Thinking, in public
Field notes on design, engineering and growth — written by the people who ship the work. No thought leadership, just lessons with receipts.
Engineering the 80-millisecond moments
Micro-interactions are where product quality is felt. Press states, instant visual feedback, focus continuity, and testing feel with the same rigour as function.
Hero sections beyond the gradient blob
A field guide to memorable homepage heroes: typographic statements, generative canvases, product-in-context and editorial openers — with the performance cost of each.
Trust marks without the clipart
Certification badges and partner logos are the least trusted pixels on B2B sites. Typographic credentials, provenance links, and when badges erode trust.
Audit first, test second: heuristic CRO that finds the free wins
Before your next A/B test, walk the funnel as a stranger. Our heuristic CRO audit method: the friction walkthrough, severity scoring, and fixes that don't need stats.
Information architecture for marketing sites: the growth lever in plain sight
IA decides what buyers find, what search engines index and what survives a redesign. The nav-to-journey map, the three-level ceiling and URLs that outlive themes.
Shipping LLM features: what production taught us
The lessons that only arrive after launch: latency budgets in the wild, streaming UX edge cases, cost surprises, fallbacks, and expectations users hold.
Rebrand rollout: the domino order matters
A rebrand is a logistics operation wearing a brand costume. The domino order — domain, redirects, app stores, email, legal — that decides whether launch week sings.
Headless commerce: when it's worth it and when it's theatre
Headless earns its complexity only in specific conditions. A decision framework: team requirements, real TCO, and the architecture sweet spots for mid-market brands.
Accessibility starts in the design file
Most accessibility rework is a design-file problem found too late. The annotations, contrast workflows and focus specs that stop retrofits before they start.
Auditing third-party scripts before they audit you
Third-party scripts are a governed supply chain, not a paste bin. Our audit method: measure the cost, gate on consent, fence with CSP, and assign every tag an owner.
AI and brand voice: keeping the robot on-script
Models drift toward LinkedIn-speak. How we write voice specs machines can follow — exemplars, register maps, persona rules — and test them with real readers.
Measuring brand without voodoo
Brand measurement for people allergic to brand science: aided recall, share of search, consistency audits and the quarterly one-pager leadership actually reads.