My corner of the internet.

Every number here is counted off this page as you read it, not typed in by me. Open a drawer or leave a mark and the panel moves. It is the same instrument I would put on any operation I was running, pointed at myself for once.

Nothing on this panel is sent anywhere. It is counted in your own browser and forgotten when you close it.

A plan chest against the wall, one drawer for each of the nine things on this desk worth keeping. Pull one out and it tells you why it is in the room. Only one opens at a time, which is also roughly how I work.

Not a claim about discipline, a map of it. Every hour of the week, weighted by how much of the work actually lands in it. The shape is the honest part: almost nothing before nine, a long run after ten at night, and a Sunday that has never once been a day off.

Read the ring outward from midnight. The heavier the mark, the more of the work happens there. The pale band across the middle of the day is for everything else.

One pair of hands. Work arrives when it arrives, and holding more of it at once does not buy me a second pair: the same day just gets divided, and every switch costs something off the top. Move the sliders and watch what happens to the lead time when I say yes to one more thing.

Eight things I actually believe, placed by how long I have held them and how sure I am. The ones on the right took years to earn. The ones near the bottom are still arguments I am having with myself. A line between two of them means the first one is why I think the second.

Nothing arrives at the top right. Everything up there started somewhere near the bottom left and was wrong for a while first.

Things I have not settled. I would rather show these than a page of certainties, because the certainties are the part that gets stale.

1. 01 What does one person owe the tools they make?

   If a system replaces the work of three people, the interesting question is not whether it should exist. It is what the person who built it owes to the shape of the world it leaves behind. I build these things constantly and I have not landed anywhere comfortable on this.

2. 02 Is continuity of a mind the same as continuity of a person?

   The research company rests on the premise that a mind can be carried forward. Whether what arrives is the same person, or a very good letter from them, is the part the engineering does not answer and probably cannot. I keep working on it anyway, which is itself a position.

3. 03 Why does almost nothing built this decade feel like it was made by somebody?

   Competent, tested, shipped, and completely anonymous. I do not think it is templates. I think it is that a thing made by a committee cannot have a point of view, and a point of view is the only thing anybody remembers.

4. 04 How much of discipline is really just staging?

   The clock four minutes fast. The clothes laid out. The file open before bed. None of these change what I am capable of, and all of them change what I do. I cannot tell whether that is a strength or an admission.

5. 05 What is the smallest complete unit of a practice?

   I have said the essay, and I believe it on most days. But a single screen that works is also complete, and so is one honest conversation with a client. Maybe the unit is whatever you can finish before you lose your nerve.

6. 06 Can a body of work be too honest to hire?

   This page is the experiment. I could show only the polished surfaces and be easier to place. I would rather be findable by the people who want the whole of it, and let that be the filter. Ask me in a year whether it worked.

Things I care about far more than the situation requires. Every one of them has leaked into the work somewhere.

• 01 Kerning Two letters sitting wrong will ruin an otherwise finished page for me, and I will not be able to say why until I fix it.
• 02 The first frame A film tells you everything in its first frame. So does a homepage. So does a proposal.
• 03 Espresso extraction A variable I can actually control, measured in seconds and grams, with an answer at the end. Rare in a working day.
• 04 Load-bearing walls Architecture taught me which parts of a structure you are allowed to move. It turns out software has them too and nobody labels them.
• 05 Release notes The most underrated writing form there is. A good one is a short essay about what somebody cared about that week.
• 06 Mnemonic images A whole company came out of taking seriously the fact that a strange picture sticks and a list does not.
• 07 Empty states Everybody designs the full screen. The empty one is where you find out whether the designer likes people.
• 08 Anime pacing Long silences, then everything at once. Most interfaces would be better if they were braver about the silences.
• 09 Unit economics What a thing really costs and who pays for it, asked early enough to still be a design question.
• 10 The garden The only project I own that does not care about my deadlines and will not be hurried.
• 11 Monospaced numerals Figures that jump around as they count are figures nobody trusts. It takes one line to fix.
• 12 Door handles The part of a building everybody touches and almost nobody designs. Interfaces are full of door handles.

The web still has corners in it, and they are never the ones the feed hands you. These are the kinds of place I end up at two in the morning. No affiliate links, no recommendations engine, just the sort of thing worth the detour.

• Garden

  Somebody's public notebook

  A wiki they write for themselves and left the door open on. Half-finished pages, contradictions left standing, and more honest thinking than any polished blog.

• Archive

  A very old index

  Scanned catalogues, dead directories, a library nobody visits. The web before it learned to sell, still sitting there.

• Shop

  One person selling one thing

  A site built by whoever makes the thing, with the shipping page written in their own voice. Almost always beautiful by accident.

• Machine

  A plotter forum

  People arguing about pens and paper weight with the seriousness of surgeons. Where I learned most of what the Gallery does.

• Frames

  A film stills archive

  One frame at a time, out of context, no commentary. The fastest way I know to relearn composition.

• Now

  A now page

  One page saying what somebody is actually doing this month. The most underrated format on the web and the easiest to keep.

• Signal

  A one-person newsletter

  No cadence, no growth strategy, sent when there is something to say. The ones that go quiet for months are the good ones.

• Ring

  A webring, still turning

  Twenty sites linking to each other for no reason but liking each other. The original recommendation engine, and still the best one.

If you keep one of these, or you know one I would like, send it to me. A good corner is worth more than a good feed and considerably harder to find. Send me one →

Everywhere else on this site shows finished things. This is the other shelf. Some of these will ship, some have been nearly done for a year, and one or two are here because admitting them is the only thing keeping them alive.

1. 01

   The fourth book

   82%

   Outlined, half-drafted, and stuck on a chapter I keep rewriting instead of finishing. It has been eleven months.

2. 02

   A short film, cut

   55%

   Shot, logged, assembled once and abandoned. The footage is fine. The reason I stopped is that the edit told me the script was wrong.

3. 03

   The plotter, physical

   30%

   The drawings in the gallery run on a machine I have not built yet. Parts ordered, frame not cut.

4. 04

   A proper design system

   66%

   Half of it is in the kit on the gallery page. The other half lives in my head, which is the least useful place for a system to live.

5. 05

   The garden plan

   40%

   Drawn to scale twice, planted neither time. The garden meanwhile went ahead without me.

6. 06

   Teaching any of this

   18%

   Notes for a course on running a practice alone. Nobody has asked. I am fairly sure that is not the reason it is unfinished.

Nothing here has a date on it, because a date I invented for myself is not a commitment, it is a decoration.

Every room worth being in has a wall people have written on. Write a line on this one and it gets typeset the moment you do, at exactly the width of the wall, in the same face as everything else here. Short lines shout. Long ones have to whisper. It is kept in your own browser and never sent anywhere.

A working life that shows only its finished surfaces is a life with half of it missing. So here is the other half, kept slightly out of the way, because the front of a house and the back of a house are both true and neither one should be pretending to be the other.

This room keeps a small note of your visits, in your own browser and nowhere else. No account, no cookie sent to anybody, nothing I can see. If you clear your browser it is gone and neither of us will know.