Christopher Butler

chrbutler.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2014

Christopher Butler is a designer who writes about design, the internet, technology and digital life.

What HN saysHN commenters praise his writing as a fine distillation of the times and include him on lists of favorite personal sites.
26HN people shared it
4linked it in comments
149stories submitted
2.3Kstory points
4 months agolast shared
2014people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    Personal Machines and Portable Worlds
    3 people · 41 points · first shared 2023 · 7 comments on HN
  2. 2
  3. 3
    AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
    2 people · 549 points · first shared 2025 · 448 comments on HN
  4. 4
    The Internet Is a Bad Name
    2 people · 16 points · first shared 2021 · 6 comments on HN
  5. 5
    The Best Interfaces We Never Built
    2 people · 9 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
  6. 6
    The Problem with Design Is Designers
    2 people · 6 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
  7. 7
    Developing Digital Disgust
    2 people · 6 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
  8. 8
    This is Not Good Design
    2 people · 4 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
  9. 9
  10. 10
    Evidence That People Won’t Scroll Doesn’t Exist
    2 people · 3 points · first shared 2023 · 2 comments on HN
  11. 11
    What Eyes Want
    2 people · 3 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
  12. 12
    What I Want from the Internet
    2 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
  13. 13
    You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown
    1 people · 257 points · first shared 2025 · 120 comments on HN
  14. 14
    In Defense of Text Labels
    1 people · 243 points · first shared 2025 · 155 comments on HN
  15. 15
    The National Design Studio is a scam
    1 people · 196 points · first shared 2025 · 53 comments on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

rolph · 2023-04-23
edit [snipped re guidelines] i also love wood, and appreciate the craft, craftsmanship, and aesthitics. heres to hoping you get good traction. i just enjoyed this too: object — A 20 Year-Old Sketchbook https://www.chrbutler.com/2023-04-22
rektide · 2023-05-09
This is a great article & accurate in so many ways. We are lucky to have such great writing & distillation of the times as this; a fine treasure. This pairs very well & adds a lot of context to "What I want from the Internet"[1], which was submitted yesterday & which I am also very aglow over. Both the rise of platforms & the smartphone are tightly interwoven around a new connected axis of computing emerging & being useful. McThrow somewhat generously includes the web in his "personal computing" vision but alas, even as a huge web fan, it's pretty clear that the brief "intertwingularizing" moment (which was extremely pro user) was giving way to Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS), to a de-personalized experience. The relevance of desktop faded, and relevance faded because users were well served by new connected services. Software effervescing, sublimating up into the cloud made it easier to share, made it easier to access to demand, freed us from worrying about backups. I think this is one of the critical junctures that Linux and the rest of the Desktops has failed to internalize, as a new need: the need to be connected. The need to be more than just isolated personal, the need to be available, the need to be connectable. I don't know quite what this future looks like or what it implies, but the "Linux on the desktop" spoke of competition with an outmoded, fading mode of computing. What was really needed was a further push onward, was a backbone for inter-app systems…
chrbutler · 2023-05-08
Hmm, there is an RSS feed. https://www.chrbutler.com/feed.rss

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