Christopher Butler
Chief Design Officer writing on design strategy, craft, and the intersection of creativity and systems.
chrbutler.comChristopher Butler is an independent blog covering design. It publishes on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, with 32 posts in its archive and 3 readers following along on Blogs Are Back.
Regular
Publishes weekly or bi-weekly
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Independent Blog
English
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The Productive Afterward
This, from JA Westenberg, is well-put: “I’m going to argue that the pessimists have the best narratives and the worst track record. The doom scenarios require assumptions that don’t survive contact with economic history, and the psychological posture you bring to this moment actually matters for how it turns out.” Westenberg’s essay is about why optimism at a time like the present makes sense. It’s exactly the sort of thing—when thoughtfully argued and laden with examples—that I need to read...
In But Not Of
I’ve been thinking about the science fiction novels that have stayed with me across years—the ones I return to in my mind even when I’m not actively reading them. Replay. The Sparrow. The Listeners. Way Station. Earth Abides. The Lathe of Heaven. I Who Have Never Known Men. When I look at them together, I see thematic consistencies that I didn’t recognize when reading them individually: the burdens of carrying knowledge or experience that others cannot understand or believe, of enduring helple...
Consistency is Primitive
Over the last week, I’ve been setting up design-to-code systems that have had a profound effect on how our design team makes and ships things. We create files in Figma that are translatable by machine—integrated with Anima to produce HTML and CSS files, compiled and refactored by Claude, then implemented by providing Claude with contextually relevant information and code. Existing templates, stylesheets, configuration files—all fed into a system that can maintain, expand, and transform what a hu...
Catching Up
At long last — catching up here! It’s been months since my last visual-journal entry here, but I have kept up offline. Here’s a sampling. A friend asked me recently about my collage source material. At this point, I very rarely cut something out of a book or magazine directly and fix it onto a page. Instead, I most often collect digital images and process them a bit before printing them at home and using them like any other collage material. Sometimes, I run already printed pages sev...
Biggest Website Update in Years
Several years ago, I created a new design for my website and attempted to alter my Blot theme to match it. It didn’t work out especially well, and I became quickly frustrated by what I perceived to be a limitation of the theme to handle what I considered to be pretty simple design choices. I was wrong, not about how simple the implementation would be, but about how to do it. Blot themes use Mustache, which defines templates without explicit logic — inserting content dynamically by wrapping lab...
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