Things I Like
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Second, I am so tired of hearing “hobbyist” and “amateur” thrown around as pejorative terms. It’s such a lame, macho move. God forbid we ever do anything for pleasure or love.
This whole thing is amazing and Kleon hits the nail on the head. In the past few years I've taken up a couple of regular hobbies. I love them, they're relaxing, they're worth my time, and I'm learning new things as I do them. And I subscribe to following my passion, but completely realize that it may not always be what pays my bills. My hobbies feed that and, to be honest, I have no idea where they'll take me in the end.
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Taking criticism is often described metaphorically as standing in front of a firing squad. Being a helpless target. But it's not. It's an empowering practice. It requires just as much work as giving criticism.
A wonderful essay on how to take criticism, so many wonderful insights, worth your time.
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It seems like a grim story. Except that the story isn’t over. During the past two years, as I have discovered the people and forces behind the 50-year U.S. tailspin, I have also discovered that in every arena the meritocrats commandeered there are now equally talented, equally driven achievers who have grown so disgusted by what they see that they are pushing back.
A bit of a difficult read, but it ends with hope and I found the history interesting and helpful in understanding where we are in the US today.
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I think we’re well past the point where our industry gets a pass for launching products without thinking about their second-order effects. But additionally: if we assume that this technology’s a given, what kind of policies and protections do we need to help the folks affected by it?
I agree with Ethan here, I have so many questions after seeing Duplex and many of them should be answered before it's out in the world and the negative consequences have started to be felt by people. Tech is full of smart people, I wish more of them would use their brains to think proactively rather than always being reactive.
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I think we lose sight of the real value of a design system when we focus too much on the components. The components are the trees.
Jeremy nails this on the head. When I think about systems I think of them more as documentation, that beyond the code, colors, and more is the way in which you should be using all of it. What's the purpose and how is it used?
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There is a lot of really interesting information about design systems and how teams and organizations are creating them, maintaining them, and thinking about them in this survey. And it's no surprise that having executives who champion the system as well as all the various disciplines involved in creating and maintaining it makes it much more successful.
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Whenever someone asks me to do something that I think seems ill-conceived in some way, I ask them to write it down. That's it. Because writing is high effort. Making sentences is the easy bit, it's the thinking I want them to do. By considering their request it slows them down. Maybe 30% of the time or something, they come back and say 'oh, that thing I asked you to do, I've had a think and it's fine, we don't need to do it'.
This is such good advice. I find writing is the way I think, so even jotting things down in a notebook helps me to clarify what I'm thinking. And in a team environment, clarity is so helpful, it will cut down on the amount of time spent spinning to figure out what the other person means.
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It’s hard for me to understand how John was able to write with so much sensitivity, and also have such a glaring blind spot.
I found this piece really thought provoking, mainly because the John Hughes films were a major part of my teenage years. I can still recite entire scenes from memory with no additional prompting, especially from "Sixteen Candles." And I, like Ringwald, think about those films now with almost two minds, one is my teenage self relating too and glad for that, the other is my adult self somewhat appalled that I watched those films as many times as I did.
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Because frankly, I can’t stop thinking about how much automation has changed our industry already. And I know the rate of automation is only going to accelerate from here.
Ethan's been doing a lot of writing about our industry and how we are moving forward and I really love this post. Too often we think what we're doing is new and different, but is it really? Can we look at the mistakes made in the past and learn from them? And as he says, "what happens next?"
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The people in a system are seldom acknowledged as a component of a system. Instead, they are people who act on a system. I think this is a mistake. People take work. In most organisations, the people of a system represent continuity and sometimes the only thing stopping it from being rebuilt and redesigned from external HIPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) influence. How I'd define people would be any real person interacting with the system; the team building it, stakeholders, open source community etc.
The idea of layers in a system and organizing them by how fast and often they change is intriguing and very clever. This piece by Boulton is really great with a lot to think about in it.
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Great visual design or even the UX of a style guide isn’t anywhere near as important as the documentation being in a single location that everyone can easily find. And if our work saved an engineer or designer five minutes asking someone else on Slack about how to use component X then The Guide is a success, if only a small one.
There is so, so, so much great stuff in this post by Robin. The way in which how you make your style guide or the exact way you use it doesn't matter as much as the way it enables communication, needs to work for your team, and, in the quote above, how it can be ugly and messy and still be incredibly useful.
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This is not about being austere for the sake of austerity, but it circles back to the question: Am I’m giving time and focus to activities that I feel help cultivate a deeper respect for the short time we may have? Making sure my fixed cost of living is as low as possible immolates the issue of doing certain jobs just to pay for a particular lifestyle. Living in a country with good health care means that you don’t have to worry about bearing the expense of treatment if tragedy strikes. These details add up. They collude to create space for thinking about and exploring the world, a space which feels non-negotiable in the quest to be present and reflective.
I've long enjoyed Craig Mod's work and writing, but this interview really struck home with me. Especially the above quote, it's much the way I think about life and work. The less income I need, the more freedom I have. But they way he treats technology and using the internet also intrigues me, just shutting it out for most of the day.
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For me, our response to an increasingly digital world has to be more about connection than just convenience. What if HelloFresh connected me to my local shops and farmers market rather than just supplying me with ingredients to cook fresh food? In my opinion, this would support their underlying mission better than their current business model. But, arguably, it would also be less profitable, so these are hard business choices. To deliver human value, internet-era organisations need to learn to build more on existing social connections, rather than always looking to remove them. This is then convenience that recognises the importance of connection.
Really interesting and good points in this piece. I've resisted delivery of groceries and many other things that I can walk to get in my neighborhood for many reasons, but primarily because it gets me out of the house and among people, something I need since I work from home. But connections are harder and harder to come by in our siloed digital worlds and I wonder if maybe we need to rethink that going forward.
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Here’s what I finally figured out, 25 years in: What Silicon Valley loves most isn’t the products, or the platforms underneath them, but markets. “Figure out the business model later” was the call of the early commercial internet. The way you monetize vast swaths of humanity is by creating products that people use a lot—perhaps a search engine such as Google or a social network like Facebook. You build big transactional web platforms beneath them that provide amazing things, like search results or news feeds ranked by relevance, and then beneath all that you build marketplaces for advertising—a true moneymaking machine. If you happen to create an honest-to-god marketplace, you can get unbelievably rich.
As usual Ford looks back to help us understand the current situation and points out that maybe we should think about ethics from the get go rather than after it's too late, much as we're doing right now with fake news and social media and all ramifications we didn't think about in the beginning.
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I find HSL enormously liberating. Historical color wheel concepts map directly to the 360-degree hue system, and HSL’s three foundational attributes let me create and fine-tune color directly in code like never before. Let’s take a look at how I’m using it with Sass.
I've been looking at use of color in watercolor painting for the past several weeks, and the way Rob talks about color with HSL maps really well to the way I now think about color. This is a really excellent post on the ins and outs of color and how you can use it and I love the system Rob is using.