The assassination of Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025, marked a horrifying inflection point in the growing debate over how digital platforms amplify rage and destabilize politics. As someone who had already stepped back from social media after Trump’s re-election, watching these events unfold from a distance only confirmed my decision. My feeds had become pits of despair, grievances, and overall negativity that didn’t do well for my mental health. While I understand the need to shine a light on the atrocities of Trump and his government, the constant barrage was too much. So I mostly opted out, save for the occasional promotion of my writing.

Kirk’s death feels like the inevitable conclusion of systems we’ve built—systems that reward outrage, amplify division, and transform human beings into content machines optimized for engagement at any cost.

The Mechanics of Disconnection

As it turns out, my behavior isn’t out of the ordinary. People quit social media for various reasons, often situational—seeking balance in an increasingly overwhelming digital landscape. As a participant explained in a research project about social media disconnection:

Ah, this brings back memories! I spent so much time in MacPaint working with these patterns when I was young. Paul Smith faithfully recreates them:

I was working on something and thought it would be fun to use one of the classic Mac black-and-white patterns in the project. I'm talking about the original 8×8-pixel ones that were in the original Control Panel for setting the desktop background and in MacPaint as fill patterns.

I figured there'd must be clean, pixel-perfect GIFs or PNGs of them somewhere on the web. And perhaps there are, but after poking around a bit, I ran out of energy for that, but by then had a head of steam for extracting the patterns en masse from the original source, somehow. Then I could produce whatever format I needed for them.

Brad Frost, of atomic design fame, wrote a history of themeable UIs as part of a deep dive into design tokens. He writes, “Design tokens may be the latest incarnation, but software creators have been creating themeable user interfaces for quite a long time!”

About Mario and Luigi from Super Mario Bros.:

It’s wild that two of the most iconic characters in the history of pop culture — red-clad Mario and green-clad Luigi — are themeable UI elements born from pragmatic ingenuity to overcome technological challenges. Freaking amazing.

The designer of the iconic “007” logo from the James Bond movies has died. Joe Caroff was 103. Jeré Longman, writing for The New York Times:

For the first Bond movie, “Dr. No” (1962), Mr. Caroff was hired to create a logo for the letterhead of a publicity release. He began working with the idea that as a secret agent, James Bond had a license to kill (as designated by the numerals “00”), but Mr. Caroff did not find Bond’s compact Walther PPK pistol to be visually appealing.

As he sketched the numerals 007, he drew penciled lines above and below to guide him and noticed that the upper guideline resembled an elongated barrel of a pistol extending from the seven.

He refined his drawing and added a trigger, fashioning a mood of intrigue and espionage and crafting one of the most globally recognized symbols in cinematic history. With some modifications, the logo has been used for 25 official Bond films and endless merchandising.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball also wrote a piece about Caroff:

Caroff had a remarkably accomplished career. He created iconic posters for dozens of terrific films across a slew of genres. The fact that he created the 007 logo but only earned $300 from it is more like a curious footnote than anything.

I grew up on MTV and I’m surprised that my Gen Z kids don’t watch music videos. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Rob Schwartz, writing in PRINT Magazine:

…the network launched the iconic “I Want My MTV” ad campaign. Created by ad legend George Lois, the campaign featured the world’s biggest rock stars literally demanding MTV. At the time, this was unheard of. Unlike today, rock stars would never sell out to do ads. But here you had the biggest stars: Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Pete Townshend, the Police…and rising star Madonna, all shouting the same line in different executions: ‘I want my MTV!” The campaign was a stroke of genius. It mobilized viewers to call up their cable providers and shout over the phone: “I want my MTV!” In due time, MTV was on damn-near every cable box and damn-near every young person’s TV.

Jay Hoffman, writing in his excellent The History of the Web website, reflects on Kevin Kelly's 2005 Wired piece that celebrated the explosive growth of blogging—50 million blogs, one created every two seconds—and predicted a future powered by open participation and user-created content. Kelly was right about the power of audiences becoming creators, but he missed the crucial detail: 2005 would mark the peak of that open web participation before everyone moved into centralized platforms.

