Jason Beaird

Spent tonight back at my alma mater, talking with UCF's Knights Design Interactive, a student UX club. We covered how designing for the web has evolved and where it's headed. They were a bright, curious crew of CS and Digital Media majors. Give them a follow on IG: www.instagram.com/kdi.club

more than meets the eye

I finally finished my blog post about the empathy exercise and Silo-themed game I ran at last week's onsite. jasongraphix.com/journal/brea...

Can't wait to run the Silo-themed team "building" game I planned for a work meetup in Chicago next week. My kids and I play-tested it over the weekend, and I printed red-level relic trophies for the winning team.

I'm sure the Venn diagram overlap of Untappd & Pixelfed users is small, but I wrote a tiny Python script with Claude that checks my Untappd RSS feed and cross-posts new check-in photos to Pixelfed. Here's the repo: github.com/jasongraphix... and here's what it posts: pixelfed.social/jasongraphix

I launched SkilletSched.com three months ago, and our family still uses it every week to plan meals. It's been fun iteratively improving the UX. I just added a feature a friend asked for: household ⭐️ ratings for recipes. If you cook at home, give it a try!

Of the 71 feeds I'm tracking at teamdesign.team, only 32 have posted within the last 12 months. I just did some cleanup and moved Atlassian, Babbel, ExxonMobil, GitHub, Gusto, Kingfisher, Oscar, Prudential, Wix, and Yelp to the dormant list.

It's been a tough week at work. Layoffs suck.

Just published a blog post about our Italian road trip through Bologna, Florence, Cinque Terre, Verona, and Venice. It was an adventure we'll never forget, and a good reminder to be intentional about experiences like this before our kids are grown. jasongraphix.com/journal/our-...

Fun fact…

I laughed at the link, but now this is playing on repeat while I work. kottke.org/26/06/daft-p...

Huzzah! No more “back to safety” step when enabling SkilletSched’s Google Calendar sync option. Our OAuth flow is now fully verified. Here’s the demo walkthrough I submitted to kick off the verification process. Drop a reply if you want to try it out! youtu.be/Vt0uRJmLf4I...

Made a delicious batch of chicken & dumplings for dinner and then spent my dev time tonight baking prep/cook/total time, yield, and tag metadata into stored recipes. #BuildInPublic skilletsched.com/@jasongraphi...

Our daughter asked to invite a friend over for dinner on a night we'd planned to try a new recipe. It turned out great, so I added it to my shared recipes: skilletsched.com/@jasongraphi... In tonight's app progress, I'm now surfacing public shares on the Recipes page in SkilletSched for easy import.

Our family has been planning and cooking meals for the last few weeks with a web app I've been working on called SkilletSched. Now, I'm opening it up for others to use, too. Here's the story: jasongraphix.com/journal/intr...

"The interdisciplinary mind isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. It’s the capability that matters most, precisely because it’s the one machines can’t replicate." matthiasott.com/articles/des...

I spent some Claude Code tokens improving teamdesign.team a bit over the weekend. I now have a script that auto-fills missing recent post thumbnails with the article's OpenGraph image. While I still wish they'd just add an RSS feed, I also found a way to fetch new posts from design.google.

I finally released the Nest photo gallery project with a working installer. Now, anyone (with an ARM-based Mac) can convert a discarded Gen2 Nest thermostat into an interactive photo frame. jasongraphix.com/journal/crea...

Do you happen to have a Gen2 Nest Thermostat lying around that you want to convert to a photo gallery like this? jasongraphix.com/journal/nest... I have an installer built (for Intel Macs) that I’d love to get a few folks to test.

I've always said that design is about learning rules to know when to break them and that applies to design process too. I love this whole talk from @jennywen.ca. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u94...

I can quit anytime I want…

Claude Code changes the question from “should designers code?” to “should designers modify firmware?” Here’s the story about how I upcycled a deprecated Nest thermostat into a photo gallery. jasongraphix.com/journal/nest...

