View out my airplane window with blue sky, Lake Michigan, and plane wing visible

Illustration of a woman holding an American flag with the other arm akimbo, forming the “O” in “VOTE” behind her.

“Don’t waste this. Keep everyone guessing. Make me proud.” When Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser spoke at our second festival in 2013, the Mac software company ...

Cabel Sasser, Panic - XOXO Festival (2024)

https://youtu.be/Df_K7pIsfvg?si=8SidWJA1c3zsquah

Peek between leafy trees and cars to a corner bodega/deli in the distance

https://www.figma.com/community/file/1438767825189857340/macpaint-patterns

A monospaced pixel font with a lo-fi, techy vibe.

Departure Mono

GMK Extended 2048 light keycaps on a beige Piggy 60% keyboard. Underneath is a vibrant orange Web Awesome deskmat.

Large, open room with a big glass wall at the back showing a sea of green trees. On the right is a polished concrete bar with stool seating, accented by a grid of wooden slats in a pleasant horizontal pattern.

Photo down the length of the main room at SFMOMA’s Art of Noise exhibit. Front to back: tables of home audio tech through the ages, soft seating with listening stations, and a large mosaic wall of record album art.

Two photos of me raising an eyebrow, a larger one to the right and a smaller one in the top left corner. It’s very 1990s, complete with lasers in the background.

A selfie of me in the wall of Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrored Room — My Heart Is Dancing into the Universe”

Close crop of a digital illustration showing some NASA patch-esque shapes, colors, and star motifs

Clear proto yellow Classic TKL keyboard with DCX Citrine keycaps

“People don’t consider the art of icons until the icons aren’t working and they’re lost, frustrated, and confused.”

Chunky icons on a yellow background: yen, square divide, distribute horizontally, card stack, crystal ball, seedling, page plus, filter, waveform, hockey sticks, browser window, person with arms out, glasses, label, blockquote, hashtag, calculator, terminal, hammer, distribute vertically, justify text, skeleton key, headlights, vector line, division symbol, move down, vector square, circle divide, UFO, move up, person waving, service bell, keyhole, square x, menu plus, mailbox, font case, ordered list, vector curve, vector circle

Folks standing around a wooden table playing Tokyo Highway. It’s a game with lots of little colorful pieces (roads, buildings, cars, and other infrastructure).

"Clark from InVision" in the style of the Stranger Things titles

Silver Neo Ergo keyboard with GMK Dualshot 2 keycaps. It’s sitting on a wooden balcony railing in the sun, with Lake Huron visible in the background

Photo of a hand gently cradling a leaf that’s starting to turn fall colors

Photo of purple, 9-key macropad on my desk next to a navy Neo70 with GMK Metropolis caps. Pad has KAM Playground caps with icons for object alignment, Boolean operations, and component management.

Beige and brown Class 0413 keyboard with GMK Chladni keycaps. It’s sitting on a sunlit wooden floor with a plant shadow cast across the top.

Diagram from my solar app showing power distribution. The array is generating 1.8 kW, and dispersing to the house (0.4 kW), battery (1.0 kW), and back to the grid (0.5 kW).

Long exposure view from the 35th floor of a San Francisco hotel

The world's simplest static site generator.

Pageboy.app

Black and white photo of two fully-manned dragon boats nearly neck-and-neck in a race

GMK Hi! Viz keycaps on a raw aluminum Kei v2 keyboard

Keeping the horrors at bay by building more keyboards

Stop what you’re doing and watch my favorite talk from XOXO

https://youtu.be/Df_K7pIsfvg?si=8SidWJA1c3zsquah

Config: time to eat a burger alone in my hotel room, watch The Bear, and play Riven.

Recreated the original MacPaint patterns :-)

https://www.figma.com/community/file/1438767825189857340/macpaint-patterns

Helena & Tobias don’t miss: https://departuremono.com

Painter’s tape holding the latest Tiden.co prototype together 😅
(🔈 on)

Trying out something new for my workshop where I jot down a list of talking points and don’t write out every single word I’m going to say 😅🤞🏻

Fridays are for avoiding work by doing fun stuff for work

Spreading the good word at Creative Works East in just a few weeks.

(quote from Felix Sockwell’s excellent book “Thinking in Icons”)

Find yourself a place where you get to play games every week

Aspects of Config were quite fun (seeing buddies mostly), but I’m not sure I’ll be back. The looming AI gloom was certainly a factor, but it’s just too damn big!

Me: “Come make icons at my 3-hour workshop!“

Also me: spends 2+ days just optically balancing arrows 🫠

First morning with the solar turned on 😎🌤️

Take care of yourself.

Check in on loved ones.

Get some rest.

Go offline.

Breathe.

Config is next week, so here’s a little sneak peek at something you might see at the Figma Creator Fund booth 😉

Ever since I saw LoveFrom’s Astra Carta seal for The Sustainable Markets Initiative, I knew it would make a beautiful Apple Watch face. Here’s my attempt at adapting its celestial design to the small screen. 💫

All these XOXO talks are filling my heart ❤️

Workshop visuals are starting to come together (and back apart)

I’m running a 3-hour icon workshop in New York in October, and I’m nervous! I’ve done much shorter ones in the past — any tips for keeping people engaged for that long?

👀 I made a lil' guy who lives in your Mac menu bar and helps you to build static sites: https://pageboy.app

No matter what, people will support people. There is still humanity here after all. If you're looking for support during this time or know someone who needs it, please reach out if you're able. Do yourself a favor, do not suffer alone.

Heading to Brooklyn tomorrow, can’t wait

started putting this down for the last hour of the work week on my cal

Just bought another font. Surely this will help me finish my site redesign! 🫠

Posts