In 1995, halfway through college, I determined I was going to be a designer. At that time, 99.99% of “professional designers” had no experience designing anything for the internet. You could have tasked some of the most accomplished designers at the time — Jony Ive, Paula Scher, David Carson, Paul Rand, Massimo Vignelli — with creating a simple 468×60 banner ad and none of them would even know what you were talking about.

Over the next five years, the world would discover what banner ads and the internet were, but most experienced designers stayed put in print, television, or whatever field they were already comfortable with. The designers who would go on to help shape the internet were from two groups:

• People brand new to the industry
• People who looked forward to starting over and getting good at something new

I was somewhere between the two groups, having spent a few years in print but leaning more into a childhood love for new technology than anything else.

Within a few years, the demand for internet-native designers exploded and created the thriving job market we have enjoyed almost uninterrupted until now. Analog design still produces some of the most amazing creative work on the planet, but the growth of that part of the profession has not been the same.

Running design at Microsoft AI and having done a decent amount of hiring lately, I can tell you that the patterns emerging now are exactly as they were in 1995. There is a giant population of designers who have a bunch of really great skills. Some of those designers will decide they are content doing the same sort of design they have done for their whole careers. Others will decide to learn as much as they can about AI and prepare for an industry that will look very different in 5 to 10 years. Finally, there is another group of people who have no design experience whatsoever but are so enamored with this new technology that they will teach themselves very useful skills in a short amount of time. Do not underestimate this third group as it’s easier than ever to fake it ’til you make it right now.

If you are content in your comfort zone, that’s perfectly fine. If, however, you are looking to lean into what’s next, here are some suggestions.

You are not (far) behind

One thing I tell people who are trying to get into running is “you are always only a month away from being in decent running shape”. What I mean by that is, your first run is going to be 5 minutes long before you tap out, but if you do it every day for a month, you’ll be able to run at least a mile or two.

I see so many people trying to fake their AI experience by adding those two letters to every job they’ve had for the last 10 years. You are not fooling anyone. 99% of designers’ “AI experience” has come in the last two years. You will very occasionally find someone who was super early, but even that doesn’t mean much, as they might not be very good. It’s like saying in 1995 that you had a Commodore 64 growing up. Cool, but not exactly an endorsement of your actual design skills.

Someone may have told you to pepper your résumé with references to AI so it gets past certain filters, but we run a big operation here at Microsoft with thousands of designers and we don’t filter like this. Furthermore, when I see someone doing this, I actually take it as a sign that I should be suspicious of what else is on their résumé. When I was in college, I was a rampant gilder of my résumé, so I understand the temptation. “Salad Bar Director” did not actually get me any jobs though. Don’t do it. Just be honest. In terms of calendar years, your competition doesn’t have much more AI experience than you do. The clock is ticking though, and designers are already learning to do extraordinary things each time a new model or technique emerges. Pay attention. Learn by doing.

Know how our field is changing

For as long as design has been a profession, there has been a debate about the relative value of generalists vs. specialists. My view has been that in digital product design, you usually want generalists, but every so often, there is no substitute for a specialist. Some people are looking at AI as a specialty right now, and that may be true in some parts of engineering like model training, but for design, it’s a tool that will make generalism more common and accessible. Even pre-AI, I have always preferred hiring designers who I can give an entire project to. I want people who can frame up a user problem, explore the solution space with functional prototypes, produce high fidelity production designs/code, and also be involved in the testing and refinement of said solutions. This is a LOT to ask of most designers, but the best generalists can usually play all four quarters of the game.

With the help of AI, there are fewer barriers to designers participating in all parts of the product making process. Want to quickly research a problem you suspect exists in the world? There are now tools to help you write and analyze that survey. Want to quickly mock up a dozen high fidelity interfaces just to get a discussion going? Now you don’t have to spend days on that. Need hundreds of illustrations in a consistent style? Plenty of tools for that. And perhaps the biggest barrier for some designers over the last couple of decades: turning your ideas into functional code. That future is now here.

For all the excitement about these advancements, they also raise uncomfortable questions. The most obvious is: do we need fewer designers now? To that, I would say yes, we need fewer designers (and engineers, and everyone else in product development) for the same amount of output. Do we need fewer designers overall though? That remains to be seen. The growth of the economy since the beginning of time has been based on productivity increases leading to greater total output of our population. So if you think we have already maxxed out our total output of products and services in the world, I would expect a nosedive in the amount of designers and engineers needed. But if you think we are only scratching the surface of product development, you should expect a future where millions of designers and engineers continue to do great things but much more prolifically. Think of the farmer 1000 years ago who could feed a few families vs. the farmer of today who can feed an entire town.

In order to prepare for this, you should anticipate companies initially employing fewer designers (and engineers, and PMs) to do the same amount of work they were doing yesterday. Managers aren’t going completely away, but organizations will flatten somewhat as companies concentrate their budgets on people close to the metal. As my colleague Jon Friedman said the other day, “there will be people directing AI, and people directing people and AI”.

Companies will increasingly ask the question they should always be asking regardless of technology trends: what is the smallest team of people I need to create the best version of this product? The difference this time is that we now have a transformative technology that can turn an inefficient team of 3 designers, 2 researchers, 2 PMs, and 50 engineers into a one-pizza squad of 1 designer, 1 researcher, 1 PM, and 7 engineers. Furthermore, the lines between job functions are blurred such that each member of that team can do some of what another member can. Engineers can help with design, design can help with research, research can help with PM, etc. There will even be one-person startups where the same person does everything and eats the whole pizza!

Another way our field is changing is that the term “product designer” will encompass more of the humanities than it did before. Our currency used to be mostly pixels, but now it is also words, personalities, and other emerging areas of focus. Content Designers and UX Writers may argue this has been the case all along, but until now, the market for pixel-focused designers has been much stronger. The best thing you can do to prepare for this expansion of design’s role is to poke around and get comfortable with all of the new powers you have at your fingertips. Go “program” the personality of a GPT for an hour. The process requires nothing more than plain English.

Learning is free

When I got into this industry, you needed to buy books and take expensive classes in order to learn how to use tools like Adobe Illustrator. There is nothing about designing for AI that requires you to spend significant money to learn. It’s all about the time you are willing to invest.

Furthermore, learning about the general field of design requires years of getting familiar with hundreds of concepts, but AI is such a nascent technology that you can count the new essential design skills on two hands right now. Image generation, prompting, evals, generative UI… there aren’t thousands of AI-specific concepts yet, so get started now.

From an employer perspective, I also don’t want to hear that you want a job here so you can start getting into AI. Just start. The most impressive applicants I’ve seen are people who have, on their own, created personal experiments with the sole purpose of learning the technology. I don’t need to see that you have used AI to help a multi-billion dollar company increase its profits by 200%. I’m also impressed seeing a series of album covers you made for your garage band using Midjourney, or how you have used a combination of your design skills, Recraft, and Lovable Dev to build a site for your non-profit in a weekend. There is no better quality in a teammate than initiative, and by showing you’ve cleared your own trail into the world of AI, you’ve shown me you might be curious enough to be an industry great one day.

Aside from understandable demands on your free time, there is nothing structural holding you back from knowing just as much about designing with AI as your competitors in the job market. If you’re looking for a couple of good newsletters to get started with, try Heather Cooper’s Visually AI or Xinran Ma’s Design with AI.

Don’t get discouraged by the hunt

I’ve worked at some of the smallest and biggest companies in the world and let me just tell you that we all have significant problems with our interview processes. If you get rejected by a company, it might be you, but there is just as much of a chance that it’s them. We’ve said no to hundreds of incredibly qualified candidates for a number of reasons, and only a fraction of the time is it because someone screwed up in their interviews. More often it’s because we are choosing one person between many qualified candidates. Or because we had to pause our process for any number of reasons completely unrelated to the candidates. Or because we screwed up in our evaluation of someone’s strengths and weaknesses.

If you’re not getting calls back from your applications, it could be because your portfolio needs work, or it could be because your approach needs work. More on each of those below. If you aren’t getting selected after interviewing, it could be because you truly didn’t interview well, but more likely it is because one person interviewed better than you did. That’s all it takes. Even at a giant company like Microsoft, it’s usually one person chosen per position. In other words, we are rarely able to hire every finalist who was qualified.

Get your book in order

These days, hiring managers will often pass judgement on your portfolio in less than 30 seconds. When you have 50 portfolios to go through in an afternoon, there are all sorts of things that will put candidates in the “No” pile quickly. If I can’t figure out how to navigate your site? No. If you have basic errors which show a lack of attention to detail? No. If I need to type in a password that you haven’t provided? No. The best portfolios show off a small handful of projects (3-5) straightforwardly, but deeply. Tell me:

1. What problem were you trying to solve?
2. Why did you think it was a problem? Research? Gut?
3. How did you explore the problem and solution space?
4. What did you end up with as a solution?
5. How did you measure if you were correct?

Importantly, remember to show a taste of #4 first for those of us with very short attention spans or a ton of stuff to get through. Wow me with the end result first and then show me how you got there.

Getting in the door is the same as it ever was

When I was in school, I remember being determined not to get jobs because of who I knew. I only wanted to get hired based on my portfolio. Only a couple of years into my career, however, I realized that that simply isn’t how the world works, and there is very little you can do to change that. There is no substitute for a trusted reference vouching for how valuable of a teammate you are. Do the social archeology to figure out the shortest line between you and someone close to the hiring manager. The reason this is so important is that what’s in your portfolio is only half your story. What you are like to work with is the other half, and to determine that, there is no better source than others who have worked with you.

To show you how important networking is: I’ve been lucky enough in my career to never be unintentionally unemployed. Every time I’ve left a job, it’s been on my own volition, and every time I’ve re-entered the job market, I’ve lucked out with multiple options. After I left my last job in 2022, I took a few months off before peeking my head up again. Within a few weeks, I ended up getting to offer stage with 5 companies, including Microsoft. I happened to be on LinkedIn one night and randomly saw a Head of Design post for Major League Baseball’s digital division in my feed. There was a one-click “Apply” button, so I hit it, just for kicks. 24 hours later I got a canned rejection notice. This whole paragraph contains enough cringey braggadocio already, but having specifically designed for ESPN, MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, the Mariners, Twitter, NBC, and even having a current offer in hand from Disney/ESPN, you’d think I would have at least gotten a call back! Nope.

The point is: no matter how perfectly matched your qualifications might be, applying to a position cold is like buying a lottery ticket. You might get lucky, but the chances are incredibly small.

Creating opportunities for your future self starts many years before you need your next job. Build relationships inside the industry, especially with recruiters. I always shake my head when I see people in tech speaking ill of recruiters. Sure there are some bad ones, but in design, the best recruiters are often in charge of filling the best positions. Treating them badly is not only unkind, but it’s also specifically bad for your future self. Whether you are an early career individual contributor or a longtime design executive, make an effort to know the very best design recruiters in the world.

If you think that you, a member of the creative class , are somehow above the world’s best talent matchmakers , think again. They have furthered the careers of thousands of people who are better than both you and me… and the best ones are some of the nicest, most interesting people on the planet.

These are the fun times

When it comes down to it, your future in design is the sum of all of your actions that got you here in the first place. The skills you’ve built, the artifacts demonstrated in your portfolio, your helpfulness as a teammate, your reputation as a person, and now more than ever, your curiosity to shed your skin and jump into an undiscovered ocean teeming with new life, hazards, and opportunity. Someone will invent the next CSS, the next Responsive Design, the next sIFR, the next TypeKit, the next IE6 clearfix, and the next Masonry for the AI era. That someone might as well be you.

