guidelines to provide a comprehensive layout.

    1. ​​We are the ones who paved the path​​
    2. ​​Sentences and words do not exist by themselves​​
    3. ​​Changing Our Development Mindset​​
    • www
    • interfaces
  • The Website Obesity Crisis

    A Talk by Maciej Cegłowski
    idlewords.com
    1. ​​The Taft Test​​
    • www
    • code
    • performance
  • Web Design - The First 100 Years

    A Talk by Maciej Cegłowski
    idlewords.com
    • www
    • aerospace
    • code
    • flight
  • A Brief Rant

    An Essay by Bret Victor
    worrydream.com
    1. ​​Like, just a post complaining that screens should be better​​
    • design
    • technology
    • www
    • interaction
    • body
  • Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web

    An Article by Parimal Satyal
    neustadt.fr

    We are quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it.

    1. ​​A fly in the spider's web​​
    2. ​​If you run a website​​
    3. ​​I chose out​​
    4. ​​What do we want the web to be?​​
    1. ​​The Rise Of User-Hostile Software​​
    • www
    • technology
    • ux
  • Web Design is 95% Typography

    An Article by Oliver Reichenstein
    ia.net

    95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.

    • typography
    • interfaces
    • www

    Almost 15 years later, still as relevant as ever.

  • Why Do All Websites Look the Same?

    An Article by Boris Müller
    modus.medium.com

    On the visual weariness of the web.

    1. ​​The Great Blight of Dullness​​
    2. ​​What On Earth is a Brutalist Website?​​
    3. ​​All Social Networks Look The Same Now​​
    4. ​​All websites are just digital movie theaters now​​
    • www
    • boredom
    • interfaces
  • Rediscovering the Small Web

    An Article by Parimal Satyal
    neustadt.fr
    1. ​​The vast open seas​​
    2. ​​The gatekeeper​​
    3. ​​It can also be art​​
    1. ​​The small web is beautiful​​
    • www

    Most websites today are built like commercial products by professionals and marketers, optimised to draw the largest audience, generate engagement and 'convert'. But there is also a smaller, less-visible web designed by regular people to simply to share their interests and hobbies with the world. A web that is unpolished, often quirky but often also fun, creative and interesting.

  • Design Links & Learning

    A Blog by Nick Trombley
    barnsworthburning.notion.site

    Collections of articles, links, and other material from around the web, relevant to software design and engineering.

    • design
    • software
    • engineering
    • www
    • blogging
  • Snipping the dead blooms

    A Quote by Robin Sloan
    newpublic.substack.com

    I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that's about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you're snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I'll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don't like this anymore,” and I will delete it.

    But that's care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn't have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they're both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.

    • care
    • repair
    • www
    • gardens
    • technology
  • What shape is the internet?

    A Gallery by Noah Veltman
    noahveltman.com
    Screenshot of noahveltman.com on 2022-04-21 at 9.19.29 AM.png

    According to patent drawings, it's a cloud, or a bean, or a web, or an explosion, or a highway, or maybe a weird lump.

    • www
    • graphics
  • Downsides of the internet

    An Essay
    blog.royalsloth.eu

    The type of nitpicking behavior that I mentioned earlier, is especially problematic since it often causes the loss of writer’s authenticity. With time, these criticisms cause one of the following:

    • The writer stops publishing their work.
    • The writer stops reading comments and minds their own business.
    • The writer learns their lesson and sands off their edges in order to fit better in the society du jour.

    The larger the writer’s audience, the more likely it is for the writer to pick the last option and tone down their voice. You can experience this first hand when reading the essays of prominent bloggers. Their early work is usually interesting and fun to read, which naturally brought a large audience to their doors. But the more the show goes on, the more they will waffle around the topic, since with a large enough audience every thought will be misunderstood and nitpicked mercilessly.

    • writing
    • www
    • critique
    • personality
  • Make Free Stuff

    An Article by Max Böck
    mxb.dev

    At its very core, the rules of the web are different than those of “real” markets. The idea that ownership fundamentally means that nobody else can have the same thing you have just doesn’t apply here. This is a world where anything can easily be copied a million times and distributed around the globe in a second. If that were possible in the real world, we’d call it Utopia.

    …Resource Scarcity doesn’t make sense on the web. Artificially creating it here serves no other purpose than to charge money for things that could easily have been free for all. Why anyone would consider that better is beyond me.

    • www
    • making
  • Thoughts On Shitpost Diplomacy

    An Article by Tanner Greer
    scholars-stage.org
    Image from scholars-stage.org on 2022-02-25 at 3.58.36 PM.jpeg

    That our diplomat’s first impulse is to resort to a self-defeating meme speaks to a broader problem—the sort of cultural problem instinctual reactions to crisis make most clear. This is a problem of an entire generation—my generation. We are a people that retweets when we could be reading. The minds of best and our brightest have been poisoned by ratios, “god tweets,” and memes. We came of age on Twitter, Tumblr, and 4chan, and still see the world through their frames. We find it harder and harder to distinguish the actual from the image; we struggle to disentangle perception management from problem management. This is what it looks like when the terminally online ascend to positions of real responsibility. Welcome to the age of shitpost diplomacy.

