Beggars Will Ride

Welcome to Dead Horses with David & Mills

I stopped writing about design roughly a year before I got fired from Quora. I worked there for over seven years and I considered myself a lifer for many of them, but I’d arrived at a point where I no longer felt confident or clear in what I had to say. I couldn’t honestly pitch Quora as a place to work anymore, and my views on design had been humbled by the mediocrity of our output as a company. My attention turned inward, towards treating the sicknesses I felt plagued the organization. I still respected the hell out of the people there, so I was shocked and crushed when I found out I was being dismissed for my efforts. I’d like to say that something unjust happened to me, but a leadership team should be in tight alignment and a CEO should fire people they are not interested in aligning with. I was paid handsomely, learned a ton, and formed some of the most wonderful and important relationships in my life. Woe is me!

After leaving Quora I joined Castle and have once again sunk the better half of a decade into one social network. I’ve really come to value the merits of staying focused on a single problem space for many years, with a team that gets better and better at working together. I hope I’m at Castle for the rest of my life! And despite my humbling, my views on design have remained quite consistent this entire time. Castle has been an opportunity to practice design exactly how I want, and I'm incredibly proud of our work. It's no rocketship, but building a truly durable social network is always a one-off miracle and I believe we’ve made critical progress. So, after six years in my cave, I'm excited to step back outside and expose a lot more of my work to light.

Mills Baker is my best friend and former colleague at Quora. We’ve been writing and recording together over at Sucks to Suck, but we’ve decided to fork our collaborations: S2S is now Rats from Rocks, which will house our takes on culture and spirituality, and over here on this plot we've formed Dead Horses which will focus on design and technology. A sort of sheets–streets distinction, but one we won't hold too dearly.

When I was but a wee lad learning about design in the early ‘00s, I benefitted tremendously from the vibrant blogosphere. Sites like A List Apart and Coudal were absolutely critical for me, and gave me the sense that I was joining a vital scene exploding with passionate discourse. There were stacks of fundamentals to learn, and a bleeding edge to keep up with. These scenes all died out, and for a variety of reasons: the stabilization of front-end technology, the move from consultancy to in-house design orgs, the migration from blogs to Twitter, and more besides.

It’s been so long since software designers have had a shared culture that I doubt many of the younger folks in the field have a sense for what’s missing. But a healthy discipline has depth: a canon of great works, shared theories, common terms. It also has life: active debates, must-attend conferences, gossip and drama. AI is reigniting these dynamics, but there was never any dependence on new technologies. Design qua design was and remains absolutely essential, and we deserve a stronger culture, particularly if we're to meet this current moment. With the ground crumbling under our feet we'll be forced to depend on the more eternal/deep/fundamental/abstract conceptions of design.

Our aim with Dead Horses is to serve the seasoned designer who is still looking for more. The designer who has learned the ropes but doesn’t feel sure how to keep upping their game. The designer who has this nagging sense that the work shouldn’t be so mysterious and frustrating. The designer who nods when someone says “design isn’t how it looks, it’s how it works” but then doesn’t actually know what the hell to do with that conclusion.

The first thing we’re putting out is a podcast where Mills and I kick off a close reading of Christopher Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form. This is a book I've wanted to talk about for a long time, because I think it's subtly brilliant and incisive and also completely insane and wrong. I love it a lot, and I can't wait to get deeper into it with Mills in upcoming episodes. We'll also be writing articles, doing interviews, and posting on Substack Notes. It's all gonna kick butt.