Archive (Page 8) • text

The sandwich we deserve

$ · June 22, 2022

Time changes a place. We never want to admit this. Our favorite stores should stay open forever. Our favorite restaurants must serve the exact same food...

We have reached this point with respect to the soap bag, and there is no turning back

Travel toiletries are one of the weirdest things to me. They are a ritual that could only exist based on the essential tension between international law,...

$ · June 17, 2022

Your city can tell me a lot based on its relationship to gin. London kind of tucks gin under the rug, not wanting to admit its colonialist history,...

The barbeque is not medicinal, despite appearances

I threw a barbeque over Memorial Day weekend. It was the usual sort of thing: a garage sale, a grill, lots of seltzer and beer. People rolled through on...

$ · June 13, 2022

All stitching, on everything you own, is drawn, manually, with two hands. On every t-shirt you own, the cuffs are drawn with two hands, the seams are drawn...

I have come up with a new rule, and it is related to a topic nobody wants to talk about, for which I am already profoundly sorry. I promise the rest of this...

The tiny tool tote

$ · June 6, 2022

You have a bag with 5 pockets, MOLLE webbing, ten sleeves. It opens like a pointy accordion. Knife, pen, leather-sleeved AirPods (it is always AirPods), and...

Precisely like BBC Planet Earth, but lower stakes and far less interesting

So we need to talk about a misfortune that happened to me that is uniquely American for a variety of reasons, and in order to do that we need to go on a...

Three boring, easy recipes

$ · June 1, 2022

All three of my most famous recipes are extremely simple. They don’t involve much; you can do them yourself. Two of them involve small pantry upgrades that...

Brief notes on garlic & incompetence

I’ve lived in a grocery-poor, food-mad neighborhood for the past 11 years, once filled with eco-hippies who, at one point, started one of Chicago’s only co-...

Ritual Practice

$ · May 27, 2022

Here are some things that I do that are conceptually related, I swear: I don’t ship unfinished work. This means you’re never going to see a public work in...

There is rarely a better option at a cocktail bar than dealer’s own, where you list a base spirit and some flavors, and the bartender does some clairvoyance....

The Glorious Dirt Trench of the Kilbourn Park Plant Sale

$ · May 23, 2022

I moved into this house in 2016, and in 2017 I found myself with a raised bed in full sun, some really good soil, and a desire to grow food for my chosen...

Alinea is overrated and you know this, but I'm writing text about it anyway

One of the final things to return in my life is tech conferences. I keynoted one a few weeks ago. It went well. I missed the people, the conversations, the...

$ · May 18, 2022

In planning this past winter’s snowbirding, I lamented to my friend Theresa, long experienced with all of the yogic parts of Costa Rica, that I was having a...

It is time once again to write a brief update on the state of text. If you are here for regular text and not metatext, you may ignore it. This doesn’t count...

There comes a point where one has to acknowledge that they’re working with software that has become very old. Workflows stay fixed for years, coming to...

Some notes on flashlight people

$ · May 13, 2022

One of my favorite things about the internet is that rare moment when I stumble upon a community that has gone so deep down a rabbit hole of gentle...

I know, I know: I have a fondness for a designed object. Bear with me and there’ll be a payoff. Kaikado are special. They sell, predominantly, tea canisters....

$ · May 9, 2022

Two years ago, a bunch of stuff happened in the world and I found myself stuck inside all spring, at the beginning of the harvest, with access to a lot of...

Only optimize for pandemics

I am generally against what Jia Tolentino has called “optimization culture”. I do not wear the best underwear; I do not own the best desk lamp; I have never,...

A bad calculator that calls people

$ · May 4, 2022

When I need to quit life, I have the phone. The phone does two things: it places & receives phone calls, and it sends & receives text messages. It does not...

Unrecommendable

I follow a handful of humans who probably make most of their money on recommending stuff. I’ve already written about Blackbird Spyplane, which has a huge...

$ · April 29, 2022

The hedonic treadmill is real, you own too many things, you accumulate too many things, and you can work with what you already have, most of the time. New...

$ · April 27, 2022

Tote bags meant well, didn’t they? Positioned as an eco-friendly alternative to one-time-use bags, we all grabbed one and headed to the market. Then we...

