2026-02-17 13:00:00
At long last — catching up here! It’s been months since my last visual-journal entry here, but I have kept up offline. Here’s a sampling.
A friend asked me recently about my collage source material. At this point, I very rarely cut something out of a book or magazine directly and fix it onto a page.
Instead, I most often collect digital images and process them a bit before printing them at home and using them like any other collage material. Sometimes, I run already printed pages several more times through the printer in order to layer images and create textures. Other times, I will build pages in digital composition programs before printing them and using them as base layers for what I add in the book.
One of my favorite things to do is create very small collages while listening to music. Once I’m done, I’ll trim them and add them to the book.
Shameless promotion of my son’s art here ^
All twenty-six letters right there on the left!
2026-02-15 13:00:00
Several years ago, I created a new design for my website and attempted to alter my Blot theme to match it. It didn’t work out especially well, and I became quickly frustrated by what I perceived to be a limitation of the theme to handle what I considered to be pretty simple design choices. I was wrong, not about how simple the implementation would be, but about how to do it.
Blot themes use Mustache, which defines templates without explicit logic — inserting content dynamically by wrapping labels in braces ({{) that end up looking like mustaches. I’d read through support documentation a few times before but never fully understood it. It’s not especially complicated; I just never tried to learn it properly. So what changed? I made a teacher.
First, of course, I wasted a bunch of time by feeding Claude several sources of information about Mustache. This was unnecessary — Claude already knows it. Then I asked Claude to explain it to me, setting the stage by reminding Claude that though I understand HTML, CSS, Javascript, and have done interaction design for a long time, I would benefit from it assuming I was completely green. Things started to click.
Next, I finalized new designs in Figma and translated them to code using Anima. I gave the resulting HTML and CSS files to Claude and asked it to critique, simplify, and recompile them.
Then, I gave Claude all my Blot theme files and asked it to recreate them from scratch to match what I had designed. This was where things got fun, because I was able to describe features and behaviors I wanted and Claude was able to make recommendations for how to best achieve them both with my theme files but also with how I structure my markdown for entries to the site. There were so many inefficiencies in how I created my entry text files that created creative resistance. Dialoguing with Claude helped me optimize this process, which, after more than a decade of maintaining my website with a flat file CMS, feels like a revelation on par with when I first set it up.
I just took a “warning I’m messing with my site” banner down, but that doesn’t mean everything is perfect. There are plenty of old entries I haven’t gotten to yet, so there will be some display oddities there due to how I had set them up in their text file. I’ll eventually update everything. But for now, I’m very happy with how this is taking shape. I haven’t enjoyed doing actual web development so much in a very long time.
It goes without saying that AI was a critical tool in this process. But what I think is most important to stress here is that AI didn’t redesign and rebuild my website for me. I’ve been very critical of headlines that oversimplify how AI can be used to create a website. Not because it isn’t possible to “have AI make a website for you,” but because what “AI,” “make,” and “website” mean in that statement will vary widely depending upon many factors that the very person likely to find such an idea compelling will not understand. Look, five years from now, there probably will be a magic website maker button. But I suspect that won’t stop people from making creative and technical choices that afford them greater control over the results at the cost of more work. I couldn’t have updated my site as quickly as I did without using AI at certain points in this process, that is for sure. But I also wouldn’t have learned as much about how everything underneath this page works as quickly as I did if I hadn’t used AI. And that, for me, is the most interesting thing at the moment: culture seems inordinately fixated upon AI as a “doer”, which should be heavily debated, and in my observation, less interested in AI as a teacher.
Anyway, I’m going on much longer than I intended. Perhaps more on that doing vs. teaching thing another time :)
If you notice anything you like, dislike, or seems obviously broken, let me know: [email protected]!
2026-02-05 13:00:00
Can there be progress without disruption?
It sometimes feels as if our culture has become addicted to doom — needing time to be marked by fearful anticipation rather than something more proactive or controlled. We’ve learned to expect that change must be chaotic, that innovation must be destructive, that the future must collide with the now whether we want it to or not.
But there’s nothing about progress that inherently requires disruption except our inability to cooperate for the sake of stability.
Consider the current conversation around AI and the future of work. Most people seem to agree there are three possible scenarios:
Scenario A: AI replaces nearly all functions provided by people so quickly that society can’t respond as it has to previous industrial revolutions. Mass unemployment destabilizes social structures supported by wage taxation. Even in a soft landing — universal basic income, increased corporate taxation — this is seen as catastrophic because it is contrary to the current capitalist paradigm and leaves humans with the existential problem of separating meaning and purpose from work.
