Figma Tips and Shortcuts 20 Oct 2026, 6:33 am

℅ Automattic Design:

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Now Playing: “Side Two” 19 Oct 2026, 8:38 am

On October 17, 2026, I released my second album of movies for your ears, cleverly titled “Side Two.” It contains seventeen tracks of instrumental music pulling from genres as diverse as jazz-funk, 1970s Italian cinema soundtracks, electronica, experimental, hip-hop, and art rock. Listen and stream on BandCamp. Also coming soon to Apple Music and Spotify.

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Silly Old Bear 15 Oct 2026, 12:57 pm

I grew up with A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, read the stories to my own child, and saw the original drawings on display at The New York Public Library some twenty-odd years ago. The subtle wit and cleverness of Milne’s storytelling helped shape my understanding of comedy and made me love books. I hated the Disney Pooh films because that wasn’t Pooh’s voice as I heard it in my head. The poetry collections (When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six) are also wonderful.

Happy Centennial, Winnie-the-Pooh.

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Another Saturday, Another Song. 3 Oct 2026, 12:17 pm

“Side Two” LP in progress. At 14 songs, it is nearly complete. I expect to release it before the year’s end.

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My Glamorous Life: in Which I am a Target 29 Sep 2026, 2:09 pm

As I limped home from Physical Therapy, a man walking in the opposite direction suddenly planted himself directly in front of me and slammed me in the head with a heavy bag.

It was a cloth bag, like a backpack with only one strap. I’ve no idea what was inside it : a beat box?  a toolbox? Whatever it was, it was heavy and hard and it struck the top and side of my head with stunning force.

The man kept walking past me.

I said, “Hey! What the fuck?”

I’m usually more erudite but my head was buzzing and I couldn’t believe what had just happened.

I wheeled around. The man continued to walk away. I had assumed he struck me by accident and would apologize. Wrong on both counts. 

Glancing over his shoulder, he waved his hand toward me as if batting away a fly. That’s when I knew he was mentally ill and had deliberately attacked me.

“Fuck you,” I said, half-hoping he would turn around so I could sock him.

He was bigger than me, he was visibly off his meds, and he enjoyed fighting, so this was unwise on my part, but I was too angry to be afraid of him.

He paused. Sensed that I was willing to confront him: me, grey- and white-haired, three times his age, two-thirds his height if that, and walking painfully with a pronounced limp.

He smiled as if my shock and anger were a magic balm for what ailed him, turned his face away, and continued his triumphal retreat.

After a minute, I turned away too, and finished what now felt like a long journey home.

I’m not harmed. No bruising, no bleeding.

What does hurt is the certainty that he chose me as a victim because I was walking slowly and with obvious difficulty. Because people with impairments are candy to predators.

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Undersung Hero: M. Frog 25 Sep 2026, 7:12 am

I bought this LP because of its Milton Glaser-designed cover featuring the colored pencil musical notations of composer/synthesist and former monk Jean-Yves Labat, alias M. Frog. It was 1973; I was about to become a high school senior, and I had hitchhiked to New York City with my friend Al Crump. The multi-floor Sam Goody record store in filthy Times Square was where I first laid eyes on it; hands instantly followed.

Produced and recorded around the same time as Todd Rundgren’s psychedelic masterpiece “A Wizard/A True Star,” to which Labat contributed heavily, “M. Frog” is an unclassifiable 36 minutes of musical joy combining elements of garage rock, psychedelia, electronica, prog rock, and avant-garde.

The Book of Seth reviews the record, tells who played on it besides M. Frog (you’ll be amazed!) and how it came to be made, and shares M. Frog’s subsequent art and life history—a tale including the accordion playing of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, an escape from a Ugandan death camp, a French tour by artists whose escape from Azerbaijani M. Frog somehow orchestrated, recordings in Israel and the Palestinian territories, and a French knighthood.

But don’t take my word for it: read “Labat, M. Frog,” reviewed May 1, 2009, and find a copy of the LP if you can. (If you can’t get your hands on the vinyl, the album is also available on Apple Music and Spotify.)

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Remembrance of Websites Past 14 Sep 2026, 11:21 am

2000 was the peak year for Adobe’s website. It was a content site filled with creative how-to articles, opinion pieces, and artist interviews where you could also, if you wished, buy or get info on Adobe products.

Now this is how you create a product site for a suite of creative products, I told myself as both a fan of the site and a writer for it. Alas, adobe.com did not share my assessment. They soon reverted to a more typical product site: all product selling; no articles, features, or interviews. Everything for the company and nothing for the readers.

