I don’t get to use my camera gear a lot anymore — the days before COVID when using my camera felt like a near-daily part of my work are very missed — but I am grateful to hear that Gear Patrol has acquired DPReview, and the site will live on. 

Much digital ink has been spilled about DPReview in the past months, and I won’t add much more to it here, save that the site has always been invaluable. It’s not just about gear. It’s about learning technique from the good people in the forums, too. Losing DPR would have been like losing Sound on Sound for music production — unthinkable. 

Gear Patrol is new to me. I hope they steward DPReview well.

I’ve always found the work of design to be difficult. 

When I started working as a designer, it was difficult because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was tripping and stumbling in the dark, messing around in Photoshop and InDesign, trying to lay out magazine ads and technical manuals proficiently. I don’t think the work was particularly good; I may have had good taste, but I lacked the required skills to get there. 

Now that I’ve been working as a designer for over nine years — ten in October! — the primary challenges are different. As I get older, the blank page becomes more daunting, probably because I don’t want to repeat myself. I’d rather be like George Carlin and come up with new material for every project. But even once we get passed the blank page (try pen and paper first), the middle — the process — is hard. Design is not a straight line.

Good design resources about the process are scarce. I assume every designer struggles with this (especially post-COVID, when so many work alone from home with less immediate feedback), but none of us share the struggle in the messy middle. We just share the beautiful end results in our portfolio. 

In that respect, design is an odd creative field. Authors love to write books about their writing process. Filmmakers make documentaries exploring their craft. Musicians release demos as bonus tracks. But designers don’t share the process. We hide it like it’s some trade secret. Even Dribbble, ostensibly a platform where we can share ​“what we’re working on,” is mostly used to share work we’ve finished.

The process is ignored.

My favourite video on the internet is Aaron Draplin taking on a logo challenge from Lynda (now LinkedIn Learning). I watch the video every time I get stuck, so I’ve seen it a few times: Draplin makes jokes, draws freely, zips around Adobe Illustrator and, most importantly, talks about all the cool stuff he has lying around his workspace.

The first several times I watched the video, I was amazed by the amount of junk Draplin collects (and worried that a key part of success as a great designer would involve becoming a pack rat). But I eventually realized that Draplin isn’t collecting these knickknacks; he’s noticing them. That act of noticing – of focused observation – is his process.

I think we as an industry could do a better job sharing how we work. A few years ago, I audibly groaned when a friend who was new to the design industry asked if I preferred Sketch or Figma. (I was kind of a jerk, I know. Dear friend, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry.) That question isn’t particularly interesting to me, although I think the evolution of our tools and the impact they have on us is worth watching and considering.

The questions that I think are most important: how do we do the work? How do we create focus? Where do we get our inspiration from? How do we survive the middle?

For years now, we’ve heard new conventional wisdom from all the creative gurus: ​“the tools don’t matter. You have everything you need to make what you want to make.”

It probably won’t be surprising to long-time readers of this site that I feel the opposite is true. The tools reveal the process, or at least imply our process. There is no right or wrong tool, so much as there are right or wrong tools for us.

No tool makes you better at your job, but the good ones make your job better. If you do high-end work with computers, a fast computer will always be a good tool. The right kitchen tools make cooking easier, or at least more fun. A good desk chair literally saves your body. Any tool that motivates you to do more of the thing you love has value.

George R.R. Martin does all his writing (very slowly) with a DOS word processor. Specifically, he uses WordStar 4. That looks something like this. One could make an argument it’s not the best tool for the job. But it’s his process. The tool merely reveals his priorities.

On the other hand, tools that get in the way have no value at all. I recently auditioned Sketch for the first time in years. Since 2019, I’ve used Figma with all my clients. In 2019, these apps were quite similar, but since then, Figma has completely leapfrogged Sketch. Things that used to take me ten minutes to do in Sketch take ten seconds in Figma. This audition was incredibly revealing of how the tools have changed, how my process has changed, and how my work has changed.

But it got me thinking: does the tool change me? Does it change my output? Are all my designs just huge Auto Layout demos?

Constraints breed creativity. What do the tools breed in us?

Copywriters have something they call a swipe file — a place they store bits of marketing and writing material they want to refer to later for inspiration. Austin Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist Journal includes its own swipe file.

Commonplace books have a similar idea: it’s a place to store your favourite stuff other people make. H.P. Lovecraft kept one. Ryan Holiday called his ​“a project for a lifetime.”

You have to make your own wells of inspiration.

For many years, when I saw designs I liked and wanted to save for later reference, I would use Pinterest to save it, or simply take a screenshot and stick a copy of it in my Mac’s hard drive somewhere. (The latter is a much better solution than the former.)

