Notes

Collected bits and pieces I’ve noticed this month.

In “Rethinking the startup MVP: Building a competitive product” Linear co-founder Tuomas Artman argues how it’s more and more unlikely your MVP has to prove an idea, but rather that it has to execute an idea better than the others have.

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Legendary car designer Marcello Gandini has passed. He was the designer behind for the iconic Lamborghini Countach, an even more shard-like Lancia Stratos Zero concept car and played a part in shaping one of the most beautiful automobiles, the Lamborghini Miura.
via Wallpaper

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“The job is not to invent, but to curate” says Josh Clark from Big Medium in “The Most Exciting Design Systems Are Boring”. Design systems should take the boring, the mundane off your (and your colleagues) hands so you can solve some new problems instead.

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In more sad news, Tiny Letter was shut down. I miss Pome.

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And in even more sad news, A Book Apart also closes.

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Chris Coyer shares his thoughts on what’s going on with CSS Tricks post selling it to Digital Ocean. I learned so much from CSS Tricks and the tone of the site was so friendly and approachable, what a bummer.

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And wrapping it up with CSS, Richard Rutter rebuilds a Creative Boom article page with no media queries, just fluid type. Cool.

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.

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These new Gold foil Field Notes are oh-oh-oh so pretty!
via Coudal

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Cooper Hewitt published the 2023 National Design Awards winners.
via kottke.org

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Ikea’s research and design lab Space10 is no more.
via it’s nice that

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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.”

via Daring Fireball

Collected bits and pieces I've noticed this month.

There were quite a lot of high profile rebrands recently, good and... no good.
The good: Burger King
Not sure: CIA and KIA
The no good: GM

More good: Midi, the hugely important audio technology from 1981 has now reached version 2.0 and Pentagram created a very cool new brand to go with it.

The new amazon app icon is not a white square with a single color logo and it's already the butt of hipster Hitler jokes. Because, internet.

This post on hyphenation on the web by Richard Clagnut is almost two years old now, unfortunately pretty much nothing here can actually be used. A bit more control over hyphenation without reaching for Javascript qould be nice is all I'm saying.

"Why I’ve tracked every single piece of clothing I’ve worn for three years" Olof Hoverfält. Yes, Olof did data science on his wardrobe. via Boing Boing

Michael McWatters writes about the shadow-death of InVision Studio and, to some extent, InVision itself.

If you're into watch faces, Arun Venkatesan has written about some of the classic styles behind Apple Watch faces.