The Best of My 20 Years of Writing on Design

In might be a surprise if you know me for my books and talks, but back in 2000 I mostly wrote about design. If you’ve followed me long enough to remember uiweb.com or the crazy Interactionary events I did at CHI, you know different but that’s not many of you. Back then I was the design advocate for Microsoft, promoting good design and usability practices across the company. While there I wrote a design column for MSDN’s developer magazine. I thought someday I’d write a primer on good design, I just didn’t anticipate it would take 20 years until I did it with How Design Makes The World.

Over my career I’ve rarely had the word design in my job title, but design has always been central to how I think. It explains why even Making Things happen, a book about project management, uses design concepts more that project management books do. If you look at my books or talks you’ll see a kind of design at work. What is a book or a presentation if not a kind of designed human experience?

Sorting through the archives to find these essays, I picked ones that were most popular and still held up despite all that’s changed. My best writing is likely in my books, but I always try to write in a timeless way.

Most of my writing is free, but if you find value here, please support me by buying a copy of How Design Makes The World or my other books. Thanks for your support.

Here’s my best writing on design from 1999 to 2020:

Why Good Design Comes From Bad DesignThe Myth of Perfect DesignHow To Give and Receive FeedbackHow To Run a Design CritiqueSimple Isn’t Always GoodThe Future of UI Will Be BoringThe Real Reasons Bad Design HappensGood, Evil and Technology5 Dangerous Ideas for DesignersGood Beats Innovative Nearly Every TimeThe Myth of DiscoverabilityWhy Software SucksWhy Designers FailThe Myth of Epiphany (From The Myths of Innovation)Programmers, Designers and the Brooklyn BridgeUsability Is Not a VerbSimple Isn’t Always GoodThe Future of UI Will Be BoringHow To Learn From Your MistakesWhy Designers Hate Politics and What To Do About itHow To Pitch An IdeaEdison Did Not Invent The Light BulbThe Powerful Decide (Chp 8. of How Design Makes The World)Questions for the Next Design Revolution? (IDSA Keynote)What Can We Learn From The Eiffel Tower?Designers, Morality and the AK-47

More specialized design essays like Fitt’s Law and the Web, Lessons on Design from Filmmaking, the Art of Usability Benchmarking, the Web Shouldn’t Be a Comedy of Errors, Critical Thinking in Web Design, Why Great Technologies Don’t Make Great Products, The Art of UI Prototyping, The Role of Flow In Web Design and others still live in the old archive from the uiweb days.

My most recent essay, How To Put Faith in Design, is my best design essay so far this year. You can also visit all 170+ posts from the design archive. Or my best posts of all time.