XD Studio Lab

Systems Before Screens

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most digital projects fail after launch, not before it. This book argues that the cause is almost always decided before the first screen is designed: in the content model, the template structure and the workflow that will maintain the thing.

Field Notes on Digital Work

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A collection of essays on how digital work actually happens: the research that never becomes an article, the systems that quietly fail, the tools that earn their place and the ones that do not.

What it covers

Research as a bounded task rather than a mood
Why publishing is the mechanism that makes notes useful
AI in professional work: what moved, what did not
Building a practice that survives changing tools

Editorial Hugo Starter

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The starter behind this site, packaged for other independent publications.

What you get

Editorial homepage with lead story, section blocks and topic navigation
Long-form article template with table of contents, disclosures and related articles
Pagefind search wired in, with a Hugo-built JSON fallback
SEO defaults: canonical URLs, Open Graph, article schema, breadcrumbs, RSS
Section and taxonomy templates for essays, systems, reviews and short notes

Who it is for

Writers, consultants and small studios publishing long-form work who want a fast site and no CMS to maintain.

Service Pricing Calculator

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A small static application that turns a project description into a defensible price range.

Why it exists

Pricing conversations fail when they start from a number instead of a scope. This tool forces the scope first: deliverables, revision rounds, content volume, maintenance and timeline, then produces a range with the assumptions visible.

Publishing Ops Kit

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The operational side of publishing, written down.

Editorial calendar with a weekly cadence that survives bad weeks
Article brief template: question, audience, structure, constraints
Pre-publish checklist covering metadata, images, alt text and internal links
Post-publish routine: distribution, syndication and the six-week review

Format

Plain Markdown and CSV files that work in any editor. No platform required.

Zero-CMS Walkthrough

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fourteen minutes, no slides. An article is written, committed, built and deployed, including the parts that usually get skipped: front matter, image handling and the search index step.

Chapters

Setting up the content structure
Front matter that matters
Local preview and template checks
Images and alt text
Build, index and deploy

The written version is My Zero-CMS Publishing Stack.

Image Pipeline Experiment

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An experiment built to answer one question: at what archive size does build-time image processing stop being the right default?

Method

The same 240-image archive is processed three ways: build-time resizing, on-demand transformation with cache warming, and a hybrid that only processes recent images locally. Build time, first-request latency and total bytes transferred are recorded for each.

Lab Note 031: Testing AI-Generated CSS Refactoring

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I handed a 1,400-line stylesheet to a model and asked for consolidation. The result was 22 percent smaller and wrong in three places.

What It Did Well

Merged duplicated rules reliably. Nine near-identical card variants collapsed to two.
Found genuinely dead selectors that I had stopped using months earlier.
Suggested a consistent spacing scale, which is the kind of task I postpone.

Where It Broke

It changed a stacking order that depended on source order rather than z-index. Visually identical until a dropdown opened.
It removed a media query covering a tablet breakpoint that only mattered for one component.
It renamed custom properties in a way that was internally consistent and incompatible with the dark-mode overrides that had not been written yet.

None of these appeared in a screenshot diff of the homepage. Two appeared immediately on a real device.

Lab Note 014: Testing Pagefind With Hugo

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Search is the one feature static sites are supposed to give up. Pagefind removes that excuse, so I wired it into this site and measured what it cost.

What I Did

Pagefind runs after the build, against the generated HTML. It reads the DOM, extracts content from elements marked with data-pagefind-body, and writes a static index plus a small JavaScript bundle into the output directory.

Typora vs Obsidian: Two Different Ways of Thinking About Writing

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Typora and Obsidian are compared as if they compete. They do not. One is a writing environment, the other is a thinking environment, and I use both for different halves of the same job.

Quick Verdict

Use Typora when the goal is a finished document. Use Obsidian when the goal is understanding something. If you only pick one, pick based on which of those two you do more of.

How I Manage Images for Static Publishing

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Images are where static sites usually lose their performance advantage. A single unoptimised hero photograph can cost more than every other asset combined.

Problem

I was resizing images by hand, which meant I stopped doing it. Pages shipped with 3 MB photographs and the Lighthouse score told the story.

AI Does Not Replace Expertise. It Changes Where Expertise Matters.

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The most common claim about AI and professional work is also the least useful one: that it will replace expertise. Watch what actually happens in a working week and a different picture appears. AI is very good at the middle of the work and unreliable at both ends.

Lab Note 018: Moving an Image Workflow to Cloudflare R2

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Build-time image processing works until the archive gets large. This note records the first test of moving source images to object storage with transformation on request.

