Blog

Hello and welcome!
Here I occasionally post about making digital products.

Do you know that feeling when you explain something you thought you knew quite well and then the other person with just one remark shows you how flawed your thinking was? Well, I do. So I figured that if I share my reflections on my design work online, forever, I’d be a bit more careful and think of how someone else would see things.

That’s all for me, but hey, this is my personal website.

I do my best to write clearly though. And instead of just giving you a reverse chronological list of posts, I’ll try to point you to what I think may be worth reading.

Design

My post What is design? is likely most linked and read. It’s not unlikely that you’ve read it just now, but did you read User-centered vs user-centric design too? They go together as they are more than only an attempt to do create impartial definitions. They’re also about my beliefs around what design should be.

I used to believe that design is mostly benign. As far as I know, I’ve never met a designer with bad intentions with their work. But the huge amount of garbage and pollution we collectively create wouldn’t be there without design. But being involved doesn’t mean being responsible—or does it?

Design ethics

Businesses don’t hire designers for their good work, so I’d say the most important question a designer should ask is who’s gonna pay me? After all, if gaining work experience changes how you see the world and yourself, your job defines who you are. I kept on thinking about these topics, but took a really long time to act on them. So: are design ethics of any use at all? And if organizations are to humans are what ant colonies are to ants: can we even understand enough about our systems to improve them?

Color

Color was another fundamental design topic, one that rekindled my interest in blogging. I wrote What is color, How we all see colors differently and Why color discussions can be so frustrating to make sense of something for very long I thought I fully understood but really still don’t.

Craft

When I picked up blogging I thought I’d be writing most about the thing I knew most about: hands-on design (there are no individual contributors in design, so I refuse to say I was one). Turned out that I like writing about things I’m learning much more. But there are a few okay hands-on design posts though! Like the one about my hybrid pen-and-paper/digital workflow and Figma library.

I’m a sucker for hypes. I almost fell into the blockchain trap. And in 2019 I couldn’t help myself and wrote about dark mode and recommender systems. Because it’s often ignored, I also like to bring up making custom fonts (not typefaces). Finally, you can’t do good design while making bad decisions, so here’s Design better by avoiding your cognitive biases.

Web development

I don’t see myself as a web developer, but the truth is that the last two years I’ve spent more time programming than designing. Sometimes I invent a problem for which I can’t find an obvious solution. If the solution is simple and interesting enough, I like writing a blog post about it. Like about how to make digital business cards, or making sidenotes for the web or adding internationalization to Jekyll websites. The problem with these is that they’re quite time-consuming to do well, while they get outdated fast, so I’m not even mentioning any others here.

Free, open source software

I didn’t write much about open source, but I find the topic very important. Why is FOSS so badly designed? How could we make these projects more successful?

Side projects

Being a designer who knows a little about making websites, I sometimes get carried away and start yet another project. I wrote a few times about how these projects go wrong and about my experience selling a project.

Misc

The posts I enjoyed writing most aren’t much about design at all. They’re lifestyle essays from before I knew what an essay was. Actually, I still couldn’t give a proper definition. Here are some of them:

More

Here’s the full blog archive.