Kyle Johnston's creative journal

Life~Work Life: I’ve been enjoying my free time after last month’s layoffs at Etsy.

Work~Life Work: Aug 5th, 12pm.

Life~Work Life: A few people wrote to say they’re enjoying the blog, which was a nice surprise.

Life~Work Life: the big event this month was a drive from KC to Estes Park for a week of hiking.

Life~Work Life: took a road trip to visit family.

This page captures projects too specialized or too small to warrant a full write-up (see my projects page for those).

Life~Work Life: I finished my first full 5k run on April 18th!

Life~Work Life: Celebrated an anniversary.

Massive Bloom is a browser-based instrument for creating evolving, atmospheric sonic textures.

Note: this will post will evolve as I learn more about CLAUDE.md files, best practices, and how those things evolve over time.

Work~Life My goal of walking or cycling most days has slowly evolved into a running goal.

Work~Life Work picked up in January after a planning and strategy-filled December.

Inspired by this post from Ashur, I created a CLI-based workflow to quickly add, edit, and publish content in a couple of my Astro-based projects.

Life-wise, it was a pretty chill month.

I’m in the ‘we’ll see’ camp about LLMs in general.

This project started with a thought captured in my spark file: Endless Doom Scroller, but kittens?

Generally, I steer clear of tech-focused nonfiction books.

Quick!

Pulled from MEMEX, a tool I built to collect visual inspiration.

This project started with an idea and this prompt to ChatGPT: Write 10 short inspirational quotes or phrases.

Capturing ideas The biggest unlock is the simplest.

Today I learned how to generate a full-text RSS feed in Astro!

At work, a fellow product designer asked how other designers structure their Figma files to support collaboration and how we flow from roving design explorations to focused design specifications.

September 2026 Taking a deep breath after spending 5 years at Etsy.

The Wadsworth Constant says that you can safely skip the first 30% of anything you see online.

TIL you can greatly improve the quality of an answer you get from an LLM if you include this in your prompt: Before you give me the answer, ask me everything you need to know to give me the best result possible.

This is a web-based project I created (with the help of an LLM) to support a concept I have for an art project.

WordWiz is a word game I created in 2024.

TIL if you use Google’s .new URLs – like docs.new or sheets.new – and you have multiple Google accounts, you can choose which account is used for new files by using: docs.new/1, docs.new/2, etc.

t000.day is a single-serving site that answers a simple question: what day of the year is it?

I created a bookshelf to track the books I’ve read since I started tracking my reading in 2009-ish.

Read on to learn how I made this image… I’ve been spending some of my free time sketching in code using Processing and the Hype library.

I created MEMEX as a tool to gather design inspiration.

I recently dove headfirst into Figma, a browser-based(!)