Jamming on a WIP

For whatever reason, while I’ve known the power of collaboration in my head, my heart generally inclined itself to stay hush on my works in progress (WIP). Some reasons: I don’t mind telling friends or people, I just also don’t want to tell everyone; there’s the paper suggesting that publicly announcing your goals could make […]

Same word, different meaning

A curious thing I learned today, via the marginalia (delightful, as always), in The Shared Language of Props:  False cognates are words that look similar but have different meanings; heteronyms are words that are spelled the same but are pronounced differently. Even expanding beyond the technical environment, I couldn’t agree more; words are incredibly contextual, […]

Good editing is cutting

If your personality is inclined to optimism, one of the most difficult aspects of the editorial skillset is learning to say no. There’s certainly an opportunity to liken this to the classic business strategy phrase, “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Without trade-offs, there would be no need for choice and […]

Uphill thinking

My team recently posted this piece by John Maeda to Shortcut. When Carly sent the team an initial draft she and John had worked on, I was mind blown—it was the best thing I’d read all week. Here’s an excerpt: Humans are innately driven to take the adventurous, longer route. Our distinct traits of creativity, […]

GL HF

As a teenager I played a fair amount of Starcraft. I was rarely ever the best player—I didn’t click fast enough, I didn’t play with enough aggression, and I relied too often on the same strategies when I should have been evolving them—which meant that I didn’t put myself in a winning position very often. […]

A newsletter you’ll want to share…

My team at Figma is working on a really cool editorial project. I can’t say much about it—only that it’s designed to earn its way into your inbox. Visit our blog, Shortcut, and scroll to the middle (“Subscribe to Shortcut for an instantly better inbox”). Subscribe to the mailing list to be the first to […]

Documenting Config

My colleague Jenny and I have been busy documenting Config here at the new Figma blog, Shortcut. Because you can already watch many of the sessions here, we decided to approach it with an emphasis on the atmosphere and the experience.