Everything Easy Is Hard Again

It’s by keeping our work legible that we keep the door open to the next generation of our co-workers. What works for them also works for us, because whether you are just out of school or have twenty years of experience, you’ll eventually end up in the same spot: your first year of making websites.

As someone who has decades of experience on the web, I hate to compare myself to the tortoise, but hey, if it fits, it fits. Let’s be more like that tortoise: diligent, direct, and purposeful. The web needs pockets of slowness and thoughtfulness as its reach and power continues to increase. What we depend upon must be properly built and intelligent... See more

Illegibility comes from complexity without clarity. I believe that the legibility of the source is one of the most important properties of the web. It’s the main thing that keeps the door open to independent, unmediated contributions to the network. If you can write markup, you don’t need Medium or Twitter or Instagram (though they’re nice to have)... See more

First, I think great web design requires discipline. And that’s really the hardest thing about making a website. In this field there are a thousand yes’s for every no because, and here’s the second reason: it’s impossible to hold a website in your hand. It’s hard and sometimes tedious to see all the variations of your work across the infinitude of ... See more

Let’s be more like that tortoise: diligent, direct, and purposeful. The web needs pockets of slowness and thoughtfulness as its reach and power continues to increase. What we depend upon must be properly built and intelligently formed. We need to create space for complexity’s important sibling: nuance. Spaces without nuance tend to gravitate toward... See more

Wirth's Law threatens to make things even worse. As software rots, multinationals may become the only players capable of making websites.

But people like Bartosz Ciechanowski are forging paths to elegant futures. The source code for his mechanical watch demo is proof that honest software is viable. Each guide is erected as a giant wall of WebGL. It'... See more

We often think making things for the web is a process of simplifying—the hub, the dashboard, the control panel are all dreams of technology that coalesces, but things have a tendency to diverge into a multiplicity of options. We pile on more tools and technology, each one increasingly nuanced and minor in its critical differences. Clearly, converge... See more