Browser tabs

In the summer of 2016 I tried doing a weekly thing where I published links to all the browser tabs left open on my work computer. It lasted all of 16 weeks. As I’m migrating my website from one publishing engine to another, I thought it might be interesting to revive the project.

And while I’m spending a lot of time thinking about web publishing more broadly, this also could be an interesting experiment: Of all these hypertext links from 2016, how many remained accessible?

No. 17 / July 8, 2022

• The Collector’s Fallacy
• How I knew I was done with my company
• I’m a very slow thinker
• Smart people don’t think others are stupid
• Singing the counter-melody
• Why I left America
• Writing daily, but posting when ready
• Living according to your hierarchy of values
• Monthly self-expansion project
• Use the tricks that woked on you
• A curious answer to the most common question
• Proudly exclude most people
• An Invitation — Roden Explorers
• The Digital-Physical

No. 16 / September 30, 2016

• A genius design trick to protect products from shipping damage
• With robots, is a life without work one we’d want to live?
• New research shows there’s one big change when cops wear cameras
• Alex Schleifer: Designing the Perfect In-House Partnerships
• 101 small ways you can improve your city
• What’s Left After the Logo Steals the Glory?
• Preserving the Quietest Places
• That vs. Which
• What reply-all emails feel like
• Researchers have finally discovered the key to naturally stripping sugar from all our foods
• Inside the mind of a master procrastinator
• Danny Meyer Just Single-Handedly Made the Apple Watch Relevant to the Hospitality Industry
• Designing Chat Interfaces
• Depero Futurista The Bolted Book – A New Facsimile
• Stupefied
• The Age of the Wordless Logo

No. 15 / September 23, 2016

• Rob Janoff on his logo for Apple
• Successful projects begin with a great kickoff message.
• The Minimalist’s Guide To Productivity
• The Beginner’s Guide To Scrum And Agile Project Management
• What can a technologist do about climate change? (A personal view)
• Metafizzy – Delightful web UI
• Logo Pizza – Hot & Ready Logos for Sale

No. 14 / September 17, 2016

• Ikea Forever
• The Perfect Company on Quartz
• An airport parking lot is an improvised village
• The Links Between Creativity and Depression, and how the design industry can tackle mental health
• Jason Fried: Make “Creative Destruction” a Regular Part of Your Routine
• Norma Jeanne Maloney: From Truck Driver to Complete Creative Control
• Nick Cave’s gift: a skeleton key that unlocks the source of songwriting
• Why You Should Be Optimizing
• How To Eliminate Organizational Debt

No. 13 / September 10, 2016

• Bureau of Betterment – Flags of Portland Part 2
• Bitter Renter, an interactive guide for first-time renters in NYC
• Heftwerk
• Hybrid Urbanism, Strelka Institute final student projects 2015/16
• Send Thanks To
• Claudio Guglieri: The Secrets of Design Leadership
• Travelocity Destination Watcher Getting Started Guide
• The Best Moments From The North American Parkour Championship
• Louise Fili’s Newest NYC Subway Poster Will Make Your Mouth Water
• Visit Mordor on Threadless
• The adjective word order we all follow without realizing it
• Tattly PETTING ZOO SET by Christoph Niemann
• A Good Pan is Hard to Find

No. 12 / September 4, 2016

• Type Hike: A typographic exploration of America’s National Parks
• As Far As Your Brain Is Concerned, Audiobooks Are Not ‘Cheating’
• Tim Cook, the interview: Running Apple ‘is sort of a lonely job’
• Fuck the Banks, I’ll Build My Own Damn House, or; How I Learned To Stop Worrying, and Build a Custom Camper Van
• Giovanni Pintori Research
• Discrimination By Design
• Ramsophone
• Out of Pocket: What Teachers Across the Country Spend on Supplies
• The Joys—and Unexpected Perils—of Sleeping in a Tiny House
• The New Question for 21st Century Cities
• Elon Musk’s Unbelievably Simple 12-minute Killer Break Down on Climate Change
• What it feels like to be the last generation to remember life before the internet
• Someone took the music out of Dancing in the Street

No. 11 / August 26, 2016

This week, among other things, I fell back in love with the folks at 37signals Basecamp.

• Memorials for the Future
• Hunting for great names in programming
• It’s urgent! (Really?)
• How to make firing people suck less for them and suck more for you
• Reminder: Design is still about words
• Taking CarPlay for a Spin
• Graphic Sensibilities with Politicized Undertones in Zsofia Schweger’s Unusual Image-making
• What Makes Great Collage-based Design?
• Dan Mall Shares His Design Trade Secrets
• Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy
• Why I Hate My Dog

