Articles

Insights and reflections on design trends, techology, techniques and my personal growth as a designer.

How to fine-tune GPT2 to generate custom text

Finetuning GPT2 to generate custom text

30 January 2024

Artificial intelligence

Colour palette generator

Handy tool to extract colours from an image and create a colour palette.

25 January 2024

Tool

The best places to find high-resolution public domain art and illustration

Finding public domain images at a good enough resolution to print can be challenging, but here’s a list of the best places to source high-quality art and illustration.

14 December 2023

Public domain

Regular expressions cheatsheet

A quick reference for some common regular expressions.

13 July 2023

Code

Training StyleGAN2 ADA with a custom dataset

An quick guide to StyleGAN and how to train it to generate your own images.

17 December 2021

Artificial intelligence

The best content management systems for static sites – updated

Static sites have been around since the dawn of the web, but thanks to the rise of static site generators like Jekyll and Hugo they're undergoing a bit of a renaissance.

20 January 2021

Web development

On distraction – thoughts on Indistractable by Nir Eyal

How to control your attention and reduce distraction, from the author of ‘Hooked’, the manual for designing attention-grabbing products.

12 January 2021

Psychology

The characteristics of good leaders

Thirteen qualities of good leaders, focusing on yourself, others and the organisation.

27 October 2020

Leadership

The Tannenbaum-Schmidt leadership continuum

Seven styles of leadership, ranging from authoritarian to permissive, and the benefits and drawbacks of each.

27 October 2020

Leadership

How to set up a Gopher server on a Raspberry Pi

Run your own Gopher server in a few easy steps (and some harder ones).

24 June 2019

Retro tech Raspberry Pi

Exploring the Gopher protocol

In the beginning, before the Web, there was Gopher.

24 June 2019

Retro tech

Can an artificial intelligence be unreasonable?

Mumsnet’s Am I being unreasonable? forum is famous for the hilarious, disturbing and hilariously disturbing topics discussed. I wondered, what would happen if I used it to train a neural network?

24 September 2018

Artificial intelligence

The best writing apps for iOS - updated

Focusing on the best writing apps, this is the first in a series exploring the best tools to get stuff done using iOS.

17 June 2018

Tools

Six great books to be a better product manager

Product management is an evolving field. These are books I've found useful as a product manager and I hope you will too.

25 April 2018

Product management

Version control for Sketch – Plant, Abstract and Kactus reviewed

Developers have used version control systems like Git for years. Lots of people can collaborate on a project, everyone has access to the latest version and mistakes can be rolled back. So why can't we use them for design?

20 April 2018

UI design

Automatic image resizing with Jekyll and ImageMagick

How to get Jekyll to take care of the boring business of resizing and cropping images.

17 October 2016

Jekyll

Using tree testing to validate your information architecture

Developing a site structure is one of the most difficult and important parts of creating information architecture. And the larger the site, the harder it gets.

10 October 2016

Information architecture

Component-based design: what it is and how to do it

As the web evolves and gains complexity, so our approach to designing websites needs to become more sophisticated.

7 October 2016

Design systems

The double diamond design process – putting the whys before the whats

It’s easy as creatives or developers - or anyone really - to start with the ‘whats’. What can we do? What should we do? What is it we’re going to do?

26 September 2016

Design process

Pen first, pixel later — why you should sketch before you computer

A blank screen is a daunting prospect. There’s a strong temptation to get right in there with your wireframing software and start drawing boxes. But don’t give in. It’s a trap.

19 September 2016

User experience