The Problem

Hugo resizes every image during the build. On a site with a few hundred images, a full rebuild takes minutes instead of seconds, and most of that time is spent regenerating variants that already exist.

E-Readers for Long-Form Research

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An e-reader is not a productivity device. That is exactly why it belongs in a research workflow.

Why I Bought It

Long-form reading on a laptop competes with every other thing the laptop can do. I would read three pages, check something, and lose forty minutes. A single-purpose reading device removed the competition rather than requiring discipline.

How I Build Small Digital Products

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A small digital product should be small enough to finish and specific enough to sell. Most of the work is deciding what to leave out.

Problem

My first three products all failed the same way: I built the interesting part and left the boring part unfinished. A calculator that works but has no delivery mechanism is not a product, it is a demo.

The Cost of Switching Tools

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The price of a tool is not the licence. It is the migration, the relearning, and the months of reduced output while habits rebuild. Almost nobody prices those three.

What a switch actually costs

Migration. Exporting, cleaning, relinking. Usually a weekend, occasionally a month.
Relearning. Muscle memory is real. For about six weeks I am slower at the same task.
Rebuilding the periphery. Shortcuts, scripts, export paths, the small automations that made the old setup fast.
Trust debt. For a while I cannot be sure the new system is complete, so I check two places.

That fourth cost is the one that quietly destroys the benefit. A half-migrated system is worse than either system alone, because attention is now split.

Framer vs Squarespace for Independent Designers

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Independent designers usually ask which platform is better. The useful question is which one fails more gracefully when the client takes over.

Quick Verdict

Framer for design-led sites where the visual result is the point. Squarespace for clients who will edit their own content for years and want the phone support to prove it.

Knowledge Management Is Really a Publishing Problem

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most personal knowledge systems fail at the same point, and it is not capture. Capture is solved. We have more capture tools than anyone can use. The failure happens after capture, in the long quiet period where notes sit waiting for a purpose that never arrives.

My AI-Assisted Website Production Workflow

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI is genuinely useful in website production, and it is useful in a narrower band than the marketing suggests. This is where it sits in my process.

Problem

Producing a website involves six phases with very different failure modes. Applying AI uniformly across all of them produces a site that demos well and fails in production.

What Architecture Taught Me About Digital Product Design

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Before I designed websites I worked on buildings and urban plans. The two fields look unrelated until you watch how projects actually fail. They fail in the same order, for the same reasons.

Constraints arrive before inspiration

A site has a plot and a budget: a plot is the client’s existing content, brand and technical debt; the budget is the maintenance capacity after launch. Every project I have seen go wrong ignored one of those two facts early and paid for it late.

The Microphone I Actually Use for Voice Recording

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most microphone reviews are recorded in treated rooms by people with good voices. This one is written in an untreated home office by someone who narrates after the children are asleep.

Why I Bought It

I was recording voice notes and video narration on a headset microphone. It worked, and it sounded like a headset: thin, close and slightly nasal. The fix was not a better microphone on paper, it was a better microphone for my room.

My Research-to-Article Workflow

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Research that never becomes an article is an expensive hobby. This is the process I use to make sure reading turns into something publishable inside a week.

Problem

I used to research until I felt ready, which meant forever. There was no signal for “enough”, so every article stayed in the reading phase and the output depended on mood.

Choosing a Portable Voice Recorder for Research

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I bought my first portable recorder for interview work and made the classic mistake: I compared sample rates instead of workflows.

Why It Matters

A recorder is only useful if it is present, powered and unremarkable. The best recording device is the one you forgot you were carrying, and the specifications tell you almost nothing about that.

My Zero-CMS Publishing Stack

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This page is the pillar. It describes the system that produces XD Studio Lab, and it is the same system I build for clients who publish regularly and do not want to maintain a CMS.

Why I Use Typora

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have tried to replace Typora several times. I keep coming back, and the reason is not features. It is that Typora removes a decision I do not want to make.

Quick Verdict

A Markdown editor that behaves like a word processor and never shows me a settings panel. Ideal for long-form writing. Weak if you need mobile or a note network.

Why I Stopped Searching for the Perfect Productivity System

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have used four different productivity systems seriously, and I have abandoned all four. Not because they failed in an obvious way, but because each one quietly moved the work from doing to maintaining.

The pattern

The cycle was always the same. I would find a system with an elegant structure. I would spend two weeks migrating notes into it. For about a month, everything felt clearer. Then the upkeep would start to exceed the output: tags to normalise, templates to fix, dashboards that needed feeding before they could be trusted.

