Summary
You should have a safe place on the internet where no one can steal your attention, especially when it comes to learning.
That phrase is from when roads were dirt paths and “on line” meant drying the laundry. But what if you drove through the internet with it now?
Online, folks make money off trying to get us to buy something by tricking our eyeballs and derailing our brains without our consent. If you scrolled down the internet freeway, it would be as if every fifth car wasn’t a car at all but one of those swaying blow-up noodle men standing in the middle of your lane. “Stop doing that and pay attention to this now!” it would say. Of course, you already are paying attention to it instead of what you were doing because of the eye-mind connection. But the worst part? You never had a say.
It tricked you.
But it’s not really a trick, is it? Tricks are for cards. This? This was an ambush.
Reading an article, scrolling a feed, or (gasp!) trying to actually learn something online is fraught with ambushes. You know what you want to do. You hone your focus. But then some random distraction reaches in and snips the thread of your focus. And it didn’t interrupt for you. Oh no. It cut in line just to make a fraction of a cent off an ad. Or to sell you jeans that won’t give you away as a Millennial. Or to tell you what weird thing Burger King’s doing with chicken now.
You came to learn but got ambushed by algorithmic salesmen.
🪵 Building something excellent is like sanding a piece of wood. “Sand it, feel the grain, get a splinter, sand again, and repeat until smooth. Lots of small splinters lead to an agonizing experience.” Author Jim Nielsen’s talking about user interfaces, but I write and create learning material this way as well. I bet you do too.
🚊 Studio Order created a digital signage system for the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority. The challenge was to maintain Massimo Vignelli’s and Lance Wyman’s 1970s design system while adding new tools to adapt for real-time information on digital surfaces. The result is one of the most effective, unshowy pieces of visual design I’ve seen. I can tell they thought about readability on screens—rare.
👩💻 Faye Tan walks through fixing ZOLO’s ineffective marketing website. Five takeaways: 1) Describe what you do in language that’s simple and clear to your visitors, 2) get the visual tone right, 3) work on credibility, 4) surface communication channels, and 5) look professional.
🧰 You might not need a design system. “Whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of building a design system too early. Default to design freedom. Engineers know there is nothing more dangerous than a premature abstraction.”
🔠 Departure Mono, a monospaced pixel font with a lo-fi technical vibe. I grew up in the ‘90s. Every specimen on this fun promo site looks so real to me. Love the color shift, the glyph inspector and that Double R Diner receipt!
↔️ Nitish Khagwal has some really fun interaction ideas. The Flower Menu might be my favorite. This kind of internet—a toy that doesn’t compromise on usability—is my kind of internet.
🏄 Son of Cobra builds surfboards and cars the simplest ways possible. “I’m going to look at it until I find the little thing that makes it less cool, go back to it and make it much cooler.”
🐕 The charmed lives of art dogs. I work from home about half the time. As I write this now, my Pocket Pyrenees sleeps on the floor next to my worktable. She’ll need a walk soon, and I’ll be glad for the interruption.
🥹 You’re only as smart as your emotions. Feelings aren't dumber or sillier than rational thought. Feelings create the situation for using reason. Trying to separate them makes it easy to misallocate our brainpower, like putting batteries in a gadget no one’s going to use.
💡 How to create a “soup of light”, layers of soft light throughout your space. Interior designer Noah Daniel lays it all out. “When you’re looking at a lamp, don’t look at it as a decorative object or a sculpture or a piece of art. Look at the actual light it’s emitting and how it affects your space.” Pointing ceiling lights at walls, whoa, mind blown.
We send out automatic updates to Pathwright that constantly improve our platform. We recently made these changes:
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Lately I’ve been working ahead more.
Sometimes I need to focus, and that means ignoring everything else. But right now, I make a few notes for next week’s priorities. Sketch a couple approaches for tomorrow’s creative todos. Set out my non-fridge ingredients an hour before making dinner. Order supplies for the next thing that needs fixing around home a couple weeks in advance. I’m mise en-ing all over the place.
For some seasons, improv and flexibility get more done. But chilling my processes out is currently putting more gas in my tank. I’m not selling passion or prework here—just enjoying change :)