The Blog
Sometimes we write stuff.
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Lettini is Good Enough
We put a lot of ourselves into our work, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know much about us. So we’re starting a new Q&A column to introduce ourselves, one-at-a-time, starting with our resident designer…
Who the hell do you think you are?
👋 Hello, I’m Matthew Lettini, but my friends just call me Lettini. You can too, if you want. I’m from the longest island in New York, and have lived in Brooklyn for over a decade. My dog is reeeally trying to get me to move to a place with a yard, though. I’ve been designing things for the web for over 15 years. -
Good Enough Marketing: The Preparation
We have a couple of exciting projects—Guestbook! Yay.Boo!—that we want to share with the world. But that’s a difficult task for us because, honestly, we’re
terriblenot good at self-promotion. We’d rather spend time making things than talking about the things we’ve made.We’d love it if, whenever we make something good, we could just “drop” it and millions of people will instantly show up and fall in love with it. But we’re not Beyoncé. The harsh reality is that most people have never heard of us at Good Enough, and we have to work on the marketing for people to know about our work.
So, how do we tell the world about our wondrous inventions?
Disclaimer: This is not a marketing tutorial. We’re not good at this stuff! But we’re going to learn, and we’re going to try a bunch of things. I thought it would be interesting to share our process and progress. At the very least, we’ll make some hilarious blunders along the way and this should be entertaining. 😅
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Adding Social Preview Images To Our 11ty Blog
TwitterX recently removed headlines and descriptions from link previews, in the name of “esthetics.” Inspired by Steph Ango, while we try not to run our business on the whims of a social media platform, this change did push us into making a change we’ve been meaning to for awhile: adding social preview images for our blog posts.For example, this is now what you’ll see when you share this post:
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How We Made A Good Enough Zine
We made a zine!
The first issue was released in August, and I finished the second issue just last week. Right now, a hundred copies are on their way from the printer to me (update: they've just arrived!). Today I'd like to share the story of how this zine came about.
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· James Adam · TIL
TIL: Tapback Keyboard Shortcuts
If you use Mac, and you use Messages on your Mac, you will probably know that in the not-too-distant past, simple reactions to messages were added: what Apple calls Tapbacks.
These are great for a quick way to say yes (or no, or WTF!?!), but they are a bit of a pain to actually send. You have you right-click on the message, then choose "Tapback...", then click the icon you want, and for a quick reaction, that's not exactly fast.
Well, imagine my delight when I learned today that you can send Tapback reactions using only your keyboard.
To send one in reply to the last message you recieved, just hit Cmd-T and then the numbers 1 to 6 to select the reaction.
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· Matthew Lettini · TIL
TIL: Use touch-action: manipulation; to avoid double-tap-to-zoom
Recently we built and launched A Good Enough Guestbook, a place where you can send us doodles and they’ll print out on our little printer. It’s quite lovely and fun, and you should send us a doodle. We might also have more in store for these printers in the future.
In the meantime, it took a bit of finagling to get the doodle interface feeling just right. One issue we ran into was that users would sometimes tap “Undo” a whole bunch in rapid succession. This undo’d just fine, but on mobile devices it would also unexpectedly zoom the page in. While this is often a good accessibility behavior of double-tapping a webpage, it’s unwanted in this interface.
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Thoughts On Thoughts
It’s time for a revolution. Too long have we, collectively and individually, been tyrannized by our thoughts and what we believe about them.
Or perhaps we can think of this as an intervention. This post is the circle of friends gathered to help us stop hitting ourselves in the face with a hammer.
So here’s a little step-by-step exploration of thoughts. It’s intended for any of us who, from time to time, struggle with intrusive or negative thoughts in any way.
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Bad Ideas Are Fun
Once I was complaining to Arun about how hard it is to come up with ideas, and he pointed out that coming up with ideas is actually very easy––what makes it hard is that we’re aiming for good ideas.
The next time you're coming up with ideas, tell yourself, Forget about good ideas, let's come up with a list of ten bad ideas. The dumber the better! I bet you’ll find that easy.
And once you loosen up your brain by coming up with ten bad ideas, some good ideas may follow.
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The Space Between Us
Good Enough is a fully-remote team, and I think it's safe to say that we'll never have a physical office. I've been working remotely for more than ten years, and overall I really like it. I love the flexibility it affords, being more present with our families, and that my employment opportunities are not constrained by the limit of where I can reasonably relocate my physical body every day.
Remote working also particularly suits the kind of work we do. There are many times where we need to discuss things or collaborate deeply on some piece of work, but there are also plenty of occasions where it's perfectly OK, or even desirable, to take time away to do some deeper thinking or exploration.
But being remote from your colleagues does have some downsides, and I think it's important to be conscious of them. Let's talk about one that I like to call the identity anchor.
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Having Trouble Getting Started? Pair Up!
A body at rest tends to stay at rest, and a body in motion tends to stay in motion, unless acted on by a net external force.
– Sir Isaac NewtonI often find that just getting started is the hardest part of doing something. This is especially true when the project is large or results take a long time to see.
A few years ago, I started talking about getting in shape but wasn’t really sure how to take that seriously. Occasional pickup basketball games with friends and leisurely bike rides with my wife were fun, but I was otherwise leading a mostly sedentary lifestyle. Doing any kind of exercise with consistency seemed impossibly tedious, so I didn’t!
Then, a minor disaster struck as I suffered a light tear in my calf muscle during a random Saturday morning basketball game.