Words that would otherwise be coming out of my mouth

This is the home of the Tiny Awards, which, since 2023, has celebrated the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web. The Tiny Awards exist because we thought it was important to shine a spotlight on the sorts of […]

Chapters 1 & 2 of our AI & Design Systems Course are live! 🎉 Our course now has over 16 hours of videos, which includes course lessons, community jam sessions, and other demonstrations. TJ, Ian, and I have been busting our asses, and are […]

 I want to talk about this moment in time, this AI era, through the lens of grief. Grief is a powerful response to loss. When we think about grief, we often think about death, but it’s taken me a long […]

The internet you grew up on isn’t dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is. YESSSSSS. The Boring Internet by Terry Godier

I had a wonderful chat about design systems and AI with Donnie D’Amato on his wireframe show. We talked about all sorts of spicy topics, and I feel like this conversation captures a lot of where my head’s at lately […]

On the latest episode of Wake Up Excited!, I got to talk with my friend, fellow traveler, and recent collaborator, Ben Callahan. Ben and I met at BDConf many many moons ago, and since then we’ve shared many adventures together, […]

Lately, I’ve been talking websites into existence. Not metaphorically, but actually sitting in important meetings with people — clients, collaborators, my wife, friends, neighbors — watching real websites materialize in front of us as we converse. I’ve been half-jokingly call […]

Brendan Dawes is a brilliant multi-disciplinary artist, designer, and technologist. Just one of his many many many creative projects is working on the incredible Eno documentary (directed by one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, Gary Hustwit). Brendan created the technology […]

I’ve gone a lot of hard and scary experiences that’s made me deeply value stability. After enduring varied traumas, I really turned on the afterburners to make up for being ripped away from my own life and to rebuild a […]

Dominic Nguyen (Founder of Storybook and Chromatic) joins me to talk about Storybook MCP the long journey of design system quality. We get into what it actually feels like to be “scaredcited” right now, and Dom shows off the newly-released […]

My 8-year-old vibe-coded a video game called “Play With Michael McDonald”, and she wanted to present it. So here’s Ella! The origin story After playing some Mario Party minigames the other evening, my 8-year-old daughter said, I wanna make a […]

Today I trekked to my daughter’s school (a long walk across the street!) to speak at her after-school coding club that’s been meeting weekly over the last month. It was really fun to see how they were learning to code. […]

I found myself using the phrase “the Creative Infinite” when I’m talking about AI as a design material. I keep coming back to it because I don’t think we’ve fully grasped what this technology actually is, what it can do, […]

On Friday night, I needed a break from screens, so decided to work on a bathroom mural that our family has been chipping away at for the last 4 years. But a lot was on my mind, so made the […]

A curated collection of the best in contemporary type design Elliot is back with a new typography book! Elliot Jay Stocks

I was walking my dog in the woods and decided to share my thoughts about the state of AI and the tension between the trajectory of AI companies and the designers/creators/makers of the world who are under a tremendous deal […]

I love this so much. We take so much for granted, so I freaking love to be reminded of the time-traveling magic of recorded music.

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.”– Tom & David Kelley But what if the meeting is the prototype? That’s the spirit of an idea I’m calling “Real-time UI” (the name […]

For months and months, I’ve been rebuilding our music studio. I’m AAAAALLLLMOST done with it, but it’s close enough to start sharing things. Here’s Melissa and I playing along with a song with an incredible vibe: Ghostwriter by RJD2.

I shared this in our Slack this morning and wanted to share it here because this is the type of community we’re trying to foster. We want to For now, the ticket for joining our community is purchasing one of […]