The Curious Engineer

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The personal website of Matt Ström-Awn

mattstromawn.com

Matt Ström-Awn · Designer, leader, and coach focused on building exceptional products and teams.

Engineering management / careersEssays / personalFrontend / CSS / browsers

’15’20’25
Posts
103 from 2 Dec 2013 to 25 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (6 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://mattstromawn.com/feed.xml

2026 6

  1. Code review was never about the code
  2. The least wrong colors, version 2
  3. High-agency strategy
  4. Design from the inside
  5. All writing
  6. Expansion artifacts

2025 3

  1. Decentralizing quality
  2. The product design talent crisis
  3. The history of album art

2024 3

  1. UI Density
  2. The polish paradox
  3. How to generate color palettes for design systems

2023 3

  1. Creating a positive workplace community
  2. Design-by-wire
  3. Platform Design: Interfaces, Incentives, Emergence & Second-Order Thinking

2022 8

  1. The micromanager's dilemma
  2. Ballet dancers and shot putters
  3. Generative art Open Graph preview images
  4. Beauty in the machine: Post-industrial design
  5. How to pick the least wrong colors
  6. Hockey sticks don't look like hockey sticks
  7. Functions and the future of design systems
  8. Stop brainstorming

2021 4

  1. The legacy of NFTs
  2. Beyond 10×
  3. Pictures of websites
  4. The service-based design org

2020 20

  1. The hand and the brain
  2. Copying is the way design works
  3. The things of everyday design
  4. Collaborative design research
  5. A design API in practice
  6. Ethics for designers in the real world: Snapchat’s Juneteenth filter
  7. Know thyself
  8. What Is Care Ethics? A Designer's Guide to Relationship-Centered Morality
  9. Bottom Line Up Front: write to make decisions faster
  10. Consequentialism Explained: Ethics Based on Outcomes (For Designers)
  11. Deontology
  12. How to make big changes one step at a time
  13. Virtue ethics
  14. The unexamined life
  15. What is a brand?
  16. A brief guide to design feedback
  17. Engagement is an antimetric
  18. Breaking looms
  19. People alignment vs. purpose alignment
  20. The paradox at the heart of A/B testing

2019 21

  1. All the books I read in 2019
  2. Product thinking is a lifeline for struggling design systems
  3. Design APIs: the evolution of design systems
  4. Making an audio waveform visualizer with vanilla JavaScript
  5. Design and machine learning
  6. Learning how to see
  7. Intuition vs. data
  8. What google search shows us about the future of product design
  9. Using Netlify to build an email sign-up widget
  10. The management strategy that saved Apollo 11
  11. The Role of Doubt in Design
  12. Delight comes last
  13. The inevitable same-ification of the internet
  14. Responsive roadmaps
  15. The slippery slope of in product messaging
  16. Switching to variable fonts
  17. Compounding design, expiring design
  18. Optimize for learning
  19. How to take your team's creative pulse
  20. All the books I read in 2018
  21. Inclusive design on the Tokyo subway

2018 14

  1. How to have more inclusive meetings
  2. Who are design systems for?
  3. The design system you already have
  4. We'll fix it later
  5. Just-in-time design
  6. Research, empathy, simplicity, speed
  7. Designing with code
  8. The 1-hour design principles workshop
  9. My management philosophy
  10. Agile & anxiety
  11. Crystal ball 1-on-1s
  12. Really bad design exercises
  13. Flight crews don't decide where to fly
  14. Why the web will win

2017 4

  1. My favorite job interview question
  2. The Wall Street Journal's Fonts: Escrow, Exchange & Retina
  3. What makes a good design principle?
  4. How to get the best design feedback from your team

2016 4

  1. Making WSJ.com more accessible
  2. Design better data tables
  3. Datum ipsum
  4. Tiny data visualizations

2015 4

  1. Mind the gap: designing graphs with missing data
  2. Goldilocks your graphs
  3. Well-designed interfaces look boring
  4. Towards better creative feedback

2014 8

  1. Asymmetrical symmetry
  2. Make it 'til you make it
  3. Better problem solving: unask the question
  4. Taking credit for success
  5. What happens when things go wrong
  6. Practice makes perfect
  7. Be curious
  8. Working to work

2013 1

  1. A website to call my own