Notes from a quiet workshop
What a month looks like when nothing has shipped yet: reading, sketching, throwing away, and writing the parts down that survive.
Nothing shipped this month. That is not an apology — it is what most months look like in a studio that has decided to publish only when something is worth living with. Here is what a month of that actually contains.
Reading
A lot of it. Old interface guidelines, accessibility research, and the release notes of software that has survived twenty years. The pattern in long-lived tools is almost boring: they change slowly, they keep their file formats, and they stay out of the way.
Sketching, then throwing away
Four attempts at a writing surface. Three of them added something — a sidebar, a command menu, a set of tags — and each one made the blank page a little further away. The fourth removed things, and is the one still open.
Writing down what survives
When a decision survives being thrown away twice, it goes into the foundations: the type scale, the spacing rhythm, the motion budget, the words we use in errors. Those files are the actual product right now. Every screen we eventually build is downstream of them.
Next month
More of the same, with one difference: the first thing we plan to show anyone. No date attached — you will read about it here first.