Notes
Essays and methods on trust, culture and how projects get read. 11 pieces so far, with 163 cited sources listed under the essays they support.
Reading a Fork Like a Rumor
A contested fork's reputation problem behaves like a rumor epidemic, not a messaging problem. The misreading and the correction travel on different roads, and that changes what fixing it means.
Jul 5, 2026 · 11 min · 10 sourcesHoly Hours
The founding text of design minimalism called ornament a crime, tied it to degeneracy, and built the whole argument on nineteenth-century race science. Then, in the same essay, its author conceded the thing he was attacking: that decorating is devotional time. Minimalism inherited his conclusion and forgot the crack in it.
Jul 24, 2026 · 10 min · 13 sourcesThe Exaggeration Engine
Teddy bears changed shape over the twentieth century, drifting toward the proportions of a human infant. One critic called that deformity, and the designers who did it sadists. The biology says something stranger: the reflex being exploited is real, faster than conscious thought, and the industry has spent a century turning it up.
Jul 18, 2026 · 10 min · 19 sourcesCuteness as Camouflage
"Cute" is the word "acute" with its sharp edge filed off, and that small mutilation is the whole mechanism. A soft, helpless surface lowers the viewer's guard, which is exactly what lets it carry whatever the guard was for. Sianne Ngai supplied the theory decades ago; a crypto project called Milady now states it outright, in its own words.
Jul 18, 2026 · 9 min · 14 sourcesColor as Evidence
In an analytic visualization, color has to encode an evidence state, not a mood. That one rule is a corner of a larger obligation: every design choice is an argument, and the honest target is a reader whose confidence matches how reliable the data actually is.
Jul 5, 2026 · 11 min · 14 sourcesConfusion is a map, not a mess
When people misread a project, the misreadings are not random noise. They come from ordinary, well-documented machinery of cognition, so they cluster in a few nameable places, travel predictable paths, and repeat. That is what makes them mappable.
Jul 5, 2026 · 10 min · 13 sourcesMystics Were Doing Information Design
A node-link graph, a radial dashboard, a correspondence table — we treat these as born with the computer. They're centuries old, and the people who drew them first called it magic.
Jul 5, 2026 · 6 min · 7 sourcesThe Half-Life of a Claim
A public claim loses believability over time even when it stays true and nobody disproves it, because the proof behind it fades from memory faster than the claim does.
Jul 5, 2026 · 12 min · 21 sourcesScoring Trust Without a Survey
You can rate a crypto project's trust-risk from public signals alone, and make the number defensible instead of a vibe, because three research traditions supply the backbone.
Jul 5, 2026 · 10 min · 20 sourcesThe Empty Center
One unanswered question can govern an entire experience. If a money product never says whether your money is safe, that silence dominates the other nine things you did well.
Jul 5, 2026 · 9 min · 15 sourcesYou as Training Data
Your public docs are training data. A model reads them, compresses them into a lossy summary weighted by whatever gets said most, and hands that summary out as your first impression, before anyone reaches your site.
Jul 5, 2026 · 10 min · 17 sources