No. 10 / August 19, 2016

• Bōru by Folklore on Behance
• Craft Beer Branding Guide
• VoteGif
• The Family Living Inside A Farmhouse, Which Is Inside An Airplane Hangar
• Quit trying to attract a crowd and just help people
• Work versus Life. Greatness versus Family.
• A 3-step process for naming a project/product. (And some resources)
• Don’t Call It That: A Naming Workbook
• What Design Can Do on Issuu
• 10 things you need to learn in design school if you’re tired of wasting your money
• Tsunami Stones: Ancient Japanese Markers Warn Builders of High Water
• McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture?
• List of generic and genericized trademarks on Wikipedia
• Usain Bolt and the Fastest Men in the World Since 1896 – on the Same Track
• Images in the public domain on Wikimedia Commons
• The beers of Omnipollo

No. 9 / August 12, 2016

• How Did the First People Populate North America?
• Dan Mall: Replace the Internship with the Apprenticeship
• Withering Heights
• SEQUENCE on Instagram
• The Deadly Results Of Flawed Design
• Playing The Long Game Inside Tim Cook’s Apple
• Designers:Watch
• Revision Path
• How Type Can Tell the History of Your City
• Designer Sam Coldy on the Perks of Building a Diverse Portfolio
• What Do Designers Have To Do With Sexism, Plagiarism + Colonialism?
• Businessweek’s Newest Designer is Turning “Big Adult” Chores into Exciting Visuals

No. 8 / August 5, 2016

• Here’s Why National Parks Maps Are Some of the Best
• The design of coins, banknotes and money-related artifacts around the world
• Milton Glaser Still Hearts New York
• How to Collect the Images and Meta Tags from a Webpage with PHP
• The Art of the Out-of-Office Reply
• Top 10 least-loved emojis
• Michael Bierut on The Great Discontent

No. 7 / July 29, 2016

Lucky number seven.

• Brainstorming Is Dumb
• The Relentless Pleasure of Little
• 55 Quotes To Inspire Creativity, Innovation and Action
• How Default Settings Rule The World
• SamsungOne Design Story
• Herbert Matter: Shaping a new design vocabulary
• Heavy Metal and Natural Language Processing
• The New Paris Metro Map
• The BBC’s detailed plans for nuclear war
• Questions to Ask Yourself When Reading About Design
• Real Life Volcano Human Sacrifice
• An Illustrated History of the Philadelphia Cheesesteak
• Brexit: How design made the difference
• Letter of Recommendation: ‘How It’s Made’

No. 6 / July 22, 2016

Looks like we’ve got maps, design, movies, food. Should be some good stuff in there. After all, I did click on them.

• The true size of things on world maps
• 4K video of Norway’s stunningly beautiful fjords
• The 50 Best Animated Films Of The 21st Century So Far
• An appreciation of The Darjeeling Limited (via)
• Least Creative Thing Of The Day: Zara Rips Off Indie Designer Tuesday Bassen’s Work
• An open letter to design students: What I wish I could tell everyone who’s just starting out.
• On the Importance of Coworkers
• Metric Maps
• This Is How To Be Productive: 5 New Secrets Proven By Research
• David Kelley speaks about the growing importance of design to the world
• What do you think about machines that think?
• Sparrow™ for Knoll by Antenna Design, 2014
• Antenna Design
• The Worldbuilding In ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Is Really, Really Good
• David Chang’s Unified Theory of Deliciousness
• Are walkers smarter than drivers?

No. 5 / July 15, 2016

• 100 Years of National Parks Service
• A Manifesto for Atheists: Ten Virtues for the Modern Age by Alain de Botton
• Lance Wyman
• Michael Bierut on Tough Design Assignments + What it’s Like to be Publicly Scrutinized
• What France Can Teach U.S. Cities About Transit Design
• The City That Embraced Its Decline
• Really Good Emails
• Gun Deaths In America
• The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists
• DesignStudio shares its favourite tomes in a transatlantic bookshelf
• A 100-year-old Japanese stationery store lets customers design the perfect, custom notebook
• HAY and IKEA Revamp the Frakta Bag
• Illustrated Cross-Sections of Major Train Stations in Tokyo by Tomoyuki Tanaka
• Ryan Carson: Begin With the End in Mind
• Subway Deserts v2
• Faroe Islands fit cameras to sheep to create Google Street View
• The code that took America to the moon was just published to GitHub, and it’s like a 1960s time capsule
• Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards, circa 2019

No. 4 / July 8, 2016

Got a little tab-happy this week and bit off way more than I could chew. Sure hope you’re hungry.