These periods of technological turnover are the most exciting times to be a designer. They are when we get to flap around chaotically and create the interaction patterns for the next couple of decades. Dive in while you can, because in a few years, we’ll all be back to making the same things again.

For now, the future favors the curious.

It was 1978, and I remember my dad climbing up on our roof with a garden hose. Every couple of hours, he would wet the house down, top-to-bottom, and everything surrounding it. I don’t remember everybody doing this, but my Dad is a Meteorologist, and back then he worked at the SCAQMD, the regional agency charged with studying, regulating, and improving air quality in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. Because of his specific remit and where we lived, he had a deep understanding of the Santa Ana winds and their effect on the Palisades.

When my dad explained what he was doing, he would point northeast to the hills behind us and tell us that if the winds didn’t die down, the fire miles in the distance would come towards our tiny little house and there would be trouble. As a small child, I don’t actually remember being scared about any of this. Every year there was a fire, the smoke was always so far away and so barely visible that it just seemed like anything else in life at the time. And besides, dads are superheroes to their children, so of course there was no danger.

We ended up living in the Palisades until I was 15, when we moved up to Seattle, but in that time, these sorts of fires happened almost every year to some degree. The 1978 one was a big one though, and my dad had a flight scheduled to New York the following morning. He woke up every hour during the night to check the wind readings, and loaded up our Impala wagon for a prompt evacuation. That is how precarious things were, even 47 years ago. By sheer luck that night, the winds subsided, and the Palisades were spared. A few more hours of wind and 1978 would have been 2025. Same damage. Completely flattened.

I guess Pacific Palisades has always been a wealthy area, but wealth back then seemed less of a step-function than it is now. The “alphabet streets” where we lived seemed like the most modest of the neighborhoods; the place where teachers, government workers, and clerks lived. My parents bought our 1200 square-foot rambler for $38,000, and pretty much no one in the neighborhood had views of anything. The neighborhood was so named because the streets went from Albright, to Bashford, to Carey, to Drummond, to Embury, to Fiske, to Galloway, to Hartzell, to Iliff, to Kagawa. Felt really great not having to even look that up just now, but I will admit that I was Today Years Old before realizing there is no J. I wonder why. Each street was basically the same, although I distinctly remember Galloway having more tree trunks pushing the sidewalks up, making it a better route for jumping your Mongoose bike or Powell-Peralta board.

As a kid growing up in the ’80s, the Palisades had everything you could possibly want. It was a “free-range” neighborhood, where we could ride our bikes as far away as the Santa Monica pier without worry. Palisades Park was home to AYSO soccer, tennis, basketball, “Par Course” stations, and most importantly to me, little league baseball. I was part of the “orange” franchise which started you off as a Ranger, then a Twin, and finally an Oriole. Our patron saint was Mel Haggai, who up until now, I didn’t know had flown 30 missions over Germany as a gunner when he was growing up (!!!). Mel got me to switch from first base to catcher, where I could have more impact on games. We didn’t have a single left-handed catcher’s mitt in the entire league, so he bought me one with his own money. I also remember perennial umpire John Meyers, who took me, my friend Adam Segel, and a few others to Disneyland, only to have to deal with us getting thrown out of the park for jumping off of a few of the rides and causing havoc.

I remember several restaurants like Jacopos, Barerras, and Gladstones, but the center of the food universe in the Palisades from 1972 to 2007 was Mort’s Deli. I have never seen more of an institution in any town than Mort’s was to Pacific Palisades. What I wouldn’t give right now for a plate of latkes and a bottle of Dr. Brown’s.

Just a few more quick memories before moving back to the fires:

• Our immediate neighbors on Iliff: Rick & Chickee Jensen, Sue & Gene Stratton, Norman & Mimi Rainwater, Cathy Crantz and her family, John & Robin Tripp and their family.
• Classmates who would go on to become very well known: Leonardo DiCaprio, Oliver Hudson, Redfoo, Jason Segel, and Will.I.Am, amongst others.
• The shocking murder of Teak Dyer.
• My shortlist of favorite teachers: Mrs. Wong, Mrs. Petrick, Mr. Freedman from Pali Elementary and Mr. Baker from Paul Revere.
• The Malibu Feed Bin, where a giant ostrich chased me when I was 4 years old and scared the living shit out of me.

I imagine there are people around the world picturing everyone caught up in this recent disaster as multi-millionaires with 5 homes who will Pay Any Amount to Not Pay Their Taxes. The Palisades, however, also contained everything from people who moved there when it was more modest, to food service workers in mobile homes, which have now also burned down.

The displaced residents of the Palisades (and other burning areas of LA like Altadena) perhaps don’t look like what you think of when you hear the term “climate refugee” but that is what they now are. That is also what many more of us are likely to become as weather events get more extreme. We can pat ourselves on the back for not living in a fire zone or in other precarious places like Florida, but quite literally at any moment, we could experience a 9.0 earthquake in the Cascadia subduction zone that will be the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. If something like this hits Seattle in the next few decades, count me as completely unsurprised, and hopefully not dead. Some areas may be a bit safer than others, but we are all increasingly susceptible to something unexpected hitting. Even if you’ve convinced yourself the weather can’t hurt you, there are always meteors.

Predictably, thousands of people on social networks have suddenly become experts in large-scale fire prevention. Some people are convinced the Palisades was lost because of too little water pressure, too few firefighters, an offline reservoir, insufficient controlled burns, a mayor who happened to be on a trip, a losing mayoral candidate who allegedly would have prevented the whole thing, a firefighting budget that was supposedly cut but really was not, and yes, even DEI programs.

My meteorologist dad is now 90 years old, and still in perfect intellectual health. I went to visit him and my mom this weekend, and we talked a little bit about the fires and this formative piece of our lives that had been completely destroyed a few days earlier.

The thing I wanted to know most was the same thing everyone else probably does: could anything have prevented this, and if so, what? After all, we’ve known about this precise danger for at least 47 years and probably a lot longer. And when I say “precise danger”, I mean the entirety of Pacific Palisades getting burnt to the ground by a Santa Ana fueled fire.

I asked a lot of questions.

The first was whether that 1978 fire would have done essentially the same damage as this one if we didn’t get lucky with the winds dying down. He said it probably would have. This is important because it shows that no one thing that we did in the last 50 years caused this. Or more precisely, I should say “caused this possibility”. Perhaps it will come out later that a certain power line caused some sort of initial spark, but the important bit is that the likelihood of a catastrophic fire like this has been around for a very long time, and the possibility was only getting stronger. It was when, not if. Sparks happen.

The second thing I asked was about all of the ways fires like these can start. It turns out there are sources you probably already know about, like arson or lightning, but even a piece of glass lying in the dry brush can act as a catalyst. If you remember burning things with a magnifying glass and the power of the sun as a kid, you can picture what that might look like. Another potential source is sparks from power lines, and it’s particularly concerning to read that power lines near the flashpoints of the biggest fires don’t seem to have been de-energized during the peak winds. My dad explained that this is usually a last resort as people will not tolerate outages for days at a time for a risk they feel is so remote (more on this later), but certainly during the several hours when the winds were forecast to be hurricane strength, it seems plausible to have done something there. Like many aspects of this disaster though, it’s best we get the facts before passing final judgement. One thing my dad was particularly impressed by is that Ariel Cohen and the weather bureau got the prediction of wind conditions exactly right, to a level of accuracy you almost never see. We indeed knew everything was lining up for a catastrophically dangerous couple of days, and if you believe the governor of California (which I do in this case), we began a proactive response before the fires even started. Did energized power lines play a role, however? We’ll have to wait and see.

The next thing I asked is if he thought any of the things I mentioned above (i.e. controlled burns, more pressure in the hydrants) would have stopped this. He said probably not. We were not “50% more water or firefighters” away from preventing this. It was simply too big and spread too fast. This is the key bit: even though a lot of these fires start in the hills, far away from houses, the hurricane force winds carry the embers at hurricane speeds for miles. So even if the main fire is only advancing at a few miles per hour, the embers are spreading out like thousands of Molotov cocktails. This is why you can’t just do a controlled burn between the hills and the houses as a buffer. The Santa Anas launch the embers right across whatever your best laid plans might be.

So finally, we get to the most important part then. If we couldn’t have stopped the fire this week, was there anything we could have done to prevent this in the 47 years since the last time the Palisades almost burnt down?

The answer? Yes.

The first and most important thing that hasn’t happened in the decades since the last near-miss is establishing fire as an ever-present, existential threat in the community’s mind. You can tell this is the case by the sheer influx of money and people into the area lately. As a small example, I have some friends who moved there (on Iliff Street, in a rare twist of coincidence!) recently. If you told them there was a pretty good risk the entire town would burn down in their lifetime, they may have had second thoughts. Ditto for all of the real estate and business development that has transformed the formerly quaint village area over the last few years.

I am absolutely not implying that anyone already in the Palisades should have moved away. I don’t think I would have. You don’t just leave wonderful places you’ve put so much love into for a threat that may never affect you.

But the fact that this seemed like such a safe haven for newcomers shows the information gap that existed before last week. The insurance industry seemed to catch on recently, but to the average person in the Palisades, the risk of fire seemed more like perhaps an unlucky block getting destroyed, rather than the entire town.

To help explain the importance of threats remaining top-of-mind, my dad reminded me of his journey at the SCAQMD from the 1960s through the 1980s. He was part of a team in charge of improving the air quality of the South Coast Air Basin. This was mostly an exercise in reducing smog, and it was a long, successful journey that carries lessons for our emerging climate and fire crisis.

Growing up as a kid in the 1980s, I remember vividly the smog alerts every summer. One moment you are running around for hours, and then within a few minutes you can no longer inhale normally. You take quick baby breaths, walk inside, and cease physical exertion for the rest of the day. And when I say “can no longer inhale”, I don’t mean that it smells dirty. I mean your lungs reject the air coming in and seize up.

When you fly into LA today and see what you think is smog, rest assured it is nothing compared to what we had in the ’80s. The one advantage this public health problem had though is that it was in your face every day. Everyone in LA felt it daily and supported their government’s efforts to solve the problem. With the community behind it, the SCAQMD, California Air Resources Board, and the EPA introduced legislation that prohibited leaded gasoline, required catalytic converters, and moved forward with a variety of other actions that eventually reduced “very unhealthy” smog days from 160 (!!!) in 1981 to only 1 in 2021 and 2022 (!!!!!).

Think about that. If you lived in Los Angeles in the 1980s, just being alive was hazardous to your health for half the year. Now, it’s a single day where you might want to stay inside.

This achievement was due to the work of Federal, State, and Regional air pollution control agencies, along with the combined research efforts carried out by scientists at Caltech, the University of California, and other academic institutions, but it would have never been possible if the community of Los Angeles didn’t lock arms with their government and perform the collective action necessary to solve the problem.

Getting people to take fire seriously would have clearly been more difficult than it was for smog, but it’s the only way to have created the collective action necessary to change the conditions of the Palisades over the last 47 years to prevent the extent of damage that occurred. What sorts of things would have reduced the damage? Something like the following:

• The replacement of highly flammable large vegetation like eucalyptus trees with other alternatives.
• The xeriscaping of yards with less flammable materials than grass.
• The prohibition of wooden roofs, or at least a big insurance discount for replacing them.
• Improved building materials and methods designed defensively against fire risk.

