I’ve been meaning to talk about the new brand identity of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra for a while. This is absolutely wicked stuff from Bond Agency, a top-notch graphic design studio.

A few years ago, I did the design work for a music magazine called The Modern Producer. (I should really put that case study back up on the website; it was great.) One of the things I had fun with was the idea of using a waveform in the logo. The branding for the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra takes that idea so much further. I absolutely adore it.

I also love the motion that they bring into this identity. It all comes together beautifully, with clean typography and a real sense of energy. I get the feeling convincing people that seeing an orchestra is energetic is a tough sell, and this branding absolute nails it. I love every bit of it.

The branding for the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra is one of the year’s bests, folks. Check it out in all its glorious detail over at Bond Agency’s website. And Bond, if you’re reading this, much respect to you for this incredibly inspiring work.

About six weeks ago, I put in an order for a customized 12” MacBook to replace my aging 2012 MacBook Pro. I wanted to see if I could get away with using the 12” laptop on a daily basis.

As a graphic and digital designer (and front-end web developer), my needs aren’t insane. But I do spend a bit of time in and out of some power-hungry apps every day.

I use Photoshop to edit images, Illustrator for logo mockups and vector work, and InDesign for print design. I’m also going back and forth between Adobe XD and Sketch for digital design.

I spend most of day hanging out with files around 250mb in Sketch. These files have a couple dozen artboards in them, a ton of pages, and quite a few images. To manipulate the images, I’m usually running Photoshop in the background and exporting updated images as I go.

Most of the time, I’m also running a couple browsers, streaming music, and working in a couple text editors. But none of that requires too much power.

And for most people, I’d guess that this laptop has more than enough power — especially for anybody running Office, working on documents in the cloud, or browsing the web.

In other words, for many people — millions of people — the 12” MacBook is powerful enough.

And for the record, if I was willing, I could make it work too.

But let’s say you want to keep everything running in the background all the time. I do this every day. Photoshop is almost always going in the background, and it almost always uses up a ton of CPU without me realizing it.

These little MacBooks don’t have fans. So at some point, the laptop needs to cool down — because Photoshop is warming it up. And to cool down, it simply throttles the speeds of the laptop. So the mouse gets laggy and Sketch gets a lot harder to use.

Now, I could quit Photoshop, but all of this is a bad omen for use as a daily driver.

Let me repeat that: this isn’t the MacBook for you if you plan on using it as a daily driver. It won’t end well.

However, this MacBook shines as a laptop.

This is where Apple got it right. This is a gorgeous, paper-thin, tiny, featherweight of a laptop. It weights practically nothing in my bag and feels like carrying around an iPad, but it’s so much more capable. And if my primary machine was a desktop, I’d absolutely want to carry around this 12” laptop. Because it’s very capable.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that you could probably do just about anything on it for a few hours at a time.

But after a few hours, it starts to get noticeably slower (in my use case). Maybe I had a bum machine, but I didn’t feel like swapping it out for a new one.

Instead, I just ordered a new laptop. One of those 13” MacBook Pros with a Touch Bar. It’s not that I need all that power, but I do think I need a fan.

If you’re a designer, or a developer, and you’re wondering if you should get the 12” laptops, I do have some advice for you. Get the 12” MacBook only if you plan on using it primarily as a laptop away from your powerful desk machine. This can’t do both, and it can’t be a primary laptop. Not yet. Maybe in a year or two (in fact, I’d be surprised if it took longer than that), but not yet.

If you’re not a creative professional, or a demanding computer user (a video editor, computer scientist, audio engineer, or the like), you should honestly pick up a 12” MacBook. It’s got all the computer you need in a tiny, lovable little body. It’s quiet, thin, and sleek as heck. I fell in love with mine. I was sad to return it.

About two weeks ago, I ordered a specced-out 12” MacBook. I had a good feeling that there’d be new MacBook Pros before the end of the month, and knew I could return the 12” within 14 days if I didn’t like it (or didn’t think it was powerful enough for my work).

This is going to be a little self-indulgent and very long, but buying an Apple laptop is a lot more complicated than it used to be.

