“The thing is, Squarespace doesn’t care about content. Its entire business model relies on the fact that you can paste any ’ol passage of slop into their system and it will look acceptable. Squarespace is doing as good a job as many gainfully employed designers.
Just ask your former clients.”
—Travis Gertz, Design Machines
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Squarespace, Content, and Design
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Typography as an interface
“Typography is an interface to the alphabet.”
— Ellen Lupton, Thinking with Type
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“Software forever remains at the limits of what people will put up with”
“Software forever remains at the limits of what people will put up with.”
— Maciej Cegłowski, Web Design – The First 100 Years
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“If you can’t find it, design it.”
“If you can’t find it, design it.”
— Massimo Vignelli
Currently watching Design is One, a documentary on Lella and Massimo Vignelli. It’s a very inspiring experience.
I want to design something that lasts.
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Selected Quotes from What Screens Want
“Metaphors are assistive devices for understanding.”
“A screen doesn’t care what it shows any more than a sheet of paper cares what’s printed on it. Screens are aesthetically neutral.”
“Web and interaction design are just as much children of filmmaking as they are of graphic design.”
“A designer’s work is not only about how the things look, but also their behaviors in response to interaction, and the adjustments they make between their fixed states.”
— Frank Chimero, What Screens Want
A while ago I read Frank Chimero’s What Screens Want. Here are some quotes that stood out to me while I was reading that I wanted to jot down.
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Beautiful Web Type at WordCamp Minneapolis 2015
This past weekend I spoke about Beautiful Web Type at WordCamp Minneapolis. Instead of doing a standard writeup, I decided to create a page with my slides and resources from the talk. Check it out to learn more about web typography and WordPress.
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Isn’t it fantastic
Later that day, I asked Ive about an Apple design that shares the new campus’s formal simplicity: the circular “hockey puck” mouse that was included with the first iMacs. Many found it hard to control, and it is widely considered a design failure. Ive didn’t accept that description. He referred to different schools of thought about arms, wrists, and mice. “Everything we make I could describe as being partially wrong, because it’s not perfect,” he said, and he described the wave of public complaint that accompanies every release. He went on, “We get to do it again. That’s one of the things Steve and I used to talk about: ‘Isn’t this fantastic? Everything we aren’t happy about, with this, we can try and fix.’ ”
— 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.
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A Month of Design
This month, I’m participating with a couple others in a challenge to work on one design piece every day for the entire month. You can check out our progress at A Month of Design.
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Frank Chimero on Massimo Vignelli
Design isn’t just battling ugliness. It’s 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. I’m in that corner, too, with my tiny rock hammer.
— Frank Chimero, Massimo and Me
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Amazon knows just how to trigger me into action
I recently hopped over to Amazon for some reason or another, and was immediately presented with this prompt:
There it was, a prompt for buying a book from an author I’d bought a couple books from before in the past.
“Oh,” I said to myself, “that’s dirty. That’s just dirty. That’s not playing fair.” And I continued saying that as I clicked on the title and pre-ordered the book. It was straight out of BJ Fogg’s behavior model — I had the motivation (“I like this author!”), I had the ability (It was two clicks between seeing this prompt and pre-ordering the book), and this provided the trigger. Well played, Amazon.