Hi, I'm Liam—a designer at Google working on Material Design. Before working on Material's adaptive capabilities full-time, I spent most of my time as a Senior Design Advocate. Before that, I led design at touchlab in New York, building all kinds of interfaces for all kinds of different devices—from sidewalk kiosks to sneakers—and plenty of apps on the side.
Throughout all of that, I've been writing about design. I'm a firm believer that writing about my practice while I do it is crucial to staying sharp and continuing to improve my skills. I've shared that writing in different venues, from Google Design to Medium, the Material Design Blog to conference stages.
With a change of roles that shifts my focus to more behind-the-scenes work (which you'll see bubble up through Material Design specs, components, and libraries) and the detotalization of social media platforms (both individual posts and the concept generally), it feels like the right time to start up a proper place of my own to record my thoughts, tips, and knowledge on design.
Interface Café is that place. The site is meant to be a calm space to work through ideas on the meaning of our work—both the theoretical (for example the philosophy of generative AI or socialization in digital spaces) and the practical (for instance setting up your design files for new devices or the importance of a sandbox). My goal is to publish a fairly even mix—along with new episodes of my podcast Design Notes and links to new discoveries—to help move my practice (and the reader's) forward through consistent sharing and discussion.
To that end, this site enables me to set up a bi-weekly (that's every two weeks) "newsletter" to deliver two specific pieces of content: one practical tip, one theoretical provocation, right to your inbox. If you're into that, just throw your preferred email address in the box.
The newsletter is the only quantified measure I'm taking of the site. I have vague goals for how often I want to post, but I won't be using analytics, and to cut down on cookies I don't even have comments turned on. If you want to talk about the stories you find here or let me know what you want to hear more or less about, hit me up anytime on all of the various social media sites.
Well, not all of them. Mainly Mastodon, Threads, and Twitter (X, Whatever).
Thanks for reading. ✌️