Although the Palisades is almost completely destroyed, there are some buildings that escaped damage, and to my eyes, they look like modern projects that used more stucco, steel, and concrete than wood. More expensive? Yes. But this is probably the way we need to think about building now, especially in areas even remotely at risk of this sort of thing. Pacific Palisades is one of the nicest locations on earth, and I’m sure plans are already being drawn to rebuild it, but there is no doubt in my mind that those plans will require these methods and safeguards. There is no longer a choice to do otherwise.

If you live anywhere near the reach of the Santa Anas, there may still be time to take action before this happens again. There is a 100% chance it will happen again at some point, perhaps even within the next few days or at this time next year. Los Angeles only has a couple more months to get any rainfall at all this season, and if the Santa Anas revisit in the autumn to an even drier backdrop, who knows what further catastrophes await.

I’m not going to say any more about these particular fires because after awhile, it’s just more speculation. Even my dad would tell you this is just his opinion, albeit one rooted in a long career of climate science in and around the Palisades. What I will say though is that if we want to avoid more catastrophes like this, collective action is the only solution.

I haven’t even mentioned the idea of human-induced climate change at all in this post, because it frankly doesn’t even matter at this point. Extreme weather is here, whether we caused it or not. Even if you believe, as some people do, that the earth just does this stuff on its own, it’s beginning to kill us at an accelerating clip, and that should be something we can all band together against. Right?

Often times, it is the artists in society who provide the parables to light the path forward.

If you’re familiar with the graphic novel and HBO Series “Watchmen“, you may remember that one of the plotlines revolves around an ex-superhero named Ozymandias conjuring up a plot to save billions of people from nuclear war by uniting the world’s superpowers against a common enemy. He engineers a giant squid and launches it from space into the center of Manhattan, where it explodes, killing many. The strategy works as intended, and the world bands together upon realizing the threat is ostensibly coming for everyone.

That is exactly where we are right now.

Earth is raining calamities down upon us that should unite us as a species. Will we do what we did during the pandemic and turn against each other again? Or can we use this even bigger, spiraling threat to put our disagreements aside and perform the collective action necessary to maintain human life on earth?

The planet will be just fine without us. It is we who are endangered.

We are living in the golden age of ice cream.

In the 1970s, we had a few basic flavors to choose from: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, chocolate chip, mint chocolate chip, and rocky road. There were a few shops like Baskin Robbins that marketed some scary stuff like Rum Raisin, but if you were just getting ice cream at the supermarket or some other ordinary location, those were your choices.

There also wasn’t as much science to ice cream back then. The term mouthfeel was still relatively obscure. It all seemed perfectly good back then because… ICE CREAM!!! … but compared to what we have today, it was, as the kids say, “supes basic”. In the 1980s, along came the frozen yogurt craze which pointed to how much untouched frontier was ahead of us. Shoutout to Humphrey Yogart, by the way — the world’s best named frozen dessert shop. Shoutout also to Aaron Cohen’s Gracie’s, which not only has excellent ice cream, but the world’s only bathroom dedicated to Dolly Parton.

Anyway, we’ve learned so much about fat content, texture, and flavor combinations since then that we have practically invented a new food group.

A few years ago, during a trip to the underrated gelato mecca that is Croatia, I had a variety which tasted different than anything I’d ever tried. It was a “fig yogurt gelato” from a little shop in Cavtat. I usually stay away from frozen yogurt because it’s generally not as good as ice cream, but this was intriguing. A great flavor (fig), combined with a beautiful tartness (yogurt), along with best texture for frozen desserts (gelato). It was outstanding, and I have not been able to find anything like it ever since…

Until yesterday!

Behold, Hellenika Cultured Gelato:

I don’t think I will ever purchase another brand of ice cream at the store ever again. It is the most perfect ice cream I have ever tasted. The creamiest mouthfeel, wonderful flavor combinations, and that little bit of tang which reminds you this is no ordinary substance.

Hellenika is a small creamery run by three Greek/Australian siblings with a single location in Pike Place Market in Seattle. Until recently, it was not available in stores, but you can now pick up pints in Metropolitan Market.

If you live in Seattle, you need to try this immediately.

If you don’t, you should try to get someone to mule you some in dry ice. Hopefully one day it will ship on Goldbelly.

Don’t get me wrong. I like a good low-grade Blue Bunny mini-cone as much as the next person, but I feel like we’ve passed through some sort of intergalactic hyperspace with this gelato. The future is now. Get this to your freezer any way you can.

I usually write a lot about the companies I work at but have held off until now because we haven’t been hiring. Well now we are! We’re specifically looking for Designers and UX Engineers to work on our design system for Copilot. Some of these positions are on my team and based where we have offices (Puget Sound, the Bay Area, Atlanta, New York, Vancouver, Barcelona, Hyderabad, Beijing, and Suzhou) and some are on adjacent teams and can accommodate fully remote work. If you are a Designer or UX Engineer with a passion for design systems and AI, we’d love to chat.

So what has year one been like? The good and the “needs improvement”.

One of the reasons I decided to join Microsoft was I missed the joy of in-person product-making. I know not everyone feels the same way so I’m not trying to make any broad statements about local vs. remote work, but for me, it has been even more refreshing than I expected. I usually come in 3-4 days a week, while others on the team are anywhere from 0 to 5.

It’s funny, sometimes I will wake up on a Monday and think to myself “ahhhh, this is going to be a chill work-from-home day” and by the end of the day, I realize I’ve been staring into a screen on video calls for almost the entire day and how much that slowly saps my energy. Meanwhile, in-person days are filled with walks, whiteboarding, and energizing sessions with some of my favorite teammates I’ve ever had. I realize not everyone feels this way about being in the office from time-to-time, but I do. Even our fierce, interdepartmental karaoke battle helped bring a bunch of teams together who had never met before.

The other great thing about lucking out and joining when I did is that we are embarking on one of the rare paradigm shifts that occurs in technology maybe once a decade. The 1980s were about personal computers. The 1990s were about the internet. The 2000s were about smartphones. The 2010s were about the cloud. And the 2020s will be about AI. The really powerful thing about all of these developments is that they don’t replace each other, but rather they build on each other. AI is the result of everything that came before it. If you got into design to help shape the culture of the world around you, these are the moments you treasure.

These turning points are also wonderful because they give you a chance to reawaken to your Beginner’s Mind. I have learned more in my first year here than at almost any other time in my career. Not only does the pace of technological change in AI force you to build skills as you go, but there are so many amazing engineers, designers, researchers, writers, marketers and other creative people to learn from, that it happens almost automatically.

When I was interviewing here, not even my prospective new boss told me about any of what was behind the curtain. Only during my first week did I find out all we are working on to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. That is Microsoft’s mission statement, if you hadn’t heard it before. It’s an uncommonly good filter with which we can all ask ourselves every day “does this project actually do that?” It’s quite freeing as it gives you license to question projects at every stage of development.

Another thing I’ve loved about my first year here is that I joined a group that has figured out how to ship very quickly. That also has its downsides, as we have plenty of craft problems to solve, but it’s great working for one of the largest and most established companies in tech and being able to ship within weeks of designing something.

One more thing that’s blown me away is the Inclusive Tech Lab, where we work on new technologies to make our products inclusive to people all of abilities and walks of life. No one experiences technology the same way, and teammates like Dave Dame and Bryce Johnson do a ton of great work to make sure that’s top of mind for everyone.

Finally, one of the unsung benefits of working for a native Seattle company again is that Seahawks stuff is all over the place. Presentations, charity auctions, everyday office attire… you name it. It’s nice to not be the only one with good taste in football teams.

I am no corporate shill, however, so I must also be honest about some of the things that need improvement over here.

At the top of my list is that Microsoft has not yet fully embraced the role design plays at most other tech companies. We were engineering-driven in 1975 and we are squarely engineering-driven in 2023. The world, meanwhile, has changed in that time. It is no longer sufficient for complex things to work. They must also shed their complexity. People expect the products and services they spend their time and money on to delight. To overdeliver. To give them superpowers. Those sorts of qualities only materialize when you have supergroups building products.

In music, a supergroup is when a singer, a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, a keyboardist (and so on) who are all at the top of their game come together to create an album. In tech, a supergroup is a researcher, a couple of designers, a product manager, and a Volkswagen Bus or two full of engineers. Up until a decade or so ago, a lot of tech companies followed the model of packing projects with as many smart engineers as they could find and only sprinkled in things like design and research as necessary. I still see some of this thinking in pockets over here. I’m trying to influence things, but it’s a delicate dance, especially when the company has had such enormous success by doing so many other things very well.

I think there are plenty of people here who still feel like being engineering-led is unequivocally good, but to those people I would say that in a modern tech company, design is engineering. It’s no better or worse, but it does have very different leverage in the building of a product.

On the plus side, Microsoft has never had as much design and research talent as it has right now, and we are increasingly looked to by the executive leadership team as lighters of the path. When we go into high-stakes meetings, we always go in with pixels and prototypes, which are uniquely good at cutting through bullshit and ambiguity. As a wise person once said, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.

There are a ton of amazing designers and researchers who have been here for 10 and even 20+ years whose hard work has led to this moment of evolution for the company, and every day I am in awe of their perseverance.

Next on my list is how often we get in our own way with “procedural goo”. I’ve worked in plenty of large companies including Twitter, Disney, and MSNBC, and have never seen the level of approvals, paperwork, and rules that get in the way of speed and autonomy here. Just transferring someone from within my own org to a slightly different role within my own org took a dizzying amount of effort. At most companies, this would have been about 10 minutes of work: one minute from me and nine from someone in HR trying to navigate to the right screen in Workday.

Then we have acronyms. My GOD do we have acronyms. I actually liked acronyms before I got here! I usually think they are cute. After seeing a new one almost every single day since getting here, I have resolved to never use them either inside or outside of work. I even say “Cyan Magenta Yellow Black” out loud if I have to!

Finally, the last thing on my list — and this is where you come in — is dedication to craft. It is so tempting to try and “science” your way into viable products these days. Build the beginnings of a customer base through rudimentary product-market fit, and then fastidiously optimize your funnel, your game mechanics, your viral loops, your push notifications, and so on and so forth. These gains are not always easy to come by, but they are rooted in ruthless experimentation and allegiance to short-term data. Our north star is at least pretty pure — Daily Active Users — and that metric is usually a good indicator that you’ve made something people like, but doctrinaire allegiance to almost any singular metric can quickly make people forget why we are in this profession to begin with: to improve lives. Or to put it squarely in Microsoft parlance again: to help every person and organization on the planet achieve more.

If you ever find yourself asking the question “how can we increase Daily Active Users?” instead of “how can we make our product better for people?”, you’ve already lost. Metrics are trailing indicators of qualitative improvements or degradations you’ve made for your customers… they are not the point of the work.

Recently, we’ve made some excellent strides in prioritizing qualitative product improvements even when they fly in the face of metrics we care about, and it’s really gratifying to see. It reminds everyone that a product is the collision of thousands of details, and the crafting of these details requires taste.

Designers are often looked to as “owners of craft and taste”, but craft is very much a team sport. It’s not just how things look and feel but also how they work. I very much like how Nick Jones (channeling Patrick Collison) at Stripe put it in this video:

“What we put out there should quite plausibly be the best version of that thing on the internet“.

