Remembrance of zeldman.coms past 4 Jun 2026, 7:35 am

As we finesse a few details of this site’s current redesign, it’s worth reviewing where we began, going back all the way to our launch in the spring of 1995.

Visual punk rock: 1995 ƒƒ

Frozen in still screen capture form below are two pages from my GIFPLEX (1995), which is still viewable on the current site. It used tables for layout and employed left and right ASCII arrows to guide the visitor through a series of animated GIFs. I made the GIFs by sampling homemade Beta and VHS tapes from my collection, using Gifbuilder, a System 7-friendly shareware video-to-gif tool. Psychotronic film fans and MST3K devotees may recognize a few frames from “Horror of Party Beach.”

And here (viewable via the Web Archive) is what the home page looked like at the end of that first year:

Note that earlier versions—and there were many; I changed the design every few days—are not available via the Wayback Machine, as it was not yet invented when I launched this site. All of those early pages, which were handspun in HTML, used to still be available live here at zeldman.com, but a few dozen or more were misplaced during one of this site’s many server migrations across three decades, and the original files are lost to Zip and floppy disks whose raw materials (I hope) have long since been recycled. If not, then somewhere in a reeking landfill, these earliest pages lie waiting for alien archivists to discover them sometime before the death of the sun. But I digress.

I called my homepage toc.html, which stands for “table of contents,” and was influenced by the weird but prescient designer David Siegel, who, along with Lynda Weinman, was one of only graphic designers taking the new medium seriously. (Fun fact about Lynda: She dated Matt Groenig before he invented The Simpsons, and appeared as a character in his early comic strip, Life in Hell, which was serialized in alternative journals like the Baltimore/Washington City Paper, for which I was a freelance writer back in those days. I later had the pleasure of meeting Lynda at a 1998 digital conference event where Jeff Veen, George Olsen and I introduced the community to our newly launched developer advocacy group, The Web Standards Project. But I digress.)

Although I blogged from the day I launched, I considered blogging merely one strand of entertainment I expected the site to provide, hence the need for a toc to cover such amusements as The Ad Graveyard, Pardon My Icons, Disturbing Patterns, and Ask Dr. Web.

Here’s another ugly home page variant from that time for your viewing pleasure.

Liquid design—precursor to RWD

Here are some really old views of pages that are still up on this website. Note their “liquid design,” which was something many of us tried in the mid-1990s, before the technology developed that would permit the more sophisticated approach of Responsive Web Design. (For more on Liquid Design and its Jello and Ice Design partners, see this site’s “A Dao of Responsive Liquid,” our “15 Minutes” interview with Glenn Davis, and Digital Web Magazine’s “Liquid Web Design: Build it right and it will work no matter what the container.”)

Fifteen Minutes

A zine within a website. You can still visit it here on this website. Fifteen Minutes featured my interviews with movie stars like Samuel L. Jackson and “web celebs” (early web creatives I admired, like Derek Powazek and the late Leslie Harpold). I performed the movie star interviews on behalf of Warner Bros., who were my client at the time, and published them on my website with permission from Donald Buckley, their VP Marketing, who also came up with the name, “Fifteen Minutes.” (Terrific guy, great mind; I was remarkably lucky in my clients.)

For your pleasure

Still available on the site, Waterbox was a collection of some of my music from the mid-1980s. These downloadable MP3 files were poorly mixed and never properly mastered, and MP3 is a lossy format—but they’re all I have left of the music I had composed, produced, and performed at my Red Flowers studio in Washington, DC during the latter part of the 1980s. Four decades later, I’ve begun composing and producing music again. You can stream my new LP-in-progress for free on Sonica (and eventually also on Apple Music and Spotify).

As an added bonus, go to the actual page and hover over the blue beanie in the orange box at the bottom of the page. It will animate to reveal my beanied punim. If clicked, it will take you to my current About page. (It used to take you to whatever toc.html page I had going that week.)

