About

I have been making things for the web for about a decade, and for the Mac for the last two years. The through-line is that I have never been able to leave the implementation to someone else — I want to know how the thing actually behaves, not how it looks in a file.

That has made me a strange hire and a happy independent. These days I build my own products, take on a small amount of design engineering work for teams I like, and write about the bits I had to figure out the hard way.

How I work

Prototype in the real medium, as early as possible. A static mock will tell you what something looks like; only a working one tells you what it feels like, and the feel is usually the whole product.

Ship the boring version first. It is the only reliable way to find out which of your clever ideas were load-bearing.

Write the copy before the layout. If the sentence is hard to write, the screen is about to be hard to design, and no amount of arrangement will fix it.

Before this

I studied bookbinding for a year after school and was not good at it. What survived is a permanent interest in how a thing is put together, and a slight prejudice in favour of objects that open flat.

If you want to talk about a project, or you just want to argue about focus rings, my inbox is open.