Most people find this out pretty early on in life, because their logic is imperfect and fails them often. But really, really smart computer geek types may not ever find it out. They start off living in a bubble, they isolate themselves because socializing is unpleasant, and, if they get a good job straight out of school, they may never need to leave that bubble. To such people, it may appear that logic actually works, and that they are themselves logical creatures.
Words are like currencies: it is not meaningful to talk about what the ‘real’ or ‘correct’ value of a dollar bill is or should be, separate from what kinds of things a dollar bill can buy you.
Our stories have an ebb and flow, and design serves to support and enrich them.
I think there’s a couple different kinds of knowledge. There’s knowledge of the mind (theory stuff you find in books), knowledge of the hand (which you can only get by DOING the work), and knowledge of others (which you only get through empathy and relationships).
To admit that we’ve fallen behind, that we don’t know what anyone is talking about, that we have nothing to say about each passing blip on the screen, is to be dead.
I write to discover what I know.
You can read plenty of information on the internet now. Print, however, still looks like the truth.
I’ve always felt that if a thing had been said in the best way, how can you say it better? If I wanted to say something and somebody had said it ideally, then I’d take it but give the person credit for it.
I don’t mind quoting a bad author if the line is good.
It’s natural to want the things we make to last. Even the smallest things, the ones made of the most fragile stuff. We want them have meaning, to be useful, to be bigger than ourselves somehow.
While our new post-Internet Explorer 6 world enables an amazing array of browser effects, the one tool we all need is constraint. Though the people we serve—managers, stakeholders, and clients—come to us with parallax envy, we must be mindful of who we are all really working for: their customers, the users.
This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
But lately I’ve been spending a little bit of time with those random pieces of inspiration to see where they go. Usually they don’t go anywhere except for the outskirts of an artboard, lost forever amidst a sea of stray points and beziers.
Who should care about your companies existence? Why should you matter to them? How can you communicate this in a clear, consistent, flexible, and meaningful way?
A website is its own, singular thing. We know it isn’t a book, a TV show, a film, or a song, but our language is limited to talking about it in those restrictive boxes. A website is a mix of all of those things, and none of those things. It is influenced by place and time. A website changes with age. It can evolve and regress.
Giant men destroy that sleeping city with their words.
The joy of pulp is the guilty pleasure of momentum, the sensation of progress, the whiplash of a joyride. That’s why chapters are so short in those terrible Dan Brown novels. You here and then you’ve finished it and now you’re there, and woah, look I’m reading! Look at all I’ve read!
I think there’s a pleasure to having everything under one roof. You feel together, all of you at once. In a way, building your own house is the ultimate project for a creative person: you’re making a home for what you think is important, done in the way you think is best.
Why is timeless design always the goal? What’s wrong with making something look like it was made when it was made?
Nobody wants to talk about shitty old stuff, but lots of people still talk about shitty new stuff, because they are still trying to figure out if it is shitty or not. The past wasn’t better, we just forgot about all the shitty shit.
There are plants and books and lights and seats and dust and you get the feeling it is a beautiful, functional space. There are finger prints all over it. The more I click around the web, the less and less I sense those fingerprints on people’s websites the way I used to.
A work of art is something produced by a person, but is not that person — it is of her, but is not her. It’s a reach, really — the artist is trying to inhabit, temporarily, a more compact, distilled, efficient, wittier, more true-seeing, precise version of herself — one that she can’t replicate in so-called ‘real’ life, no matter how hard she tries. That’s why she writes: to try and briefly be more than she truly is.
If you can’t draw as well as someone, or use the software as well, or if you do not have as much money to buy supplies, or if you do not have access to the tools they have, beat them by being more thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is free and burns on time and empathy.
Quiet is always an option, even if everyone is yelling.
These stories of his are not the only important moments in his life. They are not the only times he felt successful, accomplished, or proud. But whether it is the science of old age, or a conscious filtering—these few moments are the memories he chooses to share with us. They are from times and places that have changed him, and now his children and his grandchildren.