Links from 2023

Hiring even one person creates a lot less profit than you’d think, and launching a product rarely works out.

How can we make the case for slowing down to speed up when we are already going slow, and when shutting things down and starting over is not an option?

Throughout this piece, we’ve talked about the sans-serifs and the utilitarian nature of their design. But perhaps their greatest sin is that they often lack personality. When more and more customers are looking for a more human relationship with brands, having the same logo font as everyone else just doesn’t cut it.

GDS is thinking about its strategy for 2025-30. I’m Head of Product in the Digital Service Platforms part of GDS - you might have previously known it as…

Round robin letters allow relationships to survive the distances and distractions of modern life. They are the friendship equivalent of a mid-ranking CIA official visiting Beijing for talks: they can pave the way for a proper meeting.

This methodology involves decoupling the design tokens and elements from their implementation, allowing them to be applied across various platforms and technologies. This platform-agnostic nature of headless design systems makes them highly scalable and suitable for organizations that have a presence across multiple digital mediums beyond just the product.

So, essentially a reframing of what we called the Spotify Model in 2019, based on the "Reimagining Design Systems at Spotify" talk.

A primer on brand for product teams

This page collects all the familiar navigation patterns for structuring iOS apps, like drill-downs, modals, pyramids, sequences, and more! Think of it as an unofficial bonus chapter for Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, written by someone who cares deeply about well-crafted user interfaces.

This is a great example of a shift I’m seeing from marketing focusing on quantity (of leads) to quality (of engagement) through the funnel and correlating that with performance at each stage.

If you’re designing a brand today, you’re designing a digital entity. You’re also designing a shared entity. Brands today aren’t the work of lone geniuses. They are collaborations between marketers, product people, partners and customers.

Systems thinking allows your work to reach more people.

If a component doesn’t align with the project’s vision, it’s not sacrilege to customize or create entirely new elements.

In short, black and white logo marks no longer cover all colours. There are certain circumstances in which black and white logos could cover use of the marks in different colours, provided a change only in colour would not alter the distinctive character of the mark.

everynoise.com is and was a projection of things I worked on at the Echo Nest, and then Spotify. As of this morning, I'm not working there, and I expect most of the things I did will no longer be done. The domain is mine, but the processes that updated the site have already stopped running, and the current server may stop serving at any moment. Once that happens, I will try to bring back at least a wistful memorial to what it was.

Opinions on corporate and brand identity work.

There is a long-standing free-market complaint about Japan’s "over-investment" in public infrastructure, but in recent years, I’ve realized how clean and reliable subways, sidewalks, and public roads don't just make the city more livable, but more equitable, as well. Everyone can enjoy good public transportation, no matter their socioeconomic background (and many wealthy people ride the subway here). The train station near the San'ya “slum” is just as clean as the train station in posh Omotesando.

Such AI-driven dynamic pricing is already a reality in mainland Europe, as grocery retailers such as DIA in Spain, Iper in Italy, Metro in Germany, and Hoogvliet in the Netherlands are rolling out the technology.

We strive to be the most trusted place to find honest product information. We work tirelessly to make Looria the go-to platform when making purchase decisions.

Toggle switches should take immediate effect and should not require the user to click Save or Submit to apply the new state. As always, we should strive to match the system to the real world.

This sounds obvious, but it's amazing how many things billed as strategy within an organisation don't bear any relation to the business strategy. Sometimes this is impossible to do because there isn't a business strategy, or there isn't one that makes sense in the real world. People just... do stuff.

Two popup windows are launched - the main game window and the paddle window [...] Paddle window has a nested game! You need to win in both the windows.

I was just thinking about Iain Banks, but then really that happens most months.

Naming things needn’t be hard

159 works in the same way as 101 for the police or 111 for the NHS. It’s the number you can trust to get you through to your bank safely and securely, every time.

Didn't know about this service.

We're building a new platform to allow fans to connect with, and financially support their favourite musicians. It will be 100% run by and for the benefit of musicians, fans and the people who make it. A platform co-operative.

A practical guide to understanding trademarks in the context of Free and Open Source Software projects.

Only one I've found that does Scottish + dividends + year selector.

Search for your work in popular AI training datasets

Which is to say that the internet doesn’t make sense in aggregate anymore and trying to view it as a monolith only gives you bad, confusing, and, oftentimes, wrong impressions of what’s actually going on.

We’ve got a whole new Verge for you today. Radically new. Sometimes you just have to blow things up and start over. Yes, we have a sharp new logo that started…

My argument is that, for all the often good intentions behind purpose, it’s a fundamentally flawed way of thinking about ethics in business and marketing: one that not only leads to worse marketing, but also leads to worse social outcomes.

In other words, if we outsource the creative process, we also outsource thinking. Making is deeply connected with thinking. If you want to learn or develop something new, you have to go through a painful process if you want it to be worth something.

A snappy, but not a particularly representative quote. This is arguing for doing the thing to learn properly, later augmenting with AI.

A collection of high-quality, free, online creativity tools.

A digital museum of video game levels

American SF from the 1950s to the 1990s contains all the raw ingredients of what has been identified as the Californian ideology (evangelized through the de-facto house magazine, WIRED). It's rooted in uncritical technological boosterism and the desire to get rich quick. Libertarianism and it's even more obnoxious sibling Objectivism provide a fig-leaf of philosophical legitimacy for cutting social programs and advocating the most ruthless variety of dog-eat-dog politics. Longtermism advocates overlooking the homeless person on the sidewalk in front of you in favour of maximizing good outcomes from charitable giving in the far future. And it gels neatly with the Extropian and Transhumanist agendas of colonizing space, achieving immortality, abolishing death, and bringing about the resurrection (without reference to god). These are all far more fun to contemplate than near-term environmental collapse and starving poor people. Finally, there's accelerationism: the right wing's version of Trotskyism, the idea that we need to bring on a cultural crisis as fast as possible in order to tear down the old and build a new post-apocalyptic future.

The best UI, though, is no UI at all, or rather, just one UI, by which I mean “Universal Interface”.