PUDL: the "Pleasantly Usable Design Language"
Paul Parks has released PUDL, the "Pleasantly Usable Design Language," a specification and toolkit for applying consistent and usable application design for applications.
#ui
5 articles
Bring Back Idiomatic Design
John Loeber wants idiomatic design back, and he's right - but the loss of idiom wasn't laziness, it was physics. IBM's Common User Access standard worked because the OS enforced it and the hardware was fixed; move to the browser, then mobile, then AR, and the contract doesn't bend, it voids. We're not in a period of design failure; we're in the same chaotic pre-standardization phase that preceded CUA in the first place. The question isn't how to restore what we had - it's how to recognize the improvised patterns that are already winning, and hold the line when we find them.
Why Control Rooms Are Green - and Why That Matters
You've probably never thought about why your IDE's default theme uses the colors it does, or why every hospital, factory, and control room built between 1944 and 1980 looked the same. Beth Mathews' piece on Faber Birren answers the second question - and the answer has more to say about developer tooling than you might expect.
ByteCode.news UI design concerns
I've been trying to think about access control and data access patterns for ByteCode.news. One of the initial designs was based around having pluggable UIs. The actual app is a set of REST endpoints...
So about this site...
Chances are, if you're reading this, you're seeing an HTML site that looks... primitive. Maybe even wonky. That's because the only site deployed right now (early March, 2026) is a reference UI and is...