I’m Daniel Saunders, a designer, reader, and writer with somewhat eclectic interests, as you might have gathered from looking around this site. In real life I’m just as likely to be thinking about philosophical and social questions as I am coding problems, so that is what is reflected here! Subscribe to this site’s RSS feed or get in touch at my email.
Projects
I started coding in earnest at the end of 2021, and since then it’s become the primary focus of my longstanding freelance work. You can read a little bit about my journey from being a purely visual designer to being the unicorn “designer who codes” on this post and hopefully more posts to come. As a major step in that process, I’m excited to say that at the end of 2022, I am launching a new web design & development studio focused on building Jamstack websites.
Check out my design work page for some recent website projects that I’m particulary proud of.
I also recently helped (very modestly) the great folks at the Magnificast with some design things on their zine about Christian solidarity with Cuba. Check it out if you’re interested!
Reading & Writing
Finished Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s excellent new book, Reconsidering Reparations, and will have a review of it coming out soon.
Currently deep into Frederic Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, a fantastic exploration of the concept of Utopia and its literary elaborations in science fiction and fantasy. It’s my first Jameson, and its landing right in my sweet spot of philosophy/social theory/literary critcism.
Some new books I’ve recently acquired that I’ve got waiting in the wings: Arundhati Roy’s Azadi: Fascism, Fiction, and Freedom in the Time of the Virus, China Miéville’s A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, and Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep.
In the last few months I’ve also finished a few excellent books: László Krasznahorkai’s eerie novel Satantango (“Twin Peaks: The Return meets Tarkovsky”), Sven-Eric Liedman’s very approachable A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx, and another Táíwò banger, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics. Oh, and Ulysses for the second time.😁