To do this takes an unbroken chain of excellence:

1. An idea that can improve lives if executed well.
2. Foundational research to light the path before design and coding begin.
3. Rich design explorations and prototyping to make the experience palpable.
4. Buy-in to build it at a level of quality that makes the team proud.
5. Impeccable UX engineering and UX writing to make sure every detail is dialed.
6. Well-conceived server-side engineering to make it scalable and maintainable.
7. Creative marketing to prime people for the experience.
8. … and finally, maybe more important that anything else on this list, the will to keep refining relentlessly after the experience is launched. This part is so often neglected as companies rush to build more things.

Some people would look at this list and think “yep, makes sense”. Others would look at it and think “sounds slow and not very agile”. The trick to balancing this level of quality with speed of development is realizing that it’s often more efficient to experiment in step 3 than it is in step 6. This is why so many modern tech companies realize that hiring more designers and researchers doesn’t waste time and money… it saves time and money. With less than a week of one designer’s time, we can produce a wide variety of prototypes to test with real people. Just recently, we created an entire GPT-powered research application without even bothering a single engineer.

Design is engineering.

Finally, a brief note about prototyping. I would argue that the most impactful innovation in the craft of product development over the last 20 years has been the rise of rapid design prototyping. Prototypes that demonstrate an experience are useful not just in usability testing, but also in selling ideas up and across the organization. Engineers hate working on things that haven’t been thought through or “appropriately politicked” yet, and if you can bring them a working prototype that has already been vetted with users and various stakeholders across the company, they will love you for it and work hand-in-hand with you to get every detail right.

Design prototypes are the currency of a high-craft, high-speed product development organization, and they are increasingly the currency of our team.

Alright, back to the hiring. I plan to hire against the entire growing list of products our team is responsible for: Copilot, Windows, Edge, Bing, Start, Skype, SwiftKey, and so much more… but for now, this is a concerted hiring effort centered around Designers and UX Engineers to help build out the emerging design system for Copilot and our suite of AI-powered products.

If this is you, please have a look at the following roles we’ve just posted:

• Designer II
• Senior Designer
• Principal Designer
• UX Engineer II
• Senior UX Engineer
• Principal UX Engineer

We’d love to work with you on the future of design systems at Microsoft!

I recently got back from a trip to Korea where this stuff was all over the place. I had heard about people rubbing snail slime on their faces before but never really gave it much thought since I have quite literally never found any sort of face cream/lotion/serum that seemed any better than anything else. They are usually either too greasy or they evaporate too quickly. I’ve had pretty splotchy, combination skin my whole life, and oddly the only thing that has ever helped me is the sun. Come fall and winter, when sun is harder to come by in Seattle, things usually deteriorate pretty rapidly.

On a whim, I decided to buy three snail-based products: this cleanser, this serum, and this cream. Total cost: $45. (These are not affiliate links.)

It’s been almost two months now, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I haven’t had a single dry patch, blemish, or even a hint of redness since the very first application. Just a dollop of serum in the morning, a regular face wash with the cleanser at night, and a spot of cream right after. Whole thing takes a only a minute.

Other than the results, the best thing about this stuff is the way it feels. It’s just a super thin layer that stays on all day and you don’t even notice it.

Anyway, skin care is way off of my normal beat, but I figure if you’re looking for something new yourself or want to give an amazing gift this holiday season, you owe it to yourself to try this stuff! It really does work.

In confident pursuit of that feeling, I’m thrilled to be joining Microsoft to run Design & Research for their Web Experiences organization.

I was Microsoft-adjacent 10 years ago at MSNBC.com in Building 25, but this will be my first time as a blue badge, so to speak. I’m also thrilled to be joining Liz Danzico and John Maeda, who have also started at Microsoft in the last several months. I’ve known them both for a long time and have wanted to work with them forever.

There are several things which drew me to this opportunity, but at the top of the list is the people. Not just Liz and John, but the thousands of teammates in Seattle, Vancouver, Hyderabad, Barcelona, Beijing, and many other cities. There are certainly some great solo efforts in tech, but almost all of the best work I’ve been around has been the result of getting the right people jammin’ with each other. In my first several days here, I’ve already met so many of those people, and I can’t wait to continue the momentum Albert Shum created by carrying the torch for one of the best Design & Research teams in the Pacific Northwest.

The second thing I’m super excited about is the scale of the work. I’ve worked on the largest sports site in the world and one of the largest social networks in the world, but the properties in this group reach well over a billion people. Between the (refreshingly fast!) Edge browser, MSN, Bing, and several other products, Microsoft has quietly built up one of the top five properties in the world in terms of traffic and reach. They’ve also done it with humility, knowing how far they are from being perfect. I also love that so many of these products can and will be so much more as we begin to use some of the technology that’s emerging within Microsoft. In my first two weeks, I’m already overflowing with ideas.

Finally, the other thing I’m most excited about is getting back into the office in a flexible hybrid environment. I’ve worked in-person for most of my career and remotely for the last four years, and where I’ve landed is that everyone’s preferences are different, and it’s just tradeoffs all the way down. Where you land depends on a mix of your personality, your life outside of work, and what type of job you have. For me personally, I very much like being around people and feel like I do better work when I am… but I also like getting back my commute time a couple of days a week and making daily jogging more convenient. Also, Henry (pictured above) enjoys the extra lap time. Microsoft’s hybrid policy is a nice balance, and it sounds like exactly the right setup for someone like me.

Speaking of the exactly right, this also feels — for me at least — like exactly the right time to join Microsoft. The company has been through several distinct eras over the decades, but this feels like the era of re-commitment to the planet. To customers delightful experiences, to employees a great environment, and to the natural world, a smaller and eventually negative carbon footprint.

It’s a new year, and I couldn’t be any more here for it!

I’ve been using Pinafore (along with a user stylesheet I created… feel free to grab it for yourself) to use Mastodon on the web, and a combination of Ivory and Metatext on my iPhone. Ivory looks a bit nicer but Metatext has a Notifications tab that acts more you’re used to it working on Twitter.

If you want to move all of your activity over wholesale, go to town. If, however, you want to keep publishing Tweets on Twitter and have them automatically publish to your Mastodon account as well, this short guide is for you. The entire process should take around five minutes. It’s mostly just clicking around on a couple of websites.

Important: If you do this, the goal should not be just replicate your Tweets and never visit or engage on Mastodon. The goal should be to help you build your Mastodon presence and save you from having to manually double-post. Ideally you quickly get to the point where Mastodon becomes your primary crib.

Step 1: Open a Mastodon account

If you’ve already done this, great. If you haven’t, head to any server you want — like mastodon.social, for instance — and set up your account. You can always switch your server (along with any followers you accrue) later, so don’t stress about the server you choose.

Step 2: Open an IFTTT account

IFTTT (“If This Then That”) is a freemium service that lets you automate things on the internet. You can use the free account for now. The only difference for our purposes is that the free account will only poll your Twitter account for new Tweets once an hour. This is only a problem if you Tweet a lot per hour because they will all get posted to Mastodon in batches, once an hour. If this becomes a problem, you can always upgrade to the paid version for two bucks a month. For now, head over to IFTTT.com and set up a free account for yourself.

Step 3: Get your Mastodon posting URL

Head over to your Mastodon account on the web and choose “Preferences” in the lower right corner. Then choose “Development” at the bottom of the left navigation. Then choose “New Application” in the upper right. Under “Application Name”, type in whatever you want… something like IFTTT. Under “Application website”, type in https://ifttt.com. Leave the “Redirect URI” field alone, and make sure *only* the write:statuses box is checked. Hit the Submit button at the bottom of the screen, and then click the name of your application (e.g. IFTTT) on the resulting screen. Now open a new tab in your browser, leaving this page available for later.

Step 4 (Final step!): Connect your IFTTT account to your Twitter and your Mastodon accounts

Head back over to IFTTT.com and hit the “Create” button in the upper right. Click the big “If This” button, search for “Twitter”, and then click it. Scroll down and choose “New Tweet by a specific user”. Choose your own Twitter account and IFTTT will perform the necessary authorization. Then, type the username to monitor (in this case, your own), and hit “Create Trigger”. Now click “Then That” and search for “Webhook”. There should be a tile on the resulting page that says “Make a web request”. Click that. You’re almost done. For the fields, enter the following:

URL:
https://mastodon.social/api/v1/statuses (replace “mastodon.social” if you chose a different server above)

Method:
POST

Content Type:
application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Additional Headers:
Authorization: Bearer AccessToken (replace the word “AccessToken” with the access token from the one on the Mastodon page you left open above)

Body:
status={{Text}} (Everything inside those brackets is the content of the Tweet… you could prepend some custom text right after the equals sign if you wanted)

Now hit the big “Create Action” button, then the “Continue” button, then the “Finish” button, and BOOM, you’re done!

The next time you Tweet, within an hour, it should appear on Mastodon. If you upgrade your IFTTT account, it should lag by only a few minutes.

I encourage you to move your primary posting and reading activity over to Mastodon, but this is a good baby step if you’re not quite ready for that yet. It’s also a great way to set up news bots. We need more of those. You can follow the Axios newsbot I created here, or you can follow me on Mastodon here.

As someone who competed against Figma for a couple of years, I want to talk briefly about what makes them so hard to catch, and why I think Adobe ultimately decided they would never beat them:

Performance.

Even though I have spent over 20 years in the design industry working directly on consumer products, I never fully appreciated the importance of performance until working in the design tools industry.

Most digital consumer products are used in short bursts over a long period of time. Think about the Amazon app on your phone. You open it maybe once a week, peck around for what you need, hit Buy Now, and you’re on your way. If there is a two-second lag between purchasing and getting your confirmation screen, you don’t even think twice about it. Even in the case of an outright error, you just shake your head, hit reload, and things are usually fixed.

With professional production tools though — whether design, engineering, or otherwise — full-time craftspeople spend almost every hour of every work-week inside of your software. Every time something goes even remotely astray, it is noticed. Putting aside catastrophic stuff like data loss, even things like cursor lag, screen flicker, progress bars, and scroll/zoom performance are tiny paper cuts that form into pools of blood by the end of each day.

Figma did a lot of things right over the ten (yes, ten!) years they’ve worked on the product, but one thing they did that no one else has been able to replicate is meet and in some cases exceed native app performance inside of a web browser.

Nothing Figma has accomplished in the marketplace would be possible without this, and it is the thing that competitors have struggled the hardest to replicate. When you build software using native code, you get a lot of stuff for free. Need a scrolling list? Apple, Microsoft, and Google have multiple pre-built components you can use. Need to draw one semi-transparent shape on top of another? The system already knows how to render that. Need to optimize it all for speed? Most of that work has already been done.

Inside of a browser though, the work is rarely done for you. Even in instances where someone has already built a component, it’s often too slow or glitchy to use in a professional development environment. So what did Figma do about this? Over the course of several years, they:

• Built their own components and architecture painstakingly from scratch and never settled for “good enough”
• Worked with organizations like WebKit and Chromium to improve web browsers themselves (the benefits of which go beyond Figma)
• Detailed out in the open what they were doing and how

It was this last one that really made me see how wide the moat was for the first time. Normally companies keep their secret sauce secret. After all, why would you want to give your competitors any information that might help them compete? But a company who routinely publishes information that is useful to competitors? That is some confident shit right there. It reminded me of a tweet I can’t find from several years ago:

“The design tool war is already over, but no one knows it yet.”