To set this up a bit, I should explain a bit of what I do every day. I spend about 50% of the day plugged into a display, and 50% working with the laptop on my lap. Usually, I’m running iTunes, Mail, Codekit, Sketch, Coda, Safari, Chrome, TextWrangler, MAMP, iA Writer, and Transmit. At any given time, I might also be running a good chunk of Adobe’s apps: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, or Experience Design. OS X, or macOS as it is now called, is integral to my workflow.

I need to replace my aging 2012 15” MacBook Pro. It was the first generation with Retina display, and at this point, it’s got a few issues of its own:

• My display was one of the ones that suffered with the burn-in problem. I’m using my laptop more and more as a laptop these days, instead of solely plugging it into an external monitor, so that’s becoming a huge annoyance.
• It’s really heavy and bulky at 4.5 pounds. This was great when I used it as a desktop that could become a portable if need be, but now that I use the machine as a portable that occasionally becomes a desktop (and I carry the laptop in my bag a lot), it’s way too heavy.
• The video card is dying on the laptop. It’s getting really quirky, especially when it runs Adobe apps. The screen will go black randomly. Sometimes, when I boot the machine up, the screen is black until I reboot it (again). It’s frustrating. As a result, I’m never buying a computer with an independent graphics card again (unless I can easily replace it).
• The battery is dead. If I’m writing, like I am right now, I can get about five or six hours out of it. If I’m doing any design work or coding, I get about two and a half — at most. I could pay Apple a few hundred bucks to fix this, but why bother? I can’t get them to easily swap out the video card, so it’d be more of a bandaid than a real problem.

Replacing the MacBook Pro meant it was time to look around. Last time I bought a computer, I knew immediately which one was rihgt for me. These days, I’m not so sure.

My first inclination was that 12” MacBook. It’s an amazing little machine. Unlike most people, I love the keyboard on it. (I’m thrilled the keyboard is making its way to the new MacBook Pros.) But even at its top-end spec (which was over $2,000 in Canada!), it only comes with a 1.3ghz CPU.

I don’t really understand what all these numbers mean, although like anybody else, I understand the gist that higher is better. I suspected, with my limited knowledge of these things, that the 12” MacBook would be fine for most tasks. And it is, actually. I’ve read a lot of reviews and reports saying the machine is under-powered, but those are largely overblown.

But when things get bad, they get really bad.

Let me give you the quick five-step method to slow down the frame rate on a 12” MacBook:

1. Run a code compiler in the background that automatically refreshes your development environment every time you make a change to the site’s code. (Codekit.)
2. Have a local server running on your MacBook with something like MAMP.
3. Open a 250mb Sketch file and get to work while you code.
4. Open Photoshop to do some lightweight image editing and create assets for your website design. Leave Photoshop running in the background.
5. Now use the computer as you normally would for a couple hours, leaving all this running. Things are fine. But suddenly, the computer slows down to about 12fps. This is called ​“thermal throttling,” and it’s an issue I encountered on day three of using the MacBook as a daily driver.

Thermal throttling occurs on the 12” model because it doesn’t have a fan. So while the laptop can do some tasks pretty quick for a brief period of time, it has no way to cool down when it starts to heat up. Which means that it has to slow down.

Anyway, the 12” MacBook was a no go for me. It’d be great if I had a desktop and only used it on the road, but it won’t work as a daily driver.

So back to square one.

On Thursday, Apple announced the new MacBook Pros. They’re more or less what I wanted: thinner, lighter, still packing more than enough power to do what I want every day.

But I’m a little confused by my options.

Here are your options if you want to get work done on an Apple laptop these days:

• The 12” Macbook. In Canada, it starts at $1,649. This price has gone up since I purchased it two weeks ago, actually, by $100. Ouch. Unless you’re an office worker or just need a laptop for use on the go when you’re away from your main machine, it’s sadly a little underpowered.
• The 13” MacBook Air. In Canada, it starts at $1,199. Expensive, somewhat powerful — good enough for just about everybody, I think. I could make do with it. But it has a low-resolution screen. I wish Apple would axe this and lower the cost of the 12” MacBook.
• The old MacBook Pros. Pass. Too heavy, too bulky, and definitely not the new hotness. If I wanted one of these, I would have bought one two weeks ago. Oh, and their price hasn’t gone down in the wake of the new laptops. They’re even more expensive than before. So why bother?
• The 13” MacBook Pro, without a Touch Bar. In Canada, it starts at a poop-your-pants price of $1,899. It’s supposed to be the Air replacement (it has a smaller footprint and weighs more or less the same). It’s less powerful than the MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar, and once you spec it up to comparable-ish levels, the prices are on par. So, this seems like an oddly-positioned tweener device. I thought about order this, but when I can pay the same amount for the MacBook Pro with the new Touch Bar and upgraded RAM, why wouldn’t I?
• The 13” and 15” MacBook Pro, with a Touch Bar. This is the new hotness. In Canada, the 13” starts at a ​“sell-your-kidney” $2,299. I got the ​“my-wallet-is-bleeding” mid-tier model with 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM (a necessity in design these days). The 13” version is, again, smaller than a MacBook Air — and they weigh the same amount.