Scenario B: AI replaces most current functions, but not as quickly. Sustained unemployment persists, but the gradual shift creates opportunities for humans to differentiate themselves from machines and derive value accordingly. Painful, but manageable. And afterward, this may even make possible a more deliberate and gentle passage to a new kind of society.
Scenario C: We recognize that AI’s current trajectory is destructive to the social fabric. We slow it down, change how it’s used, possibly reject aspects of it entirely. This would be the Amish approach — where observation and discussion about how a technology benefits the community determines its acceptance, use, and integration.
Most people assume Scenario C is impossible. We’re already too far down the path, they say. The technology exists, the investment has been made, the momentum is unstoppable. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Perhaps power and money are too committed now — unwilling and unable to accept regulation — untouchable by those that want something different.
But perhaps not. There are cultures that show us the way.
Despite common understanding, the Amish aren’t technophobes. They do use technology, just not everything that comes along. They carefully evaluate tools communally, based on whether they strengthen or weaken their social fabric. They observe. They choose. They have agency. A telephone might help, but only if placed in a shared building rather than individual homes, so it doesn’t fragment family time. The Amish demonstrate that discernment does not mean rejection.
It seems we’ve lost the ability to do the same. More accurately, though, I believe we’ve been convinced we’ve lost it.
We’ve internalized technological determinism so completely that choosing not to adopt something — or choosing to adopt it slowly, carefully, with conditions — feels like naive resistance to inevitable progress. But “inevitable” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Inevitable for whom? Inevitable according to whom?
The conflation of progress with disruption serves specific interests. It benefits those who profit from rapid, uncontrolled deployment. “You can’t stop progress” is a very convenient argument when you’re the one profiting from the chaos, when your business model depends on moving fast and breaking things before anyone can evaluate whether those things should be broken.
Disruption benefits the information economy. It makes a good story when it happens, and a seductive — if not addictive — constant drip of doom when it feels as if it’s just around the corner. I’d love to live in a world in which good future narratives outsold apocalyptic ones, but I don’t. And so the medium creates the message, and the message creates the moment.
Disruption has become such a powerful memetic force that we’ve simply forgotten it’s optional. We’ve been taught that technological change must be chaotic, uncontrolled, and socially destructive — that anything less isn’t real innovation. But this framing is itself a choice, one that’s been made for us by people with specific incentives.
Think about what we’ve accepted as inevitable in the last twenty-five years: the fragmentation of attention, the erosion of privacy, the monetization of human connection, the replacement of public spaces with corporate platforms, the optimization of everything for engagement regardless of human cost. We were told these were the price of progress, that resistance was futile, that the technology was neutral and the outcomes were just the natural evolution of how humans interact.
But none of it was inevitable. All of it was chosen. Not by us, but for us.
The doom addiction makes sense in this context. If change is inevitable and we have no agency over it, then the most we can do is anticipate its arrival with a mixture of dread and fascination. Doom is exciting. Doom is dramatic. Doom absolves us of responsibility because if catastrophe is coming regardless of what we do, why bother trying to prevent it?
But stability? Cooperation? Careful evaluation of whether a technology actually serves us? These feel boring, impossible, naive. They require something we seem to have lost: the belief that we can collectively decide how technology integrates into our lives rather than simply accepting whatever technologists and investors choose to build.
I am not anti-technology. I have always been fascinated, excited, and motivated by new things. I am, however, choosey. This is about reclaiming the capacity to say “not like this” or “not yet” or “only under these conditions.” It’s about recognizing that the speed and manner of technological adoption is itself a choice, and one that should be made collectively rather than imposed by those who stand to profit.
What would it take to choose Scenario C? Not to reject AI entirely, but to evaluate it the way the Amish evaluate technology — with the community’s wellbeing as the primary criterion rather than efficiency or profit or inevitability.
It would require cooperation. It would require prioritizing stability over disruption. It would require believing that we have agency over how our world changes, that progress doesn’t have to be chaotic, that we can choose to integrate new capabilities slowly and carefully rather than accepting whatever pace Silicon Valley sets.
It would require rejecting the narrative that technological change is a force of nature rather than a series of choices made by people with specific interests.
Maybe we’ve actually lost the ability to cooperate at that scale. Maybe the forces pushing for rapid deployment are too powerful, too entrenched, too good at framing their interests as inevitable progress. Maybe Scenario C really is impossible.