My friend Brian Alvey and I believed that brands like Adobe would step in to fill the void left by the fracturing and diminution of the publishing and newspaper industries. Alas, few brands jumped at this opportunity, and the destruction of publishing and journalism continues to this day.

As a published author, former columnist for The Washington Post and City Paper, and former publisher of perfectly pitched books (A Book Apart), I say this with great sadness. The pursuit of money above all else has done the world great harm, and yet it continues, grinding ever harder, ever faster.

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My Glamorous Life: A Good Lie 11 Sep 2026, 11:20 am

In my doctor’s office, there is a framed school writing assignment his child completed during 2nd or 3rd Grade.

It’s a fill-in-the-blank story where she has hand written answers to different data fields, like “My father is really good at….”

For “My father’s favorite food is,” the kid had written SALAD.

I asked him, “Is salad really your favorite food, or is that just what you told your daughter?”

“It’s just what I told her,” he admitted with a smile.

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AI, Disruption, and Standards 10 Sep 2026, 11:12 am

Individually, we have very little power, but together we have a great deal of power.

In response to a series of Medium articles by Patrick Neeman—like this one that addressed issues of AI governance, fairness, and standardization—publisher Louis Rosenfeld invited Patrick and me to come on his show and talk about AI and standards. A live audience attended, asking questions that took the conversation further.

If you missed the live panel discussion last week, no worries; a video of the conversation is available for your pleasure ℅ Rosenfeld Media, who put on the event. The video is free to watch; to do so, you just need to register for a free account.

From the Rosenverse:

A generation ago, Jeffrey Zeldman helped end the browser wars by making one case relentlessly: build to standards, not to vendors. That fight is back—now over how AI agents render interfaces across Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Teams, and Slack. In this session, Zeldman joins Patrick Neeman to trace the line from “best viewed in Netscape” to “best experienced in one assistant,” and to have a call to arms for agentic UI actually needs. Expect hard-won lessons from the first standards war, and a clear-eyed look at MCP and A2UI.

Key Insights

• Generative AI platforms lack unified standards, causing costly, fragmented UX development.
• The web standards movement succeeded through community collaboration and public pressure.
• Separation of content and design enabled accessibility and future-proofing on the web.
• Current AI interfaces offer little control over the design details compared to traditional web design.
• Proprietary AI companies may resist compatibility to preserve exclusive user bases.
• AI tools risk devaluing human creativity and make credit and provenance recognition difficult.
• Young designers and engineers face uncertainty in career paths due to AI’s disruptive impact.
• Open source and community-driven efforts are critical in establishing AI interface standards.
• Historical patterns in tech show crises and revolutions tend to “rhyme” over decades.
• Activism in tech today requires new models due to the vastly different power dynamics. (If you thought arguing with Microsoft and Netscape was tough, consider fighting with the new lords of AI.)

Give it a watch!

https://rosenverse.rosenfeldmedia.com/videos/agent-standards-best-viewed-in-every-assistant/

(And while you’re in the Rosenverse, check out the many other excellent video conversations that are freely available there. You might even buy a book.)

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Tales o’ Tech: Suffering Fools 1 Sep 2026, 8:10 am

I.

In the early 2000s, an old friend with a new business wanted me to design his website, but his partner balked:

“I can get two websites made in India for half the price,” the partner said.

“Sounds like you should do that,” I replied, ending the negotiation.

Rude fools were not clients I chose to pursue.

The rude, cheap partner was later part of the self-selected posse of suck-ups and hangers-on who advised Elon M*sk on his invasion purchase of Twitter.

It was the rude, cheap partner’s idea to strip noteworthy Twitter users of their blue verification badges and, instead, sell meaningless blue verification badges to anybody willing to pay $8/month for the privilege. So, no blue verification mark or algorithmic support for the likes of Stephen King, but “verification” and an algorithmic boost for Joey Knuckles, First of His Mother’s Basement.

M*sk must have dug the idea, because he implemented it immediately—proving, as if we weren’t already drowning in evidence, that people with bad taste run in packs.

The instant my old friend told me his former partner was responsible for the “pay for blue marks that mean nothing” plan, I recalled our abortive design negotiation from years before and was like, Yup, that tracks.

At the time of the initial conversation, I believed most people involved in the creation of websites were motivated by altruism, aesthetics, and the desire to create a fairer world. And of course many are. Many, but far from all.

I did not see how quickly fascism was infiltrating our trade. Perhaps infiltrating is the wrong word. Perhaps there had always been a Dark Side.

II.