Fast forward a few years and everyone who has tried to match Figma’s all-around performance has fallen short. Private companies like Sketch and InVision. Public companies like Adobe. It’s not for lack of effort by hundreds of incredibly smart people. It’s just really frickin’ hard. Combine that with the fact that Figma is a moving target who is now building entirely new capabilities, and you can see why Adobe decided this wasn’t just a move they wanted to make… it was a move they had to make.

… which brings us back to a lot of the reaction we are seeing on Design Twitter today.

I don’t think people mind the abstract concept of Figma being acquired by another company nearly as much as they mind the very real threat of Figma losing what makes it so special in the first place: focusing maniacally on performance, thinking differently, and optimizing for user experience above all else. The backlash is an expression of how a lot of people feel Adobe has done in those categories over the last decade.

If I’m Adobe, I am printing out as many Tweets from today as I can, making a book out of them, and then doing this:

After that, I’m letting Figma lay the tracks for the next decade of this industry and rallying the thousands of talented people at my own company to rethink how the entire organization builds software. Within the next several years, it’s going to be possible to go from idea in the morning, to prototype in the afternoon, to working code in the evening… and the company who can do that most thoughtfully is going to be one of the most important companies in the world.

Below is my dollar-store wisdom, in case you also want to enjoy fast food in moderation.

First, some golden rules:

Rule #1

No soda. This is an easy one. A medium Coke is 210 calories, 56 grams of carbs, and no protein. It’s also about $2 for something that costs about a nickel to make.

Instead, go with free tap water or an unsweetened iced tea. Zero calories and nothing artificial. Another nice hack that works at some places is going to the soda fountain and filling your water cup with club soda. There are usually two small tabs and one of them says “water”. The other one is the “off-menu” free club soda.

Rule #2

No fries… or if you must, get a small every now and then. I understand people like fries. I like fries too. But even a small order of fries is another 220 calories, 29 grams of carbs, and only 3 grams of protein.

Rule #3

Study menus for what’s overpriced and what’s underpriced. For instance, at Mickey Dee’s, a McChicken, a hamburger, and a 6-piece McNuggets are all $2 apiece or less. Meanwhile, a Double Bacon Quarter Pounder with Cheese is $7.

These places all encourage you to buy the Value Meals, but since you aren’t getting the soda or the fries, individual prices matter.

Now onto the meat of the matter: what should you order at each of the major national fast food places?

Restaurant-specific recommendations

The general pattern you are aiming for is “one or two protein-filled items and a water or tea”. Let’s see what each place can offer you in that regard.

McDonald’s

People like to rip on McD’s because it’s the canonical fast food restaurant, but it’s usually quite solid in terms of food predictability. One strange thing about the place though: pretty much all new items they ever add to their menu suck. Crispy Fried Chicken sando? Not great. Arch Deluxe? Not great. Buttermilk Fried Whatever? Not great. To succeed at McDonald’s you need to stick with the classics… the stuff that’s been on their menu for decades.

My three favorite orders here are:

• Two hamburgers with ketchup and mustard only. 500 calories and 24 grams of protein. About $4. That’s right. Regular old J. Wellington Wimpy style hamburgers. Always tasty and tidy enough to eat while you’re driving. You can leave the pickles and onions on if you want, but I feel they drag the quality down.
• One hamburger with ketchup and mustard only and a 6-piece McNuggets. 500 calories and 26 grams of protein. About $4. Same idea as the first order but more variety of flavor for you.
• One McChicken sando. 400 calories and 14 grams of protein. About $2. This is probably the best value on the entire McD’s menu. You could consider cutting the mayo to lower the calories but you need some sort of sauce on there. Dry sandwiches are for raccoons and pigeons.

Burger King

I have friends who swear that Burger King is the only fast food place they won’t go to, for well-documented reasons, but I think it’s generally fine. I don’t seek it out, but if it’s there, I will consider partaking, if for no other reason than a change of pace.

Some BK ideas:

• Whopper Jr. All Whoppers are giant, messy, and filled with calories, but the Jr. is manageable. Weighing in at only 336 calories, with 15 grams of protein, and about $4.30, it’s a solid choice.
• Rodeo Burger. I’ll be honest, in researching this article I had never even heard of the Rodeo Burger so I went down to my local BK to give it a shot. Holy shit… this might be my new favorite fast food item. A nice, tidy burger with BBQ sauce and onion rings in it, and it’s only 336 calories? With 13 grams of protein and only $1.29, I am comfortable saying this is the best deal in fast food right now.
• Spicy Chicken Jr. Alright, we are already running out of things to order at Burger King, so I’ll just include the only other acceptable item in here. It’s not the best chicken sandwich in the world, but at 386 calories, it’s a whopping 74% less calorific than the 1498 calorie “Spicy Ck’King Deluxe” sando. Holy crap. Also, 11.5 grams of protein and it’s only a dollar!!!

I wanted to include the Impossible Whopper in here, but like all other “regular” sized burgers at BK, it’s pretty huge and loaded with calories. Also, it tastes exactly like a Whopper, so you can use your own judgement as to whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Impossible Meat is so tasty on its own that you are better off making your own burger out of Impossible Sausage at home.

Time for another fast food video review. This time we try an under-the-radar item from Burger King that has actually been around for quite awhile: The Rodeo Burger! pic.twitter.com/KDxmfHVmGf

— Mike Davidson (@mikeindustries) February 19, 2022

Jack In The Box

Jack gets a bad wrap, and I’m not entirely sure why. They almost went out of business after an E. coli scare in the mid ’90s, but since then, I feel like they have been consistently one of the best and most innovative fast food joints around. They also have some of the very best commercials of all time:

Probably my favorite thing about Jack in the Box is that they’ve been piling new stuff onto to their menu for the last 30 years and never take anything off of it. Want a classic Jumbo Jack? No problem. French toast sticks? We got you. Teriyaki bowl? Giddyup. You could literally order all three of those things during a single trip to the drive thru.

Unfortunately however, most of things on the menu are better suited for your already-in-shape summer body. Take for instance, the Grande Sausage Breakfast Burrito, which weighs in at a whopping 1040 calories. I’m not a believer in breakfast burritos as a thing that should even exist in this world, but it’s just important to pay attention to these giant menus because trouble is around every corner.

Some ideas for your next trip to Jack in the Box:

• One of the healthiest things at Jack is something I have been ordering since its introduction in 1988: the Chicken Fajita Pita. Every time I order one, I am half expecting the person behind the counter to look at me funny and say “we haven’t had those for decades, pal!” but nope, they seem to always have one at the ready. With 27 grams of protein and only 330 calories, this is guilt-free fast food at its finest. $4.79 isn’t dirt cheap, but just think of it as a small price to pay for (perhaps) adding extra days or weeks to your life.
• The Junior Jumbo Jack is an oddly named burger that should perhaps just be called “The Jack” at this point, but it’s a good option if you need your burger fix but don’t want to feel gross afterwards. It’s still 420 calories and only 14 grams of protein, so not nearly as good of a proposition as, say, Burger King’s Rodeo Burger, but it probably won’t kill you. It’s also only $1.39 so how are you going to complain too much?
• The last item I’m going to recommend at Jack in the Box may shock you: the Two Tacos deal. Oh boy, where to even start with these things. They aren’t so much tacos as they are Flappy Meat Pockets. They look nothing like they do in the amazing commercials, but once they are in your stomach, you can’t really tell the difference. Two of these bad boys are only 99 cents, and contain a total of 340 calories and 12 grams of protein. If you’re low on dough, you could keep yourself alive on these things for months before your body slapped you upside your face and asked you what it did to deserve this. Seriously though, they’re not bad. You just need to believe.

Wendy’s

I don’t know why Wendy’s isn’t more popular. A solid menu with good ingredients and IMHO the best fries in the business. Some good orders from Wendy’s:

• Dave’s Single, no cheese, no onion. Listed at 590 calories and 29 grams of protein, but without the cheese it’s probably more like 500 and 24. About $5.
• Grilled Chicken Sandwich. 350 calories, 33 grams of protein and $5.50. A good thing to order if you want to sneak in a small order of Wendy’s excellent fries.
• Spicy Chicken Sandwich. 500 calories, 28 grams of protein, and $5.50. Pound for pound, not nearly as healthy as the grilled chicken, but a big taste upgrade. Deffo skip the fries if you order this one though.

Wendy’s also has some other interesting items like chili, baked potatoes, and Frostys, but this is not what we go to fast food restaurants for. Canned chili is just as good, if not better, and you can find a lot better ice cream than what you get in a Frosty. Don’t waste your calories on this stuff.

Chipotle

Out of all restaurants in this list, I feel healthiest when eating at Chipotle. I think if it was a sit down restaurant that served you your food on a ceramic plate, no one would even accuse it of being “fast casual”, let alone “fast food”. It’s just really tasty Tex-Mex, made quickly (through the magic of sous vide!), and offered affordably.

My go-to orders at Chipotle:

• You may be on team burrito, but I am team taco all the way. Better portion control, crispier produce, easier to stuff in your mouth. A reasonably dressed, crisp taco is only 170 calories, with 11 grams of protein, for $2.75. Barbacoa is by far their tastiest meat, but the vegan chorizo and sofritas vegetarian options are great as well. I usually get three, but through the magic of taco-specific portion control, you can dial it up or down.
• If you’re trying to go even healthier, Chipotle now has a wide variety of bowls to choose from that are all pretty good. Choose vegan chorizo for your protein, stay away from things like sour cream or rice, and go to town. You can get yourself a protein-packed, veggie-rich lunch for under $10.

Chick-fil-A

There are a lot of moral dilemmas one must wrestle with when choosing to eat meat — especially meat from fast food places — but Chick-fil-A offers up another dilemma entirely: is it ok to eat at restaurants whose leaders look down on people based on their sexual orientation?

If you look closely enough, you will probably find that a lot of the companies you give money to are reprehensible in one awful way or another, but given what we know about Chick-fil-A, I have tried to eliminate my patronage there.

I did, however, find one neat trick recently that will keep me from ever having the urge to go there again. Chick-fil-A sauce in a bottle. It’s only $5 at your local grocery store, and at least for me, it’s about a two-year supply. Do they make a couple of bucks off me? Sure. But it pales in comparison to making regular visits to that place. F’ that place, and f’ it twice on Sundays.

KFC

I can’t in good conscience recommend going to KFC if you are trying to shave off a few pounds, but I did go there the other day to try the “Beyond” Chicken Nuggets, so I thought I’d post the video:

Alright, as requested, video review time! I will also say that after I ate these first two ones, there were some less fresh ones in the box, and as some people mentioned, there is a substantial quality difference. pic.twitter.com/nJg08nT00i

— Mike Davidson (@mikeindustries) January 29, 2022

To sum it all up…

The goal of this post is not to tell you what the very tastiest items are at each restaurant. If you don’t care about calories or feeling gross — as I didn’t until I hit my mid-forties — go to town and eat whatever you want. But if you’ve successfully migrated to a healthy diet 6 days a week and just want to get your grease game on once in awhile, I hope this article has been helpful to you. As bad as some of this food might be for you, eating a single portion of it three or four times a month probably won’t affect you too much.