But I suspect it’s less that we’ve lost the ability and more that we’ve forgotten we ever had it. We’ve been told for so long that we can’t choose, that resistance is futile, that disruption is the price of progress, that we’ve internalized it as truth.
The question isn’t whether we can have progress without disruption. The question is whether we can remember that we’re allowed to choose, and whether enough of us can do that at the same time.
2026-02-04 13:00:00
This is the reality of design work today. When you choose Webflow vs. WordPress vs. Shopify vs. custom development, you’re making decisions about what’s even possible to design, what fonts and components are available, how content will be structured, what the maintenance burden will be, what integrations are feasible, and what performance constraints you’ll live with.
These are foundational design decisions that shape everything downstream. But they’re rarely treated as design decisions at all. They’re business decisions (“what’s fastest and cheapest?”) or technical decisions (“what does the dev team already know?”) or procurement decisions (“we already pay for this platform”).
The pressure to do more with less, to ship faster, makes consolidation not just attractive but mandatory. You can’t justify custom development when you need to deliver three sites this quarter. You can’t argue for the perfect tool when the platform with everything integrated exists and cuts weeks off the timeline. So designers end up making the most consequential choice — the platform — based on constraints rather than design goals. And then they spend all their energy optimizing within those constraints, never questioning whether the platform itself was the right choice.
This creates a strange inversion. The design decisions that matter most — platform, structure, foundational constraints — are made by business stakeholders who already pay for a service, developers who know a particular system, or project managers looking at integration compatibility. Meanwhile, designers focus on decisions that matter less: typography within the platform’s limited font library, layout within the platform’s grid system, interactions within the platform’s available animations.
And there’s a compounding effect. Once a platform is chosen, it’s extremely difficult to switch. You’re locked in. Every subsequent project becomes “well, we’re already on Webflow, so…” The initial choice compounds over years. The design constraint becomes permanent.
One platform may integrate with a particular source for web fonts while another offers something different. One handles e-commerce elegantly but struggles with content management. Another excels at blogs but limits design flexibility. These trade-offs determine what you can make before you’ve made anything. We are rarely able to consider these things at the right time because the pressures we face make consolidation extremely attractive, if not entirely necessary.
Platform consolidation isn’t neutral. Each platform embodies assumptions about what design should be, what interactions should feel like, what structures make sense. When most design happens within platforms, most design loses its definition. It cannot distinguish itself from something else, whether by look, feel, features, or even purpose.
This makes designed artifacts with business objectives weaker, and it makes designers who produce them this way for years weaker thinkers.
The short-term question is whether designers can reclaim platform selection as a design decision. Can we advocate for the right platform early, making the case that choosing the right foundation matters more than any individual design decision that comes after? Or has the “do more with less, faster” pressure made that impossible?
Platform selection is a necessary design skill. Becoming expert at understanding what each platform enables and constrains, and being able to translate that into business language. Helping stakeholders see that a platform choice isn’t just about speed or cost — it’s about what you’ll be able to make, how it will evolve, and what constraints you’ll live with for years. All non-negotiable.
But this requires designers to think like strategists and speak the language of business constraints. It requires clients and stakeholders to trust that a designer’s platform recommendation is about design outcomes, not just designer preference. And it requires everyone to acknowledge that often the most important design decision happens before the designer has even gotten started.
But the long-term question is this: How and when do we differentiate between creativity and configuration?
When the medium determines so much that design work looks like taking a multiple-choice test, what does it mean to call yourself a designer? Are you designing, or are you configuring? Plenty of designers will think, “so what if my day job looks like that — I can be creative on my own time.” But after 20+ years of working as a designer, I know two things extremely well: creative energy is not in infinite supply, and what you do from 9-5 will shape how you think, how you see, and how you work.
2026-02-02 13:00:00
The economy is both thriving and failing, depending on where you’re standing. The stock market remains strong, driven almost entirely by the valuations of seven companies. Meanwhile, most people experience a daily reality defined by inflation — everything costs more, no one is being paid more, and the gap between what the market says is happening and what life feels like keeps widening.
This fork in the economy isn’t an accident. I think it reveals something fundamental about AI that we’ve been unwilling to name: it delivers efficiency, not innovation. And the market — the combined view of currency-wielding humans on Earth — is starting to figure that out.
I consider myself an AI moderate. I think AI is a very useful technology. It can accelerate work, uncover patterns, and illuminate information a person would never find on their own. The fact that I’m using it right now to help refine this essay speaks to that utility.