Of course, I could always go Windows. I actually walked down to the Microsoft Store yesterday and tried out the Surface Book (the Surface Studio wasn’t available for demo yet). It’s a very nice laptop, but I don’t like the way the stylus feels in my hand. I also don’t like the space between the screen and the keyboard, even when the laptop is closed — that hinge is so weird! I’d spend most of my days cleaning dirt, dust, and hair out of the keyboard as a result. Plus, I still hate Windows. So I’m skipping this too.

Am I happy with the options? Mostly. Oddly, it seems to me that laptop prices are climbing — particularly the prices for professional machines. If the prices hadn’t changed from one generation to the next, I think we’d have a great set of new laptops from Apple.

Consider this: you can buy a decent Chromebook for a couple hundred bucks, but top-of-the-line computers from both Apple and Microsoft are climbing towards $3,000 and above. I don’t get it.

I remember balking at the price for my 15” MacBook Pro in 2012. The price then, with the extra storage space I got in my model, was just over $3,000. The laptop I’m getting now is nearly the same price, and has arguably fewer features: I’m not getting a video card, there are fewer ports, and MagSafe isn’t a thing anymore.

I don’t think Apple has lost its direction. I think Microsoft is finding their mojo, and everybody’s competing to make a really great laptop for pro users, instead of a laptop that delivers exclusively on specs. For the old guard of PC users, this all seems confusing and gimmicky. To me, it’s just plain old expensive.

But I need a new laptop. So here I am.

One of the projects I’m working on is an identity project for a new Canadian charity. I’ve been trying to find a typeface that’s legible and distinctive, particularly in the regions of the world where they’ll be sending volunteers. I’ve found myself entranced by Cooper Hewitt’s typeface, which is open source and available for unrestricted public use.

In researching the typeface, I stumbled onto Pentagram’s new-ish case study about the project. It’s a very long read, but so incredibly insightful. In truth, I haven’t finished reading it yet. But the case study’s awesome, and I couldn’t wait to share it.

Check out Pentagram’s case study here.

Most of my clients start talking about the sort of design work they’re looking for and use the word ​“minimalism”. Almost every time, they mean simplicity. But they’ve heard a lot of designers talk about minimalism in the past few years and think it’s going to unlock some hidden green valley of successful business heretofore unwitnessed by mankind. 

Great designers talk about minimalism all the time. Dieter Rams, of Braun fame, spoke frequently about using minimalism to remove layers of abstraction from his industrial design. Jony Ive speaks eloquently about minimalism whenever he narrates a new iPhone video for Apple. Recent Microsoft hire Andrew Kim used the term in a (now missing) blog post on his website to discuss his affection for the Xbox One S’s new design language. 

I think minimalism has a bad end game, though. 

Minimalism leads us to the sort of ​“invisible” hardware and difficult software in films like Minority Report. I’ll be the first to say that Minority Report has some of the cooled computers ever. But every computer in the film looks completely unusable — like trying to open a coconut with a fingernail. 

Minimalism is all about the removal of features in an effort to achieve a zen-like product. It’s a philosophy more than a design mandate. And almost every hardware feature removed from a product gets added back into its software, which is why your phone feels increasingly complicated every year. 

I get it. I get that it’s the way things are going. But as designers, we should be aiming higher. 

Our goal should be to make usable products. If we want to delight people, we should be serving them with design. This applies to client services too. Clients come to us for our expertise, and our rationale — particularly the rationale of UX/​digital designers — should lean towards anti-minimalism. Human-centred design is decidedly anti-minimalist. 

Most of us aren’t minimalists. We like our creature comforts.

