Designers
Designers on craft, simplicity and how things should work.
In this listChristopher Alexander, Susan Kare, Neri Oxman and 7 more
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Christopher Alexandercompiled
Architect and design theorist (1936 to 2022); author of A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building.
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Susan Karecompiled
Graphic designer and type designer, who created the original Macintosh icons and typefaces at Apple from 1982 and has since designed interface graphics for NeXT, Microsoft, Facebook and Pinterest.
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Neri Oxmancompiled
Designer, architect and scientist, who led the Mediated Matter group at MIT and founded OXMAN, a company that builds products in collaboration with living organisms.
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Frank Lantzcompiled
Game designer and writer, founder of the NYU Game Center, creator of Universal Paperclips and Drop7, and author of The Beauty of Games. Writes about games as an aesthetic form at his newsletter Donkeyspace.
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Chris Coyiercompiled
Front-end developer and writer; co-founder of CodePen, founder of CSS-Tricks, and co-host of the ShopTalk Show podcast.
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Dieter Ramscompiled
Industrial designer; head of design at Braun from 1961 to 1995; designer of Vitsœ's 606 shelving system; author of the ten principles for good design.
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Jeffrey Zeldmancompiled
Web designer and writer; founded A List Apart and Happy Cog, co-founded the An Event Apart conference, and wrote Designing With Web Standards.
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Rasmus Anderssoncompiled
Swedish designer and programmer. Designed early Spotify, worked at Facebook and Figma, and created the Inter typeface.
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John Maedacompiled
Designer and technologist; author of The Laws of Simplicity; former president of the Rhode Island School of Design; formerly at the MIT Media Lab.
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Eric Meyercompiled
Web standards author and speaker; wrote the CSS: The Definitive Guide series and co-founded the An Event Apart conference.
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A korrentour reading
A business can use stewardship of a community publication as a top-of-funnel customer acquisition strategy without needing the publication itself to generate revenue directly.Their wordsThat's why I thought DigitalOcean was a good buyer originally: it doesn't need to generate money directly; it can function as top-of-funnel customer acquisition via being a good community steward.
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A korrentour reading
Running a niche text-based publication as a profitable business is difficult in the current tech environment.Their wordsIt's a difficult time in tech to try to run a niche text-based publication as a profitable business.
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A korrentour reading
People who behave in ways that inconvenience others always fall into one of three types: they don't know it's rude, they don't care, or they disagree that it's rude.Their wordsThese mocha-ordering fellow humans must fall into one of these categories: They don't know that it's rude They don't care that it's rude They disagree that it's rude
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A korrentour reading
A browser works better as a single window than as multiple separate windows.Their wordsIt takes some serious getting-used-to in Arc that you don't open multiple windows. You just have the one browser window. It's weird to have multiple windows. It lets you, but it probably shouldn't.
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Prioritizing money above everything else does great harm to the world, and that pursuit keeps intensifying.Their wordsThe 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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A korrentour reading
The decline and destruction of the publishing and journalism industries is ongoing.Their wordsAlas, few brands jumped at this opportunity, and the destruction of publishing and journalism continues to this day.
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A korrentour reading
Individuals have little power alone, but collective action gives people substantial power.Their wordsIndividually, we have very little power, but together we have a great deal of power.
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A korrentour reading
A first impression of someone's rudeness reliably signals deeper flaws in their character, including a tendency toward authoritarianism.Their wordsI'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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A korrentour reading
People with poor taste or judgment tend to cluster together and reinforce each other's choices.Their wordsM*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.
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A korrentour reading
The US federal government will eventually impose heavy-handed control over the internet.Their wordsSometimes I get super nervous that someday the US government is really going to fuck with the web. Like they are going to decide they just don't have enough control over it and are going to get really heavy-handed somehow.
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Getting intensely worked up over how someone else lives is a sign to re-evaluate yourself, not them.Their wordsIt's time for a re-evaluation if you're getting real worked up over how someone else is living.
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Intrinsic/utopian design is essentially responsive web design made smarter, with fewer edge casesTheir wordsIntrinsic/utopian design is simply Responsive Design getting even smarter and suffering from even fewer edge cases.
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· one recording
Susan Kare: Designing Icons & Graphics For the Original Mac
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A korrentour reading
Any coding tool released in 2026 should include AI capabilities.Their wordsAI is conspicuously missing from our 2.0 release, for sure. A 2026 coding tool should have AI tools.
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A korrentour reading
Any website with public user-generated content will experience abusive behavior.Their wordsAny site that has public-facing user generated content is going to have bad behavior.
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A korrentour reading
HTML-in-canvas style techniques are unlikely to become widely used in everyday web development.Their wordsI don't think this is likely to catch on. We might develop some patterns to make it easier, some interesting hacks to overcome the mismatch, but I don't think that will significantly move the needle.
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New web graphic technologies tend to be used for flashy, excessive effects at first before settling into more restrained, practical use.Their wordsthis is how any new graphic advancement goes: we, by which I mean the collective web industry, start by doing really outré and eye-catching stuff that we later have cause to regret.
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Shadow DOM breaks accessibility in a number of ways.Their wordsThere are just a bunch of things about it that don't feel right to me, like how it can break accessibility in a number of ways.
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A korrentour reading
The video game audience has come to embrace the medium’s worst traits as emblems of the hobby rather than treat them as flaws.Their wordsSo many of the worst things about video games are not just reluctantly tolerated but enthusiastically embraced because, through association, they have become emblems of our beloved hobby/artform/lifestyle.
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A korrentour reading
Video games are the cathedrals of the modern world and nobody yet knows what they are for.Their wordsThey are the cathedrals of the modern world. Only we don’t know what they are for.
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Designed addiction in gambling games is real and can consume a person’s life.Their wordsThe world is full of gambling games that want to crawl into your limbic system and drain every last ounce of life-force from your soul.
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A korrentour reading
Games are hard to see clearly, and the usual tools for looking at them distort as much as they reveal.Their wordsI think that it is difficult to see games clearly.