In the 2010s, I co-founded a traveling web design conference with Eric Meyer, an internationally respected CSS expert, author, and lecturer, and founding member of The Web Standards Project’s CSS Samurai. Together, we crafted a single-track, holistic web design conference peopled by charismatic speakers who had made major contributions to the industry. Our events sold out immediately, without advertising.

One night when our event was playing in a U.S. city, we held a party for attendees, and I invited a friend who lived in that town to join as our guest. I had known this man since his early 20s, and watched him grow into an industry-leading design consultant who was just then transitioning his business from a services to a product company. As his plus-one, he brought a young partner.

The young partner did not know from Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, any of our speakers, or any of the community projects to which we (including all of our speakers) devoted so much of our work and time. His first and only words to me were “Who are you?” He didn’t add a popular expletive to the question, but it was implied.

As I began to answer his question, I watched his eyes wander. He was clearly scouting for somebody cooler to talk to. So I smiled, stopped talking, and, with a wave, invited him to sample the buffet and drinks. If he’d noticed that I’d stopped talking before finishing, it didn’t bother him. Off he ran.

I am still friends with the man I’d invited to the party, although we haven’t spoken for a few years (from lack of opportunity, not lack of interest), and I have watched with happiness over the years as he has moved from success to success.

Alas, he is still partners with the punk who came to our party to paint the roses black, and the punk has become even more famous (and more of a cult figure) than my friend. That’s fine, except that the punk has since blossomed into a fascist and racist with money and power; income from his latest project supports his goal of removing brown people from Europe.

I’m not saying every rude and entitled young man in tech grows up to be a fascist, but politeness or lack of it is a signifier, and maybe if you take an instant dislike to someone who acts like a jerk, you should trust that instinct.

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Mix 29 Aug 2026, 8:59 am

Just mixed my first collaborative track with guitarist Robert Gray. We were friends as undergrads in Bloomington, IN; bandmates in graduate school in Charlottesville; and later briefly played together in the DC post-punk band Pop Maru.

We haven’t played together in decades, but we just created a beautiful jazz piece together working remotely with Logic Pro. And I taught myself more about mixing in Logic Pro. Sweet start to a Saturday.

It’s shaping up to be a busy weekend: Carrie, Ava’s mom and my friendly ex-wife, is flying into NYC as we speak. Meantime I’m creating new music for Side Two—the virtual flip side of Side One, my first album in 40-odd years. (And they were odd indeed.)

A beautiful balance of alone creative time, busy time with friends and family, and hopefully just some plain stupid do-nothing downtime, which I require to stay healthy and inspired.

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Her Glamorous Life 24 Aug 2026, 6:15 am

Snow White—17 years old—didn’t come meowing for food when I entered the kitchen at 6 a.m. An hour later I found her lying motionless on the sofa. I stared until she moved, slightly, nestling her face more deeply between her back paws. 

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The Most Important Industrial Designer of All Time 19 Aug 2026, 8:14 am

One man designed all of it. The fridge, the cigarette pack, the bus, the logo, the locomotive, the car. His name was Raymond Loewy, a French engineer who stepped off the boat in New York in 1919, and by mid-century you could live most of your day inside his imagination.

And he ran his whole career on one rule. He called it MAYA: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.

Loewy believed every customer walks around with two forces pulling in opposite directions. One is attraction to the new. The other is fear of it. His job, as he saw it, was to design as far forward as possible, to push right up to the edge of what people can accept, and stop there. The most advanced thing they’ll still say yes to. —Glenn Pajarito, New, But Not Too New 

“It should be humble, it should not jump at you, it should blend with the surroundings… that’s good design.”—Raymond Loewy

He was elected president of the American Society of Industrial Designers in 1946, and, in October 1949, he became the first of his profession to appear on the cover of Time magazine.

Loewy’s firm was associated with a steady stream of US design icons—including the “Coldspot” refrigerator, Lucky Strike cigarette packaging, Greyhound buses, Studebaker cars, Coca-Cola dispensers, radios, sewing machines, and Rosenthal dinnerware, as well as corporate graphics for Exxon, Shell, and the US Postal Service. This range testified to the potential impact of industrial design on the daily lives of millions, and its power as a commercial tool.

Loewy understood how essential package design and branding could be in the success of a product or an organization. In this respect, one of his most potent designs was for John F. Kennedy’s Air Force One, which began flying in 1962. His modern and elegant design of the plane’s livery (the external graphics and color scheme) transformed this particular Boeing 707 into an important element of the Kennedy administration’s global brand.

In his late career, Loewy was again at the heart of the American establishment as a consultant to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from 1967 to 1973.—MoMa: Raymond Loewy American, born Paris, 1893–1986

Thus began his career as the most important industrial designer of all time.