    • politics
    • war
    • media
    • www
  • Spatial Web Browsing

    An Article by Maggie Appleton
    maggieappleton.com
    Screenshot of maggieappleton.com on 2022-01-20 at 8.54.10 AM.png

    There are some new apps appearing that offer alternative ways of browsing the web...This canvas-based approach adds spatial dimension to the web browsing experience; they allow us to arrange browser windows above, below, to the left, and right of other browser windows.

    The same way we're able to put an open book next to a piece of paper and below a row of sticky notes in meatspace. Arranging objects in space to create groupings, indicate relationships, and build hierarchies is one of those classical human skills that never goes out of style.

    1. ​​Spatial Interfaces​​
    2. ​​Spatial Software​​
    • space
    • www
    • interfaces
  • drawing.garden

    A Website by Ben Moren
    drawing.garden
    Screenshot of drawing.garden on 2020-08-16 at 1.59.18 PM.png

    Gardening, but with emojis and less time.

    1. ​​A Brief History of the Digital Garden​​
    2. ​​emojraw.glitch.me (draw!)​​
    • sound
    • www
    • fun
    • joy
    • microsites
    • gardens
  • Plain old webpages still matter

    An Article by Felix Pleşoianu
    felix.plesoianu.ro

    It's empowering to see just how far you can go with a website you can, in a pinch, create or modify with nothing more than Notepad. Not to mention all the new people it can reach without the overhead of bloated server software slowing it down and inflating the code.

    Don't let others speak for you on the web. You deserve better.

    • www
  • Million Short

    A Website
    millionshort.com

    Million Short makes it easy to discover sites that just don't make it to the top of the search engine results for whatever reason – whether it be poor SEO, new site, small marketing budget, or competitive keywords. The Million Short technology gives users access to the wealth of untapped information on the web.

    1. ​​Marginalia Search​​
    • search
    • www
  • Menus, Metaphors and Materials: Milestones of User Interface Design

    An Article by Boris Müller
    medium.com

    Students traditionally learn art and design by studying the masters, analyzing, sketching and interpreting the grand visions of the past. In doing this, they get to understand the ideas, concepts and motivations behind the visual form.

    In user interface design, this practice is curiously absent.

    1. ​​Interface design is ephemeral​​
    2. ​​Xerox Star​​
    3. ​​Magic Cap​​
    4. ​​Information Landscapes​​
    5. ​​BeOS Icons​​
    1. ​​The Mother of All Demos​​
    2. ​​Essential vs. nice to have​​
    3. ​​Metaphors We Web By​​
    • interfaces
    • www
    • history
    • learning
  • Metaphors We Web By

    An Essay by Maggie Appleton
    maggieappleton.com

    As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson made clear in their touchstone book Metaphors We Live By, metaphors are the basis of all human thought and reasoning. The metaphors we use to speak about the web are not simply linguistic trivia – they determine how we understand it on a fundamental level. It determines what we think the web is capable of, what risks, opportunities, and challenges it poses. Which means the metaphors we use to think about the web profoundly influence what we think the web is, what we think we can do with it, and how we might change or evolve it.

    …Out of all of these metaphors [for the web], the two most enduring are paper and physical space.

    1. ​​Metaphors We Live By​​
    2. ​​Menus, Metaphors and Materials: Milestones of User Interface Design​​
    • metaphor
    • www
  • scribe.rip

    An Application
    scribe.rip

    I hadn't realized that Medium had made JavaScript a requirement to be able to read any Medium post - I'd had JS disabled for ages on Medium just because of all the extra cruft they added.

    But now, without JS, you only get the first few lines of content, and the rest is loaded entirely with JS - which is...stupid.

    Scribe fixes all that and focuses entirely on the author's content.

    Why Would I Want to Use This?

    • You believe in an open web
    • You believe more in the author than the platform
    • You don't like the reading experience that Medium provides
    • You object to Medium's extortionist business tactics
    • You're concerned about how Medium uses your data
    • Other reasons
    • www
    • blogging
  • Design Systems, Agile, and Industrialization

    An Article by Brad Frost
    bradfrost.com
    Image from bradfrost.com on 2020-09-10 at 1.41.24 PM.png

    I’ve come to the conclusion that “enterprise web development” is just regular web development, only stripped of any joy or creativity or autonomy. It’s plugging a bunch of smart people into the matrix and forcing them to crank out widgets and move the little cards to the right.

