February 2011
24 posts
8 tags
“Access can take away why. More practical is less practical sometimes, and being...”
– —Liz Danzico, On why, or the magic of coffee
I still believe curiosity is the key to doing good creative work. As I wrote back in March:
Creativity, at it’s core, is about progress. It’s about moving forward, about making something where there was once nothing. In order to do this, we need to...
January 2011
44 posts
7 tags
Michael Bierut’s Strict Design Upbringing →
Michael Bierut reflects upon the strict rules he followed while working under Massimo Vignelli:
I learned attention to detail. Working with a limited palette of elements leaves a designer nowhere to hide. With so little on the page, what was there had to be perfect. I learned the importance of content. Seeing Massimo design a picture book was a revelation. No tricky layouts, no extraneous...
8 tags
4 tags
“If this company were to split up I would give you the property, plant and...”
– —John Stuart, Chairman of Quaker Oats (1900)
(via)
5 tags
5 tags
“If our current lists of global thinkers seem paltry, it’s because the best...”
– —Jonah Lehrer on The Difficulty of Discovery
I’m game for some more collaboration.
7 tags
Modes of Writing →
Mandy Brown, of A Working Library, on the difference between ebooks and blogs:
Where the blog suggests paths, the book draws conclusions. Neither is superior to the other; rather, they represent different modes of writing—the first expansive, the latter convergent. Each mode suggests and learns from the other. And this is why, even if the form of the book perishes, the writing therein may...
5 tags
“How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely...”
– Isaac Asimov (via)
5 tags
Wabi, Sabi and Japanese Aesthetics →
Aen Tan writes an interesting piece on the seven principles of the wabi sabi aesthetics:
Japan in its unique cultural history had developed a rather different approach to life and had defined design in terms that are more spiritual than scientific. In a culture where harmony is preferred over logic and where habitat is respected as housing deities known as kami, instead of being exploited for...
7 tags
7 tags
5 tags
10 tags
“Art, in the platonic sense, is about truth and beauty and love.”
– —Chris Bangle, former Chief of Design at BMW, in a lecture called Good Cars Are Art
I’ve been a fan of Bangle for a few years now ever sense seeing Objectified but I seriously was not expecting a lecture like this. While the lecture was called “Good Cars Are Art,” I think an...
8 tags
“Apple reaches for greatness without apology. Market share and profitability are...”
– From a reader comment on Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish.
I love this. Money should never be the goal. The goal should be to do “insanely great” work, whatever that may be for you. I think doing good work is a lot easier than simply trying to get money. If you can do good work, money...
7 tags
7 tags
More on Ownership vs. Access →
The super-intelligent Frank Chimero posted a wonderful (albeit lengthy) piece examining out relationship to our stuff. The entire piece is worth reading and get you thinking about some heavy stuff, but I found it especially fascinating that he briefly discusses the idea of ownership vs access. The stars must have aligned or something:
[A]ccess over ownership with media is no new thing....
12 tags
Ownership vs. Access, or, Why we won't own our...
Three Christmases ago, the majority of my Christmas list was music. I got fourteen CDs that year. The following days were spent alternating back and forth between listening to each CD and dropping them into my iTunes to play on my iPod. I had a system where I’d listen to an album when it was finished, take it out of my CD player, move it to my laptop and put it in iTunes while the next album...
8 tags
Now
From Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University:
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else...
6 tags
“I try to approach science with the same incredulity that those in the sciences...”
– Alex Payne
5 tags
Forever →
Mandy Brown:
A well-made book, stored upright, in a dry, dark place, will survive a hundred years—that is, a lifetime. More if it is especially well printed, and only carefully handled, but a hundred years is a safe bet. Plenty of time to read it as a child, hold onto it through adolescence and adulthood, and then give it to your first great-grandchild. That’s as much forever as any of us can...
6 tags
9 tags
5 tags
9 tags
“The secrets of any trade that is pursued with serious intentions are more than a...”
– Bruno Munari in Design as Art
6 tags
WatchPartners & Spade on League of Two. LOVE these guys.
10 tags
Artists as Gift Givers
“Are you happy?”
“I think so.” The fact that I had to think about it made me wonder if I really was. “I think beneath it all, under the layers of cynicism and fear and confusion and stress, there is a happiness. A happiness that’s just kind of always there.”
But still, the question worried me. I’ve always been a happy person. I like to think I’m a pretty levelheaded guy—laid back,...
4 tags
5 tags
“There must be some value in Comic Sans if millions of non-designers choose to...”
– Related: The Educational Benefit of Ugly Fonts and Designers Aren’t Always Right About Comic Sans
Via Signal vs. Noise
6 tags
On Happiness →
Liz Danzico, on designing experiences that amplify happiness:
Findings show that spending money on experiences over material goods leads to longer-term satisfaction, and spending money on leisure and services typically strengthens social bonds, which in turn helps amplify happiness. In 2008, for instance, at the downturn of the economy, Wal-Mart noticed a stay-cation trend and started grouping...
8 tags
“Some say that the problem of our age is that continuous partial attention, this...”
– —Seth Godin on being lost in a digital world.
Having inboxes sitting there with new information all the time lets us hide from the work that really matters. How much of the time that we spend networking, connecting, and responding is really just a way to stop us from the real work? Seth goes...
7 tags
7 tags
5 tags
Happy Friday! [Airplane – Local Natives]
5 tags
8 tags
Maybe I've been too hard on Comic Sans →
I read every Jonah Lehrer writes anyway (two links in one week!), but when he writes an article titled The Educational Benefit of Ugly Fonts, you can bet I’ll stop everything to read it. The article gets even more interesting when he starts talking about Comic Sans versus Helvetica and their use in classrooms:
This study demonstrated that student retention of material across a wide range...
11 tags
2010 Annual Report Poster
Throughtout 2009, inspired by Nicolas Felton’s popular personal annual reports, I decided to track various data to put together a report of my own. The result was my 2009 Annual Report poster featuring data ranging from time spent to books read to movies watched. I was extremely proud of the end result and it seemed to be well received (including recognition by Mr. Felton himself!) that I...
7 tags
Big projects, Friction, and Batman Action Figures
I noticed an interesting shift in the projects I worked on this semester. In previous semesters, professors would assign small projects, usually last two weeks up to a month at the most. By the end of the class, I’d have four or five completed projects. This past semester, however, I found each class only assigned one project that lasted the entire semester. By the end of the semester, though I...
8 tags
“Always make your work be personal. And, you never have to lie. If you lie, you...”
– Francis Ford Coppola from this interview with the 99%.
7 tags
6 tags
6 tags
“The whole print-media thing is sort of self-fulfilling. It’s part of our mantra:...”
– —Tyler Brûlé, founder and editor of Monocle. He goes on:
I guess what unifies things for me is a passion for quality, and that has to strike both high and low. I’m on a campaign against cheap veneers and varnishes. We like to stand back and kick the tires a bit, not just celebrate whatever it...
10 tags
“If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not...”
– —Steve Jobs, from this amazing interview with Playboy from 1985. I devoured the entire thing.
Reading an interview about personal computer from 1985 in 2011 is a bit strange. A lot of the things Jobs talks about here didn’t actually occur until sometimes twenty years later. In 1985, personal...
4 tags
“The change you experienced last night at midnight is available to you every...”
– Dan Benjamin 