There are still a lot of blogs, 600 million by some accounts. But they have been supplanted over the years by social media networks. Commerce on the web has consolidated among fewer and fewer sites. Open source continues to be a major backbone to web technologies, but it is underfunded and powered almost entirely by the generosity of its contributors. Open API’s barely exist. Forums and comment sections are finding it harder and harder to beat back the spam. Users still participate in the web each and every day, but it increasingly feels like they do so in spite of the largest web platforms and sites, not because of them.

My blog—this website—is a direct response to the consolidation. This site and its content are owned and operated by me and not stuck behind a login or paywall to be monetized by Meta, Medium, Substack, or Elon Musk. That is the open web.

Hoffman goes on to say, “The web was created for participation, by its nature and by its design. It can’t be bottled up long.” He concludes with:

Independent journalists who create unique and authentic connections with their readers are now possible. Open social protocols that experts truly struggle to understand, is being powered by a community that talks to each other.

The web is just people. Lots of people, connected across global networks. In 2005, it was the audience that made the web. In 2025, it will be the audience again.

Elizabeth Goodspeed contextualizes today’s growing design influencers against designers-cum-artists like April Greiman and Stefan Sagmeister. Along with Tibor Kalman, Jessica Walsh, and Wade and Leta, all of these designers put themselves into their work.

Other designers ran with similar instincts. 40 Days of Dating, a joint project by Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman created in 2013, was presented as a kind of art-directed relationship experiment: two friends, both single, agreed to date each other for 40 days (40 days being the purported time needed to build a habit). The project was presented through highly polished daily updates with lush photography, motion graphics, custom lettering, and a parade of commissioned work from other artists – all accompanied by alarming candid journal entries from both parties about the dates they were going on. It wasn’t exactly a design project in the traditional sense, but it was unmistakably design-led; the relationship itself was the content, but it was design that made it viral.

These self-directed, clientless projects remind me of MFA design theses where design is the medium for self-expression. Bringing it back to 2025, Godspeed writes:

Designers film themselves in their bedrooms and running errands, narrating design decisions and venting about clients along the way. Just as remote work expects us to perform constant busyness, design influencing demands a continuous performance of creative output. …Brands have jumped in on the trend, too. Where once a designer might have been hired to create packaging or campaigns behind the scenes, many are now brought forward as faces of collaborations – they’re photographed in their studios and interviewed about their process as part of launch. The designer’s body, personality, and public profile become a commercial asset.

And of course, like with all content creators, it becomes a job that just might require more work than it seems.

Influencing can seem like a good, low-lift side-hustle at first. Most designers already have tons of unused work and in-progress sketches to share. Why not just post it and see what happens? But anyone who’s ever had to write captions or cut reels knows that making content is, in fact, harder than it looks. The more energy that goes into showcasing work, the less time there is to actually make work, even if you want to. “Influencing” can quickly become a time suck.

John Calhoun joined Apple 30 years ago as a programmer to work on the Color Picker.

Having never written anything in assembly, you can imagine how overjoyed I was. It’s not actually a very accurate analogy, but imagine someone handing you a book in Chinese and asking you to translate it into English (I’m assuming here that you don’t know Chinese of course). Okay, it wasn’t that hard, but maybe you get a sense that this was quite a hurdle that I would have to overcome.

Calhoun was given an old piece of code and tasked with updating it. Instead, he translated it into a programming language he knew—C—and then decided to add to the feature. He explains:

I disliked HSL as a color space, I preferred HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) because when I did artwork I was more comfortable thinking about color in those terms. So writing an HSV color picker was on my short list.

When I had my own color picker working I think I found that it was kind of fun. Perhaps for that reason, I struck out again and wrote another color picker. The World Wide Web (www) was a rather new thing that seemed to be catching on, so I naturally thought that an HTML color picker made sense. So I tackled that one as well. It was more or less the RGB color picker but the values were in hexadecimal and a combined RGB string value like “#FFCC33” was made easy to copy for the web designer.

So an engineer decided, all on his own, that he'd add a couple extra features. Including the fun crayon picker:

On a roll, I decided to also knock out a “crayon picker”. At this point, to be clear, the color picker was working and I felt I understood it well enough. As I say, I was kind of just having some fun now.

