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.
A research repository that gets read after the study ends
Most research dies in a read-once PDF. Build a repository people actually use: atomic notes, a lasting taxonomy, insight half-lives, traceable decisions.
Honest inventory: stock states without the fake-scarcity slime
Stock states designed honestly: real low-stock signals, backorders with dates, preorders without traps, and inventory messaging that builds trust.
Preorders and backorders: UX for not-in-stock
Preorders and backorders without burning trust: dates as promises, deposit patterns, honest expectation-setting, split shipments, and copy that keeps inboxes quiet.
Accessibility is an engineering discipline, not a ticket queue
Treating accessibility as infrastructure: axe in CI, linting, component contracts, keyboard hierarchies, and who on the squad owns what. WCAG AA as a floor.
Testing design tokens in CI like the API they are
Design tokens are an API contract between design and engineering. The CI pipeline that enforces it: grammar linting, ancestry checks, contrast tests.
Help at the point of need
The user manual nobody opens, the tooltip that shouldn't exist, and how to design help that arrives where the question does — and gets out of the way.
The logo is dead; long live the identity system
The standalone logo died when surfaces multiplied and motion became default. What replaced it isn't a smaller logo — it's an idea designed to survive every context.
After launch: the first 90 days done properly
Launch day is the start, not the finish. How we run the first 90 days after a site ships: analytics baselines, bug etiquette, and the next engagement.
Colour systems that survive dark mode and rebrands
Literal palettes break the moment a brand shifts or dark mode ships. Here's the semantic colour architecture that has survived both — twice — on real client work.
When the founder IS the brand (and when to stop)
Founder-led brands convert brilliantly and scale terribly. How to harvest founder voice into systems, manage the handover, and spot personality gone toxic.
Designing for the gift buyer, not just the fan
Gift buyers are a different user with different anxieties. Gift finders, delivery-date honesty, card messages and the Q4 checklist done right.
The technical SEO checklist we run before every launch
Our pre-launch SEO checklist became code: crawl assertions in CI, header diffs, structured-data audits — plus the judgement checks that never automate.