SUBGRID is a free thoughtfully curated weekly catalog of good design and design craft. Dispatched with ❤ from Canada every Wednesday morning.
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SUBGRID Issue #007
Published about 1 month ago • 7 min read
SUBGRID
ISSUE 007
Welcome back to Subgrid. As the New Year is here, I'm thinking a lot about productivity. Particularly, slow productivity.
"In the 16th century, Galileo’s professional life was more leisurely and less intense than that of the average twenty-first-century knowledge worker. Yet he still managed to change the course of human intellectual history." – writes Cal Newport in Slow Productivity (see This Week's Book).
In Newport's words, underlying slow productivity is a concept of emphatically rejecting the performative rewards of unwavering urgency. Instead, the author argues, grand achievement is built on the steady accumulation of modest results over time, while providing plenty of anecdotes from the productivity styles of interesting people such as Galileo Galilei, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Curie, or the singer Jewel.
We live in an era where grown-ups are trying to fit work into every corner of their lives, whether through incessant Slack messages or engaging day and night in thought leadership on LinkedIn. What's all that leading to? 21st century knowledge workers have access to the most sophisticated technology available to humanity and yet, remain the most burnt out. This frantic way of working and living seems pretty unsustainable and as Newport phrases it, a miserable way to exist for the long run.
This year, if you're a knowledge worker with some level of autonomy, it may be worth it to put slow productivity in practice. I'm convinced with Newport's argument that doing fewer things makes us better at our jobs – psychologically, economically and creatively. So, unless you are in an active Delta Force unit, practice surgery, a delivery worker, or any other genuinelytime-sensitive profession, how and where you end up is what matters, not the speed at which you get there.
Warren Buffet was once asked why it is that everybody wants to be him, yet so few people copy him. He simply said: "Because no one wants to get rich slow." So, before the concept of slow productivity sends one's ambitious and performative busyness parts in a huffing and puffing frenzy, they simply need to take a look at Buffet's long-term portfolio and its slow gains.
Personally, once I was well into my 30s, I started to vehemently dislike the theatre of hustle culture. Maybe it was burn out, or perhaps, I was aligning with my authentic self. So much so that last year, well before I became aware of Newport's concept of slow productivity, I designed a little iPhone app called Solarday to help you get through the day more mindfully. Last week, I shipped its newest update. While I didn't write this column to plug the app, I thought since we're on the concept of productivity, I might as well share it for the first time in this newsletter. (A few demo clips here).
Realfood.gov is an interesting US government website. It's a guide to encourage eating real, whole foods. While I hope the information on this site is certainly common sense, I find it admirable that a government website can have mindful colours, bold typography and illustrations. Takeaway: Eating ultra-processed food is bad for you, while eating fruits, vegetables and healthy fats lead to better health outcomes. Surprise, surprise. More interesting takeaway: the USA has a Chief Design Officer who runs the National Design Studio (the designers of this website), and currently, it's Joe Gebbia, the co-founder of Airbnb.
"When you're looking at a journey of 10 or 20 years, the launch is probably the least important thing." – writes First Round Review. It's an interesting piece on Australian design software behemoth Canva's early days and its journey to finding a product people resonated with. Now, 260 million people use Canva once a month. The original business model? "For the first two years, revenue came from a simple model [that powered 30% monthly revenue growth]: users could buy stock images and other content for $1 each." The rest is in the article.
Raphael Salaja writes: "A form submission with a gentle chime feels different than one met with silence. An error with a soft thunk lands differently than a red border alone." They make the point in a brief but well-rounded article about incorporating sound in web interfaces. While sound is more common in native mobile apps, they're a bit of a lost art (for good reason in lots of cases) on the web. With Safari and other browsers' 'mute this tab' control in the address bar, it may be worth it to layer sound in human ways into web interfaces again.
PRODUCT DISCOVERIES
Things I observe, try or love in the wild from makers who seem to put care & thought in the design. Just personal recommendations and curiosities (no affiliate fees earned).
Snap Pad: Snap Pad lets you create a physical notebook of sorts. It's like someone redesigned the clipboard and made it 10x more thoughtful. What starts as a blank canvas to hold paper can become your unique version of a paper notebook of your dreams. Mindfulness with paper, they call it. While I consider myself a digital-native consumer, every now and then I resort to pen & paper journalling and note-taking. For Snap Pad, you can whole punch your own paper or get beautiful paper made by Postalco, the Tokyo-based design studio behind this.
iA Presenter: iA Presenter is a novel way to present digital slide decks by composing the content in Markdown. If you're still making slides in Powerpoint in 2026, there is a better way. iA Presenter lets you focus on the story while letting the software handle the formatting (without any AI whatsoever). It's the sister product of iA Writer (that I covered in Issue 002) and has a native iOS app. In a presentation, the message is what matters the most, and biggest barrier to making a slide deck since the concept's inception has been handling the design & formatting – Presenter solves that elegantly.
Pampam: Pampam seems like a ChatGPT wrapper around a mapmaking interface. I like how this web app feels like a drawing tool, with a toolkit at the bottom to add fun elements to the map like a pin or a highlight. It comes with an AI explorer named Pam (essentially, ChatGPT) whom you can ask about a location (I asked it to add "Plant Matter Kitchen" in London, Ontario and within seconds, it was on the map). What's neat is that you can curate fun or useful maps for yourself or others. I might give this a proper shot before a Europe trip in March. (I also have an affinity for this genre of software. In Fall 2019, I created an iOS app called Dino built around the same concept of creating fun, social maps. Sadly, the pandemic made the app's utility irrelevant for a while, but in the backdrop of AI, there may be a resurgence of those sorts of consumer ideas.)
I've talked at great length about this 200ish page book in the column this week. Slow Productivity was a great read to start the year that contrasted the impact of using activity as a proxy for productivity vs. slow, steady work for the long haul with adequate breaks and rests.
This is the first Cal Newport book I've read and I must say, for a professor of computer science, he has a penchant for writing in simple and powerful language with well-formed anecdotes.
This also happened to be my first library issue of 2026 (yes, the simple pleasures of using the local library to issue books).
TYPEFACE OF THE WEEK
A wholesome typeface I discovered.
(There isn't designer of the week in this issue, so I decided to include a Typeface of the Week instead. Like this section and want me to include it regularly in future versions? Let me know. I love hearing from readers.)
SGP Simple: Scott Patterson of Field Report created SGP Simple as a personal project. It's inspired by a typeface called Simple. It's right at the intersection of old-fashioned meets modern, evoking the feel of writing with a Sharpie. Here's to more handcrafted things in the age of AI.
ARTIFACT FROM THE PAST
A figment of design history.
Photo Credit: NASA
The Space Pen was invented by Paul C. Fisher in 1965. It was the world's first anti-gravity pen that uses pressurized ink cartridges to write in zero gravity, on wet paper, underwater and at any angle. It became the pen used by astronauts in space, with Fisher AG-7 being the first one to reach the moon during the Apollo 7 mission in 1968.
It's incredible that these pens are still in production and available for purchase (in US & Canada stores). In fact, I gifted a couple of engraved Bullet pens (the one also in MoMA NY's permanent collection) to my wife's parents for Xmas in the year I met them. Frankly, I'm not sure if they ever use it, but if I had one, I'd use it every single day.
~ That's it for this week's edition. Pace yourself, as the path is long. ~
I'm a product designer-builder based in Ontario, Canada. I like building software that's thoughtfully designed and makes people feel good. You can visit my website to learn more about me.
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