Callie Neylan

Callie Neylan

📍 Seattle, Washington

A Second Sunday. An eighth month.

I like to think that meals like these provide ballast. They’re something we can count on, that we can regularly look forward to. But the opposite is also true: One reason we cherish them is that, deep down, we know they’re not forever.” – Adam Rapport, Editor, Bon Appetit

Wednesday, June 3. The shoes I wore to meet the architect.

My house is not a piece of software. It is not a computer or an application program. But it is a legacy system. An architectural program designed for an outdated lifestyle. It is a machine designed for a life I do not live. “In computing, a legacy system is an

On Microsoft Excel, Big Software, and Brazilian Favelas.

I often telling people designing for Excel is more like urban design than anything else. Because like a city, big software is a messy, chaotic system that is constantly evolving with millions of opinionated inputs by passionate, feeling, needy inhabitants and feisty, exuberant, competent and just as often, incompetent (but

On touching data.

Touch interface design guidelines dictate that the more simple and limited the gestural language used to control a system, the better. Use only these gestures when designing for touch devices: slide, pinch, zoom, tap, double tap. The reasoning goes that first of all, there are little to no affordances in

On loving fashion.

Seattle is ranked high on the list of America’s worst-dressed cities. Right up there with Boulder, Cleveland, and Raleigh, North Carolina. And I work at Microsoft, where, lest you think the lack of fashion sense in an already fashionless place couldn’t be worse, it is. Regardless, last weekend

Tuesday, January 13. The shoes I wore to meet the architect.

Design is about constraints. Technical constraints, physical constraints, financial constraints, political constraints. We are at the stage in our home design where constraints are converging from many angles. The shoes I’ve worn to meet the architect lately haven’t been worn to meet the architect. They’ve been worn

On birthday cake and ramen noodles.

In exactly two weeks, I will be 48. Which means it’s time for birthday cake. Enter my coworker, Safiya, who introduced me to the Momofuku Milk Bar last year when we were in New York City for the Visualized conference. They are famous for their birthday cake, among other

Who made that Pantone 629M?

Robin’s egg blue is my favorite color. Luckily, it looks really good with brown. I’m getting ready to place my first straw order, picking the Pantone color for Bellflower Chocolate this week: 629U and/or M. Thank you, Lawrence Herbert. Pantone Color Institute How Tiffany’s Iconic Box

On how good design makes food taste better.

I never knew I was a foodie gourmande until I didn’t have access to good food. Misery loves company, and some of my first conversations with my friend Paolo, who moved to D.C. from the West Coast about a year or so after I did, were about how

On the yonic and the phallic.

I have never had any desire to go to Dubai. But that changed this week when I listened to this BBC podcast on why we build skyscrapers, and learned about the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. I want to see it. “Yonic – yo• nic, adj. – a stylized