When I began sending email newsletters for Signal Tower in 2013, I turned to a hometown business with a peculiar name and loveable mascot—Mailchimp.
The Mailchimp of the early 2010s was rad. They would hire local artists to create artwork, murals and billboards.They sponsored just about every podcast under the sun. Many that may not have succeeded otherwise.
Why am I telling you any of this? Well, this newsletter may look a little different today. That’s because I’m no longer sending it through Mailchimp. I’ve moved both this blog and newsletter to WordPress.com. Mailchimp’s primary customers have shifted from independent writers and creators to e-commerce and SaaS businesses.
That’s not me. So long Freddie. Thanks for all the hi-fives!
There’s a lot that’s happened since my last newsletter.
Holly and I got married! That’s a pretty big thing.
I know everyone wants photos. I promise I’ll have them in a future post. For the time being take a look at this cool website I built for for us.
Anyways, here are my updates—
Writing
I published my 2023 Year in Review early this year. These reviews are a way to keep myself accountable and reflect on all that’s happened throughout the year. I’ve now been publishing yearly reviews for a decade. If you’re interested, you can find all of them dating back to 2014.
Designer News is Dead, made the front page of Hacker News, Sidebar.io and several subreddits. I was an early and active member of the community. As many of you know, I hosted the DN FM podcast. I’m sad it’s gone. The early days of the community were great when it was invite only. It was filled with talented product designers at leading companies. Anyways, pour one out for Designer News. The last several years moderators had faced a tough loosing battle with spam.
Hide or Disable—when dealing with permissions or access controls I always as a simple question—will a user ever be able to use the control? If yes, disable. If no, hide. We take this approach because permanently inactive items are noise and appear broken.
Photos
I’ve taken a ton of great photos since my last newsletter. Here are a preview of the photo sets.
Yosemite August 2023—My dad, uncle and brother-in-law took a hiking trip to Yosemite back in August. There are so many great photos in that album—Yosemite Falls, Taft Point, Bodie, tons of giant sequoias—it’s worth a look.
Bodie is an abandoned mining town that’s maintained by the State of California. They’ve done a fantastic job keeping the historic feel. Those photos are particularly neat because of the rare rainy and overcast skies while we were there.
We chartered The Pooch Pontoon for Holly’s birthday in September. It was an over-the-top decorated pontoon boat that took us to a small island in Lake Lanier for the afternoon. The dogs got to run free. It really was a fantastic time.
Daufuskie and Hunting Island—we took a fantastic to little trip Savannah. We spent one day at Hunting Island State park and then another ferrying to Daufuskie Island. If you’re willing to make an extra effort there are a ton of interesting places off the Georgia coast than St. Simons.
Books
I didn’t have many expectations for this book. I saw a few recommendations and decided I had a few audible credits to burn. So why not?
Outlive is a guidebook to avoiding the four horsemen: diabetes, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. And, surprisingly it’s a good one. Through early screening and preventative medicine Attia makes a case for how to fend off these common diseases.
Personally, I learned a ton about heart disease. It encouraged me to have a additional blood tests done for things like ApoB and Lp(a), which don’t appear on traditional lipid panels. And overall, I felt like it helped me learn enough to ask my doctor better questions.
Powers and Thrones by Dan Jones
This is a fantastic account of what was going on in the mediaeval world—the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the enlightenment.
This is absolutely not going to be a book for everyone. Honestly, it’s not one for most people. But if you find yourself listening to Hardcore History or are a fan of Dan Carlin, this will be right up your alley.
Links
Squish Meets Structure was Maggie Appleton’s talk at Smashing Conference last year. It’s a fantastic take on why it’s so difficult to design for AI. Historically, predictability was aligned with good UX. The problem is that LLMs are anything but predictable. Absolutely, worth a read for anyone building software.
Why Tailwind Won the Web. It has replaced bootstrap as the go-to CSS framework because it reduces context switching, is easy to copy and paste, has few dependencies and is incredibly reusable. I’m coding less frontend stuff than I was a decade ago, but the same approach of building from common utility classes is still appealing.
Requiem for an Interface—Dark Sky stopped working a year ago, and sadly many of its smart UI elements have not reappeared in Apple Weather. I tried using Apple Weather for months, but it is significantly worse to use than the old Dark Sky UI.
Exploring Bauhaus: Revolutionary Design School That Shaped Modern World A brief history of the Bauhaus, an influential art and design school founded in early 20th-century Germany. It focused on the intersection of form and function. Also worth a read is the previous post about Art Nouveau. The Power of Nature, Asymmetry, and Freedom of Form.
A student asked how I keep us innovative—I don’t Proven and boring is often better than new and interesting software. I think the key here is being deliberate in how to implement new technologies.
V0 by Vercel is a LLM chat interface that will attempt to build any frontend view that you tell it. The results are—they aren’t good. They’re actually pretty terrible. That’s not important though. It is wild that something like this exists at all. It gives credence to a running theme on this blog—the lines between product design and UI engineering will start to blur.
Thiel’s Unicorn Success Is Awkward for Colleges I find Peter Thiel equal parts brilliant, fascinating and terrifying. I remember when he started paying talented students $100,000 to drop out of collage a decade ago—he was wildly lampooned. But as usual, it turns out those students were much better without collage. Many of them have gone on to found billion dollar companies, including Figma founder Dylan Field, who changed software design forever.
Contrasting Aesthetics Thoughts on creating visual interest and inviting curiosity by altering expectations.
My Favorite Restaurant Served Gas is a wonderful ode to all the gas station-adjacent restaurants of the world.
The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets—large volume, low service and all the little tricks that make it work. I love deep dives into extremely obscure topics. This one hits all the notes.
Omg.lol a domain, URL shortener, profile page and a Mastodon instance. I’m not entirely sure how all these are related, but it’s weird and I love it.
InVision Shuts Down It’s the end of an era. For years Sketch + InVision were my go-to product design and prototyping tools. One of my all-time favorite interviews was with Clark Valberg, InVision’s memorable founder and former CEO.
And one final link to bring us back to round out this newsletter—An Oral History of the Mailchimp Hi-Five. It’s one of my all-time favorite product details in any piece of software.
That’s it. Hope y’all have a good one!
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