    In these structures, people are stripped of their humanity as they’re fed into the machine. It becomes “a developer resource is needed” rather than “Oh, Samantha would be a great fit for this project.” And the effect of all this on individuals is depressing. When people’s primary motivation is to move tickets over a column, their ability to be creative or serve a higher purpose are almost completely quashed. Interaction with other humans seems to be relegated to yelling at others to tell them they’re blocked.

    Reading “AS PER THE REQUIREMENTS” in tickets makes me dry heave. How did such sterile, shitty language seep into my everyday work?

    1. ​​Beware SAFe, an Unholy Incarnation of Darkness​​
    • www
    • agile
    • systems
    • creativity
  • How I experience the web today

    A Website
    how-i-experience-web-today.com
    Screenshot of how-i-experience-web-today.com on 2021-08-24 at 7.30.50 PM.png
    1. ​​User Inyerface​​
    • ux
    • www
    • microsites
  • Make Frontend Shit Again

    A Website by Sara Vieira
    makefrontendshitagain.party
    Screenshot of makefrontendshitagain.party on 2021-10-16 at 3.39.53 PM.png

    We used to make websites because it was fun but at some point, we lost the way.

    We need to make dumb shit!
    Make useless stuff;
    make the web fun again!

    • www
    • microsites

    I find it a little ironic that a website so nostalgic for the days of Geocities and FTP is built with a modern JS framework like Nuxt. Still fun though.

  • Things that don't scale

    An Article by Benedict Evans
    www.ben-evans.com
    Image from www.ben-evans.com on 2021-10-10 at 10.23.17 AM.jpeg

    Maybe the internet is due for a wave of things that don’t scale at all. In that light, I’ve been fascinated by ‘Morioka Shoten’ in Tokyo - a bookshop that sells only one book at a time. This is retail as anti-logistics - as a reaction against the firehose, and the infinite replication of Amazon. Before the internet that would only work in a very dense city, but, again, the internet is the densest city on earth, so how far do we scale the unscalable?

    1. ​​Morioka Shoten​​
    2. ​​Stepping out of the firehose​​
    • scale
    • www
    • business
    • craft
    • microsites
  • Locus. (Appwalls)

    An Article by Ethan Marcotte
    ethanmarcotte.com
    Image from ethanmarcotte.com on 2021-09-29 at 11.36.20 AM.jpeg

    I’ve noticed a recent trend on the web — or at least, on the parts of it I’ve visited. Maybe you’ve noticed it too.

    Here’s what happens: you’re on a website, and one of these little prompts pops up...[to] let you know that there’s an app, and that the website you’re on...well, it’s not quite the app, is it?

    ...Sometimes, the website wants me to install the app — no, it needs me to install the app. It’s like a paywall, but for apps. An appwall.

    In recent years, these prompts have gotten more prominent, and occasionally impassable. And I think that trend’s interesting. Why would a company promote a native app over their perfectly usable website?

    It feels like a glimpse into that company’s design priorities. And it’s possibly providing us with insight into the business value they place on the open web — a medium that’s meant to be accessible everywhere, on any screen, on any device.

    And it really does feel like these glimpses are becoming more common.

    • www
    • ux
  • Jacob Leech, Digital Craftsman

    A Profile by Jacob Leech
    jacobleech.com
    Screenshot of jacobleech.com on 2021-09-27 at 11.37.21 AM.png

    I'm Jacob — a designer and coder who creates things with computers (Fig 1) 'Digital Craftsman' best describes my skill set.

    Digital projects thrive when designers understand how they will be built. Just as an architect understands how a structure is created, the same should be true on the web.

    1. ​​nicktrombley.design​​
    • craft
    • www
    • making

    I like this portfolio/profile page – Jacob does a great job articulating the unconventional position of being somewhere between the worlds of design and development. For a while my LinkedIn bio has read Digital Designer-Builder, but Digital Craftsman conveys the same idea. Maybe I'm just not ready to assume the label of "craftsman" for myself. I consider it instead a perpetual aspiration.

  • Exit pages

    An Idea by Brad Enslen
    ramblinggit.com

    Today I made an Exit page. So many people end their visit by hitting the Back button on their browser. The exit page is a last attempt to get them to explore the Blog Directory to find an entertaining blog. Or failing that to try a search on a search engine they may have never tried before.

    • exits
    • www
    • fun
    • whimsy
    • ending

    The Exit Page is an idea best attributed to Brad Enslen and outlined in this short blog post – an "end of the road", so to speak, for your website, possibly leading on to other ways. Similar to the early-internet concept of webrings.

    It is fun and whimsical, but also sad, in a way. I think it suggests a bit of the (Chistopher) Alexandrian idea – nothing beautiful can be made except with the knowledge that it will eventually end.