The “DHTML” TOC

One more ugly old TOC, from the beginning of the 4.0 browser era. The featured astronaut floated about on the page and the Emigre-set titles changed colors on hover. The animations were achieved via “DHTML,” which was briefly a name for JavaScript-plus-HTML. The combination of Emigre type, HTML Verdana, Photoshop outlines, and shareware microfonts is quite possibly the nastiest recipe ever to emerge from my demented early web kitchen.

The one you possibly remember

Here’s the version of Jeffrey Zeldman Presents the Daily Report that some of you will remember from the early 2000s. Note in the sidebar the inclusion of A List Apart (web design magazine launched 1998, still operational although we publish far less frequently these days), Happy Cog (my design studio, now under new and excellent ownership), and An Event Apart—the late, lamented web design conference I co-founded with Eric Meyer.

I iterated constantly on The Daily Report, which eventually became the most important part of this website (replacing toc.html as its homepage), and at some point will share more of this site’s visual history—the good, the bad, and the hideously ugly. I will also want to talk about the Big Type revolution this site and A List Apart underwent in the wake of antialiased web typography and the high-density monitors that became affordable for just about every computer user in the mid-2000s. Look for that in Part II of this  À la recherche des sites perdu (apologies for my High School French), coming soon.

But what I want to write about next is what you’re soaking in: the current redesign of this website. This slog through the visual muck that got us here was a necessary preface to that exploration, which I promise to share with you quite soon indeed.

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She’s the Boss. 1 Jun 2026, 7:22 am

SNOW WHITE is my jailer. She reclines near me while I work, watching closely for the moment I stand up. The instant I leave my desk, she directs me to her feeding area so I can open another can of cat food and arrange its contents neatly on a plate. She’ll eat a few bites, then walk away and resume her post by my desk.

She is not here to eat. She is here to ensure my compliance.

The uneaten remainder dries out on the floor; two hours from now, I’ll throw it away and open a new can with a different flavor.

I’m vegetarian because I love animals. But as Snow White’s feeder, I’m responsible for the useless deaths of countless chickens, cows, and fish whose pulverized remains I’ve offered to Snow White and she has nibbled, then ostentatiously wasted, to prove to me over and over which one of us is in control.

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Required reading: “The Interracial Cuck Porn Theory of Everything” 24 May 2026, 7:48 am

Cameron Cummins-Smith’s grand unifying theory connects the far right’s seemingly disparate obsessions—from trans panic and great replacement theory to anti-feminism and white birth-rate anxiety—into a single ideological system fueled by pornographic narratives:

In physics there is this idea of a theory of everything: a single, unified model that can describe all physical phenomena in the universe. Real-world dark matter is part of the development of such a theory. When astrophysicists pointed their telescopes to the stars in the 1970s, they saw things that could not be explained. Either Newton and Einstein were wrong, or there was something they had missed. Dark matter was the proposed explanation: what if there is additional matter acting upon the universe that we simply cannot see?

What I propose today is perhaps even more important than a physical theory of everything: a theory that can connect and explain the wide array of right-wing psychosexual neuroses. The theory is that right-wing political narratives are significantly influenced by porn—specifically interracial cuck porn—and conversely the narratives of said porn are significantly influenced by right-wing politics. Pornography is the unseen dark matter molding and shaping how the online right speaks and thinks about politics, on anything from immigration to transgender people to higher education. Call it the interracial cuck porn theory of everything.

Read, bookmark, and share:

The Interracial Cuck Porn Theory of Everything by Cameron Cummins-Smith

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Lest we forget 24 May 2026, 7:00 am

“GIs in Paris” by Floyd Davis. Davis served as a Life Magazine artist during WWII, where he was stationed in Paris, France.

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My UX Superpower: Nothing Works! 20 Apr 2026, 8:48 am

Maybe I’m special. Or unlucky. But things that supposedly work intuitively for most users tend to fail spectacularly for me. 

After stints in academia, journalism, advertising, and music, I poured myself into web design in early 1995. I understood it in a way most designers didn’t, and rose faster than I probably deserved—until the summer Steve Jobs fired Doug Bowman and me from a redesign of apple.com.

