Archive

Software is eating the world. But progress in software technology itself largely stalled around 1996. Here’s what we had then, in chronological order: LISP, Algol, Basic, APL, Unix, C, SQL, O…

Today, the Maker Mind newsletter just hit 25,000 subscribers! To celebrate, I asked you to share your questions about launching and managing a newsletter. Here are my thoughts. Wherever you are in your journey, I hope you find these answers helpful. How long did it take you to build up that audience? (David) I launched ... Read More

Tech is always political. The way data is collected and handled is often biased, and many products are neither accessible nor inclusive. Ethical Design Guide is made to share resources on how to create ethical products that don't cause harm.

Translations: ελληνικά / عربى / 中文 (Weixin video, Youtube video) / 粵文 / bahasa Indonesia / český / Català / český / Deutsch / Español / 2فارسی / فارسی / Français / עִברִית / Hrvatski / Italiano / Magyar / Nederlands / 日本語 / 日本語 2 / नेपाली / Polskie / русский / Português / Română / Slovensky / Slovenščina / Srpski / Türk / український / Markdown for translating / Fun video by LlamaExplains / Video version by Giff Ransom

A perceptual color space for image processing A perceptual color space is desirable when doing many kinds of image processing. It is useful...

Every day, 500 million people leave information online that is picked up and packaged for a vast digital marketplace.

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.

Overreacting, catastrophizing, maximizing, overplaying… We have many words for exaggeration. However, all exaggeration mostly falls under three categories.

Altered states of consciousness may immediately bring to mind psychedelics or hypnosis, but there are many ways to induce such non-ordinary states. But first, a conundrum. In order to define altered states of consciousness, we need to ask: what is an ordinary state of consciousness? Because scientists can’t agree on an answer to this question, ... Read More

As designers, strategists, developers, and professional problem solvers ourselves, we too have a complicated relationship with the controversial belle of the ball known as Design Thinking. However…

2000 me: Wow you still work on the web, that’s amazing. It must be so easy to publish really interesting web pages. 2020 me: Uhhhhh. [Very long pause.] Look, you can pay a low monthly fee and listen…

Welcome to this edition of our Interview series, where we interview prolific creators, entrepreneurs, authors and researchers to ask them how they design their life and work. Today, our guest is Marie Poulin, a designer, teacher, and productivity expert. Before becoming a Notion specialist and productivity-extraordinaire, Marie co-founded a creative digital agency and launched a ... Read More

On Oct. 1st, 2019, my first Axidraw plotter arrived. I was looking for some motivation to try it out, and it happened to be Inktober. The rule was simple: create something every day and share it…

How to deploy a React Native App to iOS TestFlight Beta Testing Using Fastlane.

An exercise in pure mathematics has led to a wide-ranging theory of how the world comes together.

How personal productivity transformed work—and failed to.

In biology class, biology wasn't presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing.

To acknowledge how good the new M1 Macs are — and I am here to tell you they are *astonishingly* good — you must acknowledge that certain longstanding assumptions about how computers should be designed, about what makes a better computer *better*, are wrong.

My high-level workflow looks something like this: identify the problem to solve; think on the problem and let ideas percolate; research, discuss, and experiment with these ideas; implement and test the solution; deliver and maintain the solution.

Social media presents emotional and mental challenges for contemporary artists. It is undeniably an important avenue for sharing your artwork and artistic process, almost essential if you are not already firmly established. Many artists are therefore forced into working with it if they have any comm

When reading a book, taking notes interrupts our reading flow. There is a fine balance between taking too many notes and taking too few notes.

A few months ago, a tweet popped up on my timeline, where Juvoni Beckford shared an incredible achievement: reading 450 books over the course of a decade. As someone who loves reading and thinks that everyone would benefit from reading more books—whether fiction or nonfiction—I was understandably impressed by Juvoni’s consistency. Juvoni Beckford is a ... Read More

“All paintings are prison windows.” —Yves Klein I was listening to a podcast about Yves Klein last night. I’m not going to do him justice here, but what struck me was Klein’s desire to go past fixed objects into a new space of creation. His work insisted that we think about what we aren’t seeing—the immaterial ideas and assumptions and the raw material and labor that are hidden when we look at something.

Sierra was one of the biggest game publishers of the 90s. Then they got an offer that was way too good to be true, but too good to decline.

The story behind the fall of Best Made Co., Peter Buchanan-Smith's hand-painted axe company, its sale to Bolt Threads and then to Duluth Trading Co.

In college I first heard Jason Fried from Basecamp talk about how making money is a skill—like playing the drums or piano—that you can get better at over time. That resonated with me immediately. I wouldn’t expect to be able to sit down at a piano for the first time an