We make complicated things clear.
Hot Knife Design is a design and content development practice. We help technology and health organizations explain what they do, build products people understand, and publish ideas worth reading.
Why Hot Knife
Writing and design together.
Writing and design belong together. When you split them apart, things can get lost in the handoff. Sometimes the copy doesn't fit the layout, and the layout doesn't serve the narrative.
At Hot Knife, we know how a sentence and a screen work together, because we've built both for more than two decades. We've published books with O'Reilly, edited magazines, set type, and designed interfaces for analytics tools, health systems, and public agencies.
What we do
See how we work-
Content strategy & development
We figure out what you need to say, to whom, and in what order. Then we write and edit it until it's great.
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Editorial & thought leadership
Books, reports, essays, and articles that make your expertise readable. We've written and edited them for ourselves and for clients.
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Product & interface design
Dense, data-heavy products made obvious. Information architecture, interaction design, and production-ready UI.
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Information & publication design
Data visualization, reports, books, and print. Typography that does its job.
Selected clients: Random House, Hearst, New York Public Library, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Localytics, Gazelle, Vodafone.
Selected work
View all work-
O'Reilly Media
Designing for Emerging Technologies
Jon Follett led and edited this O'Reilly book, gathering practitioners from robotics, genomics, and the Internet of Things into one coherent volume.
Read about the book -
Bronze · 2008 Horizon Interactive Awards
The Nureyev Legacy Collection
Nearly two years of work turning a photographic archive and a book into a site where collectors research, read, and buy.
Read the case study -
MITX Technology Awards finalist
Localytics
A powerful mobile analytics product, made understandable for first-time users on a startup deadline.
Read the case study
Ideas, early
2006
We've written about where interfaces are going since 2006: location-aware mobile, voice and image recognition, data as a design material, sustainable design, distributed teams. Each one is now everyday.
Our essays have appeared in UXmatters, A List Apart, and Digital Web, translated into four languages. We pay attention to what's next.
Read our writing
Got something hard to explain?
A product, an idea, a body of research. Tell us about it.