2025-10-31 19:05:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Frank Chimero, whose blog can be found at frankchimero.com.
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I’m Frank Chimero, I design and write from my little apartment in New York City. I’ve been doing this for a long time, mostly for technology and media companies. Other than work, I’m interested in the same things many other people are: my partner, my dog, visiting museums, movies, paintings, reading, cooking, stimulating conversation, and long walks. A lot of those have a tendency to go together, especially here in New York, which is nice.
I started teaching design shortly after finishing undergrad and had a great time with it. My students and I had so many stimulating conversations in the classroom, and their questions really forced me to think about my presumptions and beliefs about design in a way I wouldn't have without the prompting. So, after class, I'd type them up and was eager to share, and thus my blog was born.
Writing is generally a way to scratch an itch in my brain. Sometimes it is an annoyance or disagreement with something else I read, or responding to an idea I came across in my reading that captivated me in some way, and trying to figure out why it grabbed me. Most first drafts are brain dumps in front of the keyboard or going for a walk and using speech to text on my phone. These things are incredibly rough, and take a bit of polishing until they end up on the site, but I enjoy that process too. It’s nice to nudge, tweak, and expand on parts and feel things get stronger or more clear. I try to have some interesting reference or idea at the heart of each post I make, because it’s what I want to read. The web I am interested in is the insights and ideas of individuals.
Some people will think I’m a barbarian, but I don’t think tools matter that much. I write in TextEdit. If it’s by hand, it is typically on loose copier paper and a pen I stole from a hotel. I’m sensitive to spaces and love a beautiful room and good lighting, but I think it is more worthwhile to learn how to write well in spite of the environment rather than because of it. At least, that’s what I tell myself. The trick, for me, is to seek out those beautiful places and experiences and try to hold on to the internal environment they create in me, then find ways to get it down onto the page later. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t.
A few years ago I wrote a book called The Shape of Design. I’d book trains from New York City up to Albany to enjoy the views of the Hudson Valley from the train window. The trip was about 8 hours there and back home. I got so many words down, something about the momentum of the view creating a velocity in the writing. But you know what? Once I stacked that writing up next to all the other writing I did in libraries, at the kitchen table, or coffee shops, I never could pinpoint where what was written.
This is going to be underwhelming. I have an off-the-rack Macbook Pro M4. There is pretty much nothing installed on it except Figma, my fonts, and just enough of a local dev environment to make my rickety Jekyll deployments. If you were to close your eyes and imagine the first five sites you’d need for work, I have those, too. I have last year’s iPhone with YouTube and NTS Radio on it. I’ve stripped most everything out. It makes no difference. I just type and typeset.
I’m not certain. I have no clue how one would grow an audience in 2025 without betraying some of my values about respecting people’s attention. My current mindset is to enjoy my audience, respect them, and make no presumptions about it growing.
The site either costs $60 or $0, depending on how you look at it. It’s served via Github Pages, which requires a subscription, but it also pays for other things like private repos, etc. I’ve never tried to make money with the writing on my site. Even the book I wrote is available in full online for free. This isn’t necessarily a moral stance, it is simply that the economics of it wouldn’t pay enough to justify the headspace it’d occupy. If others want to do something different, I say go for it.
I focus most of my reading time on books, and most of my digital reading is happening through newsletters these days. On the blog side of things, I mostly check up on friends’ writing by manually going to their site. “I wonder what Naz is up to?” and that kind of thing. I know there is RSS, but seeing the site is half the point. You’ve already interviewed a lot of them, but I think you would get a kick going through Rob Weychert’s obsessively maximalist life-documentation-as-blog. It is exactly the opposite of my own tendencies (“anything you don’t remember must not be that important”), and I have a lot of admiration, confusion, and respect for what he’s done.