Minimalism is about clarity and simplicity. I believe in clear, purposeful design. But I don’t think minimalism is the only way, or even the most responsible way, to get there.

Last week, Apple announced they were removing the headphone jack for their new iPhone. It wasn’t the first time they removed an ​“essential” feature; most of us remember losing the floppy drive, disc drives, Ethernet ports, and even the traditional file system (on iPad and iPhone). 

News like this usually doesn’t pan out well, but this time it was particularly tone-deaf. When Marketing SVP Phil Schiller said they were removing the headphone jack because they had ​“courage,” I think the internet broke. I’ve never seen Twitter turn anything into a meme so quickly. 

But it wasn’t the first time Apple had used that line. 

Full credit to 9to5Mac for noticing this first, but Steve Jobs once said something similar. Here’s a link to the YouTube video that’s been making the rounds this weekend. If you can’t watch it, or don’t have the time for it, here’s a quick transcription (again, courtesy of 9to5Mac):

We’re trying to make great products for people, and we have at least the courage of our convictions to say we don’t think this is part of what makes a great product, we’re going to leave it out. Some people are going to not like that, they’re going to call us names […] but we’re going to take the heat [and] instead focus our energy on these technologies which we think are in their ascendancy and we think are going to be the right technologies for customers. And you know what? They’re paying us to make those choices […] If we succeed, they’ll buy them, and if we don’t, they won’t, and it’ll all work itself out.

Apple didn’t have to say anything different when they debuted the iPhone 7 last Wednesday. Steve already said it perfectly. 

I don’t think Apple is doomed, and I don’t think they’re any worse for wear without Jobs. These marketing blunders can happen to anyone. Apple is the world’s largest company, and they put good design at the core of everything they do — but sometimes, they can’t get their own story straight. Jobs was great at that. 

The thing is, Jobs knew it’s not always what you say. It’s how you say it. There’s a lesson to be learned here, and it’s pretty simple: choose your words carefully. 

Even Apple picks the wrong words sometimes.

Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of The Witcher 3, and have come away nothing less than inspired. Its art design is truly compelling. The world is immersive and the design work is second-to-none, making it one of the most satisfying video game worlds I’ve played in years.

I was looking for a great book on the game’s art when I stumbled on this blog post, which has some of the best concept images from the game I can find. It’s incredible the work that’s gone into this. What I was hoping for was a book in the Design Works series, which are known for their conceptual drawings, renderings, and detailed hand-written notes, but this might do in its stead. (That being said, this peek at what a book like that might have been filled with me makes me what it all the more.)

A number of things stand out to me with these images. Firstly, I love how detailed the art is — most of it is painted! It’s also fascinating to see how much, or how little, the game changed between these images and its final state. And of course, the monster designs are truly fabulous.

The other great thing about The Witcher 3 is that it was made in the era of the internet, so freelancers who worked on the project are sharing their in-progress material in their portfolios (often alongside images from the finished product). A quick Google search makes more material like this easy to find.

All of this has gotten me thinking: as UI and UX designers, I think we have a lot to learn from video games (and the people who make them). They’ve got a lot to tell us about experience design. It’s one of the reasons I admire UsTwo (the folks behind Monument Valley) as much as I do: they’re both digital designers and video game designers, and see the challenges and constraints in both as creative tools. Their work is fascinating, and they have a unique outlook on what games and design can do for us.

All that to say: a lot of ink has been spilled about how video games are destroying minds of generations, but I doubt that’s the case. If anything, video games have a lot to teach us yet — and they’re still in their creative infancy. Designers should watch this space closely.

Check out the original blog post about Witcher 3 here to see more images from this collection.

For five years, I ran three to seven times a week. When I started running, I was fifty pounds overweight. I ran for an hour a day, every day, for four months. By the end of that four month period, I was at a weight I hadn’t been since the seventh grade.

Since then, I’ve put back on about ten pounds (and am now at a pretty healthy weight), but I kept running three or four times a week for five years. To add perspective, within that same time period, I’ve started a business, graduated university, met my wife, and become a married man.

Some habits die hard — but maybe they shouldn’t.

About a month ago, I finally quit my regular running habit. I read an excellent article about the biology of belly fat and muffin tops. It’s a bit over my head, but here’s what I got out of it: did you know that belly fat is the most stubborn fat on the body? The article suggests that weight training is better for burning stubborn fat than cardio, because of long-term gains in calorie burning attributed to strength-based workouts.

