design ideas observations

A Tiny But Significant Change in Fitted Sheets

Have you ever struggled to figure out which way to put a fitted sheet onto a mattress, particularly a queen-size mattress? Queen mattresses and their fitted sheets are fairly close to square, so inevitably I end up putting the sheet on incorrectly the first time around. While not an earth-shattering problem, it was annoying. And then someone had a brilliant idea and made a tiny but significant change to fitted bed sheets. Some fitted bed…

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design ideas pragmatic historian preservation product packaging

Can Desiccant Packets Be Reused?

In the further annals of product packaging, I’ve been flummoxed by another item that isn’t easily recyclable: Desiccant packets. These are the little silica packets found in vitamins and other supplements, in shoeboxes, and in any product that needs to stay dry within its packaging. I’m sure I’ve thrown away hundreds of these in my lifetime. I don’t remember when they became common within product packaging, but they seem to be in loads of stuff…

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action design tips

403 Forbidden & Alt Text

I have a habit of breaking WordPress websites and putting them back together again. I’ve done so at work a few times and with this particular site. When I say “break,” it’s not that I’m trying to make them completely inoperable. What I’m attempting to do is make them more efficiently operable, usually by combining two separate sites. A little over a year ago, when the pandemic first hit, I didn’t have the energy to…

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