Subject
67 entries
Design
Bookmarks
Bruce Cao: designer at the intersection of AI and UX
Bruce Cao is a designer focused on AI interaction and user experience, with projects spanning LLM-encouraged exploration, Google Meet icebreakers, and tools for turning loose thoughts into shareable writing.
Fran Sans: typeface from San Francisco's Muni Breda displays
The story behind Fran Sans, a typeface Emily Sneddon created from the LCD destination displays on San Francisco's Muni Breda light rail cars. An archival and design project born from a 3x5-grid modular letter system made for sufficiency, not style.
wwwjim: Jimmy Lee's personal site
Jimmy Lee's personal site — a webmaster's portfolio at jimmyl.ee. Saved as an example of personal web presence with a self-described focus on websites, web applications, and web services.
Font of Web: AI-Powered Font Discovery
Font of Web uses AI to match fonts to design aesthetics — describe or upload a design and get font recommendations. Design inspiration and font discovery in one tool.
Onlook: Open-Source Visual Editor for React
Onlook is an open-source visual editor for React that lets you edit your running app and writes changes back to code in real-time — Webflow-style design control for your own codebase, without leaving the local-first desktop environment.
Motiff: AI-Powered Professional Interface Design Tool
Motiff is a Figma-style interface design tool with AI features built in — including component generation, design suggestions, and prototyping. Positions itself as the design tool for the AI era, competing directly with Figma.
Victor Mono: Monospace Font with Cursive Italics
Victor Mono is a free monospace programming font with optional ligatures and cursive (italic) styles for keywords. Distinctive for its semi-connected cursive italics, which many developers find either elegant or distracting.
The Workflow Pattern
A blog post describing the Workflow Pattern — an architectural pattern for modeling multi-step business processes as explicit state machines rather than tangled procedural code. Argues that making workflow state explicit and persistent improves reliability, observability, and testability.
LogoArchive: Historical Logo Research Tool
LogoArchive is a purpose-built historical logo archive and research tool — a curated database of logo design history run by Richard Baird and a global community of researchers. Useful for studying the evolution of corporate identity and design conventions.
OKSolar — Perceptually Uniform Color Scheme
OKSolar is a perceptually uniform terminal and editor color scheme built in the OKLab color space, updating the classic Solarized with better perceptual balance. Addresses the color inconsistency problems of older schemes like Solarized and Monokai.
Patented Futures — MODEM
MODEM's Patented Futures reimagines nondescript tech patent filings as forward-looking product designs — mapping the implied promises and implications of corporate wearable tech patents. A design fiction project that makes speculative technology concrete.
The Noun Project
The Noun Project is a community-sourced icon library with millions of icons from thousands of designers, available under Creative Commons or paid licensing. The standard reference for finding clean conceptual icons for UI and presentation design.
Fontjoy: Deep Learning Font Pairing
Fontjoy uses deep learning to generate font pairings — one click finds combinations of Google Fonts that work together aesthetically. A practical tool for non-designers who need readable typography without expert knowledge.
Vector Magic: Raster to Vector Conversion
Vector Magic converts raster images (JPG, PNG) to clean vector formats (SVG, EPS, AI) using smart tracing algorithms. Produces significantly cleaner results than Illustrator's built-in Live Trace, particularly for logos and icons with complex curves.
Typewolf: Site of the Day Archive
Typewolf's Site of the Day archive — curated real-world examples of excellent typography in web design, each tagged with the typefaces used. An invaluable reference for designers who want to see typefaces in context rather than on specimen pages.
Mechanical Watch — Bartosz Ciechanowski
Bartosz Ciechanowski's interactive explainer on mechanical watches — how gears, springs, and the escapement mechanism keep time. One of the best pieces of interactive educational content on the web: the mechanisms are rendered in 3D and respond to your interaction.
Butterick's Practical Typography
Butterick's Practical Typography is an online book by Matthew Butterick covering the rules of good type — fonts, spacing, line length, margins, emphasis — with a pragmatic, opinionated approach aimed at people who write but aren't designers. One of the best typography references available.