In order for it to work, you have to:

• Stop running (almost), to prevent your body storing fat.¹
• Eat less and do only short workouts at the gym.
• Or alternatively, you can eat more and do longer workouts at the gym.

Your body will slowly use up its fat reserves naturally, meaning it will displace and shrink the fat cells in those stubborn areas. So long as you’re consistent.

In the past month, I’ve noticed a slight reduction of fat in that area. So has my wife. Like most positive changes in our bodies, the results are slow to come, but they’re meaningful. I say all this to say one thing: sometimes, in life and work, we have long-lasting habits. Maybe our lives and our work would be better off if we spent some time revising and changing them.

My father is always working on side projects. When I was growing up, he spent weekends building a new shed or deck, fixing the garage door for the thousandth time, or designing a new workshop for himself.

In hindsight, these projects were very specific: they were all large and time-consuming, they began on paper, they often involved learning new skills, and they always required building something with his hands.

It’s that last detail I’ve been having trouble rectifying over the past couple years. Like my father, I’ve spent a lot of time working on side projects. They’re long, time-consuming projects that I do during breaks or quiet periods between client work. They always involve learning new skills. But they rarely, if ever, involve building something with my hands.

Like my client work, all of my side projects are digital. My father doesn’t build things for a living, so his side projects are an escape. I don’t know if mine are the same thing. As an industry, we (particularly digital designers) tend to struggle with the echo chamber. Our ideas and creativity feed off each other, and become very self-perpetuating. Our work becomes homogenous.

And most people in our industry recommend side projects as a way to attract potential employers and clients, even though — in that regard — these side projects are actually unpaid spec work.

I’m guilty of digital side projects — I’m working on a huge one right now — but I can’t help but wonder if we’ve collectively missed something.

Would our industry be more rewarding, fulfilling, and creative if we all stepped away from the screen and made tactile side projects that required us to make something with our hands?

I’ve read a lot of articles about how homogenous web design has become, but few have compelled me like Morgane Santos’ on Medium. For the first time, I felt as a web designer that I wanted to join this conversation.

This part of the article grabbed my attention:

Perhaps the biggest issue with all this homogeneity is how lonely it can feel when you want to do something different. Two separate friends have told me how they don’t feel like they fit in with the design community. These two friends are guys who more or less fit the Designer Dave stereotype, too. If they feel isolated, how does everyone else feel?

I started to gather my thoughts, but explained to my wife later on that I didn’t feel qualified to share them — which is interesting to me because it proves Ms. Santos’ theory. I, too, am white and in my mid-twenties (although I do not have a beard). Some of my web design work falls prey to certain stereotypes (although I don’t necessarily feel all of it does). In many ways, I relate to Designer Dave. With that being said, I’ve tried to gather my thoughts coherently regardless.

What’s happening in design reminds me of what’s been happening in filmmaking over the past twenty years. Have you noticed that a lot of popular action movies have been bathed in orange and blue?

Once you see it, it’s hard to un-see it. Priceonomics has a really good rundown on what’s going on, and you should read the whole article, but this quote deserves special mention:

One way to figure out what will look good is to figure out what the common denominator is in the majority of your scenes. And it turns out that actors are in most scenes. And actors are usually human. And humans are orange, at least sort of! Most skin tones fall somewhere between pale peach and dark, dark brown, leaving them squarely in the orange segment of any color wheel. Blue and cyan are squarely on the opposite side of the wheel. You may remember from preschool that ​“opposite” color pairs like this are also known as ​“complementary” colors. That means that, side-by-side, they produce greater contrast than either would with any other color. And when we’re talking about color, contrast is generally a desirable thing.

I’d need to do more research, but I’d be willing to wager that a teal and orange colour scheme makes your average film studio more money on opening weekend too. Most big-budgets films are cast in this orange and blue look, while indies feel more free to roam around.

That’s not very different from web design: while market forces are unwilling to invest in unusual design, smaller organizations who need to stand out may be more interested. The same way some directors make one for the studio, and then one for them, it’s financially sensible to do the same thing as a designer. (I’m not saying to compromise your values; I’m telling you to make enough money to support yourself and your families.)