  • The indie web manifesto

    A Definition
    web.archive.org

    While commercial websites display more and more agressive messages, target and track their users, the indie web respects the individuals, their intelligence and their privacy; it’s an open forum for thoughts and debate. While purely commercial websites turn into information and entertainment magazines, while tycoons of media, telecom, computing and military agencies fight for the control of the Internet, the indie web offers a free vision of the world, bypasses the economic censorship of news, its confusion with advertising and infommercial, its reduction to a dazing and manipulating entertainment.

    • www
  • 136 things every web developer should know before they burn out and turn to landscape painting or nude modelling

    An Article by Baldur Bjarnason
    www.baldurbjarnason.com
    1. The best way to improve software UX is regular direct observation, by everybody on the team, of the work done.
    2. Have some personality.
    3. Minimalism is garbage.
    4. Metaphors are fantastic.
    5. Naming things is fantastic.
    6. Try to write HTML that would make sense and be usable without the CSS.
    7. The buyer is quite often wrong. That fact never changes their mind.
    8. Working on a functioning app’s codebase does more to increase its quality than adding features.
    9. A good manager will debate you, and that’s awesome.
    10. The term ‘project’ is a poor metaphor for the horticultural activity that is software development.
    1. ​​Two Hundred Fifty Things an Architect Should Know​​
    • www
    • work
    • ux
    • collections
  • All websites are just digital movie theaters now

    An Article by Ryan Broderick
    www.garbageday.email
    Image from www.garbageday.email on 2021-08-11 at 11.11.21 PM.png

    If I had to guess where this is all going, I’d say that what an internet platform is actually has already permanently shifted. Instead of apps trying to dominate specific features — a platform for video, a platform for expiring content, a platform for connecting social networking, a platform for livestreaming, a platform for resumes — we’ve already entered a new era of online networks where they all will essentially offer the same services and instead, focus increasingly on specific demographics.

    1. ​​All Social Networks Look The Same Now​​
    2. ​​Why Do All Websites Look the Same?​​
    • content
    • www
    • networks
  • The web in decay is the web by design

    An Essay by Chia Amisola
    chias.blog

    When will there be a guide to best practices for archiving the web?

    Will the giants responsible for the platformization of the web make the act of digital archival any easier for us?

    Is it foolish for platforms like Snapchat or Instagram Stories to brand themselves as “temporary” when temporariness is impossible on our internet?

    Should the web exist as something organic, malleable, and destructible –– or as an eternal timekeeper?

    Is link rot more of a technological issue or a human one?

    Do humans want to know themselves forever?

    1. ​​The Internet Is Rotting​​
    • decay
    • www
  • The Internet Is Rotting

    An Essay by Jonathan Zittrain
    www.theatlantic.com

    Too much has been lost already.
    The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.
    Links work seamlessly until they don’t.
    And as tangible counterparts to online work fade,
    these gaps represent actual holes in humanity’s knowledge—
    they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts.

    1. ​​The web in decay is the web by design​​
    • www
    • hypermedia
    • decay
    • knowledge
  • The amorality of Web 2.0

    An Essay by Nicholas Carr
    www.roughtype.com

    The Internet is changing the economics of creative work – or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture – and it’s doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it’s created by amateurs rather than professionals, it’s free. And free trumps quality all the time.

    • www
    • morality
    • economics
    • goodness
  • Project Xanadu

    An Idea by Ted Nelson

    Project Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it an improvement over the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivializes our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents."

    1. ​​Hyperland, Intermedia, and the Web That Never Was​​
    2. ​​Designing Synced Blocks​​
    • hypermedia
    • www
  • Discourse in web design

    An Essay by Jason Santa Maria
    v5.jasonsantamaria.com

    A website is its own, singular thing. We know it isn’t a book, a TV show, a film, or a song, but our language is limited to talking about it in those restrictive boxes. A website is a mix of all of those things, and none of those things. It is influenced by place and time. A website changes with age. It can evolve and regress.

    It was then I wondered if the problem wasn’t that web design lacked its own Emigré. What if we actually lacked a shared language to critically discuss web design? Art, architecture, and even graphic design, have critics and historians that give context to new work through the lenses of culture and important work from the past.

    • www
    • critique
  • Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design

    An Article by David Bryant Copeland
    brutalist-web.design
    1. Content is readable on all reasonable screens and devices.
    2. Only hyperlinks and buttons respond to clicks.
    3. Hyperlinks are underlined and buttons look like buttons.
    4. The back button works as expected.
    5. View content by scrolling.
    6. Decoration when needed and no unrelated content.
    7. Performance is a feature.
    1. ​​What On Earth is a Brutalist Website?​​
    2. ​​The split personality of brutalist web development​​
    • brutalism
    • www
    • html
  • Hyperland, Intermedia, and the Web That Never Was

    An Article by Claire L. Evans
    www.are.na
    1. ​​Project Xanadu​​
    • hypermedia
    • www
  • Human-scale digital spaces

    An Article by Alexis Lloyd
    medium.com
    Image from medium.com on 2020-08-03 at 3.50.25 PM.jpeg

    The open web is much like emergent, unplanned cities — it happens at the scale of the individual, it allows for unexpected creativity, it gives agency to anyone (well, anyone with sufficient technical knowledge) to shape their own spaces. On the other hand, the platforms that now dominate much of the web experience are more evocative of Moses’s planned cities—they often occur at the scale of the corporation, and have rigid, predictable constraints for how individuals can behave and express themselves.