To be clear: I have no issue with the kinds of AI driving scientific discoveries — protein folding, drug discovery, materials science. But those breakthroughs come from machine learning and analytical systems, not the large language model generative AI that’s driving the valuations of companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Alphabet. If anything, it’s bizarre that the companies using AI to advance science aren’t worth more than the ones using LLMs to force copilots on everyone.
When the internet became publicly available, it delivered immediate, ground-level transformation. Email didn’t just make it faster to send a message across the country — it made it possible to send messages virtually anywhere, at any time. No one was going to run a distributed company communicating with letters; email made that possible. E-commerce didn’t speed up shopping — it connected buyers with products no matter where they were. The internet didn’t just make existing things faster — it made entirely new things possible. That’s innovation.
AI is different. Despite being a relative triumph of research and development, it doesn’t actually deliver net-new value. It replicates human effort nearly instantaneously, but it hasn’t created anything fundamentally new in human experience. For some of us deeply immersed in it, we can see value in synthesis and analysis at inhuman speeds. But for most people, the hallmarks of AI are immediately perceivable: the uncanny valley imagery, the distortions, the flatness.
This is why AI is almost entirely pitched these days around gaining efficiency — doing what you’ve always done faster, with less cost. That’s valuable, certainly, but to whom? Companies implementing AI tools expect their employees to use them to do more, faster. When an employee uses AI to do what two employees used to do, will they get paid twice what they used to? Of course not. But the company will pocket the difference. That will make the company richer, but does it really make it a better investment? Is efficiency why any of the top traded stocks cost what they do?
And there’s a deeper problem. If AI-driven efficiency means one worker doing what two used to do, eventually it means no workers doing what used to require hundreds. Mass unemployment is the logical endpoint of efficiency without innovation. The fewer people working, the fewer people buying. No amount of efficiency will keep a company profitable without customers who can afford what they’re selling. We’re watching companies optimize themselves toward a future where no one can afford their products.
Maybe AI will create new kinds of work, the way every previous automation wave eventually did. But that’s in the future. Right now, AI isn’t delivering those opportunities to anyone, and yet it’s the basis for historically unprecedented corporate valuations with almost no trickle-down to the average person.
And this is where the forked economy comes into focus. The traded share-based economy is essentially betting on seven companies whose valuations depend on AI delivering transformative innovation. But the Economy — the one experienced by everyone who holds and spends money — is registering something else entirely. It’s seeing efficiency gains that benefit corporations without corresponding benefits to workers or consumers. We’re at a point of diversion between value and perceived value, and that diversion is costly. The market can sustain the fiction for a while, but eventually the gap becomes untenable. When trillions in valuation rest on the promise of transformation, and what’s actually being delivered is optimization, something has to give.
The reason the market remains strong despite most people’s experience deteriorating is that the market isn’t most people anymore. It’s a handful of massive valuations propped up by the promise that AI will eventually deliver what the internet did — a genuine expansion of human capability and economic possibility. But I don’t think currency-wielding humans making daily decisions about value are convinced that forward-moving innovation has actually happened.
They’re right to be skeptical. Innovation creates new markets, new possibilities, new forms of value that didn’t exist before. Efficiency optimizes existing markets, existing processes, existing value chains. Both matter, but they’re not the same thing. And they don’t justify the same valuations.
The internet made email possible, then social networks, then streaming media, then entirely new industries that no one predicted. AI has made… slightly better autocomplete? Faster image generation that still looks uncanny? Customer service bots that frustrate more than they help? The gap between the hype and the reality is a trillion-dollar problem.
I’m not saying AI won’t eventually deliver genuine innovation. It might. But right now, what we have is a technology that excels at replication — at doing what humans already do, faster and cheaper — without expanding what’s possible. And an economy built on the assumption that replication equals innovation is an economy built on sand.
I’d love to rely upon the market’s “self-preservation instinct” to sort this all out. Perhaps it will. The question is how much damage a correction will cause, whether we’ll learn anything from it, and who will be left alive and trading.
2026-01-31 13:00:00
For our first wedding anniversary, I gave my wife a clock that measures years. It’s called The Present, created by Scott Thrift, a designer whose work I’d followed for some time. I’d invested in his Kickstarter campaign, and the clock arrived just in time for that first milestone. A timepiece that takes 365 days to complete a single rotation seemed like the perfect gift for marking an anniversary — a reminder that marriage is measured not in moments but in seasons.
