Dunwich Type Founders

I changed the color mode on my phone to grayscale and the results are amazing. The urge to use it turns into a letdown when color is gone. My brain is rapidly deciding that it isn’t worth the bother and the desire for phone induced dopamine is fading fast.

It’s hard to be motivated to design something when I know that I will never design anything as attractive as a Gibson ES-335 in British Racing Green. (The color of my grandfather’s ’68 Mustang)

What’s better than a superhero knocking out a winged elephant? A mechanical lotus airship!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNaSdnz2I8g

Whoever did the design for Tony Iommi’s new album did an incredible job.
https://www.iommi.com/from-the-dark-album-announced/

Apple laid the groundwork for screen addiction in 2001 when its designers created an operating system that looked and behaved like casino gambling machines. The Cult of Mac became a legion eager to sit in front of a Mac and enjoy the bright colorful buttons and cute animations.

The lady at my favorite desi food truck refused to sell me my usual order and made me eat the chole masala instead. Indian food culture is the best.

How common was it to set pages of running copy with a Ludow Typograph? Is this just something the people at Ludlow did to show off that they could make a text face for a machine that was mostly uses for headlines?

It’s amazing that companies will spend large sums of money on AI tokens to summarize overly long and inane emails rather than teach employees how to communicate efficiently. Back in the 1990s office workers became obsessed with sending Powerpoint decks and Visio charts. So companies just told people to stop making so many presentations and charts. Problem solved.

Here’s a killer idea for a startup: email hosting that uses AI to detect and block fund-raising emails from American politicians.

Life hack: just leave your phone on “do not disturb” all the time. Check it every two or three hours if needs must. Also set up the auto reply that tells people you’re driving and will get back to them eventually. It’s wonderful.

Here’s my trick for not procrastinating with YouTube: Use Firefox. Every time you see a video you want to watch open it in a new tab. Just keep doing that. At some point you’ll have to close Firefox for an OS update, or let it restart itself after it updates, or some insane Javascript will crash it. There’s always a chance that Firefox will reopen and not be able to load all those old tabs. Now you’ll never watch all those videos instead of doing something important.

“What does freedom even mean, anyway?”
And then I had to explain the concepts of positive and negative liberty to an eighth grader.

I need furniture help. Who sells good desk lamps? I want something that will work, last, and not start a fire. But 99% of what I see is low cost knockoff junk.

“I’m sorry Dad, I lost your nice copy of The Great Gatsby.”
“Oh that wasn’t the nice copy. I gave you the one set in Times New Roman. Let me show you the Folio Society edition.”

Every time I sit down to read a big book she sits next to me and begs me to put her in my lap so she can take a nap.

After using an iPhone for over a year I am still regularly amazed at how profoundly bad iOS is.

Maybe selling one off cyberdecks on etsy will be a viable career in the age of AI. If I get rid of all these design books I can fit a workbench in my office.

When I search Amazon for “space documentary ”

When do crores stop being literal numbers and become abstract big numbers? Big as in most people can’t actually think in trillions so we use scientific notation. Do people think of “10.89 lakh crore” as a literal number or is it a huge number for the purpose of comparing it to last year’s “9.76 lakh crore?”

My eyesight is now so bad that I need four different pairs of glasses. On the up side, the Ray-Ban frames that fit me are cheap and Luxottica’s prices for weird lenses are now lower than Warby Parker.

Progress in Chinese package design: American brands just stick socks in a cheap plastic bag. This Chinese brand rolls and wraps each pair and puts them in a decent box. I’m seeing more and more good Chinese packaging. By 2030 there will be Chinese package design on par with Japanese design.

There should be some kind of Nobel Prize for the UX designer that realized we could just use our email addresses as user names.

Hey UX/UI designers: you know that dark pattern of tiny buttons you implement to make it hard to actually tap the button? You aren’t supposed to implement it with buttons that people are supposed to tap. Especially on big tablets and touchscreen laptops. You won’t ruin anybody’s day by making the play/pause button bigger than a toddler’s fingertip.

I’ve spent more time today trying to understand one passing sentence in a book by watching a long academic lecture about it than I have actually reading the book. And I still don’t get it. Tomorrow I’m going to make Claude build me a reading list so I can put even more work into figuring out this one line. This book is really fun!

For years I thought that the iOS system settings app was just a disorganized train wreck. But I've realized that it is well designed. To be hard to use. Because Apple does not want users to make their phones look like phones. Apple wants iPhones to look like casino gambling machines.

Buy reference books for stuff you would pick up your phone to look up.

AI generated clickbait videos are going to start getting weird in a few years where there are no good ideas left. “Indian hot sauce raisin brain coffee.” “Exercises guaranteed to put you in a hospital where you’ll meet hot doctors.” “Hot guitars designed by Czech luthiers who never actually existed.”

I’m not sure if I should go the school where I can do an online PPE, the school where I can do an online BA in economics with a double major in political science, or the school where I can do a BS in economics a double major in Asian studies.

Of course none of them will be useful because by the time I get the degree and a grad degree I’ll be too old to get a job anyway.

“China is just six months behind on AI!” is the new “Iran is six months out from a nuke!”

I miss the days when social media was Usenet, EFnet, and AIM. #warezart before the crackdown!

Stop giving pedestrian companies and their apps stupid names that are hard to remember with meaningless abstract icons. You don’t need to be creative about everything

Is there an email hosting service that can reliably block all political fund-raising emails?

Week four of the teenager not having electronics: he is holed up in his room building a huge model rocket.

There’s a non-zero chance that Lemmy was doing all that speed so he could stay thin enough to wear those tapered jeans that tucked into his custom boots.

What’s the state of typesetting Nastaliq on Mac? Is it just a lost cause until the InPage plugin for Indesign is released?

This one’s a fuckin banger:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHObGLeYpTI

I bought a book printed and bound in India but it smells like a book printed and bound in Belgium and that confused the hell out of me.