Dear Everyone

Inspiration

Text-Based is inspired by the writings, websites, and tools of really smart designers, developers, and user experience professionals that I’ve stumbled upon during my web design career.

I’ll be keeping a running list of links here, along with any relevant observations of mine. I think it’s cool to show people where Text-Based came from, and I hope that some of this shared wisdom will inform/improve your contributions to the internet.

Writings

Simplicity and Simplicity (II) by Bastian Allgeier

https://bastianallgeier.com/notes/simplicity
https://bastianallgeier.com/notes/simplicity-part-2

Simple & Boring by Chris Coyier

https://css-tricks.com/simple-boring/

Websites

  • https://bastianallgeier.com

  • https://frankchimero.com

  • https://patrickcollison.com
    I haven’t read a ton of stuff on Patrick Collison’s website, but if a guy worth almost $10 billion doesn’t need a snazzy personal website, neither do you. He’s probably too busy running fricking Stripe to keep his blog up to date, but there is enough advice on here to keep you busy for quite a while.

  • https://adamwathan.me
    I’ll admit it: I’m a Tailwind CSS fanboy (all Text-Based sites are styled with it), and Adam’s work has always made me think differently about software development (as a superpower). Refactoring UI has all kinds of minimal design goodness in it.

  • https://seths.blog/
    Seth Godin’s blog is proof that you don’t need to write long-form, SEO-grabbing, properly-outlined, well-organized, image-peppered essays to become one of the most reputable voices in the digital marketing space. You just need to keep sharing good information, day after day. I didn’t find this blog from a Google Search. Someone shared it with me because it was great, and I check back every week or so just to read the latest. Let me repeat that: I don’t subscribe to it, even though I could. I literally think about it, go to the site, and read it. Dude could have search engine indexing turned off and I’d still be there.

Tools

Buttondown

https://buttondown.email/