After that, Apple software and hardware went wonky for me for close to a decade.

At the time, I half-believed Mr Jobs had put a techno-curse on me. It certainly seemed that way. When my colleagues upgraded to what was then being called OS X, everything worked for them. When I tried, I failed. And failed. And failed.

Some of this was because OS X was secretly incompatible with SCSI cards, a peripheral in common use on System 7 Macs like my Power Computing P120 Mac clone tower, and Apple never bothered to clue us in. But mostly, what Apple’s new target customer found intuitive left me bamboozled.

Over the next decade, the Mac software and hardware curse lifted, but my disconnection from what other human beings apparently find intuitive persists. Over time, this flaw became, improbably, a professional advantage, because I’m as capable as any “normal” user of misinterpreting directions, misreading cues, and grabbing hold of things that only look like handles.

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Pete’s Presence 17 Apr 2026, 4:27 am

It was a spring that felt more like winter last week in New York; suddenly it feels like summer. After my air-conditioned bedroom, the living room and kitchen was like a walk-in oven. A weirdly yellow bulb lit the kitchen. The kids must have left it on when they went to bed.

I made an espresso. Alerted by the sound, Snow White appeared from wherever she had been napping. I opened a can of wet food for her and laid its contents on a paper plate, separating it into two servings—not that any cat here but Snow White ever eats the wet food.

As she bent her small white head to the task, young Jasper showed up. He is always curious, always gives her plate a sniff before jetting off to walk his rounds. But this morning, instead, Jasper bent his tiger striped head and ate alongside his elder sister.

Gazing down at the two heads bobbing as they ate, I felt a sudden warmth that had nothing to do with the hot dead air of the room. 

Maybe two small creatures scrambling for food reminded me of my brother Pete and me when we were young. Or maybe I remembered how Pete, in the last years of his life, had delighted in playing with Pablo, the split-faced cat—dark on one side, light on the other—who still lives with Cheryl, three years after Pete’s death. 

I recall those thoughts—and then, for a sweet moment, Pete just there with me.

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The Courage to Stop 15 Apr 2026, 6:17 am

The hardest thing to write is less.

Anyone can generate words now. A prompt and a few seconds and you have paragraphs, pages, a manifesto. The machine never runs dry. Which means the words themselves have stopped meaning anything. Volume has become silence.

What’s rare—what’s difficult—is knowing when you’ve said enough. Cutting the sentence that’s technically correct but doesn’t earn its place. Trusting the reader. Trusting the idea. Trusting the white space to do work.

Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement. When everything around you is excessive by default, choosing fewer words takes courage. It says: I thought about this. I edited. I respected your time more than I needed to show my work.

The web taught us to fill space. AI finished the job. Content covers every surface now, every silence anxious to be noise.

Learn to be quiet on purpose.

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Jimmy Carter was right 10 Apr 2026, 4:17 am

What Carter did in his speech was something rare in the annals of democratic government: he confronted the people with the truth—about his own failings, about the reality of the world around them, and most importantly about themselves. Even as Americans grow, for the second time, disillusioned with a Trump presidency, we have put drapes over all the mirrors. 

The American people are unhappy with Trump. They do not like this war. But they need a dose of truth right now. 

The truth is that the American people twice elected Donald Trump over more qualified Democratic women. The first time, Hillary Clinton warned explicitly that he did not have the temperament to be trusted with the nuclear codes. The second time, they overlooked an insurrection, a deadly pandemic, and a campaign full of bellicose and racist rhetoric, all despite the American economy being in the midst of one of the best post-Covid recoveries in the world. — Alan Elrod

I always believed that Carter was right. It’s nice to see him vindicated in print; I only wish he had witnessed this exoneration during his lifetime.

But Carter was faith-driven, and not in the phony way White Nationalists claim to be. To the extent that anyone can run for president without being a massively narcissistic egotist, Carter was free of the veils that egotism erects between an observer and their objective reality.

