Here's a test I run on everything I care about. Would I still recommend this in ten years? Not "is this good right now" or "is this trending" or "is this what everyone is talking about." Would I still care about this a decade from now? Would I still press it into someone's hands and say "you need to experience this"? That filter - the ten-year taste test - changes how you see almost everything.
Most things fail the test. Most things are of their moment - brilliant in context, forgettable out of it. The album that defined a summer. The restaurant that everyone had to try that year. The app that solved a problem nobody remembers having. The design trend that looked revolutionary for eighteen months and then looked dated for the rest of eternity. These things aren't bad. They're just temporal. They exist in time rather than outside it.
But some things pass. Some things sit there, unchanged, undated, as good on day three thousand six hundred and fifty as they were on day one. And those things - the survivors, the ones that endured - share something in common. They have substance. They were never riding a wave. They were the ocean.
What survived
I think about the websites I loved in 2015. Kottke.org - Jason Kottke's blog, running since 1998, still one of the best curated windows onto the internet. Are.na - the visual bookmarking tool for people who think in connections rather than categories. Letterboxd - the film logging platform that made talking about movies online feel like a conversation rather than a shouting match. All three are still here. All three are still excellent. All three look and feel almost exactly the same as they did a decade ago, because they got the fundamentals right the first time.
What do these survivors have in common? They weren't chasing trends. Kottke was never trying to be a social media platform. Are.na was never trying to be Pinterest. Letterboxd was never trying to be TikTok for films. They each had a clear point of view about what they were and what they weren't, and they stuck to it through every cycle of hype and fashion that swirled around them. That clarity is what made them durable.
Contrast this with the things that didn't survive. Vine - brilliant, culture-defining, dead. Google Reader - beloved, essential, killed by its parent company. Ello - the anti-Facebook that turned out to be the anti-everything including users. Meerkat - the live-streaming app that everyone was certain would change everything. Path - the intimate social network limited to 150 friends. Each of these was, at its moment, the thing you had to try. Each of them is now a Wikipedia entry rather than a daily habit.
The pattern is clear. The things that lasted were the things that solved a fundamental problem well, without overcomplicating it. Kottke solves the problem of "what's interesting on the internet today." Are.na solves the problem of "how do I organise my visual thinking." Letterboxd solves the problem of "how do I remember and share what I have watched." Simple problems, simple solutions, beautifully executed. No pivot necessary. No reinvention required. Just a thing that works, continuing to work.
Design that ages
There's a useful thought experiment in design: will this look good in ten years? It's a surprisingly powerful filter. Skeuomorphic design - the fake leather textures and fake wood grain and fake stitching that dominated the early 2010s - looked incredible when it was new. It felt tangible, warm, human. And then flat design arrived and suddenly all that texture looked dated, fussy, cluttered. The trend had a shelf life measured in months, not decades.
But some design ages beautifully. Dieter Rams designed products for Braun in the 1960s that still look modern today. The Helvetica typeface was designed in 1957 and still looks contemporary. The original iPod, designed in 2001, still looks clean and considered even though the technology inside it is ancient. These designs survived because they weren't responding to a trend. They were establishing principles.
This is why I build with timeless design principles rather than chasing whatever the current aesthetic is. Clean typography, generous whitespace, limited colour palette, clear hierarchy. These aren't trends. These are fundamentals. They worked in print fifty years ago and they work on screens today and they'll work on whatever comes after screens. When you build on fundamentals, your work doesn't date. It just sits there, quietly doing its job, while everything around it cycles through fashion after fashion.
The gradient backgrounds and blob animations on this site are the one concession I've made to the current moment. I'm aware of that. In ten years they might look as dated as a drop shadow did by 2018. But they're decorative, not structural. The bones of this design - the typography, the spacing, the colour theory, the reading experience - those are built on principles that predate the internet and will outlast it.
The disposable culture problem
We live in a disposable culture and it is getting worse. Products launch, get acquired, pivot, shut down, and vanish within a single product cycle. Apps you relied on yesterday send you an email tomorrow saying they're "sunsetting the service." The average lifespan of a startup is shrinking. The average attention span of a user is shrinking. Everything is optimised for the next quarter, not the next decade.
This disposability infects how we think about building. Why make something durable when the platform it runs on might not exist in three years? Why invest in timeless design when the trend will change next season? Why build for longevity when the entire industry celebrates speed, growth, and disruption over craft, substance, and endurance?
I think this is exactly wrong. The disposability of everything else is precisely why durability is so valuable. When everything around you is temporary, the things that last become remarkable. They become trustworthy. They become the anchors that people hold onto while the rest of the landscape shifts beneath them. Building for durability in a disposable culture isn't old-fashioned. It's a competitive advantage.
CultureTerminal is built on this principle. I could have chased the latest design trends, the newest frameworks, the most fashionable approach to content aggregation. Instead, I built something simple that does one thing well: surfaces interesting culture from across the internet in one clean feed. That's a need that existed ten years ago, exists today, and will exist ten years from now. The technology might change. The design might evolve. But the core purpose is durable because the human need it serves is durable.
Building for the long view
The ten-year taste test has changed how I build everything. Every design decision, every feature decision, every product decision gets filtered through this question: will this still matter in ten years? Will someone opening this site in 2035 feel like it was made with care, or will it feel like a time capsule of a moment that has passed?
This doesn't mean building something frozen in time. It means building on principles rather than trends. Using classic typography rather than the font of the moment. Using a colour palette rooted in psychology rather than fashion. Creating layouts based on readability rather than novelty. Making things that work because they're clear and considered, not because they're new and surprising.
Trove is built on this thinking. The core idea - understanding your own taste through the lens of what you collect and save - is a human need that has existed since the first person arranged objects on a shelf and thought "these things say something about who I'm." The technology is new. The interface is modern. But the underlying need is ancient. That's what makes it durable. I'm not building for a moment. I'm building for a need that'll outlast whatever moment we're in.
The same principle applies to how I write, how I design, how I think about every project. What's the underlying human need? Not the trending format. Not the viral mechanic. Not the growth hack. What's the thing that people have always needed and will always need? Start there. Build there. Stay there.
Because trends have a half-life. Fashion has a shelf life. But substance - real, genuine, considered substance - has no expiry date. The books that were good in 1995 are still good. The restaurants that were great in 2010 are still great. The design principles that worked in 1960 still work. And the products built on timeless human needs will still be useful long after the products built on trending features have been sunset, acqui-hired, pivoted, and forgotten.
Ten years from now, I want someone to open one of my products and think: "This still works. This still feels right. This was built by someone who cared about the long game." That is the test. Everything I build is an attempt to pass it.
