I’m definitely not trying to single this particular article, but it’s a common misconception about atomic design that’s persisted over the years: Starting Point: The initial stage of Atomic design begins with the smallest design elements, such as buttons, labels, form inputs, and … | Continue reading
What does a mature, end-to-end design system look like in a big, complex organization? What are all the moving pieces, and how do they hang together as a well-considered architecture? What’s required and what’s optional? Hold onto your butts, because we’re going to go deep on thi … | Continue reading
Getting support for accessibility efforts isn’t easy. There are many accessibility myths, wrong assumptions and expectations that make accessibility look like a complex, expensive and time-consuming project. Let’s fix that! Below are some practical techniques that has been workin … | Continue reading
YouTube’s recommendation algorithm led me to this interview I did about design systems with Google Chrome Developers: While it was published in Feb 2020 (), I think it still holds up pretty dang well! | Continue reading
Absolutely honored to have atomic design included in this roundup of Educational Sensational Inspirational Foundational posts. | Continue reading
It’s an honor to be referenced at Figma’s Config keynote and follow-up article AI: The Next Chapter in Design. I like how Figma used the atomic design methodology to articulate where AI might prove to be most useful. Lower-level atoms and molecules might be boring, but they serv … | Continue reading
You should never waste your midlife crisis. You can do great things with a midlife crisis. I love all of Austin’s great blogging and sharing, and this one stuck with me: never waste your midlife crisis. As a human being rocketing towards mid-life, I feel this sentiment big time. … | Continue reading
News is bad for your health. It leads to fear and aggression, and hinders your creativity and ability to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier. This comes as a surprise to no one, but is also … | Continue reading
How to Be Happier Without Really Trying summarizes a lot of the tactics I take in my own life to be happier (errr, more tranquil). This post does a good job summarizing Epicurean philosophies Live For Pleasure: Not the frat party kind. Prize tranquility. We should be strategic h … | Continue reading
I’m elated to announce that on August 17th, 2024 — exactly one year from now — I’m throwing a big-ass charity concert/party/happening in Pittsburgh, PA featuring an array of my talented musical collaborators, friends, and family. I’d love for you — yes you reading this! — to come … | Continue reading
Besides talking about the current state of Design and his masterclass at Hatch, we dive into AI, holding onto things you love that don’t necessarily pay the bills, and he reveals the story on how that famous astronaut helmet came to be. I had a fun time chatting with Damian ahead … | Continue reading
Why hello there! I’m over three weeks into my 3-month sabbatical. Or Sabbradical as several people have pointed out (which, holy shit why didn’t I think of that!). Sabbradical Brad Imagine waking up in the morning and saying “I wonder what I’m going to do today?” That’s the hi … | Continue reading
Kevin Coyle, currently working with Brad Frost and friends at Big Medium, is an incredible all-star professional in tech currently focusing on frontend. We met when we enlisted his help to migrate a mutual client onto a Terraform setup in AWS, and we both later became engrossed w … | Continue reading
I love this initiative from Shamsi Brinn: No Handoff: close the gap between product and engineering. Imagine a project where teams work together at each stage, progressively improving the end result based on qualitative and quantitative data. Project handoff is inefficient, risky … | Continue reading
I love Dan’s Artificial Intelligence & Humanity as it mirrors a lot of my own thinking about how best to wield AI. If I embrace the role of AI as an accident generator, then I’d gladly give it all the areas of my life where accidents have little penalty: the parts that have littl … | Continue reading
User Inyerface – A worst-practice UI experiment is “a challenging exploration of user interactions and design patterns.” Hilariously bad UX and a lot of fun. | Continue reading
I’m taking a three-month sabbatical! It feels really weird to write that sentence, and it feels even weirder to add an exclamation mark at the end of it. But that’s what’s happening, even if it hasn’t sunk in yet. I’ve been pulled away from work on multiple occasions over the la … | Continue reading
Well ain’t this just some pretty damning and sobering stuff. The examples they use to demonstrate the lack of thought or safety built into these technologies is incredibly unnerving. They demonstrate how basic, 101-level stuff to keep kids safe is just entirely absent from these … | Continue reading
The field of large language models is becoming dangerously centralized. A huge amount of power resides in the hands of a tiny number of firms. Source: The Dangers Of Highly Centralized AI | by Clive Thompson | Medium | Continue reading
Beyond the contemporary issues lurk deeper long-term questions. What should and shouldn’t we automate? Should we create lethal autonomous weapons, or should a human always take charge of life-and-death decisions? How will we earn a living and even find meaning if AIs eliminate jo … | Continue reading
I could look at this stuff all day: 2023 Milky Way Photographer of the Year – Capture the Atlas Via Kottke | Continue reading
Mini Moog Factory is a really fun piece of web design. The aesthetic reminds me of Habbo Hotel from way back in the day. | Continue reading
I really enjoyed this post from Dave about the different kinds of work folks can encounter. I also want to acknowledge that sometimes the job is an assembly line. Times exist when you need to slow down, think, explore, and use the non-lizard side of your brain to mold the clay … | Continue reading
If you stole my phone (please don’t) and saw all of my photos, I’m constantly capturing photos of beautiful/funny/interesting/decrepit signs. It’s one of my favorite things to do when traveling. So naturally I love this site India Street Lettering. | Continue reading