I want to take a moment to give a shout out to libraries. Librarians are god’s people. I think there is a strong ideological kinship between digital personal publishing (blogs) and libraries (self-expression, availability of information, capitalistic counterpoint, community and connection, and the overall “this is for everyone” vibe the web was born from). So, go check out your local library. Get a card, check out a book, enjoy the space, and maybe ask about what other services they have to offer besides media. Good communities come from good people and good spaces. Supporting your local library may be a way to nudge the world toward your vision of how it should be. Or it could just be a nice way to spend an afternoon.
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2025-10-27 01:00:00
Ego is one of those words that’s difficult to parse. I find language to be an imperfect tool in the quest to describe the inner workings of the mind, because in there, things tend to be fuzzy, while words are often sharp, pointing to distinct concepts that are seldom found in someone’s brain.
«I don’t have an ego», some claim. How that is even possible remains a mystery. I suspect it all comes down to how one defines the word ego, and what concepts are associated to it. Personally, I find the whole concept of trying to “give up” one’s ego to be quite futile. Take this definition as a starting point:
In philosophy, the self, or the ego, is an individual's own being, knowledge, and values, and the relationship between these attributes.
If we use this definition of ego, I don’t see how you can ever get to giving it up. Unless by giving it up one means killing themselves, which personally I don’t find to be a compelling answer to this question. Because to give up something, someone has to be there to be the subject of the giving up. But if nobody’s there anymore, nothing is given up, because there’s nothing that can be given up. Do I make any sense?
Ego gives us many other words: from egoism, to egotism, to egocentrism. Those are all words that carry a bad reputation; nobody likes to be called an egoist. As social creatures, as part of the larger group of billions of human beings currently living on this earth, we find these constant inward-looking traits to be undesirable.
That said, though, I find the idea of always living experiences in the service of others, in an attempt to suppress one’s ego, to be an unhealthy way to go about spending the time we have available on this planet. Attempting to completely annihilate the things that make you you, in order to better fit with the rest of society, is not worth it.
It’s not healthy to spend time on this planet thinking you’re the absolute best at everything and nobody can teach you anything ever. That’s obvious. But the opposite is also not healthy: living your life thinking you’re worth nothing, that you know nothing, that everyone knows more and is worth than you and that they should be the ones to talk, to teach, to do, to earn.
If there’s one lesson I try to carry with me, it's that extremes are bad. And the goal should be to keep the pendulum swings to a minimum, and spend as much time as possible at the centre, where things are balanced. And you might think I’m saying this to you, but I’m actually talking to myself. Because the ego is still there, the inner dialogue continues, and the personal struggles will persist.
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2025-10-24 19:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Romina Malta, whose blog can be found at romi.link.
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I’m Romina Malta, a graphic artist and designer from Buenos Aires. Design found me out of necessity: I started with small commissions and learned everything by doing. What began as a practical skill became a way of thinking and a way to connect the things I enjoy: image, sound, and structure.
Over time, I developed a practice with a very specific and recognizable imprint, working across music, art, and technology. I take on creative direction and design projects for artists, record labels, and cultural spaces, often focusing on visual identity, books, and printed matter.
I also run door.link, a personal platform where I publish mixtapes. It grew naturally from my habit of spending time digging for music… searching, buying, and finding sounds that stay with me. The site became a way to archive that process and to share what I discover.
Outside of my profession, I like traveling, writing, and spending long stretches of time alone at home. That’s usually when I can think clearly and start new ideas.
The journal began as a way to write freely, to give shape to thoughts that didn’t belong to my design work or to social media. I wanted a slower space where things could stay in progress, where I could think through writing.
I learned to read and write unusually early, with a strange speed, in a family that was almost illiterate, which still makes it more striking to me. I didn’t like going to school, but I loved going to the library. I used to borrow poetry books, the Bible, short novels, anything I could find. Every reading was a reason to write, because reading meant getting to know the world through words. That was me then, always somewhere between reading and writing.
Over the years that habit never left. A long time ago I wrote on Blogger, then on Tumblr, and later through my previous websites. Each version reflected a different moment in my life, different interests, tones, and ways of sharing. The format kept changing, but the reason stayed the same: I’ve always needed to write things down, to keep a trace of what’s happening inside and around me.