So if Carter’s ghost still roams this planet, he isn’t kicking his heels together at seeing himself praised at last. Whether Americans were ready to hear his message at the time or not, Carter did the right thing. His reward in life may have been ridicule and scorn, but he seemed remarkably untroubled by the personal aspects of this rejection by the American people—and continued to dedicate his life to helping others.

Had we followed his lead and reelected him, the planet would be in better shape, and clean energy, creating innovation and employment, would power our lives. Then again, had we been capable of following Carter’s lead, we wouldn’t have elected Donald Trump twice, and that is the point author Elrod makes sure we understand:

If we can’t rediscover a sense of the simultaneously awe-inspiring and intimate task of self-government, we will remain the country that re-elected Donald Trump. And we will continue to reap the consequences.

On that note, I invite you to read After a Dark Week, Americans Should Turn to Jimmy Carter’s Malaise Speech.

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Handwritten notes in the time of AI note takers 9 Apr 2026, 4:58 am

“Here is the thing people get wrong about AI in meetings. The transcript captures what was said. It does not capture what mattered.”—Lucas Radke

The best project management tool is still a pen, plus the discipline to notice what the machine cannot.

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Dine ’n em-dash 24 Mar 2026, 5:03 am

Abandon the em-dash in your human writing?

The irony—and it’s a major irony—is that real writers use em-dash frequently, and for reasons. As a written signifier of verbal speech pauses, it means something different than what commas and semicolons mean. It connects while separating. 

That’s why so many writers use em-dash when it is the best mark for the job. In turn, chatbots use it because they were schooled on millions of writers.

A moral conundrum

That this human thing real writers do is now a red flag to readers who mistrust AI is—as I said—ironic. And for editors, it’s frustrating, as it  presents a moral conundrum:

Replace a well-used em-dash with a comma so suspicious readers won’t mistakenly flag the text as AI-generated? I’ve done it. Particularly in bulleted lists where every list item includes a em-dash that could work as a colon, and/or when the writing is fairly dry—and thus potentially triggering for ticked-off hunters of AI signifiers. Le sigh.

Ultimately, the best defense is to write well. Write humanly. The closer you make it to that aim, the fewer the folks who will worry about the AI-or-human provenance of your words.

Photo ℅ energepic.com.

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RSS creator on Bluesky & AT Proto 22 Mar 2026, 9:29 am

My favorite social media channel, Bluesky, has a terrific new interim CEO and a business plan, but RSS creator and longtime blogger Dave Winer thinks they’d do better catching up to the web instead of reinventing it.

They can’t abandon the developers who made a bet on AT Proto, so they should give it to a standards body, work with them, but at the same time work on interop with products like WordPress and support inbound and outbound RSS. Markdown would be nice too. Get rid of the character limit and support links, styling, enclosures (for podcasting) and make their posts editable. In other words they have some catching up to do re the web. That’s where their leadership would be welcome instead of questioned. — Dave Winer

N.B. The link to Dave’s long-running website, Scripting News, works but the site does not use https://, so some browsers may incorrectly warn you that there’s a problem with the page. There isn’t one. Relax—and click on through to the other side.

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Too Many Notes 16 Mar 2026, 3:28 am

Lately, in work conversations, I find myself fighting a lifelong tendency to provide way more context than is absolutely required.

If you ask me to okay your work, for example, I may respond with an essay on what delighted me about it.

The teaching gene, plus the exuberance of writing and thinking clearly, compel me to answer even quick questions in slow, luxurious detail.

Above all, in each encounter, I worry that the person I’m interacting with may exit the exchange lacking some vital chunk of information it was within my means to unearth for them.

I’ve been working professionally since the 1980s. You’d think I’d be less vigilant by now. 

We are what we is.

Am I doomed to always say more than the occasion absolutely requires? Not necessarily.

For me, one of many virtues of remote work is that, after writing a lengthy and detailed response to your question, I have the opportunity to whittle it down to the bare essentials before hitting Send.

However.

One of many aspects of being me is that, when editing a lengthy text, I’m nearly as likely to extend it in even more detail as I am to do what I set out to do, and shorten it.