Outside of the field of product and transportation design, too few people know who Raymond Loewy was. The best-known industrial designer, founder of the industrial design profession, and member of the pantheon of our greatest designers, it is time for wider recognition of this amazing man. Coming to the United States from France in 1919 at the age of 25 with $40 in his pocket, Loewy brought with him a love of trains, cars, and good design, but he soon also developed a love of America. He was featured in Fortune and Life magazines and made the cover of Time. Forty years ago, he was engagingly interviewed on TV’s 60 Minutes.

Called “the frog” and “a refrigerator designer” by leaders of the auto industry, he created some of the most visionary automobiles in American history. He trained and developed dozens of other top designers. Today we see his work every time we see Air Force One, the Shell Oil or Exxon logos, or the Greyhound dog on a bus. Over his 60-year career, he reshaped the world as we know it. This is his story. —Gary Hoover: Raymond Loewy: The Unsung Story of the Greatest Industrial Designer (An American Original)

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Ebb, Meet Flow: Intrinsic Design in a Nutshell 18 Aug 2026, 12:24 pm

In 2020, the gifted makers of websites at Clearleft shared methods to achieve fluid responsive design. “Utopian” web design was (and still is) their half-kidding name for this approach, which Apple’s Jen Simmons, working indendently, called “intrinsic design.” Instead of chasing an ever-changing number of fixed breakpoints, utopian or intrinsic design follows the web’s intrinsic ebbs and flows via fluid type scales that are always in tune with the screen on which they’re viewed. In a nutshell:

The big idea that triggered this train of thought now seems very simple:

1. Define a type scale for a small screen
2. Define a type scale for a large screen
3. Tell the browser to interpolate between the two scales, based on the current viewport width

This results in a set of type sizes which is always “in tune” with itself and feels at home on any device, without needing to manually specify sizes for x number of arbitrary breakpoints. For example we can just say H2s are always “size 4” and trust the calculation to generate a suitable size heading for everybody. — James Gilyead, Designing With Fluid Type Scales

When author (and co-founder of the Web Directions conference series) John Allsopp wrote his canonical A List Apart article, A Dao of Web Design, 26 years and four months ago, his thinking was right on. But the limited tools we web designers had available to us in those days prevented from us from designing elegant, readable interfaces adhering to John’s principles.

Alas! Designers in those days, if we wanted to eat, were expected to create print-like pixel-perfect web layouts. John’s brilliant notion of designing to the web’s natural ebb and flow was not yet possible to achieve in web pages designed to promote brands and sell products. As the years passed, many in our industry forgot about John’s concept entirely.

But one web designer did not.

It took ten years of hard-won web standards support in mainstream browsers, the inclusion of actual makers of websites into the W3C’s standards committees, the backstage schmoozing of the community of front-end wizards who were An Event Apart’s earliest public speakers, and the inimitable genius of Ethan Marcotte to bring John’s notion to life while delivering web pages that, beyond following the web’s ebb and flow, were actually attractive and easy to read.

Most of you who read these pages were around for that revelation. Ethan’s Responsive Web Design enabled aesthetically minded designers to finally create accessible, readable, web-native experiences, and it has long since become mainstream web design practice. Intrinsic/utopian design is simply Responsive Design getting even smarter and suffering from even fewer edge cases.

You may wonder why I’m recounting this history and linking to Clearleft’s six-year-old articles like they were news. The answer is simple: to most people now working in the field, Jen Simmons’s and Clearleft’s innovative layout approaches still are news. So go read all of utopia.fyi and catch up with Jen Simmons’s Experimental Layouts Lab to be ready for your next web creation.

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For students who make websites 17 Aug 2026, 10:12 am

WordPress.com maker Automattic is expanding into education with a new, free product designed for teachers and their classes called WordPress.com Education. The suite for classrooms includes a full WordPress.com domain for each student, plus free domain names (on the .blog or .art domains) and plug-in support.

Teachers can provide students with access to the program for free for the first year, without having to put a credit card down or enter a trial.

This allows teachers to use the technology in courses that teach students how to build websites, or for other classroom needs such as group projects that incorporate website-building.

Unveiling the product at its annual WordCamp US conference on Monday, the company noted that the new Student plan isn’t a stripped-down version of its product. It includes 6 GB of storage, backups, staging sites, and other tools, as well as support for plugins, SFTP/SSH, phpMyAdmin, and Studio Sync. — TechCrunch: WordPress.com targets the next generation of web creators with a free student plan

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A Permanent Home 29 Jul 2026, 7:20 am

Your writing needs a permanent home—a domain that you own and control.