Why Hugo Still Makes Sense

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hugo is not fashionable. It has no dashboard, no plugin marketplace and no venture funding. It also builds this entire site in under a second, which is the only feature I actually care about.

Quick Verdict

The right generator when content is files, performance is a requirement, and nobody needs a browser-based editor. The wrong tool for teams that expect a CMS.

Obsidian After Three Years

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Three years and roughly 2,400 notes in, the most useful thing I have learned about Obsidian is how much of it not to use.

October 2026 Updated after moving the archive to a yearly folder structure. The plugin count is now four, down from eleven.

Why I Kept Using It

Backlinks. Not the graph view, which I open twice a year, but the backlinks panel. Reading a note together with every note that references it changes what you notice about your own thinking.

About XD Studio Lab

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

XD Studio Lab is an independent publication about tools, systems and ideas for digital work.

It was created by Xiaodong Wang to document practical experiments across research, design, technology, publishing and digital product creation. Everything here comes from work that was actually done: tools that were used, systems that were built, and products that were shipped.

Affiliate Disclosure

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Some links on XD Studio Lab are affiliate links. If you buy or subscribe through them, XD Studio Lab may receive a commission.

What This Means for You

You pay the same price. Affiliate commissions are paid by the seller, not added to your cost.
Nothing is recommended because it pays. Articles are written about tools that were used in real work. Commission rates are not a factor in whether something is covered.
Disclosure appears on the page. Any article containing affiliate links carries a disclosure near the top.

Amazon

XD Studio Lab may participate in the Amazon Associates programme. As an Amazon Associate, earnings may come from qualifying purchases. Amazon affiliate links follow the same rule: the recommendation comes first, the link second.

Contact

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Questions, collaborations, product enquiries or ideas worth exploring are welcome.

Email

hello@xdstudiolab.com

Email is the fastest route. Include the context you have: a deadline, a link, or the problem you are trying to solve.

Elsewhere

YouTube: demonstrations and walkthroughs
LinkedIn: professional context and shorter posts
Medium: adapted versions of selected articles

What to Include

For project enquiries, five lines are usually enough: what it is, who it is for, the timeframe, what already exists, and what a good outcome looks like.

Privacy Policy

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

XD Studio Lab is an independent publication. This policy explains what happens with information when you visit the site.

What Is Collected

Nothing is collected by this site directly. There is no comment system, no user accounts and no contact form that stores data. If you send an email, it is stored in an email inbox.

Search

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Search runs entirely in the browser against a static index. No backend, no tracking, no query logs.

Terms

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

By using XD Studio Lab you agree to the following terms.

Content

All written content on this site is the work of Xiaodong Wang unless stated otherwise. You may quote short extracts with a link back to the original article. Republishing full articles requires written permission.

XD Studio Lab

Systems Before Screens

Field Notes on Digital Work

What it covers

Editorial Hugo Starter

What you get

Who it is for

Service Pricing Calculator

Why it exists

Publishing Ops Kit

Contents

Format

Zero-CMS Walkthrough

Chapters

Image Pipeline Experiment

Method

Lab Note 031: Testing AI-Generated CSS Refactoring

What It Did Well

Where It Broke

Lab Note 014: Testing Pagefind With Hugo

What I Did

Typora vs Obsidian: Two Different Ways of Thinking About Writing

Quick Verdict

How I Manage Images for Static Publishing

Problem

AI Does Not Replace Expertise. It Changes Where Expertise Matters.

Lab Note 018: Moving an Image Workflow to Cloudflare R2

The Problem

E-Readers for Long-Form Research

Why I Bought It

How I Build Small Digital Products

Problem

The Cost of Switching Tools

What a switch actually costs

Framer vs Squarespace for Independent Designers

Quick Verdict

Knowledge Management Is Really a Publishing Problem

My AI-Assisted Website Production Workflow

Problem

What Architecture Taught Me About Digital Product Design

Constraints arrive before inspiration

The Microphone I Actually Use for Voice Recording

Why I Bought It

My Research-to-Article Workflow

Problem

Choosing a Portable Voice Recorder for Research

Why It Matters

My Zero-CMS Publishing Stack

Why I Use Typora

Quick Verdict

Why I Stopped Searching for the Perfect Productivity System

The pattern

Why Hugo Still Makes Sense

Quick Verdict

Obsidian After Three Years

Why I Kept Using It

About XD Studio Lab

Affiliate Disclosure

What This Means for You

Amazon

Contact

Email

Elsewhere

What to Include

Privacy Policy

What Is Collected

Search

Terms

Content