This blog post, for example, started life as a single-sentence social post. 

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A die-cut above 13 Mar 2026, 6:30 am

Cover art for the 1971 prog-rock LP “Fearless,” by British band Family features a distinctive, die-cut cover design depicting the five band members gradually morphing into a single entity combining features of them all.

Tom Brigham, a high school student and friend of mine the year the LP was released, had not yet invented morphing (for which he would win an Academy Award), so the morphing in this LP cover was likely rendered artistically by hand. (If you have information to the contrary, please share it in the comments.) The work feels like a Hipgnosis cover design, but I was unable to discover who created it.

If you’re curious about the LP, the cut (no pun intended) “Larf and Sing,” with its falsetto lead vocal and striking, flanged a cappella chorus, provides a taste of the band’s quirky and diverse songwriting and arranging. 

• Find 100 great album cover designs at udiscover music dot com.
• Find 149 of the greatest album covers ever at Bored Panda.
• Explore die-cut album covers on Reddit.
• Explore progressive rock history at Progressive Rock Central.
• Listen to Family’s “Fearless” LP on Apple Music or Spotify.
• Buy a 3-CD special edition from Cherry Red Records.
• Dig the LP credits on Discogs.

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My brother, the rhythmic conceptualist 5 Mar 2026, 4:45 am

Today would have been my brother Pete Zeldman’s 68th birthday. 

Pete Zeldman was a virtuoso American drummer, composer, and rhythmic theorist renowned for his pioneering work in multiple pedal orchestration and extreme four-way limb independence. Often described as a “rhythmic conceptualist,” he was celebrated for his ability to play multiple simultaneous tempos and complex contrapuntal rhythms.

The Legend of Pete Zeldman

His Music

He played with Steve Vai, Sonny Stitt, Joe Satriani, and many others (including a long-running collaboration with Cindy Shapiro, Rob Shapiro, and Jeff Virgo in the arty pop band 2.5D, a legendary improv session with Jaco Pastorius, and a short stint with John Lurie and the Lounge Lizards), and was a longtime instructor at The Drummer’s Collective in NYC. His LPs include Other Not Elsewhere (1991), Twilight Walks Over (2009), and the posthumous release Enigma, (2024). 

His Spirit

Pete was a cut-up who once greeted me by dashing into the hallway of his apartment building stark naked, shouting “Old Pete Zeldman’s got a few tricks up his sleeve,” leaping up and clicking his heels in mid-air.

He was absurd, brilliant, obsessive, kind, compassionate, and generous.

He moved to England in the 1990s where he continued to teach and put on workshops in the EU.

He was my only brother. I loved him. For moments during  our difficult childhoods, he was my only friend.

In 1993, at the lowest point of my drinking, he handed me a meeting book and escorted me to the local AA meeting where I got sober and eventually became the person you know today.

His Passing

Pete’s dear wife Cheryl was beside him when he died of pancreatic cancer on February 28, 2023 in their home outside London. 

On the first anniversary of his passing, as my daughter and I were reminiscing about Pete, the ceiling light in our apartment went out for a moment, and then came back on. As a rational, agnostic modernist who believes in science, I’m pretty sure that was Pete tapping the veil between us.

His Legacy

Here are some places where you can experience his music, thoughts, and the way he inspired other artists. If you know links I missed, please share them in the Comments.

• Enigma: 9 Volt Polyrhythmic Breakdown on YouTube.
• Enigma, released posthumously two years ago on this day by Lost in Sound Records.
• Pete Zeldman on Apple Music.
• Pete Zeldman discography on Spotify.
• Pete Zeldman recordings on YouTube.
• Posthumous podcast: Remembering Pete Zeldman with special guests  – Live From My Drum Room!  with Knewood Denard, Rob Watkins, Jeff “Tain” Watts, Jason Gianni, Cheri Denard, and Tobias Ralph.
• Pete Zeldman interview on uses this.
• Pete Zeldman archives here at zeldman.com.