Of course, a screenshot isn’t really enough. A good swipe file tells you where your inspiration comes from. It should include notes. Maybe even a full taxonomy. At that point, your basic file browser ain’t going to cut it. There’s no way to serendipitously discover things in the Finder.

These days, I like using Eagle, a macOS app that does a great job organizing all the visual media it saves. With support for everything from pictures to videos to full webpages, I think the app is a godsend. I was suspicious of it at first, mostly because it seemed to good be true, but it has survived three computers and a silicon transition without losing a single image, so I’m pretty confident in it these days.

It’s unfortunately Mac only, but it’s a darn good Mac app (if you like Mac-assed Mac apps). If you’re a Windows person or love your iPad for this sort of thing, I can’t help you. But I’d love to hear what you use.

I’ve been so busy with work since COVID that I haven’t had time to update my portfolio. I’m trying to make time to fix that now.

The newest case study in my portfolio is about One Story, a website I designed and developed about a church curriculum for kids and youth. It’s chalk full of images and details about the project. Check it out here.

Richard Rutter shared an idea for limiting typographic widows with CSS. I love the simplicity of his proposal and would be thrilled if something like this were implemented as part of the core spec.

Twelve years ago felt like a golden age for indie bloggers. Shawn Blanc had just gone full-time independent and was writing up a storm. Austin Kleon posted the slides that ended up becoming *Steal Like an Artist*. The Great Discontentposted their first interview (with Dan Rubin). The Verge was still called This is My Next. John Siracusa was still writing 50,000 word macOS reviews.

The community was growing behind the web, too. Frank Chimero wrote a lot more then, and eventually a lot of what he wrote became The Shape of Design in 2012. Also in 2012, Kai Brach crowdfunded the first issue of Offscreen Magazine.

Maybe this is nostalgia. In 2011, I started freelancing and was actively seeking my tribe. For me, it was a magical time to be online. TGD was how I heard of all the designers I count now as inspiration. It gave me the confidence to explore my path. And Shawn Blanc quitting his job to blog full-time was an aha moment for me. Austin Kleon shone a light on how to do your best creative work (and continues to do so; he’s the best). Frank and Kai proved that there was still space and interest in sharing something deeper and more philosophical online.

Is there a community of people like this in 2023? Who is today’s Shawn Blanc? Who else is shining a light like Austin Kleon?

The newest additions to my list of must-read bloggers are Matt Birchler and Nick Heer. But I’m still looking for the next generation of creative pros and artists who remind us why we get up every morning and make stuff.

Who’s making food for the creative soul?

Before the Apple Silicon transition, it was always the case the biggest MacBook Pro was the most powerful. That’s no longer the case. These days, 14″ MacBook Pro can be specced out to be just as powerful as its bigger sibling. 

Without considering the implications of this, I purchased the 16″ MacBook Pro last year — the biggest one available — out of sheer habit.

Next time, I’m getting the 14″. I want as much power as I can get, but when I’m portable, I want as much portability as possible.

When in doubt, the answer is simple: reduce, reduce, reduce.

Didn’t Dieter say the best design is as little design as possible?

Probably still true. Probably true of words too.

(Edited for brevity.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing more often — doing something like what Austin Kleon does, or what he used to do: frequent updates about what I’m working on and thinking about, giving away whatever knowledge I have for free, and linking it all together with some sort of meta-textual awareness.

Post-Twitter, it seems like the best sort of thing to do with a personal website: write personal thoughts, sometimes using more than 280 characters, and link them together. Sometimes add links to things outside of this site too. Share it all for free, in the tradition of the open web (none of this paid newsletter stuff, lest suddenly I do this as a job and begin to despise it).

Of course, as soon as I thought about it, I started thinking about the forever-unfinished state of this redesign. Despite starting work on it during the early days of the pandemic, I never found time or motivation to finish it. It felt too much like work, and I was already up to my ears in work. I assumed that it would slow down at some point, but it never did. (An amazing predicament to be in as a freelancer.)

And so the site sits unfinished, and I feel unable to participate in my own work as I once did.

I don’t like Wordpress. It’s open source, but it also lacks direction, and I disagree with almost every direction it’s taken in the past half a decade. I’d prefer something Markdown based, so I can write on my computer, run a quick script from the command line, and be up and running. But I also want the flexibility to create complex structure if I need it. (I keep thinking I may one day want to share my photography work on the site, and that would require its own design and post type, so I do want to some flexibility.)