My second thought is this: there are ways to play with established conventions.

Priceonomics included an image from Mad Max: Fury Road in their article. It was my second-favourite movie last year, and a big part of that was because I adored the colours. The story is that director George Miller wanted to show the film in black and white, but Warner Bros. refused (market forces at work). In response, Miller gave them what they wanted: blue and orange, cranked up as high as he could make it go.

That sense of over-saturation practically outdoes Transformers, and in a backhand way, forces you to notice it and be aware. I don’t know a single person who saw it who didn’t mention the colours. It’s subversive. Miller wants the colours to be part of the film’s intensity, yes, but he also wants it to reflect the insanity of everything else going on. It’s absolutely intentional.

I think we can learn something from Miller: If you’re given constraints that you don’t like, be subversive with them. We design for audiences who are smart enough to notice, and while they might not realize you’re being playful, they’ll appreciate your work all the more. You’ll stand out within the confines of homogeneity.

All that being said, at the end of the day, I don’t know the answer to homogeneity in web design, nor do I feel qualified to share my thoughts on the topic. For me, sharing this takes courage.

I learned in school that our brains are wired to notice semiotic patterns. Blue and orange is one such pattern. Boring websites are another. And while neither are going away any time soon, I think there’s a lot we can do to subvert expectations and experiment with new things.

Most digital todo lists suck. I’m sure you’re aware of this. I’m certain you’ve probably spent hours combing through tips on LifeHacker about how to organize the chaos of your life with ​“this one simple app that will blow your mind.” Or maybe you’re like me and you’ve bent over backwards to fit your workflow into somebody else’s expensive dystopian view of getting things done.

I don’t need to tell you that task management apps suck. 

But I need to share this because nobody is saying it, and we’re all pretending like we’re organized, but the truth of the matter is that the people who make these apps must have nothing to do — because their apps don’t work for busy people. So this post is for them. 

I only need one thing from a todo list: to tell me what I should be working on right now. And when I’m done that, what’s the next thing I can do?

That’s it. No gimmicks. It’s that simple.

Yes, all your extra features, like sub-tasks of a sub-project inside a project within an area of responsibility in the context of ​‘Phone Calls’ are all well and good, but if you cannot give me a high-level look at what needs working on today, don’t bother.¹

This isn’t just about what’s due: it’s about what’s important, what’s in progress and what big-picture project I should be working on. If I need to finish a project by Friday and it will take three days, then it should show up in a special Today view as early as Wednesday and not leave the Today view until it’s done, even if it’s overdue by three months and a day. 

My task management app should be about managing what’s important, making changes to the unimportant on the fly, and getting crap done. 

For reference, this is where I’m storing all the crap I need to do now. 

Note: This post was originally called ​‘I Tried Every Todo List App So You Don’t Have To’. I changed it for the sake of brevity, not because it’s untrue. I think I did try almost every todo app on the market for iOS and the web.

Yep. In 2015, I’ve made a blog.

I know this is totally counter-cultural at the moment. Writing a blog on your own self-hosted website is increasingly unpopular. And I know Medium is all the rage right now, along with Tumblr, and I even understand why. But in the age of streaming and on-demand content, I really like having my name on the masthead.

I guess I’m a traditionalist. As far as I’m concerned, places like Medium are nice ways to give somebody else all your best words and let them find a way to monetize it. Let the kids have it.

Of course, I didn’t decide to start writing online again solely to rail against the system.

Why I Started a Blog

Before I became a web designer, I was a writer. I’ve been writing since I could read. I even convinced my parents to buy me a typewriter when I was around eight years old, thinking it would help me become more like Hemingway and Tolkien. (What eight-year-old thinks like that, right?)

I started writing professionally when I was twenty-one. I worked at an ice cream chain, and a gentleman came into the store who ran a television studio. We got talking, and when I told him I wanted to be a screenwriter, he told me his last writer just won an Emmy and to give him a call. He gave me his card.

From there, with no portfolio or CV (amazingly), I was suddenly writing commercials for a small production studio a five minute walk from my apartment. It was the dream gig for a young guy in school. That gig turned into opportunities to write for places like AppStorm, Paste Magazine, Jim Dalrymple’s The Loop Magazine, and more. Most of the time I would write app reviews or articles covering design in the Apple world. That writing led to opportunities doing design work, and I never looked back.