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What a year that was. 3 Mar 2026, 9:57 am

“1995 begins with web designers creating cinematic experiences using images and browser tricks, and ends with the arrival of table support in Netscape Navigator, giving true control over layout.”—Richard MacManus

Read Richard’s post: From Batman Forever’s cinematic design to HTML tables.

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Advice for job seekers 2 Mar 2026, 6:56 am

I recently heard from an accomplished former colleague who had failed to impress the recruiter evaluating their initial application for an open position. It was a position for which they were more than qualified. So why hadn’t they scored so much as an initial interview?

Turned out the candidate had punted on questions like, “Tell us about a project or piece of work you’re especially proud of, from any point in your career.” Their answers were brief, generalized, and lacking in detail. Without the context that thoughtfully detailed answers would have supplied, their application was easy to pass over.

When I explained this to them, they responded that they’re humble about their accomplishments and don’t like to brag.

Modesty is a becoming trait, but discomfort in talking about yourself can prevent you from developing a habit of reflecting on your work as it maps to organizational and customer needs … and that’s a habit that every professional who isn’t independently wealthy should cultivate.

Here is how I advised my colleague:

A DM from “Uncle” Jeffrey

If you get a second chance at that job opportunity, you definitely want to brush up on your ability to tell stories about your career, and you need to let go of that embarrassment about listing your accomplishments.

You need to do that for EVERY opportunity that comes your way, not just [the particular opportunity they’d mentioned].

How Recruiters See it

Don’t think of it as bragging. Think of it as part of a negotiation. You’re telling the company what kind of value they can expect to get out of you in return for the salary and benefits they pay.

Like it or not, you are SELLING your services, and you need to think of it as part of your professional responsibility. It is NOT bragging. It’s as clear and focused and enticing an explanation as you can provide for why this particular company can gain exceptional and specific benefits from your expertise, experience, and confidence. Benefits that map to their customers’ current and future needs.

Not responding in detail sends the message to the recruiter that the candidate doesn’t care very much. Isn’t serious about this particular job. May even be responding to every job ad that crosses their desk, rushing through the answers, and not thinking deeply about why they and this company belong together and can uniquely benefit each other.

LET ME REITERATE

That’s how recruiters see diffident communications that lack detail.

They don’t view it as humility. Okay. It’s humility when a world-famous person does it. Like, if Tim Berners-Lee, in an interview, is kind of humble about inventing the WWW, that’s cool. If Paul McCartney behaves modestly when asked about his decades of musical output, that’s cool. But you and I are not TBL or Paul McCartney. We need to sell ourselves.

For a person the recruiter doesn’t know, this is a pitch. The recruiter is looking for people who truly have the abilities that are needed, can show that they understand the business’s needs and bring EXACTLY the unique combination of skills that will help the business grow, have confidence in their abilities and are not afraid to delve into details.

Delving into details in the application stage tells the recruiter you’ll delve into details when solving complex problems for the company and its customers.

Avoiding those details in the application stage doesn’t read as “this person must be a genius who has accomplished so much, they are simply too humble to talk about it.”

To the recruiter it reads as “This person is not passionate about our organization and this particular job opportunity. I’ll look for someone who gives a damn.”

I’m explaining how recruiters think so you can relax, stop worrying that you’ll be misinterpreted as bragging, and be better prepared for this initial stage of landing the job you really want.

Telling you this because I care. Hope it helps!

LAST WORD

[And reader, if you’re similarly modest and tongue-tied when applying for work, I hope this note helps you, too. ]

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American healthcare 19 Feb 2026, 9:48 am

Hello from CVS. 

CVS messed up my order so I have to wait around for 30 minutes while they reprocess it. 

It costs $30/month, used to be home-delivered, and their app said that today was the last day I could pick it up. 

But when I arrived, they told me they’d taken it out of readiness yesterday even though I still had a day’s grace. (I couldn’t pick it up yesterday because I was having a procedure done on my knee.)

They had also quoted me a price of $1200+/month. So I had to talk to them about that. 

Don’t worry. The 2nd pharmacist I talked to said it’s still only $30/month. Hooray.