Some options:

• Grav
• Statamic
• Craft CMS (I think Craft is the best CMS in the world right now, but I wouldn’t be able to use flat files at all if I took this approach)
• Kirby
• Ghost

Leaning towards Craft or Kirby at the moment, but neither of them really match what I’m looking for. Obviously I could use Jekyll or any of its descendants, but something about that approach holds me back. I think it’s great they support plain text so well, but my site may end up being more rich than mere static text would allow.

In the meantime, I’d like to keep writing here. The work of the site is the text itself, not the container surrounding it. As much as the web designer in me hates to admit it, carrier pigeons have delivered more important words on paper with much less ​“design.”

I was saddened to hear about layoffs at Sketch. No company deserves to suffer layoffs, and certainly not a company that has done so much for its industry as Sketch. If you’re hiring, it sounds like the 80 people they’re letting go would be great for your team.

After Adobe bought Figma, I suggested to a couple different teams I freelance with that we could try Sketch again for our workflows. I’ve been impressed with their marketing efforts since the Figma acquisition (sadly it sounds like the marketing team is who they’re letting go of), and I miss using a Mac-native design app. 

Sadly, I think this ship has sailed. None of these developers are in love with Figma, and all of them hate Adobe, but Sketch being Mac-first immediately ruled them out for the teams I’m on. I wish Sketch took the Affinity route: build an amazing Mac app, and then build out native Windows and iPad versions. That could have made Sketch an unbeatable proposition in an increasingly tool-agnostic world.

It’s Figma’s world now. And in Figma’s world, it’s hard to beat ubiquity.

Over two years ago, I wrote about how I was going to redesign my personal blog. I did not intend for it to take two years. I thought it would be a minor thing I worked on in my spare time during COVID lockdowns.

Unfortunately, I have had no spare time. In those past two years, my work has exploded, my wife and I bought our first house, and we had some health concerns that required our attention. (We’re fine, don’t worry.)

So I’ve spent a grand total of 15 hours working on the redesign in two years, which is a paltry amount of focused efforts divided into a hopeless amount of working days. I’ve not been very successful.

What I want to share today are some failed designs. I think sharing the failure is as important as sharing the successes. Rather than share dozens of art boards, I’m cropping many of them to be around the same aspect ratio as most laptop displays.

In over two years, I haven’t gotten past some basic wireframes for this site. I’d be ashamed of my progress if I hadn’t worked on so many other projects in that time (I have yet to update my portfolio with any of the work due to a lack of time).

But what I have is terrible. These designs have too much white space, or too little white space. They lack any sense of coherency or purpose. What is the point?

I overthought everything to such an extent that my website started to look more like a portfolio than it did a simple blog. I already have a portfolio. A few months ago, I asked my wife what her thoughts were, and she told me what I already knew: I’d entirely overthought my goals here. Somehow, I’d stopped making a blog and started making a résumé.

What I want to make remains simple: I want a place where I can share blog posts or title-less, tweet-length updates. I want a place I can share some personal images (not client work). Maybe one day I’ll share my film reviews too.

In short, I want to lessen my dependence on third-party social media and make a small home for myself on the web. I do not care if this home houses my work. That’s what my portfolio is for.

When The Verge rolled out their new redesign, I realized they’d already done what I want to do: they have mixed status updates and lengthy blog posts in one feed. Their new site’s design is not entirely to my taste, but its function is closer to what I wanted to do two years ago.

Sometimes, when you’re working on a project, you drift away from your intended purpose. You become so enamoured with all the possibilities that you forget why you started in the first place. One must say no to all these ideas if they are ever to accomplish their purpose. Assuming the stated purpose is good, and assuming the intent is there, then the designer’s goal is to remove distractions. The designer must say no to a thousand new ideas that distract from the statement of the original.¹

That doesn’t mean some ideas don’t have merit. I have become fascinated with indented margins and side notes. Hanging margins are nice because they allow for left-aligned metadata that can float to the left of the article. Side notes are nice because it’s easier to find footnotes in place while reading an article. (Klim’s blog posts are the first place I can recall seeing this online, although side notes have existed in the marginalia of books for longer than anybody’s living memory). I plan on using side notes on my portfolio blog, where I already incorporate indented margins. Every idea has its place.

In the meantime, I’m throwing all my designs for my personal website out the window, and I plan on making something radically simpler. I know what it needs to look like. Now all I need is some free time.

Well, here we are. The inevitable future of our draconian Adobe overlords is here: Adobe has bought Figma for $20 billion.

For some reason, this caught me off guard. I really like Figma, and I work in it every day. It’s a great tool. I also have a Creative Cloud subscription for Lightroom, Photoshop, some XD usage (for some clients), Illustrator, etc.

