Ian Daniel Stewart

Here’s Don Norman in The Design of Everyday Things on fighting the incredible power of social pressures on behaviour. What kind of social pressures? The social forces that cause “otherwise sensible people to do things they know are wrong and possibly dangerous.” When I was in training to do underwater (scuba) diving, our instructor was […]

I wrote a post on one of our design blogs at work: Why I’m so excited about the Gutenberg Editor for WordPress. Potentially interesting if you’re interested in design and WordPress. Or, if you’re just curious about where WordPress is heading. I was in a reflective mood when I wrote it so to accompany it […]

Adweek’s reasons why this second grade handout should be your new creative manifesto feels like it has everything right. At least for me. Maybe I should go back to second grade.

If you’ve been following the increasingly strange news about Russia’s Internet Research Agency and their involvement in U.S. political life you might find this in-depth look at their activity — from way back in June of 2015 — as fascinating as I do. I friended as many of the trolls on Facebook as I could […]

We found this tomato plant growing in the gutter near the grocery store.

Moreover I hate everything that merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity. — Goethe Nietzsche prefaces his “untimely meditation” on “the use and abuse of history for life” with this quote. He thought it could stand in as a ceterum censo — a call for total warfare — in his mind against […]

Many of my friends and family know this already but for the past three months I’ve been on vacation from work. Everyone that works at Automattic (What’s that? You’ve probably heard of our biggest project, WordPress.com) can take a 2-3 month vacation, or sabbatical, every five years. That’s a lot of time to take off […]

An oddly satisfying habit I've picked up this summer: making a colour scheme every day with the Adobe Capture app. You can check out the colour schemes I've made at color.adobe.com.

The Atlantic has a good read on being charitable with the people we disagree with. In a nutshell, leaving behind the straw man and weak man versions of an argument we often construct. Instead, building up a steel man version of that argument.  It reminds me of investor Charlie Munger’s advice on “having an opinion.” I’m […]

As of this morning, I’ve done some sort of bodyweight exercise for 30 days straight. It’s been mostly push-ups, with some chin-up training, dips, and squats, mixing it up with lighter and heavier days so I don’t over exert myself.   I use the Todoist app to remind myself to do this (and some other […]