But they won’t have it ready for another 30 minutes… and after that they go on lunch break.  

So I’m cooling my heels in a plastic chair, trying to ignore the loud bland pop and country music they play here and trying to also not get sick from the coughing dude sitting next to me. 

But I will say that everyone who works at this CVS is empathetic and polite, and that counts for a lot in my book. I’m also deeply fortunate to have a top-tier American insurance policy through my job.

Plus the delay gave me time to write this blog post.

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The salad bar theory of UX professionalism 16 Feb 2026, 6:20 am

Back when we thought office spaces were necessary, I used to run a small creative studio in Manhattan. Most days a bunch of us would cross the street to order lunch from one of those “we make everything” mega-delis designed to feed and siphon cash from midtown workers.

The highlight of the place, and its most popular item, was an endless (four benches!) salad bar.

“Food by the pound,” my colleague Mike called the endless, four-bench salad bar. He meant that quantity, and not quality, was what we were consuming. Which was something our taste buds already knew and our wallets had accepted as inevitable.

Code by the pound

The phrase stuck in my head and it echoed something I’d noticed creeping into our changing UX culture at the time. For instance, around 2015, I’d noticed it in GitHub, where cool people had dozens or even hundreds of checked boxes denoting shipped code, whereas pitiable bastards like me had only a few checked project boxes to our credit.

To offset the feeling of falling behind, and to assert the primacy of value over volume, I would ask myself (and my clients) “Which is more valuable to a company? Inventing the iPhone? Or shipping a million little bug fixes?”

volume and value

It was an unfair question, of course, because every little bug repair fixes user experience hiccups, and therefore every single one is important to a company’s viability and success. Moreover, few things most of us create in our work have the world-changing potential, for better and worse, of the major inventions  of our time: your open web, your smartphones, and latterly, of course, your AI.

And just as no one person “invented” the iPhone, so no single GitHub item would have contained all the work that all the iPhone’s makers put into it. The comparison, if you’ll forgive an additional food metaphor, arrived slightly undercooked.

Still, my point in making the unfair comparison was that employees could look awfully busy shipping an endless buffet of itty-bitty fixes, but the prodigiousness of their output did not necessarily correlate to their significance to the company and its customers. Whereas the employees who delivered the next iPhone and nothing else might be stuck with a thin GitHub brag box, but would have a far greater impact on the world than their code-by-the-pound colleagues.

10X, anyone?

I think of this as I watch the industry fall in love with ideas like 10Xing, where how much, how many, and how fast become more exciting than what should we make, and why.

This is an arms race. What comes after those is almost always a war. It’s a war no tech company wants to lose. Hence the focus on output and tooling. In time, we will complete the transition and return our gaze to surprising and delighting the customer. Meantime, strap in, and wear a large bib.

Photo by Connor Scott McManus.

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Works in Progress 10 Feb 2026, 5:52 am

So a dear friend bought me Logic Pro as a birthday gift last month, and I’m teaching myself the program by creating music inside it. If you’re the kind of music lover who finds rough mix acetates fascinating, you may enjoy sampling the quick mixes of partially completed pieces I’m beginning to share in a new album on Sonica.

At the moment, there’s one partial piece up: a rough mix of the beginning of something I’m temporarily calling Airy Clouds. The music will change significantly in the coming weeks. At the moment, only the first minute or so is “finished;” bass and drums continue when Section One concludes, but that isn’t meant to be listened to, except as a loop on which the next section may be built. I will probably upload several versions of the piece as I continue to work on it, so the curious may follow its progress. (At least, I hope what comes next is progress.)

I haven’t worked at music composition and production since the late 1980s, when I had my Red Flowers studio in Washington, DC. Back then it was analog multi-track, early MIDI, African reed instruments, and handmade effects and treatments. You can hear some degraded mixes of that early music in my Hound of Muzak collection, also on Sonica. Those tracks were never mastered. They were quick, cassette mixdowns in DBX noise reduction that got played back in Dolby C (don’t ask!) and converted to RealAudio, then later converted from RealAudio to MP3, so if they sound any good at all, it’s kind of a miracle. I still have the multitrack masters, but the equipment they were recorded on used a proprietary tape format that hasn’t been supported or manufactured for close to four decades, so it’s unlikely there will ever be clean, mastered versions of those pieces (and others I didn’t even get a chance to mix down).

