My design philosophy

Recently I’ve been thinking about my design philosophy. How it’s evolved over the years, and what has stayed the same. Where it is similar or different to my colleagues. Which articles or books I return to over and over again, and like to share with people.

I’ve tried and failed a couple of times to write a more detailed and personal (read: indulgent) version of this post, but I can never get over the hump and just get the damn post out, so I’m shipping this instead.

• Understand the medium you work in.
• Development is design.
• Make space to vibe and have fun together (not just spar and critique).

Maybe I’ll expand on these points a bit more in a later post, but you know what… I like how this little blog has turned out.

My recommended reading list

Here are some pieces that deeply influenced me and how I build for the web:

• A Dao of Web Design — John Allsopp (2000)
• What Screens Want — Frank Chimero (2013)
• The Web’s Grain — Frank Chimero (2015)
• Atomic Design — Brad Frost (2016)

Educational Sensational Inspirational Foundational reading list

What a name for a site. Zach Leatherman has put together a “historical record of foundational web development blog posts” at esif.dev. It’s a fantastic list. The motherlode.

I was pleased to see that I’d read (and re-read) most of these. Most of the posts on that site are evergreen — as relevant and as educational as they ever were — but they’re also products of their time.

For many of the posts that came from 2015 onwards I read them around when they were published, which does help to understand their context and impact.

For everything that came before ~2015, I was lucky enough to have Mark Rickerby as a mentor early enough in my career. I honestly think he shared pretty much every single one of the 2000s and early 2010’s links on that site with me. As always, thanks for everything Mark.

We do our best work when we understand and accept what the web is

… and we do it better together.