It was more than 20 years ago, but I can still remember it clearly. I was sitting in front of an old cathode ray tube watching a grainy VHS tape of my state’s high school track finals. Kevin, a friend who was one grade above me, had just won the 800m with a new state record. What was really memorable was how he won the race.

For the first half, the pack stayed tight — as you’d expect from a final. But then, on the backstretch, Kevin started accelerating when everyone else was tiring. He looked like a Ferrari against…

When I encounter inexperienced designers, there’s one thing that always sticks out about the way they think. Or more specifically, the way they don’t think.

They don’t think of every design project as a design system. They don’t appreciate the interconnectedness of their design decisions. They solve design problems in isolation, not as a whole.

In short, noob designers lack system thinking, and it holds them back from thriving in the big and meaningful projects they dream of. This worries me because skills and tools can be taught, but new modes of thinking are difficult to adopt. …

Talk to any design system advocate and you’ll hear the word “consistency” over and over. Consistency in customer experience is what has matured our design field, governed UX best practices, and elevated many loved brands and services to the top of their industries.

We all know that consistency is a core principle of good UX and visual design. It provides familiarity, strengthens intuitive behaviour, and establishes a strong brand identity. Consistent experiences help build trust, while disjointed design erodes it.

Design great Massimo Vignelli describes consistency as “discipline”, and the goal of creating “continuity of intent throughout”. …

If you follow my writing you’ll know I’m not afraid to tackle the often-taboo issue of money. I freely discuss what I earn as a freelance designer because I believe it’s not done often enough, and being honest about money can help teach immensely valuable business lessons. There’s also nothing quite as compelling as using specific real-world examples like dollars and cents.

So what lesson did I learn from my 2020 freelancing income report? I made 33% more than the year before, and that’s mostly due to COVID.

The pandemic is a disaster. I don’t want to minimise the hurt…

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of freelance platforms — Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer.com and the like. I’ve written about it before. I simply can’t understand why you’d want to leave both your income and reputation at the mercy of a third-party who doesn’t always have your best interest in mind. Especially if you aim to build a full-time career from freelancing. It’s your livelihood — you want to be in control of it.

When I came across Jon Younger’s recent article on freelance “revolution” predictions I found myself nodding in total agreement and cringing in frustration in equal…

Artists, designers, writers, and anyone else who produces creative work, this is a must-read essay by David Perell: Expression is Compression.

Some of my favourite passages (emphasis mine):

…people make sense of the world by making it simpler and more beautiful — by making compression progress…creators move towards compression progress not by following their rational mind, but by following their intuition for what’s interesting. In doing so, they compress large data sets into elegant deliverables which are easy to share and remember.

That means to ship something excellent, you have to be willing to cut what may have taken weeks…

If you’re rich, you’re more lucky than smart. And there’s math to prove it.

A new study that claims the predominance of luck over talent in the distribution of wealth has been mathematically confirmed. Two Italian physicists — Alessandro Pluchino and Andrea Rapisarda — and one economist — A. E. Biondo — make the case, and they’ve got a computer model to back it up.

“If it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier…

“Complexity is like energy. It cannot be created or destroyed, only moved somewhere else. When a product or service becomes simpler for users, engineers and designers have to work harder.”

In Why Life Can’t Be Simpler, Farnam Street brilliantly explains Tesler’s Law as it relates to what we’ve all experienced about digital product design.

Simpler isn’t always better

The first lesson from Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity is that how simple something looks is not a reflection of how simple it is to use.

“People have an intuitive sense that complexity has to go somewhere. When using a product or service is…