Interface Aesthetics

The least-respected discipline in software, and the one most responsible for whether a piece of software gets cared about. I don’t mean “design” in the dribbble sense. I mean the felt sense of a tool — does it respect your attention, does it make a small ceremony out of opening it, does it feel like a place you’d want to return to.

This area pulls in:

• Typography on screen.
• Restraint as a virtue.
• The difference between legible and readable.
• When motion helps and when it lies.

Threads

• note

  Reading on paper vs. screen

  My current best understanding of why reading on paper feels different — and what of that can be ported to screens.
• project

  Margin

  An experiment in marginalia as a primary writing surface — what happens when the side-note is more important than the main text.
• post

  Why I paused Reading Room

  A short retrospective. I learned the answer to my own question, and the answer was "build something else."
• project

  Reading Room

  An attempt to design a "reading mode" worth using — paused while I figure out whether it's a feature, a tool, or a stance.