I also look forward to food engineering really coming into its own over the next decade. We spent the ’80s and ’90s making food demonstrably worse for you and worse for the planet, but with recent innovations in food science, we can now do amazing things like make real cheese without cows. The 2010s ushered in the golden age of ice cream (among other things), but my bet is the 2020s and ’30s will be the golden age of high-quality, lab-assisted healthy food. If you want to find out more about it, watch David Chang’s The Next Thing You Eat on Hulu.

I remember vividly the first time I saw Flash on a computer screen. It was 1997, I was finishing up college, and I had managed to teach myself enough HTML to think about pivoting from print design to interactive design as a career.

Web design, at the time, was a clumsy beast. Most web sites were essentially Times New Roman black text on a grey background with an occasional low-quality image here and there. The “design” part was often just figuring out how to best organize information hierarchies so users could feel their way around.

Once we got bored of basic HTML (there was no CSS at the time), we started doing unholy things with images. We’d set entire pages in Photoshop, slice our layouts into grids of smaller images, and then reassemble everything into a clickable mess. These were dark times.

My college, having invented PINE, was considered “on the front edge” of the internet at the time. Here’s is what our site looked like back then:

Even the most beautifully designed sites felt a bit lifeless, and once someone came up with a new layout that worked well, everyone would just ape it. To make matters worse, every new advancement in methods required more convoluted hacking to display correctly across Netscape, Internet Explorer, and every other fringe browser in use at the time. It was a total mess.

Here is the first version of Zeldman.com I could find, from 1998. Amazing for the era, and holds up impressively in a nostalgic, cyber-Americana sort of way, but you can see how limited we were by screen widths, color palettes, and layout technologies.

Then one day in 1997, I clicked on a link to Kanwa Nagafuji’s Image Dive site and the whole trajectory of web design changed for me. It looked like nothing I had ever seen in a web browser. A beautiful, dynamic interface, driven by anti-aliased Helvetica type and buttery smooth vector animation? And the whole thing loaded instantly on a dial-up connection with nothing suspicious to install? What was this sorcery? Sadly, I can’t find any representation of the site online anymore, but imagine the difference in going not just from black-and-white TV to color TV, but from newspaper to television.

Nagafuji’s work was such a huge, unexpected leap from everything that came before it that I had to figure out how it was done. A quick View Source later revealed an object/embed tag pointing to a file that ended in “.swf”. A few AltaVista searches later led me to the website of Macromedia, makers of ShockWave Flash (“SWF”), the technology that powered this amazing site.

I downloaded a trial version and was blown away at the editing interface. Instead of a shotgun marriage of Photoshop, HTML, browser hacks, and a bunch of other stuff that felt more like assembly than design, here was a single interface to lay out text, shapes, images, and buttons, and animate everything together into an interactive experience! It was magic.

After mucking around in the Flash editor (version 2 at the time) for a few hours, I did what every self-respecting web designer would do and immediately set out to find other cool stuff to copy. Over the course of the next several months and years I would find such gems as:

Yugop from Yugo Nakamura
Once Upon a Forest and Praystation from Joshua Davis
Nose Pilot by Alex Sacui
Natzke.com by Eric Natzke
Presstube by James Paterson
Gabocorp from Gabo Mendoza
John Mark Sorum by WDDG
2Advanced by Eric Jordan
NRG Design by Peter Van Den Wyngaert
The Hoover Vacuum Site by Fred Flade

… and of course, everything by Hillman Curtis (Rest in Peace)

(Sadly, much of this work is hard to relive due to Flash already being disabled in many browsers. I’ve tried to point to video demos where possible, but you can also try your luck with the Ruffle plug-in.)

From there, a bunch of us new designers set out to learn more about animation, type, scripting, and everything else that put you at the vanguard of the profession in those days. Flash was the first technology that showed us we could be great.

My initial effort was mdavidson.com, a rudimentary personal site that was the precursor to Mike Industries:

From there, I would move on to design Flash sites and features for ESPN, Disney, K2, The New York Rangers, and dozens of other organizations, never matching the quality of the masters listed above, but always breaking new ground in one way or another.

Other fun projects I collaborated on with my friend Danny Mavromatis included a virtual observation deck for the Space Needle, an interactive on-demand SportsCenter, and a Disney movies-on-demand service fully 20 years ahead of Disney+! All in Flash.

Perhaps the thing that gives me the most joy though is something we built and gave away for free: sIFR. What started as our brute-force attempt to use Akzidenz Grotesk for headlines on the front page of ESPN, turned into a more elegant implementation by Shaun Inman, which then turned into a scalable solution by Mark Wubben and me. We poured hundreds of hours into sIFR not to make any money but just to advance the state of typography on the web.

Over the next several years, sIFR was used to display rich type on tens of thousands of web sites. Although it relied on Flash, it was standards-compliant and accessible in its implementation, so it was the preferred choice for rich type until Typekit came along in 2009 and obviated the need for it.

All of this is to say, the role Flash played in helping transition the web from its awkward teenage years to a more mature adulthood is one I will always appreciate. And we haven’t even talked about its role in game development.

When discussing the life and death of Flash, people often point to Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts on Flash” as the moment things turned south for it. Worse yet, the idea that “Steve Jobs killed Flash”. I don’t think either of those things is actually true.

Flash, from the very beginning, was a transitional technology. It was a language that compiled into a binary executable. This made it consistent and performant, but was in conflict with how most of the web works. It was designed for a desktop world which wasn’t compatible with the emerging mobile web. Perhaps most importantly, it was developed by a single company. This allowed it to evolve more quickly for awhile, but goes against the very spirit of the entire internet. Long-term, we never want single companies — no matter who they may be — controlling the very building blocks of the web. The internet is a marketplace of technologies loosely tied together, each living and dying in rhythm with the utility it provides.

Most technology is transitional if your window is long enough. Cassette tapes showed us that taking our music with us was possible. Tapes served their purpose until compact discs and then MP3s came along. Then they took their rightful place in history alongside other evolutionary technologies. Flash showed us where we could go, without ever promising that it would be the long-term solution once we got there.

So here lies Flash. Granddaddy of the rich, interactive internet. Inspiration for tens of thousands of careers in design and gaming. Loved by fans, reviled by enemies, but forever remembered for pushing us further down this windy road of interactive design, lighting the path for generations to come.

RIP Flash. 1996-2020.

If you feel so moved, pour one out for our old friend in the comment section below.

When I noticed it broke, I spent several hours trying to figure out why and to fix it as quickly and easily as possible. Essentially, there are two reasons why it doesn’t work anymore:

1. PHP 7 no longer lets you use "=&" to “assign a new object by reference”. I don’t even really know what this means, but I do know you can solve it simply by removing the &. There is only one place you need to do this in Mint’s code and that is on line 3409 of /mint/app/lib/mint.php where it says $DOM =& new SI_Dom($xml);. This problem was infuriating because it just makes the whole app fail silently, without throwing a single error. I spent a half a day deleting random code just to identify the culprit.
2. The MySQL API has been deprecated in PHP 7 and Mint uses it for all of its database work. You’re supposed to rewrite all of your queries to use the new mysqli or PDO_MySQL APIs, but after a few hours of trying to do this, I realized my PHP skills were not up to the task and I opted for an easier solution instead. There’s a wrapper you can just include with your Mint install that translates all of the functions on the fly for you. This method is generally “not recommended” by people who actually know what they’re doing, but for a quick fix, it worked perfectly for me. If someone wants to patch Mint correctly, I will gladly post a pointer to it here. Anyway, all you have to do is download that file, upload it to /mint/app/ (next to path.php), call it something like mysql_bridge.php and then add this line right above the first include statement in /mint/index.php: include(MINT_ROOT.'app/mysql_bridge.php');

Voila! You’re done. The whole procedure should take only a few minutes.

You’re rekindling angst at a Pearl Jam show and without any warning they go right into a Beatles song. You recognize some David Bowie lyrics on Spotify, and you discover it’s an unrecognizable version of Let’s Dance by M. Ward. You listen to Tiny Cities by Sun Kil Moon several times before you even realize it’s an entire album of beautifully fermented Modest Mouse songs.

How often have you thought to yourself, I would love to hear this person sing this other band’s song in their own style? For instance, I wish I could listen to Mike Doughty sing just about anything.

Over the past year or two, we’ve started to see artificial intelligence begin to approximate that dream (or nightmare, depending on your perspective). First it was eye-opening deep fake videos of past presidents appearing to say things they never said, but now it’s moved on to much more creative and cool endeavors like OpenAI Jukebox. You should read the full description on the site, but essentially they are training models to identify everything that goes into a song: instruments, lyrics, musical style, and a whole lot more. The models are primitive for now, but even at this early stage, they can start recombining things in interesting ways like having Ella Fitzgerald sing a Prince song but in the style of folk rock.

I spent a good part of the weekend messing around in Jukebox, and it’s mesmerizing. It really feels like the beginning of something big, and just as excitingly, something that could get orders of magnitude better within only a few years.

When you listen to it, it almost feels like the first words of a child… or if you prefer, the first song from Jimmy Page.

A lot of the stuff in the library is pretty rough, but here are some of the most interesting ones I found:

• Frank Sinatra introducing Jukebox
• The Greatest Love of All by Whitney Houston re-arranged and sung as Bob Dylan
• U Can’t Touch This by M.C. Hammer re-arranged and sung as Earth, Wind, and Fire
• Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. A poem by Robert Frost. As read by Dolly Parton, Aretha Franklin, Neil Diamond, or Billie Holiday.
• Some of them aren’t so much “good” as they are fascinating, like this attempt at Brain Damage by Pink Floyd which sounds like a singer who doesn’t know English trying to just sound out the words as best he can.
• Others come pretty close to the real thing, like these Ray LaMontagne and Ryan Adams songs, which sound like they’ve just had a few too many whiskeys.

Everything feels very Frankensteiny right now, but imagine a few years from now when these techniques are improved and expanded. We may reach a point where there is a virtually unlimited universe of concert-quality covers you can create with just a few taps. As a music lover, this is super intriguing, but on the other hand, I wonder how musicians will feel about it. And will their opinions change based on whether we can find a way to monetize it generously for them? I could see some artists rejecting this sort of thing outright because it’s not real music in the traditional sense, and I wouldn’t blame them. But what if you told them that every time their voice was mixed into another song, they made a royalty off of it? That might change some opinions.

This is going to be a really fun space to watch closely over the next few years. Until then, I leave you with another great cover: Metallica’s Orion — by Rodrigo y Gabriela. Incidentally, the header image for this page is from their Masonic Auditorium show in 2015. Pure luck but probably the best photo I’ve ever taken.

Players put their bodies on the line every day to a degree that most of them are not fairly compensated for, so I will almost always side with players in terms of wanting them to get the best deal possible. This is a unconventional idea to help achieve that goal and get both sides to a good and equitable place as quickly as possible.

The elevator pitch

Before the start of the 2020 NFL season, all 32 starting quarterbacks should initiate a quarterback-only strike. Everyone else shows up to work and gets paid. If there is no acceptable deal in place by opening week, the games begin, the quality of play degrades dramatically, ratings/attendance/sales tank, and owners — unable to wait out a group of 32 players with many millions more in financial security than 99% of the league — are forced back to the bargaining table with a 16-game season, a true 50/50 revenue split, and a few other things players are quite reasonably asking for.

