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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.

I love this essay from Baldur Bjarnason, maybe because his stream of consciousness style is so similar to my own. He compares the rapidly changing economics of web and software development to the film, TV, and publishing industries. Before we get to web dev, let's look at the film industry, as disrupted by streaming…

After spending four frigid days in Toronto with my design team, I've been thinking about what makes in-person collaboration truly valuable—and what doesn't. While tech companies debate return-to-office mandates, I found myself in a conference room with three designers and a whiteboard, tackling a pressing feature deadline. What emerged wasn't just a solution to our immediate challenge, but a deeper understanding of when being together matters and when it doesn't.

James Poniewozik, writing for The New York Times: > Whether they work in sand or spores, heavy-handed metaphor is the true material of choice for all these opening titles. The series are different in genres and tone. But all of them seem to have collectively decided that the best way to convey the sense of epic event TV is with an overture of shape-shifting, literal-minded screen-saver art. His point is that a recent trend in "prestige TV" main titles is to use particle effects…

Appearing on Joe Rogan's podcast, this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Apple “[hasn’t] really invented anything great in a while.” He said, “Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and now they’re just kind of sitting on it 20 years later.” Let's take a look at some hard metrics, shall we?

I’ve had Matthew Butterick’s _Practical Typography_ website/ebook bookmarked since I discovered it over ten years ago. It’s making the rounds again, and I think it’s a good reminder that we are all “professional writers” as he describes…