About
Marcin Wichary is a designer, writer, and technology historian based in San Francisco.
He is the author of Shift Happens, an acclaimed two-volume history exploring 150 years of keyboards and typewriters. Over his career, he has served in pivotal design roles at Figma, Medium, Code for America, and Google, where he famously created interactive Google Doodles including the playable Pac-Man game.
Through his personal blog Unsung (unsung.aresluna.org), he publishes essays celebrating software craft, interface quality, typography, and vintage computing history.
You can also find Marcin Wichary on:
- Website: https://unsung.aresluna.org
- Twitter: @mwichary
- GitHub: mwichary
- Mastodon: mastodon.online/@mwichary
Articles
- The secrets of your menus
- The Swiss Cheese model, pt. 3
- “You can always click on the mirror icon to turn it into… a mirror.”
- “This was not the first time the European Commission had attempted to correct for the permissions pollution.”
- “I just chose words carefully.”
- “We want it to really confuse people, but also really make people happy.”
- “An absolute bare minimum of interactivity”
- “They had no concept of a duty of care to their users.”
- “This time, there had to be a different ending.”
- Medium’s writerly favicons
- Let me walk around
- Two previews for the price of one
- Mark MacKay’s explainers
- “This way, the interface does not get in the way.”
- “This would result in some serious street cred and respect.”
- Testing tip: Make your keyboard fast
- “A quick internet search should provide you with step-by-step instructions.”
- YouTube’s right click relay
- Movie review: General Magic
- Zalgo: The good, the bad, and the very, very ugly
- Got your back, pt. 7
- “The ghosts are fast and they don’t turn blue.”
- The Swiss Cheese model, pt. 2
- The item vs. the position
- “Behind their simplistic behavior is a fairly elegant system.”
- “I think there’s a lot of value in these.”
- “If nothing happened, you probably did not press the button quickly enough the second time.”
- Deeper dive: Were Touch Bar’s problems software rather than hardware?
- History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often tiles
- “What actually happened was the birth of a genre in digital graphics.”
- Name pronunciation in Asana
- Tap to top: Ivory
- Tap to top: Bear
- A bug becoming a feature (1972 edition)
- Linear’s visual key feedback
- “If you aim for the king, you better not show up eight years late.”
- Arno Beck’s art
- “I want to code; I’m not looking to make lifestyle choices.”
- iPod’s circular apps
- The first notch is magical
- Seeing like a state
- “Solving a largely imaginary user goal”
- “Microsoft’s most ambitious attempt to reinvent the start screen”
- Xcode’s clever minimap
- “It’s unclear how Sopwith escaped to the general public.”
- When commit means cancel
- “Some guy named Paul”
- “As a Windows user, it’s a very surreal way to install a program.”
- Asana’s fascinating Tab shortcuts
- The monkey lives again
- You only get one chance to make a zeroth impression
- One and one thing only
- “Insights and ideas emerge from that interface.”
- “Next up? You know it. You hate it. It’s the invisible wall.”
- “This is a sphere getting exponentially angrier as time passes.”
- “Gravity is worth asking about.”
- “Rather than fighting my tendency to type these two characters in my omnibar, I neutralized it.”
- What it says on the tin
- In between the lines
- “Every now and then some Unicode hyphen character makes its way into comments.”
- Meta on meta and Meta
- A time machine in Logic Pro
- “A vicious circle of incompatibility”
- Chrome’s breaking and entering
- “Creativity is fundamentally not an efficiency problem.”
- Safari and system design, pt. 2
- “Jokes, art projects, or cruel and unusual punishment”
- Unsung Heroes: Repeat in Excel 97
- “Something seems to be going crucially wrong with the frame rate.”
- Five moments in snapping history
- “Try quickly typing 1+2+3. I bet you won’t get 6.”
- “Is this acceptable? Not really. Is it understandable? Absolutely.”
- “Maze of pages, redirects, and confirmation emails”
- The Swiss Cheese model, pt. 1
- text.makeup
- “No such thing as too fast”
- A good kind of an update: The responses
- “It would’ve been much simpler to just use an animated cigar.”
- Max one weird thing
- Sets of overlapping circles
- “Cursed knowledge we have learned that we wish we never knew.”
- “If HEIC has no haters I’m dead.”
- More absolutely strange Google shortcuts
- Flickr’s optimistic committing
- My one (1) Medium secret
- “Animating something and animating something well are two very different things.”
- “Not being good at something doesn’t mean you can’t love it.”
- “…or I could click seventy buttons.”
- The adjective of the present or the verb of the future
- A good kind of an update?
- “Nothing at all like the bloated app that Dropbox’s Mac client has grown into”
- An accident inside an accident
- “Relying on passengers to open the doors proved to be a bit of a curse.”
- The great release notes of BBEdit
- “If you never saw the words Game Over, did you really do it all?”
- About Unsung: Recent improvements
- “You are a printer we are all printers”
- Balls (practically) to the wall
- If you’re a button, you have one job
- “The root of all margin-collapsing evil”
- “I know you think I’ve lost my mind, but trust me.”
- A simple notification preview in Retro
- Finder’s elite eliding
- Make the logo^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsomething bigger
- “That’s a big number – by almost any scale other than Google’s.”
- “No one knows who patient zero was.”