A running collection of things I’ve found interesting, well-made, or worth spreading—mostly from art, design, tech, photography, and film, with the occasional thought or two of my own.
Collected bits and pieces I’ve noticed this month.
In “Improving The Double Diamond Design Process” Andy Budd writes about how the “Double Diamond” design process is an ideal that does not match how design actually happens in many (most?) organisations and how it could be improved to be more usable and useful in reality.
Once you come to the realization/acceptance that no one – not even the interested, motivated, and committed – has the kind of focused attention available for your thing that you assume they have, you will have a much better chance of capturing and sustaining any of it at all.
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In “Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter”, which is well worth a read if you care about thinking and note-taking and note-taking for better thinking, Casey Newton links to researcher Andy Matuschak’s site on note taking. Wow. I got lost in there, in a good way, for quite some time and still keep it open in a tab.
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On a related note, ahem, I love how Readwise is approaching highlights and sidenotes in their Readwise Reader reading app.
This is a mockup of an idea I had. It is for a UI interaction for recording video on your phone while editing it in a way.
To start recording, you tap and hold the “Record” button.
Move your finger off the button to pause and back on to resume recording. To stop, lift your finger, and the video is saved to the camera roll.
The button is circular for a good balance between surface area and the distance required in every direction to move your finger off it. It also grows larger when tapped, so you don’t accidentally pause when you move your finger a little.
Whether a kind of fluid blob of a button that “sticks” to your finger a little before letting go and pausing would be a neat way to indicate the threshold between recording and pause or be a flaw instead could be discovered with an actual prototype. But I have a hunch there might be a sweet middle ground somewhere.
Today I learned that in 1993 Coca-Cola created OK Soda in an effort to lure Generation X. A bold swing marketing and design wise, but a flop product wise. More on Messy Nessy Chic and Two Designers Walk Into a Bar.
via Cabel Sasser
Image courtesy Two Designers Walk Into a Bar
I’ve long been inspired by the punk band Wire’s rules of negative self-definition: “No solos; no decoration; when the words run out, it stops; we don’t chorus out; no rocking out; keep it to the point; no Americanisms.”
I think it’s often best to start by deciding what you won’t do and set up boundaries and constraints and guardrails.
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Stephanie Smith writes on the Wise Design Medium… um… blog, about making better colour choices that are accessible and also on brand: “Accessible but never boring (Part 1)”
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“I make things because I enjoy making them. I share them when I have a sense that those things are exactly the sort that would inspire me had I not made them myself. This is not the way to build a large audience, to achieve fame, or to amass wealth. But it is the way to be seen (a very different thing from being validated) that also creates a way for someone else.
The best thing that could happen when I share something online is for someone else to experience it and think, “If he can do that, then I can __.””
When we buy a physical product, we accept that it won’t change in its lifetime. We’ll use it until it wears off, and we replace it. We can rely on that product not evolving; the gas pedal in my car will always be in the same place.
I’d argue that the great thing about software is precisely that it’s never finished, that it can be changed for the better without throwing it out and buying a new one.
But I see where this is coming from – software changing for the worse, from being tired of constant feature creep and ever more bloated software we often have no choice but to use.
To borrow Gilgado’s analogy: stop moving the gas pedal around.
Collected bits and pieces I’ve noticed this month.
In March 2012 a new drawing app called Paper, made by FiftyThree, was launched for the iPad. Ten years later one of its founders Andy Allen reflects on the decisions behind the app's many unique features.
Having wrestled with making a complex app layout play nice on differently sized screens, keeping the essentials available on smaller screens and carefully considering what to add when there is screen space available, a lot of the problems and layout visualisations in this case study of rebuilding the layout of TechCrunch with modern CSS looked very familiar. Long, but good.
via Sidebar
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Cabel Sasser observes how people use the world (or in this case, amusement parks) differently from how the designers intended:
“If it looks neat, people will want to take a photo with it. If it looks comfortable, people will want to sit on it. If it looks fun, people will play around on it.”
The Great Blizzard of 1888.
From Wikipedia: "Snow fell from 25 to 147 cm in parts of New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and sustained winds of more than 72 km/h produced snowdrifts in excess of 15 meters."
This has, by now, circulated wide and far in design-related interwebs. Nonetheless, nice observations and thoughts on the intangible in interaction design from Rauno Freiberg.
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From Robin Dunbar of Dunbar's number fame, comes a chart showing the number of people one can have a meaningful relationship with at various levels of intimacy. This is obviously not an introvert's chart, ha-ha, ha…
“The layers come about primarily because the time we have for social interaction is not infinite. You have to decide how to invest that time, bearing in mind that the strength of relationships is directly correlated with how much time and effort we give them.”
Some novel music apps from developer Marcos Tanaka – MusicHarbor for finding out about new releases by artists in your Apple Music library and MusicBox, which is best described as “read-it-later, but for music”.
"Fish Market in Moonlight" (1841) by Petrus van Schendel, or "Monsieur Chandelle", a Dutch-Belgian master who specialised in painting nighttime (market) scenes lit by candles and the moon.
