Hi friends,

Like our friend Simon Collison, we’re always looking for brilliant new, or newly designed, personal websites. We get excited about bespoke sites because they’re part of what helps keep the web free, open, and creative. And while there are, of course, lots of places to publish, owning your own domain and controlling your own content is still the only way to ensure your online identity is secure and lasts as long as you want it to. So we’ve been happy to see a few beautiful examples so far this year:

Belgian web and graphic designer Veerle Pieters’s site is wonderfully colorful and comes complete with an RSS feed. Design systems advocate Jina Anne’s site is elegant in monochrome. Designer-developer Meagan Fisher’s site covers all the bases on just one page.

We’ll be keeping an eye on Simon’s own redesign and rebuild. And, if you’ve redone your own site, please let us know. We’d love to see it.

On technology, design, and business

• This is fun: the National Park typeface, courtesy of the Design Outside Studio
• Blacks Who Design, a handy directory for hiring
• Happy anniversary, Facebook and goodbye, transparency tools
• The magic, ease, and importance of HTML and CSS
• Sign up for this newsletter about Amazon

On anything and everything else 

• Here’s an aerial view of human life, narrated by philosopher Alan Watts
• And a Google calendar to keep track of space events
• We’ll take this argument for more sunshine 
• Wandering the Mexico City that shaped “Roma”
• VR images that change the way we look at photography 

In parting

“Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” — Mary Oliver