If you wondered what prompted my interest in standards when I became a web designer, the answer is that the absence of standards in my former (musical) creative chain made it impossible to create clean, proper mixes of a great deal of music I had created, and I did not want anyone’s web work to suffer the same fate. Silver lining.

Forty-ish years is a long time to go without making music, and an NYC apartment isn’t an ideal recording location, but I’m inspired as hell.

Works in Progress is what its title suggests—a composer’s sketchbook, if you will, with progressive renderings to come. Remember those animated shovel-wielding guys that symbolized “construction in progress” on early 1990s websites? If you don’t like my “classical” LP cover, picture that guy instead. And if you’re still reading this page, why not pause and visit the Sonica LP-in-progress instead?

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Claude Code for Designers 9 Feb 2026, 5:00 am

FIRST, the disclaimers:

1. The article I’m about to link to is about working with AI. If you believe AI is a useless or dangerous invention (and I agree with you on the second point, which means I support the idea of regulating AI like any other public utility), you’ll have no interest in learning how to incorporate it into your product design practice. Skip the article and go with God.
2. The article is hosted on Substack. 

Some of my favorite writers—folks who are as anti-fascist and pro-democracy as they come—publish on Substack, but I read and recommend their work less and less frequently, because Substack has a Nazi problem.

To wit:

Awkward: Substack’s Nazi Problem

Substack call themselves a platform rather than a publication, a classic web conundrum. But most other self-described platforms typically have terms and conditions banning dangerous or harmful speech, and an (overworked, underfunded) Trust & Safety team that removes the worst content published there.

Thus, its glory days, Twitter tried to ban the most toxic speech. They weren’t always successful, and a bunch of us did a lot of complaining about that, but they had great people on staff who worked hard to stem the worst abuses. X, in contrast, not only does not check bad speech, it actively promotes it, which is why many of us choose to post elsewhere.

Like X, Substack refuses to remove Nazi content from their platform, labeling it a free speech issue. Free speech sounds good, and is good in principle. And at least Substack, unlike X, does not deliberately amplify the worst speech it allows on its platform.

Ah, but but Substack takes a 10% cut of all subscriptions, including subscriptions to inflammatory, dangerous content, e.g. Nazi stuff.

Profiting from all speech, including atrocious speech, undermines Substack’s “neutral platform” argument, since profit incentivizes them to publish bad content that drives passionate subscriptions.

Some writers have left the platform in protest—and there are certainly other services that offer writers the same benefits without the Nazi problem.

On the other hand, migrating to a new platform can be difficult, and you can lose your audience in the process. Thus many writers who are not Nazis nevertheless remain on Substack and rationalize it.

And still other writers are unaware of the Substack problem. I suspect that that’s the case with the author whose article I’m about to link to.

The writer’s dilemma is also the reader’s.

If you feel okay reading non-Nazi stuff on a platform that profits from everything published on it (including Nazi stuff you’ll never see but which nevertheless contributes to the platform’s bottom line) … and if you already work with or are inexperienced but open-minded about AI (while also being aware of the societal dangers the technology poses), then this article may be for you.

Although I’m conflicted about it for the reasons above, I  recommend the article Claude Code for Designers: A Practical Guide by Tommaso Nervegna as a relatable, informative, and useful hands-on guide to harnessing Claude Code and a handful of other tools to build not only functional prototypes and client demos but working websites and real web apps with users and databases. 

TL;DR: A full-stack designer/developer who used to code rediscovers his superpower through Claude Code and Get Shit Done. The promise: no more translation layer between vision and implementation; just a direct path from Figma to production. How to get there if you wish to try doing the same: just follow the steps.

Read: Claude Code for Designers: A Practical Guide.

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