An ongoing stream of what the Autogram team is writing, reading, and discussing.
Paul Ford writes eloquently about the tension between big, alluring tech revolutions and more sustainable organic innovation.
According to the results of this December 2020 survey, best practices for Design Tokens are still fuzzy. Using them to capture highly variable design metadata in complex systems is increasingly popular, but questions like “Who owns their defintion?” and “Can they be standardized across organizations?” remain unanswered.
Detailed post-mortems for high-profile digital projects are rare; this look at the key decisions that shaped 2020’s COVIDTracking Project demonstrate how critical a team’s foundational principles can be.
Working with systems rather than individual components or tasks means stepping back to see the big picture. Whether the system is biological, mechanical, economic, or social, self-reinforcing cycles are a common piece of that picture.
Building a design system is hard; keeping track of what every other team is doing is practically impossible. Component Gallery does the heavy lifting for you, cataloguing publicly available design systems, presenting a unified browsing interface for the different components they share, and calling out vocabulary digressions that can mask otherwise similar work.
Down in the dumps over the turnaround time for your enterprise content initiatives? “According to internal Pentagon communications, it took U.S. Cyber Command 22 days to finalize and post the meme.” Metrics are hard for the government, too: according to the report, “the graphics may not be shaping adversary behavior.”
ProPublica breaks down the elements of their new article page template. Key features included a smorgasbord of header variations, editorial control over treatment and placement for embedded media, and automated generation of image variations based on focal points with optional per-breakpoint overrides. It’s a good look at their efforts to polish the key elements of their primary content type.
The old joke is that every successful organization has at least one secret, load-bearing spreadsheet. Custom spreadsheets are often the spackle and Krazy Glue of enterprise, plugging the gaps that “real software” isn’t nimble enough to fill. “If you want to see the future of B2B software, look at what Excel users are hacking together in spreadsheets today.”
Karen, 
Ethan and 
Jeff consider the quality of well-structuredness.
The goal of structured content isn’t more structure; it’s to put handles on bits of information that live inside of other content so software can do useful stuff with that information on demand.
What do we call the quality that makes it easier for software to do that? Parsability touches on how easily data can be teased out by algorithms, but isn’t quite right. Accessibility feels close, but collides with the broader concept of web accessibility. Availability might work, but it’s important to focus on goals and audience rather than technical criteria. “Who is the data accessible to, and for what purpose?” is a better question to ask than “How accessible is it?”
John Cutler’s This Beautiful Mess blog is a treasure chest of insights into process and collaboration. This post breaks down the seductive danger of an ‘everything process’ that makes multiple workstreams look aligned on paper, but doesn’t account for their distinct rhythms and needs.