text

Kaikado

May 11, 2022

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....

---

The grammar

Premium post · 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

May 6, 2022

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

Premium post · 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

May 2, 2022

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...

---

One Week

Premium post · 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...

---

One tote

Premium post · 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

April 25, 2022

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...

---

Two Faces

April 21, 2022

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

Premium post · 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

April 15, 2022

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....

---

Leveraged

April 11, 2022

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

---

Trinidad Sour

Premium post · 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

April 6, 2022

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

Premium post · 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

Premium post · 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

March 30, 2022

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"

Premium post · 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

March 25, 2022

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

Premium post · 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,...

---