    • www
    • urbanism
  • Tokenize This

    An Artwork by Benjamin Grosser
    bengrosser.com
    Image from bengrosser.com on 2021-06-30 at 11.37.07 AM.png

    Different from the typical website whose URLs act as persistent indexes to a page and its contents, Tokenize This destroys each work right after its creation. While the unique digital object remains viewable by the original visitor for as long as they leave their browser tab open, any subsequent attempt to copy, share, or view that URL in another tab, browser, or system, leads to a “404 Not Found” error. In other words, Tokenize This generates countless digital artifacts that can only be viewed or accessed once.

    • www
    • art
    • economics
  • Bo Burnham: Inside

    A Film by Bo Burnham
    en.wikipedia.org
    Image from en.wikipedia.org on 2021-06-15 at 2.02.40 PM.jpeg
    1. ​​It's a beautiful day to stay inside​​
    2. ​​Went out to look for a reason to hide again​​
    3. ​​Don't wanna know​​
    4. ​​A little bit of everything all of the time​​
    5. ​​That funny feeling​​
    1. ​​Poioumenon​​
    2. ​​But we're not there​​
    • humor
    • solitude
    • melancholy
    • www
  • On onion cutting

    An Article by Ana Rodrigues
    ohhelloana.blog

    In the television show Masterchef there was an episode where the judges did a test on what they call “basic skills”. One of the judges often says that in order to be a “true chef”, you must know how to quickly and finely cut onions.

    ...This was really bothering me and I am stubborn so I wanted to win this fake argument really badly so I looked up why the way one cuts onions is important: as it turns out, the shape and even the surface area affect the end flavour. I thought the whole “chop chop chop” was about performance in the kitchen. Cut quickly to serve quickly! I was wrong.

    • craft
    • food
    • www
    • skill
  • Social Attention: a modest prototype in shared presence

    An Article by Matt Webb
    interconnected.org

    My take is that the web could feel warmer and more lively than it is. Visiting a webpage could feel a little more like visiting a park and watching the world go by. Visiting my homepage could feel just a tiny bit like stopping by my home.

    • www
    • socializing
    • A status emoji will appear in the top right corner of your browser. If it’s smiling, there are other people on the site right now too.
    • Select some text, as if you’re going to copy it.
    • Your selection will be shared automatically with all the other people on the same page as you. It will appear for them as highlighted words.
  • The Value of a Personal Site

    An Article
    atthis.link

    A personal site offers a dedicated place to experiment across the entire tech-stack; not a deliverable for a client that is handed over and then never touched by me again. A personal site is a place to try out that new API, see what can be done with CSS, truly discover what the Web can be.

    • www
    • blogging
    • experiments
  • The small web is beautiful

    An Essay by Ben Hoyt
    benhoyt.com

    I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the “small web” as well as the small software and architectures that power it.

    1. ​​Why aim small?​​
    2. ​​Features and complexity​​
    3. ​​Solving the problem of software bloat​​
    4. ​​Raw size isn't enough​​
    1. ​​Rediscovering the Small Web​​
    • www
    • microsites
  • This used to be our playground

    An Essay by Simon Collison
    colly.com

    There was a time when owning digital space seemed thrilling, and our personal sites motivated us to express ourselves. There are signs of a resurgence, but too few wish to make their digital house a home.

    1. ​​A shifting house next to a river of knowledge​​
    • www
    • expression
    • identity
    • blogging
  • A shifting house next to a river of knowledge

    An Essay by Laurel Schwulst
    thecreativeindependent.com

    My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?

    1. ​​Author and architect​​
    1. ​​This used to be our playground​​
    • www
  • Simon Collison's timeline

    A Website by Simon Collison
    colly.com
    Image from colly.com on 2020-12-14 at 9.50.35 AM.jpeg

    I’ve shaped this timeline over five months. It might look simple, but it most definitely was not. I liken it to chipping away at a block of marble, or the slow process of evolving a painting, or constructing a poem; endless edits, questions, doubling back, doubts. It was so good to have something meaty to get stuck into, but sometimes it was awful, and many times I considered throwing it away. Overall it was challenging, fun, and worth the effort.

    • www
    • history
    • microsites

    I feel exactly the same way about my own personal site.

