Alex Dobrenko

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) is among history’s greatest marginalians—he left behind over 8,000 notes in around 700 volumes.1 It makes sense, then, that he courted women via marginalia. Here, he annotates a text for Sarah Hutchinson. The object of Coleridge’s affection happened to be his best friend’s sister-in-law. Also, Coleridge was... See more

Which is all to say: there is always something a little, well, dangerous, about the concept of originality: a danger that has been elided by our contemporary startup-statured culture, which holds as gospel that imitation is for normies, and innovation for the kind of geniuses most people now secretly believe themselves to be.

But very few interfaces do a brilliant job of the third need: showing me where I've been and how I got here. We can do it at small scales. Patterns like breadcrumbs help us navigate through website or wiki with lots of subpages, but those don't scale well beyond ~7 steps.