• Millennials Don’t Want Fun; They Want You To Lead Better
• The empty brain
• Are Branding Agencies Still Relevant?
• Unpleasant Design & Hostile Urban Architecture
• Ghost Boxes: Reusing Abandoned Big-Box Superstores Across America
• H-Day
• Merlin’s FAQs > Merlin, Connectedness, and the So-Called Social Graph > Why do you hate PR people so much?
• Merlin’s FAQs > Hiring Merlin > Do you charge money to do things?
• Talent Isn’t Fixed and Other Mindsets That Lead to Greatness
• Tobias Frere-Jones: Break Things Deliberatly
• 6 Questions to Weigh When at a Career Crossroads
• Career-Propelling Money Advice for Creatives
• Get Noticed in a Crowded Marketplace By Challenging the Design Tropes
• Do You Have to Be a Jerk to Be Successful?
• How to Fight Through Intellectual Discomfort
• Celebrate Unusual Holidays With Poland’s Youngest Stamp Designer
• The New York Times Magazine Design Director Gail Bichler on Staying Impartial and Politically Charged Covers
• Do Templates Make Good Design Accessible to All or Diminish the Role of the Designer?
• Updating a Famous Type Anomaly from AIGA Medalists Alvin Lustig + Elaine Lustig Cohen
• Italy’s Friendliest Graphic Design Studio on How to Reinvent a Hit
• Jean Jullien’s New Book is a Dark Journey Into the Modern Condition
• Illustrator Tiago Galo Finds Inspiration in the Dullest Places
• The First Thing I Ever Designed: How Alexander Isley Helped Analog Designers Embrace Digital
• Why Default Fonts Lead to Default Work for Everyone
• Project Bloks
• Why It’s Time to Kill Advertising as We Know It and Start Building ‘Storyworlds’
• Tour a Tiny Home at GreenLife July 8-10th
• A shopper’s manifesto: These three simple questions are the key to quitting fast fashion
• In Siberia in 1908, a huge explosion came out of nowhere
• Here’s How I Can Tell If Someone Read My Email
• The U.S.-Canada Border Runs Through This Tiny Library
• To Surprise a Voice
• Atlas
• To Get Happier, Focus on What Makes You Miserable
• All That Jazz: Posters by Niklaus Troxler
• When Design Is Too Good: Stunning Border Signage Is Deemed a Threat
• Misleading Thumbnails
• More bonkers and surreal selfies from Izumi Miyazaki
• #Badgehunting: Flour Bag Heaven
• Japanese Matchbox Labels
• Unread Messages
• How Flight of the Conchords outlasted the hipster
• Outstanding Chinese Typography Design Exhibition
• Letterform Archive

PS. This is probably way too many links, at once don’t you think? I do really like the concept of sharing, for the most part, unabridged lists. But maybe I should do more to curate each week’s list, or have a limit?

No. 3 / June 23, 2016

Thursday edition. Heading out of town until after the 4th, so no tabs next week. If a tab closes in a browser and no one is around, did it really ever exist?

• How to listen to Apple Music offline
• A minimal and harmless way to display posters and photos
• Ciao, Massimo
• The Legendary Creator of Metal Gear Solid on His Weird New Game
• Britain Votes To Leave The EU — Here’s What To Read
• Working in the Age of Distraction
• SosoTasty
• Zig Zag City Guides
• The Dangers of Being Too Hard On Yourself (via)
• RAMS: The First Feature Documentary About Dieter Rams
• Derek Jeter’s Conversation With President Obama
• Watch Japanese Workers Build A Wooden House — Without Nails Or Screws
• Deconstructing The Genre-Bending Magic Of ‘Gorillaz’
• The creative’s secret to career longevity
• 2005 AIGA Medalist: Meredith Davis
• Design feedback made simple: 4 steps to better collaboration

No. 2 / June 17, 2016

Here they are. This week’s browser tabs. Orphaned, afraid. Will you adopt one?

• ‘SimCity 2000’ Teaches 2016 Urban Planners to Reconsider Rebuilding, Alien Attacks
• Ikea Museum set to open in Sweden
• The Creative World’s Bullshit Industrial Complex
• Comma Queen: Whichcraft—That vs. Which
• Cartography Comparison: Google Maps & Apple Maps
• This former CIA officer Amaryllis Fox has a lesson for Americans
• On Icons

No. 1 / June 3, 2016

PRE-S: For quite a while I had been thinking about doing something on a weekly basis. I finally feel like I found the right construct: listing all my open, unread browser tabs at the end of the week. I’ve made a habit of emailing them to myself anyways, so why not share them with you?

These are all the links that, for whatever reason, I didn’t get to this past week. Tabs left waiting patiently in my browser. A snapshot of what piqued my interest. I wanted to read them, watch them, listen to them — I really did. But perhaps you will instead. And maybe someday I’ll get around to them. Just not today.

• Declarative Design Tools
• The Ideal Design Workflow
• Articulating Design Decisions
• Has Design Become Too Hard?
• Caminhos Film Festival
• North
• The Making Of A Mural
• The Little Prince
• Look-See
• The Design Legacy Of Dieter Rams
• Want to be more productive? Don’t go paperless.
• Tofino: Eight weights of “West Coast Swiss,” designed for the screen.
• The Perks Are Great. Just Don’t Ask Us What We Do.
• When New York City tried to ban cars
• GE’s Predix Design System
• Why you don’t need design like Apple
• How to apply a design thinking, HCD, UX or any creative process from scratch
• State of the Digital Nation 2016
• Fuck All
• Font Management in OS X, by Kurt Lang
• The idiocy of traffic studies
• City Observatory