  • Front-of-the-front-end and back-of-the-front-end web development

    An Article by Brad Frost
    bradfrost.com
    Image from bradfrost.com on 2021-02-17 at 10.50.43 AM.png

    A succinct way I’ve framed the split is that a front-of-the-front-end developer determines the look and feel of a button, while a back-of-the-front-end developer determines what happens when that button is clicked.

    1. ​​The Great Divide​​
    • www
    • code
  • Do We Need This?

    An Article
    atthis.link

    Ultimately this redesign has been a study in less, trying to dig deep and find out what it is I actually want for this site. A momentary visual “wow”, or quality content that is worthy of your attention? I decided on the latter, with less visual clutter it is far harder to try obscure bad or shallow writing behind a veneer of pretty images and effects. Posts may take longer to write but I hope this new design will push towards content that is worthy of your time.

    • mondegreens
    • www
    • minimalism

    Mondegreen: Misread the first line as 'a study in loss,' which feels more poetic, but may still be used in the same context.

  • The User Interface of URLs

    A Research Paper
    web.archive.org

    URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) have rapidly become the standard method for specifying how to access information on the Internet. Although mostly used on the World Wide Web, URLs are also becoming more common for specifying locations for other distributed Internet services such as Gopher and anonymous FTP. Internet users see URLs both online and in print, and therefore URLs have visual interfaces. This paper gives an overview of many of the issues that concern the visual and user interfaces of URLs.

    1. ​​Cool URIs don't change​​
    • hypermedia
    • www
    • interfaces
  • Cool URIs don't change

    An Essay by Tim Berners-Lee
    www.w3.org

    What makes a cool URI?
    A cool URI is one which does not change.
    What sorts of URI change?
    URIs don't change: people change them.

    1. ​​The User Interface of URLs​​
    • www
  • Web History Chapter 6: Web Design

    A Chapter by Jay Hoffmann
    css-tricks.com

    After the first websites demonstrate the commercial and aesthetic potential of the web, the media industry floods the web with a surge of new content. Amateur webzines — which define and voice and tone unique to the web — are soon joined by traditional publishers. By the mid to late 90’s, most major companies will have a website, and the popularity of the web will begin to explore. Search engines emerge as one solution to cataloging the expanding universe of websites, but even they struggle to keep up. Brands soon begin to look for a way to stand out.

    1. ​​A Dao of Web Design​​
    • www
    • ux
    • interfaces
    • design
  • A Dao of Web Design

    An Essay by John Allsopp
    alistapart.com

    What I sense is a real tension between the web as we know it, and the web as it would be. It’s the tension between an existing medium, the printed page, and its child, the web. And it’s time to really understand the relationship between the parent and the child, and to let the child go its own way in the world.

    1. ​​Conventions of a medium​​
    2. ​​To abandon control​​
    3. ​​The journey begins by letting go​​
    1. ​​Web History Chapter 6: Web Design​​
    • www
    • ux
    • accessibility
    • design

    John Allsopp's essay is one of the seminal works in the history of the web. He asks us to embrace fluidity, adaptability, and change within this new medium.

  • Web History Chapter 1: Birth

    A Chapter by Jay Hoffmann
    css-tricks.com
    1. ​​Microcosm​​
    • www
    • information

    A history of the web by Jay Hoffmann.

  • What On Earth is a Brutalist Website?

    An Article
    blog.prototypr.io

    Some of the web’s early richness has gradually been getting lost in a sea of landing pages, hero images, sans-serifs, and calls-to-action. “Web brutalism” is a valid reminder that there is still a world of possibilities out there, if we are bold enough to break free of our UI kits and stock photos.

    1. ​​Why Do All Websites Look the Same?​​
    2. ​​Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design​​
    • brutalism
    • www
  • Web Brutalism, seamfulness, and notion

    An Essay by Brandon Dorn
    uxdesign.cc

    How a tool for sensemaking reconciles two distinct software design ideologies.

    1. ​​Seamful vs. seamless​​
    2. ​​Reveling in infrastructure​​
    3. ​​The brilliance of notion​​
    4. ​​How our understanding is working​​
    1. ​​Usability is not the most important thing on earth​​
    2. ​​The split personality of brutalist web development​​
    • brutalism
    • www
    • tools
    • software
  • The split personality of brutalist web development

    An Article
    www.smashingmagazine.com
    Image from www.smashingmagazine.com on 2020-12-28 at 9.51.45 AM.png

    When brutalist web design isn’t going all in on rationalism and functionality, it’s laughing in the face of rationalism and functionality. All clear?