That is, until recently. I don’t have a place to share my thoughts with the world. I want to have somewhere to share my writing that, like my words, belong to me. Most importantly, I miss being forced to think about what I want to say. It’s one thing to have an opinion, but another to hold it up to such scrutiny as to write it down. So here we are.

Make It Feel Like Me

I was living in the apartment my wife and I share before we were married. Our wedding was at the end of the month, so to avoid paying for an extra month of rent at her old place, we got the keys for the new one a month in advance. I started moving the essentials there: we had a mattress, a bean bag chair, and my TV with a Wii U and PlayStation. We stocked the kitchen with just enough bowls and plates for me to get by, and I brought some of the old kitchen stuff from my college days down.

And that somehow felt like enough. It didn’t feel like home yet — that didn’t come until later — but it felt like me. That’s what my vision is for this site. I want it to feel like me. Nothing but some text, some funky colours, and maybe the occasional image or two. I didn’t want any crazy JavaScript or wild animations. I just wanted an online home for my thoughts, where they could live unfettered from the noise and distractions that come with being on the web circa 2015. A place that would be as opinionated as me, maybe even to the point of being unpopular. I don’t care really. This isn’t for you. Selfishly, this whole place is for me. And I think today’s web could use a little more of that selfishness. Maybe it’s the only way to keep everything from looking the same.

None of this is to say this place won’t get cluttered as time goes on. This is a brand new home with only a couple pieces of furniture. Give it a couple years to start looking crowded. By the time my wife and I moved into the apartment officially, there was enough stuff in it to fill Noah’s ark. And I’m excited for that to happen to this website, too. Not everything should be a masterpiece of Zen minimalism, least of all the online homes that represent our real selves. We’re messy and complicated people, right? So I figure the website will get messy and complicated too in time.

I’ve kept a couple things from my old blogs on here — just my most important thoughts from the past year. I didn’t want to clutter this place up with junk right out of the gate. I just wanted to make something new, and to learn a few things on the way. Expect me to do more of that around here. Sound good?

Some great news from the Adobe front: they’ve finally realized they need a solution more unique than Photoshop for today’s digital designers. They call it Adobe Comet. I think it looks super exciting. 

The video on the landing page doesn’t do a whole lot for me — it’s clearly some promotional fluff to last them until launch — but it looks like a great tool. I like that they’re clearing thinking through competitive features and UX designer’s needs, so it’s not going to be just a ​“me too” product. 

What surprises me is that it doesn’t look like they’re promoting it as a part of Creative Cloud; at least, not yet anyway. My understanding (although I could be wrong) is that the beta will be open to the public.

A part of me wonders if it will have an extended beta like Brackets, Adobe’s open-source text editor. That would be unfortunate. Brackets is nice, but it always feels a little behind compared to competitors like Atom (the text editor we’re using here). 

And that’s a sort of summary for Adobe’s current position in the digital design app marketplace: behind the eight ball. I don’t know if Comet will be more of the same or a sign of real change, but I’m excited for its debut in 2016.

Incredibly sad news. Frutiger is responsible for a great many beautiful typefaces, but Univers is one of my favourites. For lack of better terms, a gentleman’s Helvetica. Rest in peace.

Every time I start mocking up a new project, I have a habit of beginning the work in Photoshop. After all, it seems that many other designers — some who I greatly respect — swear by the software. So there’s this part of me that figures, it must just work.

Of course, we all know that’s not necessarily the case. But when Adobe used this year’s Creative Cloud update to release Design Space Preview, I spent yet another week trying to make Photoshop work for me.

It still doesn’t work.

I can certainly appreciate the vision Adobe has for the product, but it’s so far behind. Artboards and a simplified skin won’t save Photoshop. Here’s what it would take to get me out of Sketch and back into Adobe’s playground:

• proper support for vectors and much stronger zooming capabilities
• better font rendering, as well as displaying typefaces as vector properties. Really, if anybody should be able to pull this off, it would be Adobe. If I can do it in CSS, I want to be able to do it in Photoshop.
• a native, speedy, buttery-smooth app for OS X. Sketch is so much less prone to crash on me that using it is a total no-brainer.
• an interface that doesn’t make me feel like I’m wandering through a pit of darkness and despair

Am I asking for too much?¹