Why it will work

Athletes get out-negotiated by owners for a very simple reason: there are 32 owners and none of them ever need another paycheck again. Losing even vast amounts of their fortunes will not degrade their quality of life. There are 1696 active NFL players and most of them are materially affected every time they miss even a single game check. 32 billionaires vs over a thousand normal people who need paychecks is a recipe for exactly the sort of terrible deal that was signed ten years ago and threatens to be signed again. The goal of a Quarterback-Only Strike is to change the equation to 32 billionaires vs 32 of the most popular cash-rich players.

Do quarterbacks really have that much cash cushion? Let’s take a look at lifetime earnings for the 32 starting quarterbacks in the league right now. Note that this doesn’t even include endorsements, but also doesn’t include taxes:

1. Drew Brees: $244m
2. Tom Brady: $235m
3. Rodgers: $233m
4. Roethlisberger: $232m
5. Ryan: $223m
6. Rivers: $218
7. Stafford: $210m
8. Newton: $121m
9. Wilson: $109m
10. Cousins: $100m
11. Dalton: $83m
12. Tannehill: $77m
13. Carr: $72m
14. Garoppolo: $64m
15. Fitzpatrick: $63m
16. Foles: $62m
17. Goff: $49m
18. Winston: $46m
19. Wentz: $39m
20. Trubisky: $24m
21. Mayfield: $24m
22. Murray: $24m
23. Darnold: $22m
24. Brissett: $17m
25. Jones: $17m
26. Allen: $15m
27. Mahomes: $13m
28. Watson: $11m
29. Haskins: $9m
30. Jackson: $6m
31. Prescott: $5m
32. Lock: $4m

I have no idea how these guys invest or spend their money, but in my estimation, until you get down to the final few players (especially Dak… sorry Dak!), you are looking at pretty good financial cushions. Certainly enough to weather a few games or an entire season… especially if you include lost backpay in your deal requirements. Most position players in the league cannot afford this sort of holdout, but pretty much all starting QBs can.

It’s also possible that other players who have lifetime earnings over, say $25m, decide to join this strike in solidarity, but it’s not strictly necessary. Some marquee names might include J.J. Watt ($85m), Richard Sherman ($69m), or the NFL’s top selling non-QB jersey title holder Odell Beckham Jr. ($48m).

The other thing that’s nice about this proposal is that it’s literally the only position in any sport that could pull it off. Football could easily weather a strike at any other position, but not quarterback. Baseball could weather a strike from any position — even pitchers. Fans love offense! Basketball could weather a strike from any position because superstars are spread out amongst all five positions. I don’t watch a lot of hockey or soccer so I will just assume they fit my narrative too. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Quarterbacks are almost always the face of the franchise, the entire game runs through them in today’s pass-heavy NFL, and this is the perfect time to consolidate that power against owners and use it to improve conditions for the other 1664 players who don’t hold the same cards they do.

When I initially came up with this cockamamie scheme a few months ago, the reason I thought it might not work is that of all players on an NFL team, you would think quarterbacks would be the coziest with owners. But now that I see my own team’s QB, Russell Wilson, along with Aaron Rodgers, come out as strongly against the current CBA proposal, I think this thing could have some legs.

In conclusion

If players cannot get the very best deal they deserve this offseason, a Quarterback-Only Strike should be actively considered because it changes the negotiation from 32 vs 1696 to 32 vs 32. Additionally, you only need a majority of owners to cave, so if a few owners are insulated by the fact that they don’t have star quarterbacks yet, the rest of the owners are still vulnerable.

It’s also entirely possible someone else has already thought of this and kicked enough holes in it to show why it wouldn’t work. Basically, I need some more eyes on this thing. Agents, players, sports attorneys, whoever. If you know of someone who you think would have an opinion about it, I’d love to hear from them. The comment section is open below.

The new class of experiences on mobile phones at the time, however, was uninspiring. Palm Treos with barely functional browsers on them. Blackberries that handled email but little else well. T9 keyboards that were a pain to use. Barely any designers wanted to work on this stuff. It wasn’t very fun to create, use, or even tell anyone you worked on.

When the iPhone came along in 2007, it was the first mobile device that was fun to design for and fun to use for a wide variety of things. As it grew more and more useful, I began to think of internet-connected phones as quite a bit more exciting but still ultimately a transition state to full cyborg land. It seems inconceivable that in 10 or 20 years, we will still be staring down at these glass rectangles instead of directly at the world with whatever augmented reality experiences we choose in between.

As phones have gotten more comically large and the services on them more tragically addictive over the past few years, I’ve found myself wondering if there is more value in letting some of this connectivity go. Clearly smartphones provide a lot of value for us, but what is the true cost of all this convenience? Being able to receive a text from your spouse while you’re at the supermarket is valuable, but the same device that delivers you that text can deliver a social network notification while you’re driving that ends up killing you or others.

Attempting to quantify the large and small harm caused by smartphone use is a big project better suited to places like Tristan Harris’ Center for Humane Technology, but you don’t need to quantify it to admit it’s doing you some amount of harm.

There is no shortage of advice about how to make your phone less addictive. Turn off a bunch of notifications. Flip on Do Not Disturb. Use Black & White mode. Delete social networking apps. It’s all good advice, but for me, having that giant, heavy glass brick in my pocket is a constant reminder of what’s at my fingertips.

What I’ve really grown to want is less at my fingertips.

Minimum viable connectivity.

Wherever I happen to be, I want the least amount of potential digital distractions and appholes around me. It’s no different than the concept of eating healthier. When you want to lose weight, you don’t keep a bunch of junk food in your pockets and just promise to never open it. You remove junk food from your house completely.

Until recently, there was no great way to stop carrying your smartphone with you without giving up a ton of benefits. Over the past two weeks, however, I’ve begun using an Apple Watch without a phone almost all day long, and it’s been great. It’s introduced exactly the amount of digital friction I need in my life and I don’t imagine going back to hyper-connected smartphone world anytime soon.

“The best way to guarantee success is by preemptively engineering systems to reduce friction for positive habits, and increase friction for negative ones.” — Craig Mod, from the great piece I linked to above

I love that I am still generally reachable by phone or text when I wear it. I love that I can still navigate with maps. I love that I can track my runs without third party services and listen to podcasts along the way. I love that I can see when it’s about to rain.

And I love that that’s about all I can do. I don’t mind that texts are a little harder to send. I don’t even mind that there’s no camera. If I’m on vacation in an interesting place, I will surely take my phone, but do I really need to be taking more photos around town? Probably not. This is the point many people will break with me on this whole strategy, but try it. You may be surprised.

In terms of things I don’t like about about this experiment so far, it really just comes down to a couple of flaws with the watch itself: the LTE radio is pretty spotty and the Apple Podcast app is a usability disaster, both on the phone and the watch. Because the radio is weak, you really need to make sure anything you want to listen to is downloaded already, and because the apps are so bad, it’s very hard to ensure that actually happens. You’ll generally have some podcasts downloaded and ready to listen to but they just aren’t always the ones you expected. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Even with those problems, I still feel great about this less-connected road I’m going down. Somewhat surprisingly, I don’t even feel like I’m missing out on anything.

The hyper-connected future will probably still happen, but the form it will take doesn’t feel so inevitable to me anymore. I’ve learned in these two weeks alone that I don’t actually want every distracting digital experience in the world at my fingertips. I only want what is helpful and stays out of the way.

The last time I wore a watch was in high school, and I distinctly remember how excited I was to finally get a cell phone my junior year.

27 years later, I’m just as excited now to do the opposite.

First, let’s dispense with the easy part: despite what you may read on Twitter, remote work is neither the greatest thing in the world nor the worst. We are not moving to a world where offices go completely away, nor are we going through some sort of phase where remote work will eventually prove to be a giant waste of time. In other words, it’s complicated.

The way to look at remote work is that it’s a series of tradeoffs. You enjoy benefits in exchange for disadvantages. The uptake of remote work over the next decade will depend most on the minimization of those disadvantages rather than the maximization of the benefits. Reason being, the benefits are already substantial while many of the disadvantages will be lessened over time with technology and process improvements.

Instead of writing about the advantages and disadvantages separately, I’m going to cover several aspects of remote work and discuss the tradeoffs involved with each.

Work Overhead

There is a certain amount of “overhead” involved in having an office job. You usually need to wake up at least an hour or two before the workday begins, put yourself together (often a much more arduous process for women because of the gender-specific norms we’ve set up), commute to work, and any number of other things involved in just getting to your desk every day. Then, when the day is over, you often do the same thing in reverse. To make things easy, let’s call this 90 minutes on each end. That’s an extra 15 hours a week! For reference, there are days when I wake up 10 minutes before my first meeting of the day and it’s no problem at all.

Lopping that 15 hours off is probably the part of remote work that is the most unconditionally positive. You could try and rationalize your commute by saying it’s when you catch up on all of your great podcasts or whatever, but you don’t need an actual commute to do that. You could spend that time in the morning on a walk and then go for a run in the evening and it would be a lot healthier.

Math-wise, if you assume that most employers do not consider overhead time as part of the ~40 hours you’re getting paid for, working remotely can reduce your true work week by about 27%. If you already work remotely and you were to consider taking a traditional job again, you’d be agreeing to a whopping 37.5% longer week!

Anecdotally, I’ve heard that some people actually do miss their commutes and in some cases have set up “fake commutes” for themselves. They’ll wake up, drive 5 minutes to the coffee shop for an espresso, and then drive back. I do this occasionally, but it’s just for the coffee.

Daily Habitat

The advantages of remote work get less clear when you evaluate your “daily habitat”. If you compare a Google office, for instance — full of perks like on-site massage therapists, crepe stations, and basketball courts — to a tiny apartment shared with two roommates and a screaming baby, I bet most people would choose the Google office. On the other extreme though, what if you compare a cramped office with poor ergonomics and bad lighting with a comfortable home on a ranch with alpacas and a nice fish pond out back? In other words, there are a wide range of variables that will determine whether your home office habitat is more enjoyable than an office would be.

If you asked me “would the average tech worker living in San Francisco prefer to work from home, in San Francisco” I would probably say no, due to the combination of office perks and small living quarters. If you asked me the same question but for Denver, I might say yes. We have a lot of people at InVision who have traded cramped, overpriced apartments in tech hubs for more comfortable situations across the country and the world. This seems like it will be a common outcome in the near future.

So… in order to answer the question of whether you’d like office life better than home office life, you need to ask “what is the office like” and “what would my home office be like”?

On the question of how optimal your home office would be, I can’t really say I’ve nailed this yet, much to the chagrin of my wife. I take video calls from all around the house, and I can see how that would be highly inconvenient for everyone else in the house. If your work activity is limited to one room, the rest of the house remains off-microphone and off-camera. I need to get better at this and stop taking so many meetings from the living room couch.

InVision also issues everyone $100 auto-refilled coffee cards every month to encourage people to change up their surroundings frequently. While I take advantage of this once or twice a week, I also don’t want to be the person in the coffee shop loudly conducting their business in public every day.

Meetings

The aspect of remote work I was probably least excited about was video meetings. I’ve never been big on video calls in general (even personal ones), and all of the video conferencing I’ve done in the past has been rocky. Flaky connections, unwieldy software, and uneven power dynamics have generally made for a poor experience.

