In January 2025, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence was fired after a disastrous app redesign wiped nearly $500 million from the company's market value. But calling it just a "redesign" misses the deeper story of how a beloved audio company lost its way. Through conversations with multiple former employees who worked directly on the project, I discovered that what happened at Sonos wasn't simply a botched app update—it was the culmination of strategic missteps, organizational dysfunction, and forgotten values that had been building for years.

I was sitting on a barstool next to my wife in a packed restaurant in Little Italy. We were the lone Kansas City Chiefs supporters in a nest full of hipster Philadelphia Eagles fans. After Jon Batiste finished his fantastic rendition of the national anthem, and the teams took the field for kickoff, I noticed something. The scorebug—the broadcast industry’s term for the lower-third or chyron graphic at the bottom of the screen—was different, and in a good way. (Continued)

My wife and I are big movie lovers. Every year, between January and March, we race to see all the Oscar-nominated films. We watched _A Complete Unknown_ last night and _The Brutalist_ a couple of weeks ago. The latter far outshines the former as a movie, but both share a common theme: the creative obsession. …

For my mental health, I've been purposely avoiding the news since the 2024 presidential election. But as I slowly dip my toe back into the news cycle through occasional glimpses of headlines and social media, I'm struck by the disturbing parallels between Trump's first two weeks in office and Hitler's systematic dismantling of German democracy in 1933.

Remember the Subservient Chicken? That quirky Burger King website where you could type commands to make a guy in a chicken suit do stuff? Two decades later, we're still typing commands into boxes—but now we're talking to AI. As designers grapple with a web increasingly built for machines rather than humans, we're facing a familiar challenge: how to create delightful experiences within new technical constraints. From Flash microsites to AI-readable interfaces, web design is evolving once again.