This is a fascinating window into how AI SaaS pricing models are evolving. "We could tell we were creating a not-lovable experience." www.elenaverna.com/p/we-stopped...

I’m converting my deprecated Gen2 Nest into a mini digital photo frame and just got a test image loading. I would have abandoned this project already if it weren’t for Claude Code, which is making the trial and error of it fun.

Having shared the viral video with my teens, it was fun to read about how a 77-year-old curator at the National Gallery of Art started making videos in Gen Z slang. www.milkkarten.net/i/186801044/...

Completed the first step of my side quest to do something fun with this little hunk of e-waste.

I love our local UX community. Cesar led us through a great, practical workshop on Journey Mapping at last night’s Downtown Orlando UX Meetup. youtu.be/MhztaBCwt6U

We did it! Our DIY Library Ladder Wall project is complete. It was quite a holiday break marathon to get this built, but we're so happy with how it came together. Check it out: jasongraphix.com/journal/libr...

The bulk of our winter break DIY project just arrived. Not pictured: vintage 10ft library ladder and butcher block countertops. 📚

Symmetrical internet is much better than fast download speeds alone. At our old house, a 300mb fiber plan worked great. We moved in September and the upload on our “gig” cable internet capped out at about 50mb. Just got fiber run with only a 500mb plan, and this chart makes me smile.

One of my product design colleagues shared this from their granola.ai 2025 "crunched" report, and I've never felt more seen.

Time to let the kids shave off my November beard again. Unsurprisingly, they attempted a 6️⃣7️⃣ this year.

We've been chatting with ProductTank Orlando about doing a collab event for a long time. So excited that it's happening, and that we're meeting in Full Sail's Treehouse, which is such a rad venue!

The weather was perfect for this year’s Falcon 5k. Adelyn didn’t train at all, so we took it slow and had fun.

Creative Mornings Orlando is always inspiring, but it was especially refreshing to hear stories from students and recent grads at today’s “Rising Creatives” event.   creativemornings.com/cities/orl/b...

Tonight’s random vibe coding project success, presented without context.

Experimenting with agent mode in ChatGPT Atlas is a good reminder that designing web experiences that are intuitive and accessible for all humans makes them more usable for everyone, including the robots. Watching Atlas work is like facilitating a user research session.

Just put a fresh set of caster wheels on my old standing desk. After about 5y, the tread wore off one from my original set. Still love being able to roll my desk around.

I Installed a closer on the door of our new home office today. I was a bit nervous as it was my first time having to drill and tap machine screw holes, but it turned out great!

I took my youngest daughter to see Alex Warren perform at UCF last night. A few weeks ago, my oldest and I went to Benson Boone at Kia Center. Middle school girl dad life is out of the ordinary, but mystical and magical.

"Delightful is fleeting. Delight is enduring." - @cameronmoll.bsky.social chieflydesign.substack.com/p/delight-vs...

Just re-discovered loadmo.re via today's sidebar.io newsletter, which reminded me to check out www.hoverstat.es and httpster.net again too. I need more unconventional design inspiration in my life.

Looking forward to next week's @douxmeetup.com discussion on the UX of AI. www.meetup.com/downtown-orl...

It’s inspiring to see new signs of pride and allyship popping up around Orlando. You can paint over (and pressure wash) a crosswalk, but The City Beautiful will keep shining through.

The school year begins! We officially have two middle schoolers.

A few people have asked how @teamdesign.team automatically cross-posts to LinkedIn, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon. I wrote a blog post detailing the 10-step Zap that makes it happen. jasongraphix.com/journal/team...

It's exciting to see new articles on ALA and this one really hit home for me as a design manager. I love the organism analogy in balancing the strengths of people and craft leadership in a design org. alistapart.com/article/an-h...

Ames and I celebrated our anniversary with a long weekend in Tampa. It’s been great to slow down, connect, and dream about our next 22 years together.