h.massau

Does Nielsen Dream of Electric Sheep?

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Once upon a time, there was a man dressed up as a corporate Isaac Asimov, infinitely more boring and infinitely more pedantic, who shot the WWW 27 years ago. It’s 1998. The Internet is a Pandora’s box: it’s the web of Tim Berners-Lee and GeoCities, the web of Hillman Curtis, Joshua Davis, and Yugo Nakamura, the web of Flash, Fireworks, and hand-coded HTML.

Jakob Nielsen

And out of nowhere comes Jakob Nielsen with his lazy heuristics, his grandiloquent airs, and his breadcrumbs, and he convinced us all. Or almost all of us. And the web, which used to be a beautiful place full of things to discover, turned into a library of endlessly regurgitated templates, and we designers became sausage factories. Sausage with breadcrumbs. Breadcrumb on breadcrumb. All very UseIt, and insufferably boring. Jakob Nielsen was the champion of web commoditization, and we were the suckers who bought into it: it gave us an air of maturity and importance, keeping us far away from those Flash hippies making things that were increasingly complex and hard to imitate.
Today I read an article, from 2025 already, where this guy, not content with putting a bullet in the web 27 years ago, predicts that in a couple of years web user interfaces will disappear, and the web itself will become a data layer for “intelligent” agents, with no humans in the loop. From guru of mediocre standardization to agentic snake-oil salesman with non-stop flights. I don’t know why he isn’t selling crypto-babble.
Thank you so much, Jakob. I forgive you, it must be horrible dreaming of electric sheep.

Manifesto MIGA

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

MIGA, which stands for ‘Make Internet Great Again’ (and winks at Argentina’s iconic sándwich de miga), was born from the idea of going back to the basics of the internet.

We propose reviving the era when the internet was a habitable place, where you could visit a website and spend hours learning about something that interested you. The internet where you decided when it started and when it ended; you sat at the computer that probably occupied a central place in your house, at a weird desk with a sliding tray for a giant, loud white keyboard. You opened a can of Pepsi, grabbed some Pringles, and entered a private world of infinite exploration.

The Good AI

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Un pie de imagen.

What if, instead of letting AI take the fun out of design, we use it to build custom design tools? What if, instead of replicating a traditional tool, we build it like a synthesizer—one that, instead of modulating sound waves, uses a pair of vector oscillators that can be filtered and processed?
En Laburo Estudio nos planteamos eso, y lo que comenzó como un experimento terminó en un generador visual que nos permite operar con nuestro sistema gráfico tal como nosotros queremos, y exportarlo para seguir iterándolo manualmente en Figma o Illustrator.
Our design system isn’t very complex, but as grid density increases, execution becomes increasingly laborious. It focuses on five operations applied to the Iso (serialization, rotation, scaling, deformation, and mirroring) through which grid density is modulated, playing with the optical effect generated by a dark background plane behind the Iso filled with the light background color. We didn’t invent anything new; like the hard-working folks we are, we identify with a brutalist aesthetic influenced by Enzo Mari, the Manuel Belgrano school in Córdoba, the roofs of FADU…
The first iterations were complete crap. The AI didn’t understand the Iso; it invariably tended to see it as an ‘L’ or as the counterform of the ‘L’. Nor did it understand how these optical effects were produced between the background and the Iso. In other words, it understood nothing. So, as if explaining it to a “Junior Assistant to the Junior Designer,” we took a step-by-step teaching approach: we fed it many images we had designed by hand and recorded each sequence of the process, explaining operation by operation how we arrived at that result, so that once it digested it, we could define which variables needed to be manipulated from the tool to give us the versatility we were looking for.
It was a long and frustrating process, but as the hours went by and with a heavy token burn, we started getting decent results. Today we have a tool that keeps iterating, but fulfills what we set out to do: generate grids, modulate them to our liking, randomize them, and bring them into Illustrator or Figma. Using AI to speed things up, without losing the craft.
We might not have built an AI that makes your bed and washes your dishes, but for us, it’s pretty close.

☏ ☺ ☞ ☃ ☵ ⚵ ⵘ ☺ ☞ ⵥ ☵ ⚵ ☏ ☺ ☞ ☃ ☵ ⚵ ☏ ☺ ☞ ☃ ☵ ⚵ ☏ ☺ ☟ ✐ ☵ ⚵ ☏ ☺ ☟ ✏ ☵ ⚵ ☏ ☺ ☞ ☃ ☵ ⚵ ☏ ☺

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

send me an email at hernanmassau [at] gmail [dot] com o via LinkedIn.

☟

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Lab

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Some of the design (and construction) tools I built for myself using Claude Code. They fit my workflow like a glove, but they might not be for everyone.

Riso Glitch Halftone Animator v3.0

Risograph printing simulator, halftones, ink misregistration, generative graphic layers, and frame-by-frame animation sequence.

RISOGRAPH / HALFTONE / GLITCH / ANIMATION

Halftone Lab II - Animator

Typographic and animated dot halftone processor. Density control, chaos-to-order transitions, and export to PNG, WebM, and GIF.