The flying car of a tiny dog

I got into cooking in 2003 when a 1st-generation Hong Konger taught me how to make Sichuan stirfries in my tiny college apartment. I bought three things: a...

For the past 15 years, I’ve used two typefaces in most of my work: a serif for text, and a sans for headers & interface. Here is the chronology, for those...

Malibu Stacy has a new hat

$ · April 18, 2022

Probably half because I bike, half because I travel, and half because I exist during apocalypse, I am into what could broadly be called “everyday carry.” In...

nickd.org's Redesign: A Postmortem

Over here at Draft, we recently unveiled a new, revolutionary, ground-up rewrite of our personal site, nickd.org. This is our first rewrite in a few years....

Donella Meadows was a systems professor who worked at MIT & Dartmouth. Her work, especially her posthumous book Thinking in Systems, has been wildly...

$ · April 8, 2022

There was a request for more cocktails, and so now we have this. The ritual involves popping the top off a bottle of Angostura in defiance of god. It’s the...

Three ingredients, thirty minutes

We need to discuss butter sauce. I have ripped it off wholesale: first from Salt & Fat, who I later learned ripped it off from Marcella Hazan. Still, people...

Make it plug, make it work, make it nice

$ · April 4, 2022

On the one hand, tools don’t matter. On the other, there is USB-C. In text, I try to seek the wonder in elegance. So I will say some nice things about USB-C...

The Sacred Ritual of the International Home & Housewares Show

$ · March 31, 2022

Do you like design? (You probably do, since you are reading this.) Are you a victim of the horrors of late capitalism? Do you pay attention to trends in...

Overcompensatory image capture

It is time for photography text. I have been taking pictures since 1994. I have posted a bunch of recent work here. I have owned cameras from pretty much...

"They don't need my help"

$ · March 28, 2022

Like every millennial in a big city, I was into craft beer for a while. Who knew that there was a class of beer that looked like tar, tasted like chocolate,...

A non-comprehensive overview of soy sauce

There’s a certain sort of face that people make that conveys, approximately, are you utterly kidding me, crossed with of course you do, crossed with this...

An unconventional jawn

$ · March 23, 2022

The only two mailing lists I subscribe to are Dirk’s Friday Fresh Fish Flash, an important business text about a local seafood shop; and Blackbird Spyplane,...

A few years ago, I visited the Stahl House in Los Angeles. You’ve probably seen it before: it’s the Case Study MCM masterpiece perched at the top of a cliff...

The state of text

Every so often I will write about the state of text. This won’t count towards the every-other-free-text thing that we have going on here. It’s just some text...

$ · March 17, 2022

The secret to amazing cooking is staying organized, and the secret to staying organized is the useless term mise en place, which is French for “organize...

Open questions I still have about coffee, even though I am ravenously obsessed with it and spend lots of time trying to learn about it

Why would you turn your AeroPress upside down? What is the difference, flavor wise, between Hario, Chemex, and Kalita Wave? What is the difference, flavor &...

$ · March 11, 2022

I mean, you’re going to eat street food. You don’t go all the way there, wherever there is, so you can eat cheffy stuff all the time. That is a renunciation...

Since my career began in 2006, I have been to a total of 85 airports in 25 countries across 258 segments. I have seen enough. I am allowed to teach you how...

Bul-Gama Bonanza

$ · March 8, 2022

Chicago is about 3 million people, and the suburbs are about 8 million people. So there must be something good in the suburbs, right? There, grudgingly, is....

A flip is a genre of cocktail where you throw a whole egg in with everything, shake it bare to mix & form a merengue, and then shake with ice to cool the...

On the marginal generosity of Google Slides

$ · March 3, 2022

A few years ago, my pal Jon Bell made Design Explosions, where he did some enormous deep dives into the way that specific apps work. Here is one on mapping....

The marginal generosity of Google Slides

$ · March 1, 2022

A few years ago, my pal Jon Bell made Design Explosions, where he did some enormous deep dives into the way that specific apps work. Here is one on mapping....

This is text. Text intentions

February 28, 2022

I will discuss text now. I won’t discuss text often, but if you are going to discuss text on text, it should definitely be at the beginning of text. There is...