Design Thinking

Stripe Press

1/5/26 • 1 min read

Stripe Press is owned by Stripe, the financial infrastructure company, acting as their in-house publishing arm. It’s a strategic content initiative – a publishing venture by the same company that provides online payment processing services.

That said, they produce a number of interesting titles and h/t to @bradbarrish for putting Stewart Brand’s Maintenance of Everything, Part One on to my timeline. I realise that I have ‘Get Together’ already and that it’s horrifyingly five years old which consigns itself to historical account versus practical guide.

As an aside, I rather like Stripe Press’s website design as well, it’s rare to encounter a site that doesn’t feel like the product of a commoditised template library. I imagine the design intent was slightly skeuomorphic – to capture the feel of lifting the book off a shelf and opening it. The holy grail for physical product retail - how do you approximate the tactile experience to drive conversion? The lazy and environmentally harmful answer always seems to be ‘free returns’.

Icon Design & Visual Literacy

1/1/26 • 1 min read

You may not know Jon Hicks but you’ve likely seen his work as the graphic designer of Firefox, MailChimp and Shopify logos.

In 2012, he published a book entitled ‘The Icon Handbook’ - it’s a great primer and culimination of two years of work and guides you through the process of designing icons - from identifying an appropriate metaphor to drawing symbols through to the practicalities of implementation. Best of all, he is providing it free of charge on the basis that quite a lot of the content has aged although that does not apply to many of the foundational principles.

Even if you’re not interested in creating your own icons, the chapters on history, metaphor and use are valuable and accessible to a non-design audience.

Warning systems rely on icons to overcome language barriers and issues with translation so understanding the design process can only inform better briefs and more effective design.