For me, every design process involves a writing process. Designing leads me to write, and writing often leads me back to design. The journal became the space where those two practices overlap, where I can translate visual ideas into words and words into form.
Sometimes the texts carry emotion; other times they lean toward a kind of necessary dramatism. I like words, alone, together, read backwards. I like letters too; I think of them as visual units. The world inside my mind is a constant conversation, and the journal is where a part of that dialogue finds form.
There’s no plan behind it. It grows slowly, almost unnoticed, changing with whatever I’m living or thinking about. Some months I write often, other times I don’t open it for weeks. But it’s always there, a reminder that part of my work happens quietly, and that sometimes the most meaningful things appear when nothing seems to be happening.
Writing usually begins with something small, a sentence I hear, a word that stays, or an image I can’t stop thinking about. I write when something insists on being written. There is no plan or schedule; it happens when I have enough silence to listen.
I don’t do research, but I read constantly. Reading moves the language inside me. It changes how I think, how I describe, how I look at things. Sometimes reading becomes a direct path to writing, as if one text opened the door to another.
I love writing on the computer. The rhythm of typing helps me find the right tempo for my thoughts. I like watching the words appear on the screen, one after another, almost mechanically. It makes me feel that something is taking shape outside of me.
When I travel, I often write at night in hotels. The neutral space, the different air, the sound of another city outside the window, all create a certain kind of attention that I can’t find at home. The distance, in some way, sharpens how I think.
Sometimes I stop in the middle of a sentence and return to it days later. Other times I finish in one sitting and never touch it again. It depends on how it feels. Writing is less about the result and more about the moment when the thought becomes clear.
You know, writing and design are part of the same process. Both are ways of organizing what’s invisible, of trying to give form to something I can barely define. Designing teaches me how to see, and writing teaches me how to listen.
Yes, space definitely influences how I work. I notice it every time I travel. Writing in hotels, for example, changes how I think. There’s something about being in a neutral room, surrounded by objects that aren’t mine, that makes me more observant. I pay attention differently.
At home I’m more methodical. I like having a desk, a comfortable chair, and a bit of quiet. I usually work at night or very early in the morning, when everything feels suspended. I don’t need much: my laptop, a notebook, paper, pencils around. Light is important to me. I prefer dim light, sometimes just a lamp, enough to see but not enough to distract. Music helps too, especially repetitive sounds that make time stretch.
I think physical space shapes how attention flows. Sometimes I need stillness, sometimes I need movement. A familiar room can hold me steady, while an unfamiliar one can open something unexpected. Both are necessary.
The site is built on Cargo, which I’ve been using for a few years. I like how direct it feels… It allows me to design by instinct, adjusting elements visually instead of through code. For the first time, I’m writing directly on a page, one text over another, almost like layering words in a notebook. It’s a quiet process.
Eventually I might return to using a service that helps readers follow and archive new posts more easily, but for now I enjoy this way.
I don’t think I would change much. The formats have changed, the platforms too, but the impulse behind it is the same. Writing online has always been a way to think in public.
Maybe I’d make it even simpler. I like when a website feels close to a personal notebook… imperfect, direct, and a bit confusing at times. The older I get, the more I value that kind of simplicity.
If anything, I’d try to document more consistently. Over the years I’ve lost entire archives of texts and images because of platform changes or broken links. Now I pay more attention to preserving what I make, both online and offline.
Other than that, I’d still keep it small and independent.
It costs very little. Just the domain, hosting, and the time it takes to keep it alive. I don’t see it as a cost but as part of the work, like having a studio, or paper, or ink. It’s where things begin before they become something else.
I’ve never tried to monetise the blog. It doesn’t feel like the right space for that. romi.link/journal exists outside of that logic; it’s not meant to sell or promote anything. It’s more like an open notebook, a record of thought.