The Bloomberg report claims that ​“Figma will continue to exist as a standalone product,” which is a puzzling statement because it implies Adobe doesn’t want to bring Figma into Creative Cloud.

So with that, I have a number of questions about this deal. I asked some of these questions on Twitter, but there are some new additions as well:

1. At some point, is Adobe going to make Figma part of Creative Cloud?
2. If they do, does that mean that Adobe will build a native Figma app for Mac and PC? Because that could actually be a plus side of this announcement. It would be great if Figma supported local saves, along with my local backups, my local typefaces, etc.
3. If Adobe brings Figma into CC, how do they plan on integrating it into the rest of their CC tools?
4. If Adobe brings Figma into CC, will they kill off XD? Or do they simply integrate the two tools? I can’t see both co-existing in CC. (This might be the reason Figma exists as a separate tool.)

If the report is accurate, the solution to all these questions might be simple: Figma stays how it is and is allowed to function as a profit centre for Adobe. Adobe does not integrate it into CC, and maintains XD in parallel.

XD has a lot of neat features, and it would be a shame to lose them. But you’d have to pry Figma from my cold, dead hands at this point, so I hope they don’t cancel it altogether. That would make me very sad.

There are some potentially good things that could come out of this, though:

1. People who use CC may not need to pay for a separate Figma subscription. I wouldn’t complain if this happened!
2. Figma’s collaboration tools are so much nicer to use than Adobe’s. There’s no comparison. If Adobe embraced some of their tooling, that could make Adobe’s crummy collaboration tools a lot better, and I’d appreciate that.
3. I’ll once again mention my desire for a native, offline Figma app with full support for my local font library. If Adobe wants to integrate Adobe Fonts support into Figma, that would also make my life easier.

For those among us who are philosophically aligned against Adobe, I guess Sketch is probably the only big option left — but it’s only an option if you’re a Mac user. Sour grapes to Windows folks who don’t want to support Adobe.

Personally, I’m saddened by this, excited by this, optimistic about this, and extremely pessimistic about this too. I’m a whirlwind of emotions. This whole thing feels like somebody punched you in the gut, and then hinted they might change their ways. (This is always how it feels to be an Adobe customer, though, so not much has changed

The last time I wrote about Apple’s laptops, in May 2020, I said the following:

Apple’s laptop lineup, in all honesty, hasn’t looked this good in almost a decade. Now that they’ve replaced the butterfly keyboard with the Magic Keyboard, it’s easy to recommend almost any of their laptops.

I spoke too soon. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear the lineup was about to get way better. The transition to Apple Silicon has been a boon for Mac users.

I’m writing this on a 2021 MacBook Pro with an M1 Max chip. That chip has 10 CPU cores, 32 GPU cores (!!!), and 64gb of RAM.¹ It’s also got an SD card slot! It’s a miracle of a machine. I won’t oversell it: it’s the best laptop I’ve ever owned. Honestly, it might be the best computer I’ve ever owned.

This machine is faster than the Intel Xeon-powered iMac Pro desktop workstation it replaced, and not by a little. Once in a while, I run a command in Terminal that used to take some time on the iMac. When I run the same command on the MacBook Pro, I blink, and it’s over.

It blows my mind, honestly, how much faster these machines are in day-to-day use than their desktop counterparts were a couple short years ago.

We also have an M1 MacBook Air, which was my laptop before I got the new MacBook Pro, and is now my wife’s primary non-work machine. That MacBook Air is as fast as my old iMac Pro. Let me repeat that: the little laptop with no fan and Apple’s most barebones Mac CPU is faster than my old, 240w desktop workstation machine with Intel Xeon processors. How is this possible?

Oh, and apart from one machine, the Touch Bar is gone. We now have this glorious scissor keyboard with full-height function keys and a much-improved Touch ID button. I can’t praise it enough. It just works. I haven’t thought about keyboards in a while.

The ecosystem around these laptops has also improved tremendously. In April of 2021, I wrote the following:

Apple’s external display situation remains a hot mess. They offer a mismatched 24″ LG screen, an ugly 27″ LG screen with inconsistent build quality and no glass above the LCD panel, and a $6,300 (CAD) 32″ ​“pro display” with an ​“optional” $1,300 stand. To make matters worse, this $7,600 setup was outshone this week by the new 13″ iPad Pro, which offers a much better backlighting system with 2,596 local dimming zones. The pro display offers 576.

If none of that meant anything to you, let me be frank: Apple’s pro display for their Mac is outshone by their tablet range. As a friend of mine said the other day, you’d be better off taping four iPad Pros together and treating them as one extended display for your Mac than you would buying Apple’s Pro Display XDR.