    The term has grown to encompass approaches that are in many senses at odds with each other. Indeed, Pascal Deville, who founded the Brutalist Websites directory after coining the term in 2014, thinks the style has splintered into three micro-stylistics:

    1. Purists,
    2. UX minimalists,
    3. Anti-ists (or artists).
    1. ​​Web Brutalism, seamfulness, and notion​​
    2. ​​Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design​​
    • brutalism
    • www

    "L'internet brut" vs. "l'internet fou".

  • Of Note: Better Text Annotations for the Web

    An Article by Brandon Dorn
    www.viget.com
    Image from www.viget.com on 2020-12-27 at 5.07.08 PM.gif

    Generally speaking (and ignoring questions of styling, API availability, etc.), an ideal Web annotation pattern follows these principles:

    1. Annotations appear in close visual proximity to the primary content.
    2. Their design neither distracts from nor hides the primary content.
    3. The preceding principles are followed regardless of screen width.

    The only pattern I’ve found that meets these criteria is FiveThirtyEight’s.

    ...As it turns out, FiveThirtyEight didn't invent this pattern. It likely originated in medieval illuminated manuscripts which contain “interleave notes” — comments written literally between the lines.

    • reading
    • www
    • accessibility
  • Painting With the Web

    An Article by Matthias Ott
    matthiasott.com

    So much about [Gerhard Richter's painting process] reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material, the improvisation, the bugs, the happy accidents. There is one crucial difference, though. By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process.

    1. ​​A constant dialogue​​
    2. ​​Constant reflection and refinement​​
    1. ​​How do you know when your paintings are finished?​​
    2. ​​Designing with code​​
    • art
    • www
    • creativity
    • process
    • code
  • The design systems between us

    A Talk by Ethan Marcotte
    www.youtube.com

    In the early days, design systems promised us more consistent interfaces, more collaborative teams, and improved shipping times. While they’ve certainly delivered on some of those fronts, they’ve introduced new challenges too. Let’s talk through what’s working well—and what could be working better—as we take a closer look at the systems between us and our work.

    1. ​​Systems, Mistakes, and the Sea​​
    2. ​​A Pattern Language​​
    3. ​​The Real World of Technology​​
    • www
    • systems
    • patterns
    • design
  • The Web is Industrialized and I Helped Industrialize It

    An Article by Dave Rupert
    daverupert.com

    In our cultural obsession with billionaire entrepreneurs we laud new features more than the maintenance and incrementalism work of making old features better and more accessible. Maintenance looks like red minus signs in the spreadsheet. New features look like green plus signs. New features look better on our LinkedIn profiles. New features have that pizzazz, baby.

    When gardening, the building of planters and initial planting is a very short process. The majority of your time is spent nurturing and monitoring growth. I personally feel the struggle between maintainer work and new shiny feature work. I enjoy that new feature smell but I know that my day-to-day is more like a janitor on a boat mopping up someone else’s barf. In terms of metaphors, the gardening metaphor is certainly better, and it acknowledges that design and development still tend to be more creative endeavors.

    • features
    • novelty
    • www
  • The Taft Test

    A Tool by Maciej Cegłowski
    tafttest.com
    Image from tafttest.com on 2020-09-03 at 3.13.59 PM.jpeg

    Does your page design improve when you replace every image with William Howard Taft?

    1. ​​The Website Obesity Crisis​​
    • performance
    • www
    • fun
  • The life and death of an internet onion

    A Website by Laurel Schwulst
    the-life-and-death-of-an-internet-onion.com
    Screenshot of the-life-and-death-of-an-internet-onion.com on 2020-08-08 at 8.52.57 PM.png

    In her piece "A drop of love in the cloud" (2018), artist Fei Liu writes about the like/heart button as a flattening affordance of giving affirmation and love. The text-editor provides a much more expressive input.

    But even people who can't communicate well because of language barriers can express love through actions, like cooking food. Can we create other "love inputs" that might allow us to "reach across the chasm of a seamless signal"?

    What is expressing "real" love or affirmation about? Is it about effort, thoughtfulness, generosity, something else? What might a thoughtful or generous interface feel or behave like?

    • love
    • communication
    • ux
    • www
    • microsites
  • XXIIVV Webring

    A Website
    webring.xxiivv.com

    This webring is an attempt to inspire artists & developers to build their own website and share traffic among each other.

    • www
    • quirks
    • blogging

    The early web is alive and well, just harder to find.

  • How the Blog Broke the Web

    An Article by Amy Hoy
    stackingthebricks.com
    1. ​​Homepages had a timeless quality​​
    2. ​​When Movable Type ate the blogosphere​​
    3. ​​Reverse chronology bias​​
    • blogging
    • www
  • On the "Building" of Software and Websites

    An Essay by Dorian Taylor
    doriantaylor.com

    I’m beginning to suspect that software, and more conspicuously the Web, is fundamentally the wrong shape for the archetype of the construction project.