The Present is beautiful: about twelve inches in diameter, with a domed glass front and a single white hand that passes over a rainbow gradient. The gradient flows from a sliver of white at the winter solstice through blue, green, yellow, orange, and red — watching seasons change as the hand moves from winter’s pale beginning through spring’s blue-green to summer’s yellow-orange to autumn’s deep red. We’ve watched that hand make ten complete rotations, each one marking another year together.
That clock took its place in what has become a collection of fifteen. Each one measures time differently — some track the familiar twelve-hour cycle, others span longer periods like The Present’s year-long journey. People often ask why I collect them. The answer lies somewhere between their mechanical beauty and what they represent: they are interfaces to time itself, each offering a different way of seeing our relationship with duration and change.
The collection fills our home deliberately. With some exceptions, most rooms have a single clock, and I’ve matched each to its space in a way that feels right. Most are silent — no audible ticks or chimes — but the loudest one hangs in our downstairs bathroom. Its mechanism drives what’s marketed as a “silent sweeping” second hand, but it produces a very audible hum.
In a typically silent space, that mechanical presence becomes something you can appreciate rather than tolerate.
In our downstairs hallway hangs a beautiful red Canetti clock — three stacked discs that rotate with time.
You can see it across rooms, its bright color pulling you through the house, organizing space around temporal awareness.
Another Scott Thrift piece hangs in our bedroom. This one measures a 24-hour period, pulling a single hand across a gradient from white to purple, marking the progression from sunrise to sunset.
It feels appropriate to see at the start and end of each day — a reminder that time follows natural rhythms, not just the arbitrary divisions of twelve hours repeated twice.
For me, and I hope for anyone who spends time in our home, this is more of a composition than a collection. Each clock creates its own temporal experience in its space, and together they create a kind of temporal architecture for how we move through our home and our days.
Most of the clocks in the house, even the vintage ones, now use battery-powered quartz movements — the variations are in how those movements drive hands across the clock face. Some have second hands that tick forward second by second, others have silently sweeping second hands, others have only minute or hour hands, and a few have other geometric forms that rotate to mark time.
There’s an illusion of perpetual motion — of course if the battery dies, the movement stops — but as long as it’s working, the feeling of constancy is a balm on the mind distracted by the churning woes of the world. The mechanics themselves are fascinating to me. These clocks don’t create digital worlds in the way that other personal machines I’ve written about do. But their machinery is almost like a key that opens the door onto an inner world — one that is quieter and protected from the volatility outside.
My phone shows 3:47 PM. My year clock shows late January. The phone’s precision can sometimes feel like a kind of tyranny — uniform, invisible, relentless. The year clock acknowledges that time has qualities, not just quantities.
There’s something profound about how mechanical clocks make time visible through motion and geometry. They don’t just display time; they embody it. Their movements create a kind of physical poetry. In an age where most of our interfaces try to hide their mechanisms behind smooth glass surfaces, these clocks celebrate their machinery, their gears, their essential nature as tools that transform abstract time into tangible movement.
Medieval scholars kept skulls on their desks — Memento Mori, reminders of death. I suppose that, in a way, my clocks serve a similar purpose. Each tick, each rotation, each completed cycle is a reminder of time’s inexorable passage and our own finite allocation of it. We only get so much; it is always moving forward; there is no rewind.
When The Present’s hand completes another full rotation, when another year has passed in what feels like a moment, I’m confronted with the speed of it all. Already, its hand has made ten complete journeys around that rainbow gradient. How many more?
Perhaps this is why I’m drawn to how these machines require attention — clocks need winding, adjusting, maintaining. This interaction creates a more intentional relationship with time. When I wind a clock, I’m not just maintaining a mechanism; I’m participating in the measurement of my own duration. When a battery dies and a clock stops, there’s a strange silence where constant motion used to be. It breaks the spell, reminds you that these systems of measurement are fragile, that they require care to continue.
We live at a time when digital technology distorts time. With perpetual connectivity, endless scrolling, and always more to consume is built the illusion of forever — that it will always flow — and the illusion of never — that any one bit of information has the lifespan of a mayfly. The digital wants to be timeless despite being the output of short-lived humans operating machines.
A clock can be a tether back to reality — a physical marker of duration that provides a vital reminder that our time is bounded, textured, and follows patterns older than any machine.
Each clock in my collection is an argument for a different way of seeing time, a different way of being in time. They are personal machines in the truest sense — not because they create virtual worlds, but because their machinery unlocks contemplative ones. Each creates its own temporal world, its own rhythm, its own reminder.
Population: 1.
Each, in its own way, reminds me that a moment can be as long or as brief as we need it to be. This is the long now, and this, too, shall pass.