Interesting and/or cool stuff I've come across from art, design, technology, photography, movies I've watched and liked and, occasionally, my thoughts.
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.
"Because no matter how good Figma is, it's an intermediary abstraction, like Photoshop before it. If you're working with the web, you'll work faster without such an abstraction layer in the design process filtering the collaboration between programmer and designer.
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Leave Figma to the early conceptual stages of web design. Or put it to good use for native mobile development, when you rarely have a choice. But embrace doing the bulk of the design for the web directly in the core elements of its periodic table."
The old "should designers code?/designers should code" yadda yadda yadda.
I mostly agree, that we keep replacing Photoshop with faster, more convenient tools for us to make pictures of websites. End of the day though, they’re still pictures of websites and apps.
When you're working on an app with a mostly locked set of components and styles (a design system), working directly in code can be totally OK, and will shorten the time it takes to ship the change. Add to that the (waste of) time spent on keeping your pictures of the app synchronised with the app itself and working directly in code makes even more sense. Exploring wildly different layouts and design ideas is still faster with visual tools.
"And thus, throwing humility to the wind, I’d like to propose Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem, as a sort of play on Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. More specifically, it will always end up frustrating very large segments of the population and will always fail to accurately represent the “proper” level of moderation of anyone."
"You, me, and UI", is a nice article series on various topics to do with user interfaces from The Verge.
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What's in a day if you mash the activities of all 8 billion people on Earth into one?
Among other things:
Time spent growing and collecting food varied strongly with wealth, from over 1 hour in low-income countries to less than 5 minutes in high-income countries.
via Om Malik
