"“We begin in admiration and end by organizing our disappointment.”"

"Now, this is a bit pessimistic—he is a French philosopher, after all—but right now the statement does ring true for the technology industry. Think about the weight we’ve added to the world: attention-greedy devices and services, new business structures that turn out to reinforce existing inequalities instead of working against them, technocratic blowhards, never mind the surveillance shit storm we all now must navigate."

"No metaphors or analogies are needed for insight, only the willingness to listen to the subject speak for itself, even if it contradicts received wisdom."

"But not every site can be a big vertical stack of bricks, can it? What happens if you place things side-by-side?"

"If you’ve ever designed a responsive website, this is the source of all your sadness. This is the fount of your tears, the wellspring of your suffering. If you believe in the afterlife, this is the circle of hell where they light the soles of your feet on fire."

"What is this monstrosity? Why does it feel like docking a spaceship? Why can’t I scroll? And why is there lag on my fancy laptop? What’s that sound? My computer’s fan?"

"I believe every material has a grain, including the web. But this assumption flies in the face of our expectations for technology. Too often, the internet is cast as a wide-open, infinitely malleable material. We expect technology to help us overcome limitations, not produce more of them. In spite of those promises, we typically yield consistent design results."

"Ambient, atmospheric, blurred, or tinted photographs become background images, because we can’t quite be sure how it will be cropped across different viewports."

"The web is forcing our hands. And this is fine! Many sites will share design solutions, because we’re using the same materials. The consistencies establish best practices; they are proof of design patterns that play off of the needs of a common medium, and not evidence of a visual monoculture. So this is a good start, but it is only a start."

"What would happen if we stopped treating the web like a blank canvas to paint on, and instead like a material to build with?"

"Hockney began with an image-making practice that relied on the grid necessitated by the Polaroids’ borders and produced a rectangular final work. When he switched to normal film, he was able to overlay images in any necessary shape that accurately described the time and space of a scene. Nobody would set out to make a picture with these edges—what you see is what was required by the images he managed to snap."

"In essence, Hockney abandoned the notion that a two-dimensional work of art needed to exist at a fixed, rectangular size. Instead, small individual photos were overlaid and assembled until they formed a complete picture. Individually, the photos don’t mean much, but collectively they…"

an edgeless surface of unknown proportions comprised of small, individual, and variable elements from multiple vantages assembled into a readable whole that documents a moment

A lack of edges permeates the web at all levels. You just have to look for it:

Edgelessness applies to the screens that show the web, because they offer an infinite canvas that can scroll in any direction for however long. Boy, do we take for granted that a screen can show more content than is able to be displayed in a single shot.