J. Hogue is Highchair designhaus

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The previous Articles, Ideas, Musings, & Rants

  • Read & Reviewed |

    Tina Seelig — Constraints Drive Creativity

    Tina Seelig, author of “inGenius,” “Creativity Rules,” and recently “What I wish I knew when I was 20.” Quotes & ideas When you challenge assumptions, you open the aperture of what is possible. Example: Gave students each $5. Think about...

  • Read & Reviewed |

    Distractions as Processing Time

    Thinking and reading about distractions, whether or not they are good or bad. When someone talks about technology (i.e. mobile phones), distraction is bad. Yet when someone talks about creativity, a certain amount of distraction is good. Or at least,...

  • Written |

    Eclipse Witness

    Saw a 94% total eclipse today. Ran around like mad yesterday to find a pair of glasses. Finally found some this morning. I expected it to get darker for some reason. Have I experienced an eclipse before? Without the glasses,...

  • Written |

    Math Rock

    To quickly put come closure around my COVID posts recently… it became less and less novel to talk about. Mundane. Now its part of life. Its not special anymore. And life was moving fast enough but everything felt the same...

  • Written |

    Day 189: COVID-19

    Its fall. Fall descended swiftly, from 80+ degree days in August to low 70s and now 50s overnight. I had to turn the heat on to take the chill off the house in the morning. But by September 26 it...

  • Written |

    Day 119: COVID-19

    Its been over 100 days. Oomph officially has no office right now — we are between the former place, whose lease ran out, and the new place which has no certificate of occupancy. We are all officially remote workers. Overall its...

  • Written |

    Day 84: COVID-19

    George Floyd was a black man killed by police last week in Minneapolis. An officer knelt on his neck as a control tactic while George pleaded for his life saying (this should sound familiar) “I can’t breathe”. Nine minutes the...

  • Written |

    Day 70: COVID-19

    Yup, it’s been 10 weeks now. 10 weeks of grocery shopping with anxiety, very little news watching or listening or reading because of the stress and anger, walking around with masks on and wondering why other people don’t have masks...

  • Written |

    Day 48: COVID-19

    I’m trying to get back to a Monday schedule for putting these observations together. So only five days have elapsed between when the last one was put out. This past weekend was the best yet. Warm and sunny all weekend...

  • Written |

    Day 43: COVID-19

    Its surprising and its not surprising when our president manages to make strange times even stranger. I’m no fan… primarily because he makes everything about himself. This crisis has been no different. He was trying to tell the American public that...

  • Written |

    Day 37: COVID-19

    The strange times continue. It’s Earth Day today. The best thing we all can be doing right now is staying home. The skies are unusually clear all over the country. Smog reports have vanished from places like L.A. and Seattle....

  • Written |

    Day 28: COVID-19

    Easter was yesterday… was it yesterday? Yes, yes it was. I think. The morning had an inside egg hunt for the girls and small Easter baskets. There was an online video church service that they were in briefly. It was...

  • Written |

    Day 21: COVID-19

    So, yeah… this new not-normal is starting to become normal. I don’t like it. I’ve started reading. It’s bad when I start reading — as in, I know I really need to relax when I am able to focus on a...

  • Written |

    Day 14: COVID-19

    It’s been two weeks now. Like the rest of the country and most of the world, we are staying home as much as possible, only venturing out for essential services. A lot has changed but a lot feels the same....

  • Written |

    Day 7: COVID-19

    It’s been seven days now. They have been plain days on some ways and exceedingly weird in others. Working from home is pretty much routine. School from home is another matter. Seven days with very few options even if we...

  • Written |

    Day 1: COVID-19

    Day 1 of working from home and the whole community being shut down. Quarantine and such started a little bit over the weekend, but this is the first Monday — a Monday in which things should have been normal — that has...

  • Written |

    Let’s Not forget How Weird This Is

    It’s about two months into the Coronvirus outbreak that started in Wuhang, China. The media term is Coronavirus, which is actually a broad type of virus, but the medical name for this outbreak is COVID-19. The U.S., generally, was slow...