That said, I understand why people monetise their blogs. Writing takes time and energy, and it’s fair to want to sustain it. I’ve supported other writers through subscriptions or by buying their publications, and I think that’s the best way to do it, directly, without the noise of algorithms or ads.
I’ve been reading Fair Companies for a while now. Not necessarily because I agree with everything, of course, but because it’s refreshing to find other points of view. I like when a site feels personal, when you can sense that someone is genuinely curious.
Probably Nicolas Boullosa
Hm… No mucho. Lately I’ve been thinking about how fragile the internet feels. Everything moves too quickly, and yet most of what we publish disappears almost instantly. Keeping a personal site today feels like keeping a diary in public: it’s small, quiet, and mostly unseen, but it resists the speed of everything else. I find comfort in that slowness.
Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog.
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2025-10-22 15:05:00
Yesterday, OpenAI announced Atlas, its AI browser. To the surprise of literally nobody, it’s Chromium with AI slapped on top. Perplexity also has a browser: it’s called Comet, and it also is Chromium with AI slapped on top. Then we have DIA, which is, you guessed it, Chromium with AI slapped on top. I think Opera also has one of those Chromium browsers with AI slapped on top.
I code sites for a living (allegedly), and I honestly cannot overstate how uninterested I am in all these new browsers. Because these are not new browsers: these are Chromium frames with AI slapped on top.
The thing I found more interesting about the whole OpenAI announcement was Sam Altman tweeting: «10 am livestream today to launch a new product I'm quite excited about!». This is coming from someone who’s allegedly running a company that’s building a tool that should usher in a new era where computers will replace most of human work, where we’ll all have a super intelligence always available in our pockets, ready to dispense infinite wisdom.
And yet he’s quite excited about a fucking Chromium installation with AI slapped on top of it. I guess building an actual browser, from scratch, is still a task so monumentally difficult that even a company that is aiming for super-intelligence can’t tackle it.
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2025-10-21 19:40:00
Found on Kev’s blog and originally started by Dave, here are my answers to this fun blog challenge:
Sometimes. I’d say maybe a few times a week? I’m terrible at being consistent, and that includes flossing regularly.
Coffee in the morning, tea (sometimes) later in the day, not enough water the rest of the time. Did I mention I’m terrible at being consistent? That includes drinking enough water.
Right now, I’d say flip flops, even though they are a terrible choice when you have to walk around the woods.
Probably Crema catalana. It’s the one dessert I’m resisting the temptation to buy what’s needed to make it myself at home because I know I’d end up eating it every day, three times a day.
I say hi to the dog that’s for sure sleeping somewhere near.
From a purely physical perspective, I’d say 22. If I have to consider all factors, I’d say 36. And I’m 36.
Do beanies and toques count as hats? Because if they do, then I own 7 hats. If they don’t, then I’m down to 3.
It’s from a walk with the dog the other day: clear sky and some tree branches and leaves illuminated by a lovely light. Most of my gallery looks like that.
I don’t watch TV, and the last time I watched a TV series, I think it was in the dark days of the COVID shutdown, which happened what, 32 years ago? I don’t even know what’s on TV these days.
The oldest memory I have of a job I wanted to do was car designer. I remember loving seeing yellow FIAT Coupé around. Funny because now I couldn’t care less about cars.
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2025-10-20 15:20:00
Quick PSA for those of you out there who are interested in subscribing to either my From the Summit 2.0, the newsletter version of People and Blogs, or simply prefer to get these blog posts delivered via email: all those newsletters require double opt-in.
What that means is that once you have signed up, you should get a second email asking you to click a link to confirm your email address. Sometimes those emails land in the spam folder for reasons unknown to me. Maybe I don’t pray the SMTP gods with enough conviction, who knows.
What I do know is that I see a lot of people signing up and then not confirming their addresses. So, if you did sign up but did not receive the confirmation email, ping me either via email or Apple Messages, using [email protected], and I’ll look into that.
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