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Today I moved my cursor over the boundary of a sidebar in some UI hundreds of times at different speeds. Designers ship where I work, and a designer had opened a pull request adding a tooltip to sidebar handles to teach users keyboard shortcuts and let them know they they could drag to resize. Looked great, very useful. We should ship it.

I realized how completely insane it is to be a designer of things for screen though, because there was just one thing that was bugging me: the tooltip appeared too quickly for me. I got a flash of tooltip when I crossed the boundary, at cursor-moving speeds I’d consider normal enough. It was maybe… 150 milliseconds from feeling great.

To designers making for screens, this will sound totally reasonable I think. I think it will sound reasonable that I crossed the boundary hundreds of times, too. To other folks, it probably sounds absolutely mad. Who cares about this tiny detail? Who will even notice? I suspect once enough of them accumulate, roughly “everyone.”

It reminded me of Ira Glass talking about adding 100 milliseconds more space between one piece of audio and the next. About the smallest of differences in when a piece of music starts when scoring the piece. Each one small, but they all add up—or at least he hopes they do. Maybe no one cares; maybe no one will ever notice.

It’s both unreasonable and beautiful to care about these details. Life is pretty short, and yet we spend a lot of it obsessing over the smallest details when it comes to things that we enjoy, and that we want others to enjoy. Yours could be about cooking, or gardening. I wish for everyone that they care enough about something.

Still sick, but not quite as sick. I worked from the garden in the morning for the fresh air, and from the couch in the afternoon for the comfort. Both helped a little, I think—especially the garden. I’ve got a million things to do and the energy to do… well… not all that many of them. I’ve always got more to do than I can do. Don’t we all? What’s with that.

I re-read Max Porter’s Shy this past weekend, and I just love how comforting it is to see phrases that are not only uniquely British, but sometimes uniquely some-region-of-England. I don’t know why it’s comforting, but it is.

Shite

Dickhead

Bumblefuck nowhere

Those are easy to understand, but there’s language and spelling in there that would make no sense for folks outside of Britain. A lot of authors might soften them until they could be understood by just about anyone, but Porter doesn’t, and it would be a different book if he did.

You’ll never actually make something that everyone loves and understands equally, so you might as well make the thing you want to make, in the way you want to make it, and hope that it resonates with someone. No piece of art is complete until the audience completes it, anyway.

Sick as a dog. I haven’t felt this ill in a long time. Pounding headache, feeling like I’ve gargled glass, and barely slept a couple of hours. Not how I planned for today to go, especially after a fun and restful weekend spent with friends. I suppose you don’t get to choose when you’re sick. If you did, I suspect you’d never be. Anyway, that’s the news. Sick as a dog. Speaking of dogs, I’m lucky enough to have one curled up next to me.

I found the perfect typeface for my personal projects today. There’s no permanently-perfect typeface, of course, but there’s perfect for right now; perfect for this project. It satisfied my brain in all of the right ways. It made every word look great. It even made my name look great, and I normally hate how Craig looks in basically every typeface I’ve ever used; even the one that I designed. I’ll share more soon. I’ll typeset this journal in it soon, and… everything else.

The most annoying thing about time is that it either relentlessly happens or barely does, but very rarely does it simply happen, in the way that you expect it. Rarely do I think that I’ve had the perfect amount of time to do something, or experienced something for just the right amount of time. Today time relentlessly happened. The day is over and I haven’t done all of the things I normally would. I’ve just about written this though, so I guess that’s something.

The act and art of writing truly is the best. I’m a designer, and it’s so easy to start working in a visual medium and try to solve every problem via that medium. Whenever I take a step back and write, I realize that I should have done it much sooner.

After you’ve written lot of words in a lot of contexts, you also notice that there are only so many types of things that you write. Today I wrote about software concepts—what they are, what their purpose is, what their qualities are—and realized at some point that it felt a lot like describing characters in a novel.

Once you have a mental model for these types of writing, it makes it easier and faster to write, I think. Writing novels will help you with technical writing in non-obvious ways (and vice versa). Writing anything, really, will help you write everything better. It’s easy to get caught up in how to do some specific thing well, but—as usual—it’s often better to just start and figure it out.

Exhausted; completely exhausted, and I don’t think I even know why. Had a thought over the past couple of days that I’d love to take a Teenage Engineering PO-33 K.O! on stage whilst telling stories. A bit of texture. A crackling announcement at the train station:

We are sorry to announce that the 15:42 service to London Victoria is running approximately 10 minutes late.

Something simple. Just enough to be interesting. Probably not even the right tool for the job, but somehow seems like one of the more romantic to take up on stage. I sort of like the constraint, or maybe I just want an excuse to get any Teenage Engineering toy.

There’s something romantic about British train stations to me, too. A light drizzle catching the light, collar pulled up against a breeze whistling through the platform, the click-clack of luggage wheels on stone slabs. Greetings, goodbyes and waiting.