455: Shift Happens ft. Marcin Wichary

What It Covers

Marcin Wichary, designer at Figma and author, discusses his seven-year journey creating Shift Happens, a 1,200-page, two-volume book about keyboard history. He covers self-publishing, typography engineering, creative process, balancing technical and design skills, and building interactive web experiences while maintaining playfulness in long-term creative projects.

Key Questions Answered

• •Technical Designer Identity: Operating at the intersection of design and engineering means writing code for creative purposes rather than production. This includes prototyping, scripting for typesetting, creating 3D web previews, and constantly negotiating with engineers about what breaks rules versus what inspires. The key is using code to unblock design work while surrounding yourself with people who have complementary skills in areas where you lack expertise.
• •Book Production Scale Management: Creating a comprehensive historical work requires building a research database first, spending approximately one year compiling materials before pattern matching for stories. The project evolved from an estimated 80,000 words to 260,000 words across 1,200 pages with 1,300 photographs and 42 chapters. Setting external deadlines with an editor prevents infinite tinkering, as creative people naturally gravitate toward endless refinement without constraints.
• •Self-Publishing Design Freedom: Self-publishing allows breaking traditional book conventions, including starting with a cold open without front matter, placing table of contents at the end, positioning acknowledgments mid-book, and digitizing never-before-digitized typefaces from mechanical keyboards. Creating 12-13 printed prototypes throughout the process helps validate design decisions, with fifty percent of page area dedicated to photos that actively participate in storytelling rather than decoration.
• •Maintaining Creative Playfulness: Treating fun seriously requires deliberate practice and framework development, similar to how comedians and magicians approach their craft. The formula involves mixing what you're already good at with new skills to learn, providing both stability during difficult periods and excitement from growth. Writing down weekly accomplishments and celebrating small creative wins helps maintain momentum on multi-year projects when motivation naturally fluctuates.
• •Typography Engineering Intersection: Working at the overlap of typography and front-end engineering creates unique value in an underserved space. This includes building tooling and processes for font rendering, understanding font metadata complexities, managing line height calculations across platforms, and negotiating between historical typography traditions and modern web constraints. Browser limitations require constant conversations with vendors about APIs for features like local font access.
• •Web Performance Philosophy: Building websites with raw HTML, CSS, and JavaScript rather than modern frameworks can deliver faster load times and complete creative control, though it requires accepting limitations like manual dark mode implementation and responsive breakpoints. The trade-off involves easier transitions and animations versus maintainability concerns. For creative projects, direct control over every element often outweighs the benefits of state management frameworks.