Every few years, the internet convinces writers that a new digital paradise has arrived. First, it was social media like Facebook. Then blogging networks like Tumblr. Then it was Medium. More recently, it’s been Substack.

Platforms promise us an eager audience, built-in monetization, a smooth user interface, and a supportive community. As a writer who just wants to focus on writing, it’s incredibly tempting to hand over the keys to our creative kingdoms and let these portals handle everything. (Believe me, I gave in at one point. For years, I just stopped blogging altogether and even gave up a domain that had high traffic! But I got back in 2012 and never left.)

However, this is the truth that has not changed since the dawn of the Internet: When you build your audience entirely on someone else’s platform, you aren’t a homeowner. You are a tenant. Or worse, a digital sharecropper.

And corporate landlords always change the rules eventually. It’s not personal, it’s just business.

—Elizabeth Tai, Substack writers, you need a website!

Photo: Jeffrey Czum, ℅ pexels.com.

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You lost me at “infielder.” 24 Jul 2026, 6:38 am

The instant a business guy uses a sports metaphor to make his most important strategic point, I am lost. If you want me to understand your business idea, try wrapping it in Wendy Carlos’s secrets of synthesis or quotations by Orson Welles or the punchline to an old joke.

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The name of this LP is “Side One.” 21 Jul 2026, 9:57 am

On Sunday, I published Side One of my album on Bandcamp. The name of the album is also “Side One.” It is instrumental music with roots in Soundtrack, hip-hop, funk, jazz, 19th Century Romantic classical, ambient, electronic, and art rock. You might wonder if those divergent genres belong together, but the proof is in the listening.

For complicated reasons, I haven’t composed, produced, and released music since the late 1980s, back in the multi-track reel-to-reel and early MIDI days!

A few months back, a friend bought me Apple’s Digital Audio Workstation. I’m teaching myself this entirely new (to me) way of producing music by creating music—like I taught myself HTML and CSS by making websites.

It feels like there is no end to the music that has built up inside me over the past decades when I silenced this part of myself. I am thrilled to be creating and sharing music again.

I have no commercial expectations for these tracks; I just want people who might like my music to be able to give it a listen. If you object to Bandcamp, you can also listen on Sonica, although the mixes there are slightly different.

(I published to Sonica one track at a time; once I had sufficient material to sequence into a proper LP-style side, I remastered the tracks—in some cases also adding parts, and in other cases, taking them away. BTW, if you create music and are looking for a place to share with other creators, Sonica is a great place for it.)

Sonica is also where the curious can hear some of the music I created in my studio during the late 1980s, as well as some initial rough drafts of the newer music that has now found its way into Side One of Side One.

Side Two of Side One will be out as soon as I finish creating it. Meantime, grab a pair of headphones and enjoy Side One of Side One.

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Stalin decided what was good science. Millions starved. 11 Jul 2026, 4:46 am

[Soviet pseudoscientist Trofim Denisovich] Lysenko’s supposed innovation … was based on a disproven idea in evolutionary biology called Lamarckian inheritance. French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his followers thought that things an organism experiences in its lifetime can be handed down to the next generation. The classic example is a giraffe that has to stretch to reach leaves producing offspring with long necks.

This idea ran counter to Mendelian genetics, which holds that genes — not environmental influences — control traits and are passed to offspring. Mendelian geneticists thought it would take five years to breed more cold-tolerant crops. Lysenko said he could do it in two to three years.…

Lysenko was put in charge of a prestigious genetics institute and forced his scientifically unsound farming practices on the collective farms. His methods were disastrous.

Soaking seeds in freezing water hampered germination, leading to crop losses. Millions starved. Meanwhile, Mendelian genetics was branded a “whore of capitalism,” and geneticists were forced to renounce their views or lose their jobs. Many were jailed, and almost a dozen were executed or died in prison. — Tina Hesman Saey, “Here’s what happens when you put politicians in charge of science”

See also:

Trump administration proposal would all but end scientific merit in grant funding, critics say—Los Angeles Times, 10 July 2026

Researchers say this new Trump rule could destroy American science as we know it. They’re fighting back, CNN, 4 June 2026

What does Trump’s call for ‘gold standard science’ really mean? —Science, 27 May 2025

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The Secret 8 Jul 2026, 10:32 am

If I learned one thing in 25 years of running design and education companies, it’s that idealism isn’t a business strategy.

If you wonder why my partners and I had to shut down organizations we and lots of you loved, refer to the previous sentence.

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