Life is a series of necessary restrictions, Iron Bull. The small-minded beat against every wall they find. The wise learn to make the most of the options they have.
â Vivienne, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Although this is a video game quote, I find it particularly relevant to design.
Later that day, I asked Ive about an Apple design that shares the new campusâs formal simplicity: the circular âhockey puckâ mouse that was included with the first iMacs. Many found it hard to control, and it is widely considered a design failure. Ive didnât accept that description. He referred to different schools of thought about arms, wrists, and mice. âEverything we make I could describe as being partially wrong, because itâs not perfect,â he said, and he described the wave of public complaint that accompanies every release. He went on, âWe get to do it again. Thatâs one of the things Steve and I used to talk about: âIsnât this fantastic? Everything we arenât happy about, with this, we can try and fix.â â
â Ian Parker, The Shape of Things to Come
I’ve been slowly working my way through the New Yorker’s recent piece on Jonathan Ive. A bunch of quotes have stood out, but this one in particular really resonates with me.
Design isnât just battling ugliness. Itâs also an unending fight for beauty, balance, consistency, and parity, because the world devolves into an ugly, imbalanced, inconsistent, and unequal place unless we are vigilant. Beauty has a role in the good life, so designers like Massimo chip away at their corner: visuals. Iâm in that corner, too, with my tiny rock hammer.
â Frank Chimero, Massimo and Me
If we had a way of tracking these qualitative burnout factors, rather than merely the hours we spend on our work, we could better understand how much weâre pushing people, and how far our employees are from their own personal sweet spots. We could allocate projects in a way that best matches how people work, rather than treating them (both people and projects) as fungible commodities. If we had a tool that sacrificed hourly precision for holistic accuracy, weâd suddenly understand a lot more about our âcapacityâ.
â Geordie Kaytes, “Time Tracking: What Do We Think Weâre Measuring?“
There are many advantages to platforms, like WordPress and its ilk, that handle this kind of work for you (not the least of which is you donât need years of experience as a web developer to prepare for it). But they also restrict your ability to change and experiment with the structure and organization of your writing. They imagine a line separates the authoring and editorial work from the design and production. I donât much care for that line. And I donât want anything to prevent me from crossing it.
â Mandy Brown, Index Cards
The quote jumped out at me, because in the past couple cycles, WordPress has been working to blur the line that separates “authoring and editorial” from “design and production.” We’ve been working on better integration of media, the possibility of front-end editing, and looking at new and better ways to give users control of their content. Maybe one day soon we can get rid of the line entirely. It’s something to strive for, at least.
In The Laws of Simplicity John Maeda posits, âThe simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. When in doubt, just remove. But be careful of what you remove.â The final warning is important. Removing things often leads to simplicity merely because the user has fewer items to process. But removing visual cues that help the user mentally process the interface â such as graphical elements that group items, that differentiate buttons and labels and that make things stand out â could do exactly the opposite by giving the user more work to do. So, rather than guide the design by style, guide it by principle.
~Â Dmitry Fadeyev, Authentic Design
“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.”
– BrenĂ© Brown, Listening to Shame
Would you like a pocket-size device that reminded you of each appointment and daily event? I would. I am waiting for the day when portable computers become small enough that I can keep one with me at all times. I will definitely put all my burdens upon it. It has to be small. It has to be convenient to use. And it has to be relatively powerful, at least by today’s standards. It has to have a full, standard typewriter keyboard and a reasonably large display. It needs good graphics, because that makes a tremendous difference in usability, and a lot of memoryâa huge amount, actually. And it should be easy to hook up to the telephone I need to connect it to my home and laboratory computers. Of course, it should be relatively inexpensive.
–Â Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
There are many ways of seeing. Each has an element of truth, but none is the whole truth. If you limit yourselves to one way of seeing, one truth, you will limit your power. …You must be flexible. You must be willing to learn from different sources. And you must always remember that the truths you see are incomplete.
~ The Thirteenth Child, Patricia Wrede
I was reading Jeffrey Zeldman’s interview on The Great Discontent and this quote stuck out:
Another thingâdonât be afraid to ask for help. I sucked at Flash and Iâm glad web standards won for many reasons, but one selfish reason is because I found Flash unpleasant to use as a creative tool. I simply didnât understand it well enough, but I was at a professional level where I couldnât go to a community college and take a Flash course. Someone would say, âThereâs Jeffrey Zeldman taking a remedial Flash class.â You have to find a way to keep learning and not get trapped in whatever imaginary status you have.
–Â Jeffrey Zeldman
I just found this really amusing and wanted to share.