Happily, however, internet connections have gotten more reliable, and with Zoom, the software is pretty good now too. As for the power dynamics, that’s where working at an all-remote company has helped tremendously. Instead of 9 people in a room together, reading each other’s body language, and one person halfway across the world stuck behind a screen, everyone is in the same boat. It’s a nice equalizer. In fact, during one conversation we were having around inclusion, a couple of people cited videoconferencing as one of the big reasons they felt more empowered in meetings. Since everyone is just a postage stamp sized video on everyone else’s screen, there is very little raising of voices or aggressive body language. It’s harder for one or two people to dominate conversations this way. It’s a rare instance of a technology’s shortcomings providing an accidental benefit.

I will say this about video meetings though: I have a very hard and sudden limit I reach with them. My first hour or two of video meetings every day are a joy. But the days when I have to do 4 or 5 hours on Zoom, it gets tedious. This is not the case for me with in-person meetings. I feel like in an office full of people you genuinely enjoy, sitting down in a conference room or taking a walk with them is refreshing. It’s part of what makes office life enjoyable… for me at least!

I think the evolution and improvement of video meetings — especially in remote work situations — is going to be a huge lever in pushing companies towards more remote work over the next decade. Although video meetings aren’t nearly as bad as they once were, there is a LONG way to go here. I’m sure in the next several years, we’ll see things like three-dimensional holograms and other stuff that will blow our minds.

One other thing about meetings in remote companies: working remotely has made me realize how unimportant and ritualized so many meetings are. Often times, I will get 90% of the way through scheduling a meeting in Google Calendar only to ask myself “can’t we just update each other on this project throughout the week via Slack?” Even staff meetings seem unnecessary sometimes.

Countries and Time Zones

One of my favorite things about working at an entirely remote company is interacting with people from entirely different cultures every day. Over the past year, my team has included people from Washington, California, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Israel, Colorado, New Jersey, Australia, Spain, England, Mexico, Germany, and the Fake Washington… and that’s just my direct team. The rest of the company employs people from almost every continent. Although we are all still subject to our natural bubbles associated with tech work, it’s great to work with people outside your culture on a daily basis. We even have an ordained rabbi on our team, who leads our education programs!

There are challenges with hiring and getting hired internationally though. The first is local employment laws. It’s much easier to hire people in a country if you’ve officially set up a corporate entity there. That’s a bit of work. Even if you’ve set up an entity, it’s also a bunch of work making sure you are in compliance with local laws because they differ so greatly across the world. As a small example, even though we have an unlimited vacation policy that doesn’t require documentation in the United States, there are some countries where employees must enter all time off requests into a system; not because we want them to, just because laws require it. It’s a bit easier to hire people on contract in countries where you don’t have an entity set up, but there are downsides to that too. The bottom line is: even in all-remote global companies, it’s going to be easier to employ people in some countries than others.

Time zones are another challenge, and it’s almost all downside there. The simplest rule of thumb is that the further away people are, the more challenging it’s going to be to coordinate with them. I would consider our “fairly convenient time zones” to be everything from PDT to GMT. Anything outside of that and you are getting into territory where people may need to shift their work days a bit in order to accommodate the rest of the company. For instance, the person on my team who works from Israel actually time-shifts his day so that he works from 4pm to about 12 or 1am (local time), and that’s the way he likes it. He spends the first half of his waking hours with his family and the last half at work. Kind of a swing shift. It’s also doubly hard for people in managerial roles to be outside of core time zones.

Connection to Teammates

It’s a privileged thing to be able to say, but almost everywhere I’ve worked as an adult, I’ve felt a strong connection to my teammates. When you are fortunate enough to work in a field that you love, in an industry that’s booming, around people who share similar goals as you, you can’t help but feel like you have a second family at times. I know there are a lot of people who say the whole family metaphor of work is wrong and exploitative, but I believe in it in some situations. While I do believe that an employer can attempt to trick you into thinking you’re family in order to keep you loyal, I’ve also been in plenty of situations where my team DID in fact act like a family; looking out and sacrificing for each other, spending time with one another outside of work, and just generally helping each other through a lot of tough shit.

While it may not be “family” in the genetic sense of the word, going on stressful missions with people is bonding in a very similar sense. Every win and every loss brings you closer. I feel a sense of closeness with my old team at Twitter, for instance, that I’ve never felt with most other people in my life.

While I love the ~800 people I work remotely with at InVision, it feels different than what I’ve experienced in the past. On the one hand, I am in awe that I get to work with amazing people from Australia, Europe, Africa, Asia, and both Americas every day; people who I would never have even met if the company was headquartered in Seattle or San Francisco. But on the other hand, I’m only interacting with two-dimensional electronic representations of them on a daily basis.

Once a year, the entire company gets together for a week and it’s fantastic to see everyone in-person. In addition to that, between smaller team get-togethers and one-off work trips that I take, I probably see at least one teammate a month… sometimes many more.

I’m able to cope with having predominantly digital relationships during the day because I have a healthy social life outside of work, but if I didn’t, it might be rough. A lot of people look to office life for a good percentage of their real human interaction every day, and if you’re one of those people, I could see remote life being not fun at all.

Even though we have tools like Slack to help us keep up with what all of our teammates are doing, it’s different than being in a building together. It’s better the more independently you can work, but it’s worse if you need to be in communication with teammates for most of the day.

Importantly, this is also one of the reasons why it’s risky hiring junior people into remote roles. We tend to hire the most experienced people we can find, because in a remote company, you have to be able to paddle your own boat most of the time.

I do worry that if it is true, it may have a negative effect on our ability to coach up the next generation of designers, engineers, and other knowledge workers. In other words, a world in which every company works 100% remotely is probably a world which is less hospitable to people just starting out. There is no substitute for in-person tutelage.

Productivity

I’ve spent a long time thinking about whether remote work is more or less productive than in-person work, and I can’t say I know for sure either way. The complete answer is probably “it depends”, but my gut is that remote work is probably “almost” as productive as in-person work, hour-for-hour. In some cases, it may be 50% as productive and in other cases, it might be 200%, but if you told me the average was like 90%, I’d believe you. This number, however, is based on if you had the same group of people in one room together vs. across the world. Part of the beauty of remote work is that you have access to people you’d never have access to if you required they live in a certain city.

Let’s say, for instance, that you wanted to start a tech company in Lebanon, Kansas — the geographic center of the contiguous United States. You’d be hard pressed to find 20 A+ designers, engineers, and other employees crucial to your success (sorry Lebanon, nothing against you!). If you started your company in Lebanon and hired remotely though, you could hire top talent from all around the world.

This has interesting implications for SF and other tech hubs vs. the world. People in SF would tell you they would still have the talent advantage over you because they can hire A+ talent AND co-locate everyone together. This may be true right now, but a) it’s very expensive, and b) it may not be as true in the future when living in SF becomes even more cramped than it already is.

In terms of being super-productive in remote environments, the biggest lever is to work as asynchronously as possible. Carve off large chunks of work that you can do on your own without having to check in every hour or even every day. For design reviews, do some of them over video, but collect as much feedback via asynchronous comments as you can.

I’ve spoken with several startups over the last few months who are trying to make remote work more productive, so I expect a lot of innovation here shortly. I’ve begun using Navigator to help with my meetings, but there’s a lot more that will be done in this space.

Tools

The thing that has taken the most getting used to at an all-remote company is all of the communication that gets done over Slack. To be perfectly honest, I am not sure if Slack has made me more or less productive. It is likely that it has had effects in both directions.

On the positive side, it’s a very well-designed product for what it does and it makes non-face-to-face communication a snap. If you want to have a sporadic conversation with multiple people over the course of hours, it’s great for that. If you want to chat quickly with someone, it’s also great for that. If you want to broadcast interesting things to channels that the whole company can view and participate in, it’s great for that too.

On the negative side, it does feel like a second inbox to me. It also feels like an excuse not to document decisions properly. One of my least favorite workflows in Slack is:

1. Chat with Sara, David, Rachel, and Frank about something for awhile.
2. Make a decision at some point and stop chatting.
3. Wake up days or weeks later and wonder what became of that thing you were talking about.

Did the thing actually get done? Did you have an action item? Where is that conversation again? Was it with Sara, David, and Rachel? Or David, Rachel, and Frank?

I think Slack as a tool has the same core problem that Twitter has: it’s too easy to use it in a way that isn’t helpful. I think Slack has done a good job of trying to lightly push you in healthy directions, but I still haven’t had the aha moment where I couldn’t imagine my life without it. Often I do imagine my life without it, in fact.

To Slack’s credit, I think they provide a service that is so flexible that it’s really up to you and your company to use it in a way that adds the most value. I think if you visited the company with the worst Slack hygiene in the world, you would be appalled, but if you visited the company with the best Slack hygiene in the world, you would be beyond amazed. Stripe, for instance, maintains good hygiene by automatically deleting all Slack messages older than, I believe, six weeks. I really like this policy. It forces you to use Slack as a conversation medium and not a system of record.

Happiness

The two things you want most in a job are impact and happiness. While I’m very happy myself, I can absolutely see why remote work is not for everyone. Building on the aspects above, the three factors I think would most determine happiness are:

• The qualities of your home-office habitat.
• The qualities of your company’s office habitat.
• What sort of human interaction you want/need from co-workers on a daily basis.

You probably need at least two of those things to fall in your favor to enjoy your chosen path. Additionally, all three could change at any time, and the second one is very dependent on what company you’re talking about.

I think another important factor in determining happiness is how hard of a line you want between work and home life. One benefit of traditional office environments is that when you physically leave the office, it’s not too hard to flip the switch and go into “home mode”. Sure you may have to deal with the odd email every now and then, but it’s relatively straightforward to set up the work/home boundary. In remote life, it’s not always as easy. Personally, I am ok with this, as I would happily trade several hours of evening or weekend work for the ability to take off and go on a two-hour run in the middle of the day if I don’t have any meetings.

What’s Next

Whether individuals are better suited for co-located or remote work, one thing that seems like a happy medium is offering employees the ability to work from home a lot more often. For instance, a workweek that included Mondays and Fridays as home days and Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays as office days would be fantastic. You’d get the benefit of everyone being available for face-to-face time three days in a row, but you’d also reduce commutes and potentially lengthen weekends. A lot of companies are already doing this for one day a week, but in many cases, two would be even better.

While hybrid setups like this will become more popular, it’s also pretty clear that more companies will try the all-remote route. In addition to advancements in collaboration and telepresence technologies, I imagine there will be entire companies set up around helping organizations work remotely. I could see something like Stripe Atlas addressing this opportunity directly. Just enabling companies to pay employees across many different countries is an entire company in itself.

I also wonder what other innovations we will see in co-working spaces. Although InVision offers co-working space in several cities, I don’t make use of it myself, so my experience with them is limited. I’ve talked to people who love co-working spaces and also people who hate them. Seems like there’s a big opportunity to create more cross-pollination between companies in the same co-working space. One of the surest ways to dream up new ideas is to mix with people who are nothing like you, and co-working spaces of the future could be one such way of doing just that.

Finally, I’m excited for more best practices to emerge around remote work. I still feel like we are all casting about in the dark a bit. We’re making it work, but are we as efficient and effective as we could be? Surely not. I haven’t gotten a chance to dig into 37Signals’ “Shape Up” yet, but I’m thinking something like that but specifically geared around collaborating remotely. Someone will write the book on this, and it will do extremely well. Additionally, it will need to be updated every year because of how swiftly remote work is progressing.

It’s been an exciting year learning to work in this new, distributed way. I can’t say for sure that I’ll be working 100% remotely for the rest of my life, but it does seem difficult to imagine going completely back to full-time office life.