My latest writing on design, freelancing and making stuff happen.
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Try and ditch Photoshop and Illustrator if you’re making a web app. siteInspire is hardly a complex design but I didn’t touch either once apart from creating assets. Having no...
This hauntingly beautiful article by Olivia Laing for Aeon Magazine stopped me dead in my tracks last night, and has forced a re-evaluation of the fortnight I spent alone, and similarly withdrawn, in Brooklyn...
It’s only recently that I’ve discovered the wealth of articles and discussions on Hacker News, the social news forum of the Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator.</p><p>So when I posted my “100 mile bike...
This has to be the most painful realisation of 2012 for me. What was yours? [Update: lots of eye-opening responses on Hacker News]
With CycleLove approaching its first birthday (and no doubt some teething pains and temper tantrums imminent), it seemed like a sensible time to recap on lessons learned over the course...
Programmers sometimes use a technique called rubber duck debugging to fix problems in their code: “To use this process, a programmer explains code to an inanimate object, such as a...
If you're losing sleep because you can't stop thinking about something, here's a disarmingly simple tip from Chris Guillebeau, author of The Art of Non-Conformity and The $100 Startup. I kept waking up...
Working as a digital designer (and amateur programmer) in Scotland I was briefly exposed (1) to the software development methodology of 'extreme programming', whose creator Kent Beck advocated coding first, and optimising...
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I became a news junkie, compulsively devouring two or even three news websites on a daily basis. It was an itch I could...
If you're a designer and love your job, stop reading now. This article is not for you. But if being a graphic designer is getting you down, you need to...