OBLIVION GFX — GMUNK
GMUNK's portfolio page for the screen graphics designed for the 2013 sci-fi film Oblivion — HUD displays, data visualizations, and interface animations created for the film's UI aesthetic. Brad Munkowitz is one of the defining figures in sci-fi film UI design.
HUDS+GUIS
HUDS+GUIS is a design inspiration resource focused on heads-up displays and interface graphics — primarily sci-fi and near-future UI aesthetics from film, games, and interactive media. A reference archive for designers working on data-dense or futuristic UI.
Huetone: Accessible Color Palette Tool
Huetone is a color palette tool for UI design that generates WCAG-accessible palettes using the OKLCH color space for perceptually uniform lightness scaling. Solves the practical problem of creating design tokens that meet contrast requirements across all shade steps.
hue.tools: Color Utility Suite
hue.tools is a color utility suite for designers and developers — format conversion, harmony generation, palette tools, and color manipulation in one place. A no-frills reference tool when you need quick color work.
IRA Design: Gradient Illustration Builder
IRA Design is a free gradient illustration builder from Creative Tim — mix and match illustrated components to create custom scenes. A quicker alternative to commissioning custom illustrations for landing pages and marketing.
Kinopio: Spatial Thinking Canvas
Kinopio is a spatial thinking canvas for organizing ideas as cards with visual connections — mind mapping meets whiteboard, without the VC-funded complexity of competitors. Community-funded and built to encourage creativity over automation.
Input: Fonts for Code
Input is a customizable font family by David Jonathan Ross designed specifically for code — monospace and proportional variants, adjustable letter shapes, and a typeface built for long hours of reading code. One of the most thoughtfully designed programming fonts.
Openby.design: Open-Source Design Resources
Openby.design is a collection of open-source design resources curated for practitioners — fonts, icons, illustrations, and UI components available for free use. A useful bookmark for finding high-quality open-source design assets.
Welcome to AirSpace
Kyle Chayka's famous 2016 Verge essay coins 'AirSpace' — the homogenized global aesthetic of Airbnb listings, coffee shops, and startup offices that blurs the distinctive character of places. A sharp cultural critique that became the canonical framing for globalization-as-aesthetic-flattening.
Michael Bliss
Michael Bliss's personal portfolio site — a designer or creative professional whose work was worth bookmarking. Minimal context from the save; likely saved as a visual reference or creative inspiration.
VS Code Theme Tools
VSCodeThemes.com is a gallery for previewing Visual Studio Code themes visually before installing — saved alongside VSColors and Nord palette as part of a VS Code theme research session.
Fantasy UIs — Pushing Pixels
Pushing Pixels is an archive of interviews with screen graphics designers who create fictional UIs for films and TV — Blade Runner 2049, Mr. Robot, The Expanse, and dozens more. A deep resource on the craft of designing believable futuristic interfaces.
Why Figma Wins
Kevin Kwok's analysis of why Figma dominates design tools — the browser-first architecture enabled cross-side network effects by pulling non-designers into the design loop, making collaboration both the core product and the distribution mechanism.
What Do Data Visualizations Look Like As Food?
A dinner party where data visualizations were served as edible food — a conceptual art project probing what happens when you make abstract data tangible and consumable in the most literal sense. An interesting edge case in the 'embodied cognition' design space.
NASA Designs Travel Posters for Exoplanets
NASA's JPL-designed travel posters for exoplanets in the style of 1920s-1930s WPA travel prints — one of the most successful examples of science communication through design. The posters made exoplanet science broadly legible without dumbing it down.
Visage: A Visualization Tool that Democratizes Good Design
Visage is a data visualization tool from 2014 designed to let non-designers create professional-quality charts and infographics without design expertise. It reflects the era's push to democratize data presentation beyond Excel and static image tools.
Every Parking Lot Should Look Like This
Tweet by @illumynous of a parking lot that looks like it should — presumably a green, tree-covered, or unusually well-designed parking structure. Saved as a urbanism / design inspiration.
