Topic
design
- Weekend Reading: Readwise with Roam, WWI Naval Intelligence, and Interaction Density
š Readwise2Roam I'm liking so far the process of manually typing notes in Roam from highlights in my books. Something about it feels more efficient and leaves me with more meaningful, succinct notes. This could comeā¦
- Weekend Reading: Figma's Typography, Xerox Alto, and a Timeline of CoVID
āØļø I Pressed āB, You Wouldn't Believe What Happened Next An entertaining talk about the complexity of typography, from Marcin Wichary at Figma's recent Config conference. š„ Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto An techā¦
- Alfred Emoji Pack
As a keyboard shortcut user, I'm always on the hunt for ways to keep my hands on the keoard. Shortcut snippet tools like TextExpander are also catnip for speeding up typing. I've gotten used to many of the emoji shortā¦
- Weekend Reading: Figma Multiplayer, Rice vs. Wheat, and Tuft Cells
š¹ How Figmaās Multiplayer Technology Works An interesting technical breakdown on how Figma built their multiplayer tech (the collaboration capability where you can see other usersā mouse cursors and highlights in theā¦
- The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up
A thought-provoking post from Florent Crivello. Engineersā continuously seek structure and organization assuming that itās a proxy for efficiency. Here the author points out that with new tools enabling AI systems toā¦
- Balancing Power and Usability
This is another one from the archives, written for the Fulcrum blog back in 2016. Engineering is the art of building things within constraints. If you have no constraints, you aren't really doing engineering. Whetherā¦
- How Google Designed the Stadia Controller
This is a neat piece showing some of the process and iteration behind the Google design team's work on the controller for their new gaming service, Stadia. Olsson says the team went through āhundredsā of prototypes, sā¦
- Weekend Reading: Signaling, Busyness, and Magic Ink
šš¼ Applause Lights This is from 2007, but is still a very astute observation in how politicians and activists use rhetoric to signal rather than recommend a real, actionable way forward on issues: The substance of aā¦
- Weekend Reading: Ted Chiang, Renewable Energy, and ColorBox
āš¼ Ted Chiang Uses Science to Illuminate the Human Condition I enjoyed this interview with author Ted Chiang. It covers his recent short story collection Exhalation: Stories with nice context and background on the idā¦
- Weekend Reading: tracejson, Euclid, and Designing at Scale
š° tracejson An extension to the GeoJSON format for storing GPS track data, including timestamps. GPX has been long in the tooth for a long time, but it works and is supported by everything. This approach could have sā¦
- Weekend Reading: Terrain Mesh, Designing on a Deadline, and Bookshelves
š MARTINI: Real-Time RTIN Terrain Mesh Some cool work from Vladimir Agafonkin on a library for RTIN mesh generation, with an interactive notebook to experiment with it on Observable: An RTIN mesh consists of only rigā¦
- Weekend Reading: Tissot's Indicatrix, National Park Fonts, and Starlink
š Tissot's Indicatrix This is a neat interactive tool to visualize distortion due to map projection using Tissot's indicatrix, a mathematical model for calculating the amount of warp at different points: Nicolas Auguā¦
- The Spatial Networks Shop
Our design and marketing team put together this awesome shop for company-branded gear ā some shirts, mugs, and other swag with product brands and other fun stuff (I even got my own tribute). I'll have to say that my pā¦
- Wireframing with Moqups
Wireframing is a critical technique in product development. Most everyone in software does a good bit of it for communicating requirements to development teams and making iterative changes. For me, the process of wireā¦
- Fulcrum's New Look
We just finished up a several-month's-long effort updating the design and branding of Fulcrum, from the logo to typefaces, to web design and all. As happens with these things, it took longer than we wanted it to whenā¦
- Designing with Figma
We've been doing prototyping over the last 6 months using Figma, a tool for building mockups and making them interactive for testing UX designs. This post from Caleb covers some basics in how it works with some greatā¦
- A Live Experiment in Disassembling a Map
This was a cool idea from cartographer Daniel Huffman. He live-streamed a walkthrough taking apart one of his map projects in Illustrator to see how he puts it all together. I love this idea and am excited to see himā¦
- The Incredible Inventions of Intuitive AI
This talk on "generative AI" was interesting. One bit stuck out to me as really thought-provoking: Dutch designers have created a system to 3D print functional things in-place, like this bridge concept. Imagine that yā¦
- Weekend Reading: Railway Logos, Meditation, and the Next Feature Fallacy
š© The Next Feature Fallacy The vast majority of features wonāt bend the curve. These metrics are terrible, and the Next Feature Fallacy strikes because itās easy to build new features that donāt target the importantā¦
- Designing Mapping Apps for Mobile
For the Geo DC September 2012 meetup, I talked about our design process at Spatial Networks developing Fulcrum, and how we build highly-functional, easy-to-use mobile features for mapping work.
- A Never-Ending Train
An amazing train station design — the trains don't have to stop.