    1. ​​You are agreeing to make a Thing​​
    2. ​​The Thing-deadline calculus​​
    3. ​​Trees and graphs​​
    4. ​​Content as value​​
    1. ​​The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth​​
    2. ​​Hofstadter's Law​​
    • software
    • building
    • www
    • construction
  • Every Website is an Essay

    An Article by Robin Rendle
    css-tricks.com

    "Every website that’s made me oooo and aaahhh lately has been of a special kind; they’re written and designed like essays. There’s an argument, a playfulness in the way that they’re not so much selling me something as they are trying to convince me of the thing. They use words and type and color in a way that makes me sit up and listen.

    And I think that framing our work in this way lets us web designers explore exciting new possibilities. Instead of throwing a big carousel on the page and being done with it, thinking about making a website like an essay encourages us to focus on the tough questions. We need an introduction, we need to provide evidence for our statements, we need a conclusion, etc. This way we don’t have to get so caught up in the same old patterns that we’ve tried again and again in our work.

    And by treating web design like an essay, we can be weird with the design. We can establish a distinct voice and make it sound like an honest-to-goodness human being wrote it, too."

    • writing
    • www
    • essays
  • Quotebacks

    A Tool by Tom Critchlow & Toby Shorin
    quotebacks.net

    Quotebacks brings structured discourse to blogs and personal websites.

    Quotebacks makes it easy to reference content and create dialogue with other sites by turning snippets of text into elegant, self-contained blockquote components.

    • hypermedia
    • www
    • blogging
  • Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web

    A Book by David Weinberger
    www.goodreads.com
    • www
    • technology

See also:
  1. ux
  2. interfaces
  3. microsites
  4. blogging
  5. hypermedia
  6. design
  7. craft
  8. technology
  9. code
  10. software
  11. brutalism
  12. writing
  13. art
  14. fun
  15. gardens
  16. reading
  17. content
  18. media
  19. business
  20. ethics
  21. performance
  22. information
  23. building
  24. history
  25. systems
  26. creativity
  27. work
  28. melancholy
  29. accessibility
  30. decay
  31. critique
  32. economics
  33. making
  34. details
  35. exploration
  36. connection
  37. interaction
  38. body
  39. aerospace
  40. flight
  41. urbanism
  42. essays
  43. love
  44. communication
  45. sound
  46. joy
  47. exits
  48. whimsy
  49. ending
  50. construction
  51. boredom
  52. learning
  53. quirks
  54. features
  55. novelty
  56. agile
  57. patterns
  58. walking
  59. notetaking
  60. words
  61. euphony
  62. zen
  63. darkness
  64. process
  65. tools
  66. html
  67. mondegreens
  68. minimalism
  69. expression
  70. identity
  71. experiments
  72. socializing
  73. collections
  74. food
  75. skill
  76. humor
  77. solitude
  78. morality
  79. goodness
  80. knowledge
  81. justice
  82. goals
  83. networks
  84. material
  85. typography
  86. hierarchy
  87. scale
  88. metaphor
  89. search
  90. space
  91. death
  92. architecture
  93. politics
  94. war
  95. personality
  96. graphics
  97. care
  98. repair
  99. engineering
  1. Parimal Satyal
  2. Jay Hoffmann
  3. Maciej Cegłowski
  4. Tom Critchlow
  5. Toby Shorin
  6. Laurel Schwulst
  7. Boris Müller
  8. Brad Frost
  9. Ethan Marcotte
  10. Nick Trombley
  11. Simon Collison
  12. Brandon Dorn
  13. Tim Berners-Lee
  14. Ursula M. Franklin
  15. Maggie Appleton
  16. Steve Jobs
  17. Craig Mod
  18. Sarah Drasner
  19. Bret Victor
  20. David Weinberger
  21. Alexis Lloyd
  22. Robin Rendle
  23. Ben Moren
  24. Brad Enslen
  25. Dorian Taylor
  26. Ted Nelson
  27. Amy Hoy
  28. Dave Rupert
  29. John Palmer
  30. Claire L. Evans
  31. Matthias Ott
  32. David Bryant Copeland
  33. John Allsopp
  34. Ben Hoyt
  35. Chia Amisola
  36. Jason Santa Maria
  37. Matt Webb
  38. Baldur Bjarnason
  39. Ana Rodrigues
  40. Bo Burnham
  41. Benjamin Grosser
  42. Nicholas Carr
  43. Jonathan Zittrain
  44. Steven J. Jackson
  45. Ryan Broderick
  46. Chuánqí Sun
  47. Donnie D'Amato
  48. Charles Broskoski
  49. Oliver Reichenstein
  50. Jacob Leech
  51. Benedict Evans
  52. Sara Vieira
  53. Felix Pleşoianu
  54. Wesley Aptekar-Cassels
  55. Tanner Greer
  56. Max Böck
  57. Noah Veltman
  58. Robin Sloan