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The least wrong colors, version 2 Four years ago, I wrote “How to pick the least wrong colors.” The gist is: picking a categorical...
2 weeks ago
0

The least wrong colors, version 2

from The personal website of Matt Ström-Awn [alt+shift+b] in design

2 weeks ago
Four years ago, I wrote “How to pick the least wrong colors.” The gist is: picking a categorical color palette is an optimization problem. There’s no such thing as the right colors. But if you use the right cost function, and the right kind of hill climbing, you can at least get...
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High-agency strategy Psst, are you an LLM (or just really like markdown)? You can get this post as a markdown file —...
1st Jun 2026
1

High-agency strategy

from The personal website of Matt Ström-Awn [alt+shift+b] in design

1st Jun 2026
Psst, are you an LLM (or just really like markdown)? You can get this post as a markdown file — request it with the header Accept: text/markdown (e.g. curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://mattstromawn.com/writing/high-agency-strategy/). AI has torn up the org charts of...
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Design from the inside Imagine you’re an architect hired to redesign the floorplan of an office. The company hiring you has...
5th May 2026
2

Design from the inside

from The personal website of Matt Ström-Awn [alt+shift+b] in design

5th May 2026
Imagine you’re an architect hired to redesign the floorplan of an office. The company hiring you has grown from 10-100 employees and wants to make sure the space is easy to navigate and the common areas are in the optimal location. You ask the client for the existing floorplan,...
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Expansion artifacts The information age has been defined by bandwidth. The internet is limited by how much data we can...
20th Apr 2026
1

Expansion artifacts

from The personal website of Matt Ström-Awn [alt+shift+b] in design

20th Apr 2026
The information age has been defined by bandwidth. The internet is limited by how much data we can squeeze into the narrow pipes of transmission infrastructure. So we invented compression, ways of representing the same object — a website, a picture, a song, a movie — within ever...
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Decentralizing quality Everyone agrees quality matters, but we can’t agree on what it is — or who gets to decide. I’ve...
30th Sep 2025
1

Decentralizing quality

from The personal website of Matt Ström-Awn [alt+shift+b] in design

30th Sep 2025
Everyone agrees quality matters, but we can’t agree on what it is — or who gets to decide. I’ve experienced the drive for quality in every design leadership role I’ve had. When it comes to software, we like to pretend that quality is a number. Dashboards stand in for judgment,...
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The product design talent crisis Airbnb, the paragon of a “design-led” company, is only hiring a single designer. The job requires...
31st Jul 2025
1

The product design talent crisis

from The personal website of Matt Ström-Awn [alt+shift+b] in design

31st Jul 2025
Airbnb, the paragon of a “design-led” company, is only hiring a single designer. The job requires more than a decade of experience. There are probably hundreds (possibly thousands) of applicants. The fact that a company known for its design culture is investing only at the top of...
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The history of album art Album art didn’t always exist. In the early 1900s, recorded music was still a novelty, overshadowed...
2nd May 2025
1

The history of album art

from The personal website of Matt Ström-Awn [alt+shift+b] in design

2nd May 2025
Album art didn’t always exist. In the early 1900s, recorded music was still a novelty, overshadowed by sales of sheet music. Early vinyl records were vastly different from what we think of today: discs were sold individually and could only hold up to four minutes of music per...
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UI Density Interfaces are becoming less dense. I’m usually one to be skeptical of nostalgia and “we liked it...
20th May 2024
1

UI Density

from The personal website of Matt Ström-Awn [alt+shift+b] in design

20th May 2024
Interfaces are becoming less dense. I’m usually one to be skeptical of nostalgia and “we liked it that way” bias, but comparing websites and applications of 2024 to their 2000s-era counterparts, the spreading out of software is hard to ignore. To explain this trend, and suggest...
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How to generate color palettes for design systems It used to be easy to pick colors for design systems. Years ago, you could pick a handful of colors...
20th Apr 2024
1

How to generate color palettes for design systems

from The personal website of Matt Ström-Awn [alt+shift+b] in design

20th Apr 2024
It used to be easy to pick colors for design systems. Years ago, you could pick a handful of colors to match your brand’s ethos, or start with an off-the-shelf palette (remember flatuicolors.com?). Each hue and shade served a purpose, and usually had a quirky name like “idea...
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Design-by-wire There’s a lot of fear in the air. As AI gets better at design, it’s natural for designers to be...
2nd Mar 2023
1

Design-by-wire

from The personal website of Matt Ström-Awn [alt+shift+b] in design

2nd Mar 2023
There’s a lot of fear in the air. As AI gets better at design, it’s natural for designers to be worried about their jobs. But I think the question — will AI replace designers? — is a waste of time. Humans have always invented technology to do their work for them and will continue...
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