And Calhoun makes this point:

It was frankly a thing I liked about working for Apple in those days. The engineers were the one’s driving the ship. As I said, I wrote an HSV picker because it was, I thought, a more intuitive color space for artists. I wrote the HTML color picker because of the advent of the web. And I wrote the crayon picker because it seemed to me to be the kind of thing Apple was all about: HSL, RGB — these were kind of nerdy color spaces — a box of crayons is how the rest of us picked colors.

Making software—especially web software—has matured since then, with product managers and designers now collaborating closely with engineers. But with AI coding assistants, the idea of an individual contributor making solo decisions and shipping code might become de rigueur again.

Let's continue down Mac memory lane with this fun post from Basic Apple Guy:

With macOS 26, Apple has announced a dramatically new look to their UI: Liquid Glass. Solid material icon elements give way to softer, shinier, glassier icons. The rounded rectangle became slightly more rounded, and Apple eliminated the ability for icon elements to extend beyond the icon rectangle (as seen in the current icons for GarageBand, Photo Booth, Dictionary, etc.).

With this release being one of the most dramatic visual overhauls of macOS's design, I wanted to begin a collection chronicling the evolution of the system icons over the years. I've been rolling these out on social media over the past week and will continue to add to and update this collection slowly over the summer. Enjoy!

This is an amazing article and website by Marcin Wichary, the man behind the excellent Shift Happens book.

…I had a realization that the totemic 1984 Mac control panel, designed by Susan Kare, is still to this day perhaps the only settings screen ever brought up in casual conversation.

I kept wondering about that screen, and about what happened since then. Turns out, the Mac settings have lived a far more fascinating life than I imagined, have been redesigned many times, and can tell us a lot about the early history and the troubled upbringing of this interesting machine.

Indeed, Wichary goes through multiple versions of Mac operating systems and performs digital paleontology, uncovering long lost Settings minutiae. It's also a great lesson in UI along the way. Be sure to click in the Mac screens.

Stephen Heller, writing for PRINT magazine, revisits a long out-of-print book called Visual Persuasion by Stephen Baker, a creative director from the Mad Men era of advertising.

Although published in 1961, Visual Persuasion has as much relevance, vitality, insight, vision and spunk as any recently published book (including those that I’ve authored). The truth is this: I wish I had written it. Even though it is nearly 65 years out of print (and contains its share of outdated mores and stereotypes), it easily could still serve (with a minute refresh) to provide ideas to ward off what designers fear is the inevitable AI apocalypse—an end to original thinking and making, visual or otherwise.

One maxim, Heller notes:

Eye movements are based on conditioned reflexes. “Left-to-right habit makes our eyes travel clockwise in exploring a [layout],” Baker notes. The optical center of a page is slightly to the left. The tendency is to focus attention on a person’s eyes more than on any other part of their face. This mirrors one’s emotions with fair accuracy.

When I was younger, I had a sheet of US Bicentennial stamps and I always loved the red, white, and blue star. Little did I know then that I would become a graphic designer.

The symbol, designed by Bruce Blackburn at Chermayeff & Geismar is a multilayered stylized five-pointed star. It folds like bunting. Its rounded corners evoke both a flower and a pinwheel at the same time. And finally, the negative space reveals a classic, pointed star.

Before there was Jessica Hische, there was Jim Parkinson. You might not know his name, but you’ve seen his work. Most famously, he was known for the mastheads for Rolling Stone magazine and the LA Times. Stephen Coles has this remembrance.

It’s been said that desktop publishing democratized graphic design. For those of you too young to know what the term means, it means the technology that enabled graphic design to go digital. It was an ecosystem, really: the Mac, PostScript, LaserWriter, and PageMaker. But before all that, designers depended on typesetters to set type.

David Langton writing for UX Collective:

A lot was lost when the Macintosh wiped out the traditional typesetting industry. From the art of typography to the craft of typesetting, many essential elements were lost. Typesetters were part of a tradition that stretched back more than 500 years to Gutenberg’s printing press. They understood the basics of type: kerning (spacing between the letters), leading (the space between lines of text), and line breaks (how to avoid widows — those solo words abandoned at the end of a paragraph). They knew about readability (like how to avoid setting type that was too wide to read). There were classic yet limited fonts, with standards for size and leading that assured that everyone working within common ranges maintained a threshold for quality. Yet it was in the craft or business side of typesetting that these services were most under appreciated. Typesetters provided overnight service. They worked overnight, so graphic designers did not have to. We would finish our days specifying the type, and the typesetters would keystroke the manuscripts, proofread, stylize the type, and set up columns following our instructions.