Lumen: A Retro-Reflective City Bicycle — Kickstarter
Kickstarter campaign for the Lumen bicycle by Mission Bicycle Company — a retro-reflective city bike designed for urban cycling safety. Mission Bicycle was a prominent San Francisco custom bike brand.
The Data Visualisation Catalogue
Severino Ribecca's Data Visualisation Catalogue — a reference library of chart types organized by function, with descriptions of when to use each. The go-to resource for choosing the right chart type for your data and communication goal.
Gifpop: Custom GIF Cards for Everyone
Gifpop was a Kickstarter project by Sha Hwang and Rachel Binx turning animated GIFs into lenticular prints — physical cards that animate as you tilt them. A delightful collision of internet culture and traditional print media.
How to Design Useful Monitoring Graphs and Visualizations
A guide to designing useful monitoring graphs and dashboards — distinguishing signal from noise, choosing the right chart type, and setting alert thresholds. The operational side of data visualization that analysis-focused tutorials skip.
Tiny Tiny Interface
A tweet by @salleedesign showing a tiny, minimal interface — saved by Ryan as an example of beautiful, constrained UI design. A reminder that simplicity is an aesthetic choice, not just an engineering one.
Why We Hate Infographics (And Why You Should Too)
Qunb's critique of infographics — arguing that most fail because they prioritize visual novelty over clarity, substituting decoration for information. A data visualization purist's case for charts that communicate over charts that impress.
The New Petzval (D)SLR Lens
Lomography's New Petzval Art Lens — a reimagined version of Josef Petzval's 1840 portrait lens design, crowdfunded on Kickstarter for DSLR and SLR cameras. Known for its distinctive swirly bokeh and sharp central focus characteristic of the original Petzval optical formula.
Evening of Design, Typography, and Tech
Personal photo from a design and typography meetup in San Francisco with @shashashasha (Sasha Greif), @somerandomdude (Chris Bowler/Nick Disabato?), and @stewf (Stephen Coles). Ryan received a book.
Shit for Making Websites
A bluntly named web resource aggregator listing tools, fonts, frameworks, and assets for building websites circa 2013. One of many 'awesome list' precursors that collected web development resources before GitHub awesome lists became standard.
Map Stack by Stamen
Stamen Design's Map Stack tool, which let anyone create beautiful custom map styles by layering and compositing tile layers from different map providers. A 2013 milestone in making professional cartographic design accessible to non-cartographers.
Colourco.de – Find Your Colour Scheme
Colourco.de — a browser-based color scheme generator that lets you pick harmonious palettes interactively using color theory rules (complementary, analogous, triadic). A clean early example of applying color theory algorithmically in a web tool.
User Experience Trends for Admin Dashboards
Speckyboy's roundup of UX trends for admin dashboards in 2013 — covering the shift to data-dense responsive designs, flat UI aesthetics replacing skeuomorphism, and the emerging design language for metrics and analytics interfaces.
Flatland — Flat UI Theme for Sublime Text
Flatland is a flat dark theme for Sublime Text from Thinkpixellab — one of the early flat design themes for code editors, released in 2013 when flat UI was becoming the dominant design aesthetic following iOS 7 and Windows 8.
Stamen ♥ Here — Nokia Here 3D Map Tiles
Stamen Design's rendering of Nokia Here 3D map tiles — a collaboration that turned Nokia's lidar-based urban data into stunning isometric city visualizations. A showcase of what happens when cartographic data meets sophisticated design.
Flat UI Design — A Showcase
fltdsgn.com is a showcase gallery of flat UI design work — a 2013 curated collection of the design aesthetic that was displacing skeuomorphism across mobile and web interfaces. A gallery artifact from the peak of the flat design movement.
10 Tools for Creating Infographics and Visualizations
A roundup of 10 tools for creating infographics and data visualizations in 2013 — covering both no-code tools (Infogr.am, Piktochart) and more sophisticated charting libraries. A snapshot of the early infographic content marketing boom.
