“The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What’s that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating… and you finish off as an orgasm.”– George Carlin (via nazgum)
“The digital world, even the high end brands, has become a sleazy carnival, complete with hawkers, barkers and a bearded lady. By the time someone actually gets to your site, they’ve been conned, popped up, popped under and upsold so many times they really have no choice but to be skeptical.”–
This is a huge part of consumers’ erosion of trust in technology.
(via marco)
Stop setting the focus on the search field
When your website’s content is so long that you expect most of your users will have to scroll to read/see the whole page and you have a search field (or other textfield) on that page, please stop setting the focus on that.
It’s just annoying when you read an article and can’t use the keyboard to scroll without having to click on some ‘non-clickable’ area first.
In 99% I do not want to search for anything on your site! I just want to read that article.
“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”– Albert Einstein (via mattonrails) (via nazgum)
Less important is more important!?
I had to smile when I wrote this. :-)
“– Paul Graham in Taste for Makers (via Harry Brignull)It seems strange to have to emphasize simplicity. You’d think simple would be the default. Ornate is more work. But something seems to come over people when they try to be creative. Beginning writers adopt a pompous tone that doesn’t sound anything like the way they speak. Designers trying to be artistic resort to swooshes and curlicues. Painters discover that they’re expressionists. It’s all evasion. Underneath the long words or the “expressive” brush strokes, there is not much going on, and that’s frightening.
When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.
”
I like it when my pictures make it to Explore. :-)
“Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand—and melting like a snowflake…”– Francis Bacon
“In my experience, it has been a real challenge to convey how much longer a simple solution takes over a complex one. A truly simple and elegant solution just demands more time and cycles than most people understand.”– Kristee Rosendahl in the same article I linked to earlier.
“[Steve Jobs] is a design dictator of the company. And it’s fortunate for Apple and the world in general that they have him, because without his iron hand, the company would soon devolve back into a political, consensus-driven company. It would still have great products from a certain point of view, but I doubt that they would ever have the game-changing superiority they exhibit now. Committees would grow, politics would ensue, control battles would happen, and superior products would be hampered by all of this. Steve removes all of that; he makes the final decision and pushes details that no one else would have the authority to push. And being at the top, you have to listen to him or else you’re fired. That’s it; end of story.”–
David Shen, who hopefully won’t mind that I’ve edited this a bit for punctuation and capitalization. (via marco)
Make sure you read the whole article.
“Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products…We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are.”– Jonathan Ive (via Andy Budd) (via nikf)
Great interview with Jonathan Ive of Apple.
A lot of what we seem to be doing […] is actually getting design out of the way. And I think when forms develop with that sort of reason and they are not just arbitrary shapes, it feels almost undesigned. It feels almost like “Well, of course it’s that way. Why wouldn’t it be any other way?”
“I have only ever designed products that I myself would like to live with so it goes without saying that we live with Braun products and Vitsoe furniture. As a designer, it is only by using your products daily that you are able to tell what sorts of improvements may still be needed.”– Dieter Rams in Simplicity, purity and openness. (via 37signals)
Last weekend, I tried out an iPod touch for the first time - and had one of those (rare) moments when software makes me smile…
One of the things I wanted try was the software keyboard. So I went to Twitter and produced a short tweet.
While typing, I quickly noticed that there’s no dot (.) amongst the visible keys. “Well”, I thought, “they wouldn’t have just forgotten such an important sign!” And: “The most straight forward thing would be to hit ’Space’ twice for a dot…”
And Boom! There was a dot. Great! :-)
“Brooks’s law is a principle in software development which says that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”. It was coined by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month. Brooks adds that “Nine women can’t make a baby in one month”.”—
Only thing more astounding than the immutability of this 35-year-old observation is the number of smart people who know Brooks’s Law but somehow believe their project can be its first exception.
Absolutely one of my favorite examples of the lying Lizard Brain.
Check out this talk by Seth Godin for more on the Lizard Brain.