Designers would then pick up the galleys from the typesetters in the morning. The black type was photographically printed on white photo paper. You’d have to cut them up and paste them onto boards, assembling your layout.

Because this was such a physical process, we had to slow down. Langton says:

But since the Macintosh became an in-house tool, the process was reversed. Now, designers design first, then think about it. This shift in process has contributed to a trivialization of the role of graphic designer because anyone can noodle around with the Mac’s sophisticated type tools and make layouts. The design process has been trivialized while the thinking, the evaluation, and the strategic part of the process are often abandoned.

One small thing I’ll point out is that desktop publishing wasn't popularized until 1985.

• PostScript was released by Adobe in 1984.
• The LaserWriter printer was released by Apple in 1985.
• PageMaker was released by Aldus—later bought by Adobe—in 1985.

I have relayed here before the story that I’ve been using Macs since 1985. It wasn’t the hardware that drew me in—it was MacPaint. I was always an artistic kid so being able to paint on a digital canvas seemed thrilling to me. And of course it was back then.

Behind MacPaint, was a man named Bill Atkinson. Atkinson died last Thursday, June 5 of pancreatic cancer. In a short remembrance, John Gruber said:

I say this with no hyperbole: Bill Atkinson may well have been the best computer programmer who ever lived. Without question, he’s on the short list. What a man, what a mind, what gifts to the world he left us.

I‘m happy that Figma also remembered Atkinson and that they are standing on his shoulders.

Every day at Figma, we wrestle with the same challenges Atkinson faced: How do you make powerful tools feel effortless? How do you hide complexity behind intuitive interactions? His fingerprints are on every pixel we push, every selection we make, every moment of creative flow our users experience.

Apologies for linking to a lot of Christopher Butler recently, but I really love his thinking about design. This time, Butler reminds us about the importance of structure and how the proto-graphic designers we studied in art history, like Piet Mondrian, mastered it.

A well-composed photograph communicates something essential even before we register its subject. A thoughtfully designed page layout feels right before we read a single word. There’s something happening in that first moment of perception that transcends the individual elements being composed.

My favorite passage in his essay begins here:

Perhaps we “read” composition the way we read text — our brains processing visual structure as a kind of fundamental grammar that exists beneath conscious recognition. Just as we don’t typically think about parsing sentences into subjects and predicates while reading, we don’t consciously deconstruct the golden ratio or rule of thirds while looking at an image. Yet in both cases, our minds are translating structure into meaning.

The next eight short paragraphs build on this idea and crescendo with this banger:

In recognizing composition as this fundamental visual language, we begin to understand why good design works at such a deep level. It’s not just about making things look nice — it’s about speaking fluently in a language that predates words, tapping into patterns of perception that feel as natural as breathing.

Composition is a fundamental visual language. I had never thought of it that way and yet it feels right.

The whole thing is great. Please go read it.

A lot of young designers love to look at what’s contemporary, what’s trending on Dribbble or Instagram. But I think to look forward, we must always study our past. I spent the week in New York City, on vacation. My wife and I attended a bunch of Broadway shows and went to the Museum of Broadway, where I became enamored with a lot of the poster art. (’Natch.) I may write about that soon.

Coincidentally, Matthew Strom wrote about the history of album art, featuring the first album cover ever, which uses a photo of the Broadway theater, the Imperial, where I saw Smash earlier this week.

Jay Hoffman, from his excellent The History of the Web site:

1995 is a fascinating year. It’s one of the most turbulent in modern history. 1995 was the web’s single most important inflection point. A fact that becomes most apparent by simply looking at the numbers. At the end of 1994, there were around 2,500 web servers. 12 months later, there were almost 75,000. By the end of 1995, over 700 new servers were being added to the web every single day.

That was surely a crazy time…

As a longtime Apple fanboy, it's a little hard for me to appreciate the visual design of Windows—Microsoft is a nemesis, if you will. But I will tip my hat to the design practitioners there who've made the company finally pay attention to design.

Side note, reminds me of a story about what Steve Jobs once told me when I was designing the welcome animation for Mac OS X.