tag · Design
14 piecesin your own image
To describe a burden well enough to dissolve it is to re-make its world in your own shape.
paint is a physics engine
Wiremod and Dreams both work, and almost nobody is fluent in both. That split is not a fact about people.
the changelog is the leaderboard
Every game has an intended action and a found one. We still file the distance between them as a defect.
the room that forgot what it was for
Forty years of research built a place for each context and a memory of what it was for. Only the place shipped.
a root to stand on
Every multi-organization tool ships a switcher, not a root. So I built the root Paperclip shipped without.
three games to sell one
Final Fantasy VII shipped once in 1997. The remake takes twelve years, three products, four platforms.
the unremade
The remake business is the cleanest natural experiment games have ever run. Almost nobody reads the results.
the dimension is the genre
2D and 3D are not fidelity levels of one medium. They are two media, and crossing over is a genre change.
visible upon breakdown
A managed service is invisible exactly when it is working. The only fix is artifacts the client can check.
the menu is the squat
Tarkov's menus are not bad UX. They are a posture about time, work, and reward.
SCADA is the future
Every few years, someone reinvents the pixel. Rounded corners. Glassmorphism. Neumorphism. Gradient meshes. Animated SVG backgrounds that consume more …
the last screen
Thirty years of interface design assumed a human was looking. If the agent does the work, who is the UI for?
what SCADA knows
Three Mile Island gave industrial automation thirty years of alarm design. Software never read it.
The Radar Paradox
License Radar's design came out of iteration, rejection, and noticing when something accidentally worked.