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• Linux was accidentally designed for agents

  May 19, 2026

  I recently built a home theater PC on Linux. In years gone by this would have been much harder than doing the same thing on Windows or macOS. Today it’s easier, because my agent can do it without my intervention. The two major desktop operating systems “outgrew” text-based UI decades ago. They were designed to please humans with pretty graphics, pointing devices over text input, and progressive di

• Ideal failures

  May 13, 2026

  The way I used to design UI was to sit with Figma, or a React prototype with no back end. Imagine every failure mode. Design beautiful flows for each. I slipped into this mistake while working on LanWhisper, a voice dictation app. I designed for the failure modes I could imagine, drew the flows, and shipped the app. Then real users hit failure modes that I hadn’t anticipated. For example, the AI t

• Free software scares normal people

  Oct 30, 2025

  I’m the person my friends and family come to for computer-related help. (Maybe you, gentle reader, can relate.) This experience has taught me which computing tasks are frustrating for normal people. Normal people often struggle with converting video. They will need to watch, upload, or otherwise do stuff with a video, but the format will be weird. (Weird, broadly defined, is anything that won’t pl

• Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools

  Feb 03, 2025

  Code forces humans to be precise. That’s good. Computers need precision. But it also forces humans to think like machines. For decades we tried to fix this by making programming more human-friendly. Higher-level languages. Visual interfaces. Each step helped, but we were still translating human thoughts into computer instructions. AI was supposed to change everything. Finally, plain English could

• Atomic design in 1998

  Feb 08, 2018

  When you hear “atomic design,” you probably think of Brad Frost. Interestingly, he was not the first person to develop that method of delivering design as components, or even the terminology. Brad published his atomic design article in 2013. While digging through the archives at frog, I’ve learned that Mark Rolston developed and applied an atomic framework as early as 1998. The description found

• There is definitely a grid

  Jun 10, 2016

  Grids are the best thing to ever happen to graphic design. They form a rational basis for organizing information. They support the harmonious distribution of elements and visual weight. We don’t design things with grids because it’s easy, or because everyone else is doing it. It’s not a trend. We design with grids because they help the brain process information. The text of this article is left-al

• The Eli Schiff problem

  May 19, 2016

  Fellow members of The International Cabal to Destroy Design, I write you today because we stand atop a precipice, faced with the threat of annihilation. The rogue Eli Schiff has been systematically exposing our wicked deeds in an attempt to derail the Modern Minimalist plot. I’m sure you remember this piece from last year: This move towards the design engineer has excited designers like Cap Watkin

• The right way to unsubscribe

  Oct 23, 2015

  Clicking “Unsubscribe” should have a straightforward outcome. In the wild it’s rarely that simple. Here’s an example from Ugmonk, a fantastic clothing brand run by a passionate designer. I’d never unsubscribe from their newsletter in real life, but let’s pretend: Notice that clicking “Unsubscribe” doesn’t unsubscribe. It brings us to a screen with the action “Update E-mail Settings”. Does clicking

• The fear of being right

  Oct 07, 2015

  The best designs often look wrong. They appear unexceptional. They don’t show off. They don’t push our technical skills to the limit. They leave out things we expect. They don’t reflect the latest trends. “It just doesn’t look right.” “It almost looks unfinished.” “Nobody does this anymore.” Great designs achieve their goals and nothing else. They’re not flashy for the sake of being flashy, and th

• We need a bigger touch screen

  Sep 15, 2015

  Human beings need space to express themselves. Eyes have a broad field of view, heads turn, and arms reach several feet in many directions. Unlike us, our screens are small. They constrain our movement to small twitches of the fingers and a few degrees of eye movement. They’re easy to carry around, but they’re also restrictive. The invention of the touch screen removed a barrier between people and