Voice-based interfaces are becoming commonplace. Voice assistants such as Siri and Cortana have been around for a few years, but this past holiday season, voice-driven devices from Amazon and Google made their way into millions of homes.

In February 2016, I moved from London, England to Pittsburgh, USA to join Duolingo - the world's most popular education app and then fledgling ~45 person startup. My first task at Duolingo: work on creating the name and brand identity for a new flashcard app concept - our first ever foray outside of language education.

In 2006, I made a big decision: I resolved to throw everything I had into pursuing a career in software design. I'd been handcrafting GeoCities-like websites for myself and others since the late nineties, but now I wanted to get serious about it.

Today I'm releasing a free little web-app for optimizing ("cleaning up") SVG files. It's called SVGito. If the idea of SVG code or optimization is new to you, take a moment to read this other article explaining how to think about SVG. As its name suggests*, SVGito is a small tool.

In 1975, the Environmental Protection Agency had a problem. Not an existential threat, like the agency faces today, but a problem nonetheless. The EPA-still young at the time-was a mess. Graphically speaking, anyway. "There was no standardization at all," says Tom Geismar, a graphic designer best known for his role in crafting logos for NBC, Mobil, Chase Bank, and eventually the EPA.