Flat Pixels: The Battle Between Flat Design and Skeuomorphism
Sacha Greif's analysis of the flat design vs skeuomorphism debate in 2013 — arguing that neither extreme is right and that texture and depth serve communicative purposes. Published just before iOS 7 settled the debate by going fully flat.
iWantHue — Color Palette Generator
iWantHue generates palettes of maximally distinct colors for data visualization — optimized in HCL color space for perceptual uniformity and colorblind accessibility. The go-to tool for assigning categorical colors to data categories.
Sandra Dieckmann: Illustration
Sandra Dieckmann's illustration portfolio — a German-born, London-based illustrator known for intricate, folklore-inflected animal drawings with soft color palettes. Her work has a distinctive quality: detailed but never fussy, dark subject matter treated gently.
Pitch Interactive
Pitch Interactive is a data visualization studio based in Oakland — known for their work on drone strike data, network visualizations, and public-interest data journalism. One of the few studios doing both rigorous data work and high-quality visual design.
UX Design for Startups
Fray's blog post on UX design for startups — practical guidance on user research, information architecture, and prototype testing when you have a small team and limited time. A snapshot of UX practice as it was becoming standard in product-focused startups.
Samizdat Drafting Co.
Samizdat Drafting Co — a small design studio or tools project whose name invokes the Soviet underground self-publishing tradition. Saved in the same cluster as designer tools and visualization references from January 2013.
Designer News
Designer News was a Hacker News-style news aggregator built by LayerVault for the design community — launched early 2013. It briefly became the primary link-sharing hub for UI/UX designers before LayerVault shut down in 2015.
Finding Ideas For Your Next Project
Nathan Barry's guide to finding project ideas — specifically for designers and developers who want to build products. The advice: find problems you already have, look at intersections of your skills, and ship small things to learn fast.
Desktop Genetics Design Competition Brief
Desktop Genetics' 2013 design competition brief — an early-stage biotech company building software tools for genome editing. Interesting artifact from the pre-mainstream CRISPR moment when genome engineering was transitioning from academic to startup territory.
UC Suspends New Logo Following Public Outcry
The University of California suspended its newly designed logo in December 2012 following a massive public backlash — the design was widely mocked for looking like a loading spinner or toilet. A case study in institutional identity design and public reception.
University of California Rebrands Itself with Surfer Charm
Fast Company Design coverage of the University of California's 2012 identity rebrand — a modernist logo that became one of the most controversial university redesigns of the decade. The new mark was ultimately pulled after overwhelming public backlash.
Top 20 Data Visualisation Tools (2012)
Net magazine's 2012 roundup of the top 20 data visualization tools — a snapshot of the ecosystem just as D3.js was establishing dominance. Covers both code-based libraries and drag-and-drop tools across the complexity spectrum.
Visual.ly Launches Social Network for Data Visualization
Visual.ly launched a social layer for data visualization in 2012, letting creators share and discover infographics. An interesting bet that dataviz had enough creative community to sustain a dedicated platform — ultimately it didn't reach critical mass.
Steve Jobs Was Right to 'Steal,' and Beer Is Inspiring
PandoDaily defending Jobs' famous 'good artists copy, great artists steal' philosophy — arguing that creative theft (synthesis and transformation, not copying) is a feature of great design and product thinking. The beer angle was about how informal settings unlock creative thinking.
User Interface Designers Invade Silicon Valley
The Verge's coverage of the 2012 influx of UI/UX designers into Silicon Valley, driven by Instagram's $1B acquisition demonstrating that design was now a core value driver in tech. The moment design went from nice-to-have to strategic necessity.
Turntable Rider: Half Bicycle, Half DJ Controller
Wired's coverage of the Turntable Rider — a bicycle handlebars design that doubles as a DJ controller, with the rider's body movements controlling pitch and cross-fading. An example of the 2012 intersection of maker culture, physical computing, and music hardware.
Joe Gebbia: The Airbnb Story
Joe Gebbia's telling of the Airbnb founding story — air mattresses and design thinking, the YC application that got in on the third try, and how they survived by selling novelty cereal boxes. A case study in trusting design intuition and persistence through improbable early days.