A few years ago I got way into birds. I wouldn’t dare call myself a die-hard birder (yet), but it’s been a lot of fun to learn about the birds that show up in my back yard. I backed Bird Buddy‘s Kickstarter campaign as soon as I learned that a smart bird feeder was in the works. … | Continue reading
Containing multi-site management within a single codebase covers how one can apply atomic design principles in a React codebase. | Continue reading
Two innovations — Ethyl and Freon, conjured by one man presiding over a single laboratory during a span of roughly 10 years. Combined, the two products generated billions of dollars in revenue for the companies that manufactured them and provided countless ordinary consumers with … | Continue reading
Today marks the 1-year anniversary of Ziggy leaving us. We had a hell of a 2022 and so I’m only just now getting the opportunity to write about my best bud. Thankfully, I’ve had a year to work through my grief, so I can arrive at this difficult task with a better perspective. Th … | Continue reading
I pay attention to anything Zach has to say about web components (and, well, pretty much all web stuff), so I really liked 3 Methods for Scoped Styles in Web Components That Work Everywhere. WebC is something I want to play around with, and I’m hoping I have a good excuse to soon … | Continue reading
In what I hope becomes a series, I’ve been recording myself as I drive home from dropping my daughter off at school. Shifting away from more heady topics like AI’s impact on design and development, I felt like talking about the importance of choosing a name for your design system … | Continue reading
This is fantastic. | Continue reading
I had the great opportunity to chat with Behrad Mirafshar on the Lean Cast podcast. We covered a lot of ground about design systems and AI’s impact on the field of digital design. I really welcomed the opportunity to dig into these things that feel really relevant and important. … | Continue reading
Here’s my brother sharing how he’s seen the design system landscape since he’s started working on them. There’s a lot of good stuff here, but I especially like this part: The success of a system depends more on the people and process within the system more than the framework or t … | Continue reading
I had a great time talking with Brian and Eric about web components, design systems, and trends in web development. | Continue reading
I wish I was better at journaling. I love it and love having documentation of the things I’ve done, feelings I’ve felt, experiences I’ve had, etc. I just haven’t built the habit yet. I’d like to change that. While I want to document my life moving forward, I also want to start p … | Continue reading
Some really great things in here. I found myself nodding right along. | Continue reading
I had an unique opportunity to be interviewed about my interest in both music and web design. I covered a lot of ground! The interview is pretty raw (meaning not super edited), but it’s interesting (to me anyways). Check it out: Brad Frost – Music, Web Development, & Artificial I … | Continue reading
Despite its hyperbolic title, The End of Front-End Development is a well-considered piece by Josh Comeau. I share many of the sentiments expressed here, though how things will actually shake out is anyone’s guess. In my view, this is one of those areas like climate change where i … | Continue reading
I’ve spent the last two years thinking about doing these two projects, and the actual effort to bring them into existence only took two weekends. I arrived at an important insight: if you find yourself frequently revisiting an idea you have kicking around in your head, do yo … | Continue reading
I drive my kiddo to school in the morning, and my 12-minute return trip home is a fruitful time to think and prepare for my day. I had the realization that my little drive home is a nice window of time to share my thoughts, so I’m exploring what that might look like! This feels l … | Continue reading
Once upon a time, I had the word “artist” in my bio. Somewhere along the line, I removed it. Maybe it was because I was preoccupied with what I do for money. Maybe it was because I’m not a professional artist. Maybe it was because my art isn’t particularly great from a technica … | Continue reading
developer experience needs to pivot from a concept centered on feeling fast and living on the bleeding edge to one based on the enabling of developers to deliver reliable and first rate end user experiences — for as many users as possible, and for as long as possible. This doesn’ … | Continue reading
While there’s nothing particularly revolutionary here, Why You Should Stop Reading News shares an important message that needs to be repeated often. | Continue reading
Neurodiversity Design System articulates some good design best practices to make information accessible to more people. Like most things accessibility related, these are design considerations that make an experience better for everybody, not just those with disabilities. | Continue reading
Mitigating climate change is often framed as requiring money, effort, and sacrifice to keep something bad from happening, usually to other people. But we finally have the tools we need to create something new and better—to transform our technological and infrastructural systems i … | Continue reading
I’m terrible at focusing. I flit around from task to task like a goddamn hummingbird, never stopping too long on one thing to make too much progress. Flow state? More like “no state”, amirite? I’ve got many legitimate things contributing to my lack of focus, and I know not to b … | Continue reading
Clever Code Considered Harmful is a great read. When it comes to day-to-day production code, here’s the barometer I like to use: will a junior developer, someone at the very start of their career, struggle to understand this code? In the context of a shared codebase, good code is … | Continue reading
There’s so much truth to this tweet by Masato: To me, design systems hiring is fundamentally broken.Companies do not have a vital way of searching for candidates specializing in design systems.And candidates cannot find DS job opportunities efficiently because of full of non-spe … | Continue reading