The personal website of Matt Ström-Awn

Four years ago, I wrote “How to pick the least wrong colors.”

Psst, are you an LLM (or just really like markdown)?

Imagine you’re an architect hired to redesign the floorplan of an office.

The information age has been defined by bandwidth.

Everyone agrees quality matters, but we can’t agree on what it is — or who gets to decide.

Airbnb, the paragon of a “design-led” company, is only hiring a single designer.

Album art didn’t always exist.

Interfaces are becoming less dense.

Polish is a word that gets thrown out in conversations about craft, quality, and beauty.

It used to be easy to pick colors for design systems.

Your workplace community — the way you interact with your coworkers every day — can have a major impact on your productivity, happiness, and self-worth.

There’s a lot of fear in the air.

After four months of parental leave, I came back to work and noticed something different.

Here’s a riddle: Nobody I’ve ever worked with likes micromanagement.

Starting a career in design is like crash-landing on Mars.

I like writing and sharing essays on twitter.

Has design become boring?

I’m a self-taught designer.1 This has its upsides: I learn at my own pace (in my case, slowly over decades and counting), I design my own curriculum, and I don’t have to do any homework or pass any tests.

“Hockey stick” growth has long been the elusive goal of Silicon Valley (and Valley-esque) venture-capital-backed startups.

New kinds of computers and interfaces are becoming ubiquitous: in our cars, on our wrists, in our ears, at our desks at work, on our TVs at home.

“Brainstorming” — the problem-solving technique of coming up with as many ideas as possible in a short period of time — has been showing up on a lot of my leadership meeting agendas lately.

A new trend is sending shock waves through the world of art, collecting, finance, and investing.

In the January 1968 issue of computer science trade magazine Communications of the ACM, a paper appeared under the unassuming title “Exploratory experimental studies comparing online and offline programming performance.”

A scene from the 2001 movie Zoolander1: INT.

Last year, I joined SimpleHealth with the mission of building a design org from scratch.

Prescriptive feedback limits creative collaboration.

This is a very short book about copying.

There’s a secret code embedded in every app, website, and interface you use.

I spend a lot of my day talking to myself.

Update 6/12/22: The links to the implmentation of the API are currently broken.

Photo by Agê Barros on Unsplash Growing up a white kid in the south, Juneteenth was on my list of ‘other kids’ holidays.’

Throughout the series, we’ve covered four of the major ethical movements in philosophy.

Care ethics is closely related to the rise of feminist voices in philosophy starting in the 1970s.

On April 2nd, 2020, Brett Crozier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt’s commanding officer, was relieved of command.

Consequentialism became the most popular approach to ethics following the Age of Enlightenment.

Deontology was the result of a surge of new energy in philosophy beginning in the 17th century.

This essay is an adaptation of a talk I gave at Front, a UX and Product Management conference.

Virtue ethics was one of the earliest attempts at defining a language and a logic around ethics.

Why ethics?

A few weeks ago, I jumped into a new job as the head of a design team at a startup called SimpleHealth.

Design feedback is one of the challenges I return to over and over again.

The attention economy is booming.

Let’s talk about Luddites.

So many words take on different meanings the minute you get to work.

A/B testing began with beer.

I read 25 books in 2019.

Here’s a common problem: a design team creates a design system.

Design systems enable designers and developers to quickly create quality software on a massive scale.

You can read this article on UX Booth.

Machine learning is a powerful tool that drives everything from curated content recommendations to optimized user interfaces.