“The basic starting point of Graphic Design Criticism as a Spectator Sport is “I could have done better.” And of course you could! But simply having the idea is not enough. Crafting a beautiful solution is not enough. Doing a dramatic presentation is not enough. Convincing all your peers is not enough. Even if you’ve done all that, you still have to go through the hard work of selling it to the client.”
- Michael Bierut
Design Observer Article: Graphic Design Criticism as a Spectator Sport
“As organizations shift from neatly ordered hierarchies to chaotic, flattened “heterarchies,” where anyone can “friend the CEO,” a new generation of tools will be invented that will allow design and technology to enable leaders to make true connections among people and inspire change.
Just as design enabled us to have an emotional connection with a piece of glass and aluminum that lives in our pocket, design and technology together will restore some of the humanity in what it means to lead in the 21st century.”
- John Maeda
Article: How to design a better world by John Maeda.
Andrea Donderi says there are two types of people in the world: Askers and Guessers:
“In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.
In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.”
Thank you Erika for pointing me to this article after I expressed on Twitter how I have a hard time asking for favors. Definitely giving this some more thought.
“This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of what you do will not be possible without them. And there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do. You might no longer think of it as a job, at least at first, because anything that seems like drudgery will be done by robots.”
- Kevin Kelly
From this Wired article titled Better Than Human, with a thoroughly disturbing photo.
“If I can give entrepreneurs a single piece of advice for 2013 it would be to deliver on your promises. Not just to your investors but also to your team and ultimately to yourself. This is no time to be in denial. That is a lethal attribute in times like these.”
- Fred Wilson
In this post Derek Sivers eloquently explains how he differentiates between focusing your time locally versus globally. And, he admits, he is not local.
Interesting read.
“I’ve built my entire career on pushing myself to do things that I didn’t believe I could do. I pushed myself to learn this thing called web design and HTML and then later, CSS. I pushed myself to try to design a building with letters and numbers, which led to my letterpress posters. For me, you could define my career by that alone—pushing myself to do things that I didn’t think I could do or that I thought I had no qualifications to do, yet I found a way to make them happen.”
- Cameron Moll
A quote from a wonderful new The Great Discontent Interview featuring Cameron Moll, a talented designer, and through and through good person that I greatly admire.
“Just coloring inside the lines won’t help you succeed. More esoteric character strengths like optimism and zest are things that can be taught and are also predictive of success.”
- Paul Tough
Quote from this 99U Article: Your IQ Doesn’t Matter & Other Lessons About Creativity From Children
“What kind of day was today?” you ask. The steps answer.
Wonderful essay by Craig Mod on how the Fitbit changed his walking behavior: Paris and the data mind.
5. When toasting, chink your glass with everybody at the table and look each person in the eyes before drinking.
This list of 13 table manners ruled my life as a kid growing up in Switzerland. I agree, Swiss table manners matter.
How To Create Time:
1. Eliminate or reduce media
2. Work offline.
3. Do less.
4. Don’t make appointments or schedule meetings.
5. Sleep in two shifts.
6. Make time less precious.
Read Caterina Fake’s full post on How to Create Time.
(via @amrit)
So happy to see my studiomate Jason Santa Maria interviewed over on The Great Discontent. Jason is all kinds of wonderful; an amazing designer, layered with serious thoughtfulness and topped off with a huge heart. Oh, and he is a fantastic speaker.
Shhh… You have the opportunity to see Jason speak this coming tuesday, here in Brooklyn, October 9th, during Beyond Beta week.
“As much as I love the social web, it exhausts me. I feel like I’m constantly leaving when I’ve only just arrived. Twitter (my social media of choice) is a constant stream of surprise not unlike walking down the streets of New York City.”
- Able Parris
Focus Means Ignoring, by Able Parris
INTERVIEWER: How important has your sense of optimism been to your career?
BRADBURY: I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing. If you behave every day of your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find out. You don’t know—you haven’t done it yet. You must live life at the top of your voice! At the top of your lungs shout and listen to the echoes. I learned a lesson years ago. I had some wonderful Swedish meatballs at my mother’s table with my dad and my brother and when I finished I pushed back from the table and said, God! That was beautiful. And my brother said, No, it was good. See the difference?
Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.
Read the full interview at the Paris Review.
(via Raul)
Here’s an interesting New York Times Article by Sam Roberts explaining New York’s History in 50 Objects.
Congrats to the Mast Brothers for being the example of how Brooklyn is booming these days.
Craig Mod just published the digital edition of Art Space Tokyo in several formats, across multiple platforms.
This launch is of course about the book, but perhaps more pressingly, it’s about what a contemporary digital book looks like — scattered and disjointed, spread across multiple platforms in various states of open and closed. Read his thoughtful post, titled Platforming Books.
“For me, my time is no longer defined by the fact that it’s spent without the internet. It’s simply my time, and I have to fill it. The luxury that no internet has afforded me is that I feel like I have more time to fill, and fewer ways to fill it. It’s the boredom and lack of stimulation that drives me to do things I really care about, like writing and spending time with others”
Offline: how’s it going?, by Paul Miller
(via @papermuse)
“But one thing I’ve learned is that the minute I start fixating on what I don’t have — time, money, a child I can send to camp for the summer, central air conditioning — I just feel that much hotter and put-upon, and those bad feelings seem to attract extra obstructions to my day.”
What My Son’s Disabilities Taught Me About ‘Having It All’, by By Marie Myung-Ok Lee.
(via @jbrewer)
“There is no parent more vulnerable to the excesses of overparenting than an unhappy parent. One of the most important things we do for our children is to present them with a version of adult life that is appealing and worth striving for.”
Raising Successful Children, by Madeline Levine
Ian Storm Taylor wrote a great post on one of the most important color tricks he’s ever learned; to avoid using the color black in his work.
(Thank you Carly)
“Success is based on action. The more you volunteer, the more you get to act. Successful people step forward to create opportunities.”
9 Beliefs of Remarkably Successful People, by Jeff Haden
“I’m utterly convinced that the key to lifelong success is the regular exercise of a single emotional muscle: gratitude.”
True Secret to Success (It’s Not What You Think), by Geoffrey James
“If you think an apostrophe was one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, you will never work for me. If you think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis, I will not hire you. If you scatter commas into a sentence with all the discrimination of a shotgun, you might make it to the foyer before we politely escort you from the building.”
I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why, by Kyle Wiens
(Note to self: Pay more attention to punctuation and overall grammar. #mustgetbetter)
“The entire software industry is changing. Computer users used to spend hundreds of dollars for great software and pay again every couple years for upgrades. But over the past couple decades people have grown accustomed to getting more and more value from software while paying less and less for it. The web has played a huge part in that, but the trend was accelerated by the App Store and Apple’s management of it.”
The Sparrow Problem, by David Barnard
Last Friday’s news about Google having acquired Sparrow still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Especially as the Sparrow team right after the announcement made it clear that there will be no more updates to the app. Bummer.
(via @cindygallop)