  • Written |

    What Marc Maron Taught Me

    I’ve been listening to Marc Maron’s podcast WTF for a few years now, off and on. Not every episode, because the guy interviews people all the time. Just the people that interest me. He’s a great interviewer and always gets...

  • Written |

    A Cold or Allergies?

    Its the end of August and the weather has been usually cool — mid 60s to low 70s. My throat feels like I maybe have a cold? It could also be allergies, though. That’s why I am writing this down. I...

  • Written |

    Reactions to David Carson 30 years later

    I had a coincidence happen recently where a friend mentioned something that sparked “that makes me think of…” David Carson and she said “Who’s that” which led to some Googling and a stumble upon an article from 2017 about what...

  • Written |

    Digital Patina is Still on my Mind

    The challenge to find a way to integrate “Digital Patina” into virtual objects is still very much on my mind. Like many things, though, it has not occupied a place of priority. It comes back to me when I encounter similar...

  • Written |

    SASS Color Loops are Awesome

    Managing Color Themes with SASS Maps SASS maps are great for storing information, but their real power comes out when you create a mixin or loop that traverses the map. We had a recent project where we had a number...

  • Written |

    CSS Variables are Awesome

    What SASS Variables can do vs. What CSS native Variables can do SASS variables give us a lot of flexibility and repeatability and were the first on the scene to begin to give front-end developers a modern syntax for keeping...

  • Written |

    Notes from the PPS Annual Meeting

    I usually attend the Providence Preservation Society’s annual meeting — I don’t always, but I usually. This year’s was pretty good, with a great speaker and some fun announcements. Here’s a recap of what I learned. Nellie Gorbea, RI Secretary of...

  • Written |

    And now for something completely different

    A recent project brought me this bit of WYSIWYG editor span spam: <p> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> <span> [ content ] </span> </span> </span> </span> </span> </span>...

  • Written |

    More Ammunition for My Manifesto

    There must be something in the air. My Manifesto was a revelation for me — it gave me very good reason to launch a personal website that most designers would call unfinished, or at least unfinished-looking. Now Mat Marquis has...

  • Written |

    Ammunition for My Manifesto

    My Manifesto was a call-to-action to remove complexity and get back down to the basics. In some ways, it is the art of defining what something is by removing what it is not. In the case of a website, what...

  • Written |

    Design from the Inside Out

    The digital design process needs constant refinement. One of the most impactful refinements we have made to our design process has been to wireframe and design the homepage last. After many years of thinking about the homepage as the hub...

  • Written |

    Lessons on design from Charles Moore

    I like to compare web design to architecture. I think it is an apt metaphor and will expand upon that idea later in a full article. For now, though, I’d like to share a quote from Mark Simon about the...

  • Written |

    More Power to the Users

    If 2013 was the year of Content — or was it Content Management — then 2014 should be the Year of the User. It’s been a long time since a web designer could design a site for one mobile device...

  • Written |

    How do you solve a problem like Blockquote?

    I am obsessed with semantic markup and object-oriented CSS. We don’t always follow those guidelines to a T, but our team always tries to get close. The perfect set of markup and CSS — and therefore the perfect project —...

  • Written |

    Stop using the term “Mobile”

    I wrote this in 2013, and am keeping it published it because I find it interesting as a historical artifact — this is what we were concerned about 4 years after the iPhone made web design a lot more complicated. ‘Mobile’...

  • Written |

    The Web is Responsive by Default

    If you think about it, responsive layout is not a new thing. Open a simple HTML file in a web browser, and the content automatically adapts to fit the width of that browser. The web is responsive on its own...

  • Written |

    The Challenge of Digital Patina

    I challenge designers and developers to start to integrate “digital patina” into their application design and UIs. What is digital patina? Let me give you a few examples: Your smartphone’s homescreen may display “trails” from where your finger has touched...

  • Written |

    Mobile Means more than Smartphones

    Mobile is not really a thing. As much as we talk about it, what we are really discussing is the way in which users of websites are freer than ever to use a wide array of devices to connect to...

  • Written |

    Do I Need a Native App?

    I wrote this in 2012, and am republishing it because I find it interesting as a historical artifact — this is what we were concerned about 4 years after the iPhone made web design a lot more complicated. Most of the...