In my desperation, I summed it up with this:

Whatever comes next, will Apple please, for the love of everything good in this world, rip the computer out of the iMac and just sell me the display.

With that sentence alone, I feel like I willed the Studio Display into being. True, the Studio Display lacks HDR support, but now that I’ve had one for a couple months, I’m happy to say it’s a great monitor. The camera sucks, and there’s no HDR, but guess what? It’s an iMac display without a Mac attached to it. Webcam aside, it’s probably exactly what Apple needed to make.

Apple’s new chips also enabled the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID – a wireless keyboard with Touch ID built in. When I’m working at my desk, I often have to enter my password. This keyboard has saved me so much time every day. It doesn’t hurt that it looks great. While Face ID would be fine, I’m happy with Touch ID. Face ID is more convenient, but somehow, touching a key to authenticate feels more secure than having it happen automatically. (The Face ID-equipped iPhones and iPads operate this way too: any user authentication requires double-clicking the lock button.)

Overall, I am giddy about the state of Apple’s laptop lineup.

But like anything else, there’s room for improvement. I was excited to see the new M2 MacBook Air debut last week, but the continued existence of the 13″ M2 MacBook Pro stymies me. That laptop still ships with a Touch Bar, the old Touch ID button, and the old chassis. It doesn’t have the extended display with the notch (which I like), and it doesn’t have MagSafe. It’s missing the SD card slot and the HDMI slot. It’s a MacBook Air with a fan and a worse chassis. Why does it exist?

Any time that somebody asks what laptop they should get, it’s a shame when there’s a model you have to warn them against. That’s the 13″ MacBook Pro.

I think it exists because people buy it, and Apple is putting in the minimum effort required to keep selling it. There are rumours on the horizon of a 15″ MacBook Air and a 12″ MacBook Pro, which could theoretically straddle the price difference between the 13″ MacBook Air and the 14″ MacBook Pro better than the existing 13″ MacBook Pro could.

(Read that paragraph again: that word salad means Apple has a problem in the lineup. This isn’t rocket science. Please forgive the word salad; it’s not my fault the lineup is hard to understand.)

In addition, there’s a major feature missing from these laptops: cellular radios. The iPad can do it — why can’t the MacBooks? I think Apple needs to do a lot of work on macOS to prevent the system from downloading too much data over cellular networks (Macs are data-hungry on wifi!), but this has to be a product on their radar. If they ever add it to a machine, I would consider upgrading for that feature alone.

And if they want to give me more USB ports on the laptops, I won’t complain. (They could at least add a couple more to the Studio Display, while I’m thinking about it.) You could also add my voice to the choir of people asking why they don’t ship better webcams on these machines, but the 1080p webcam on the MacBook Pro is also fine.

But that’s it. This short list reflects how happy I am with the laptops in our household. I have a litany of complaints about macOS at this point. I much prefer it to Windows, but the quality of the OS is degraded by a myriad of little bugs that affect my quality of life every day. That being said, the laptops are the best they’ve ever been. That hasn’t been true since 2015. For the first time in seven years, it feels like the Mac laptop lineup is in a great place.

Over the past four or five years, I’ve gone back and forth between Lightroom and Capture One many times with my photography work. I find C1 takes me a little longer to work with, but I often prefer the results I can get with it — especially with regards to colour accuracy.

That’s why I was curious about their recent Capture One for iPad preview. I’m impressed with the work they’ve done on the UI. It’s clearly early days — this is still a preview — but I’m more interested in editing with this on iPad than I am in editing with Lightroom CC.

What that preview video confirmed for me is that I just don’t like working on iPads. I watched as David danced around the iPad UI and couldn’t stop thinking about how much faster all these edits would be on my Macs.

So Capture One for iPad looks very impressive. I have a lot of questions still: how are photos synced? Where are they stored? How can I manage the synced photos and edits between machines? Does this work well for catalogs, or is it meant for sessions? Etc. It’s exciting progress, though. My congratulations to the Capture One team for thinking out of the box and designing a UI that is specifically tailored for a touch interface. 

But now I have a different question, unrelated to Capture One, but very much related to the iPad: For years, my assumption was that the software was holding back the iPad. But with software like this, the software won’t be the problem. The problem is just that my human fingers are not as precise or fast as a dialled-in mouse or trackpad.

If Apple announced a new version of iPadOS that somehow fixed all the issues I have with file management, window management, and other productivity features on an iPad, would I want to use an iPad? 

I’m starting to think I will always prefer the mouse-and-keyboard paradigm.