Things I Like
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Mysteries are presented to the walker — the floating sound of a guitar above, screen door murmurs, cats frozen, baths splashing, the far off buzz of a motorcycle. Mysteries sometimes answered, more often serving only as ballast for the flitting narratives of the walker mind.
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Reflective, analytical writing doesn’t fit the “get in, score, and get out” model. Its rewards and gratifications are far from instant. But they are long-lasting. And I believe web design needs such writing, alongside the more usual kind, to advance its purpose. Web design is a public practice. It can tell us about our culture and society. Web design writing must in part be concerned with insightful accounting of the social, cultural, aesthetic and even political forces reflected in the work itself. It can be an opportunity to intensify, alter and expand our discipline.
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But everything from the 90s to today is going to remain mostly broken in that respect. Most of what we said and did had ephemerality long before apps started selling us ephemeral nature as a positive advertising point. Possibly no other generation threw so many words at such velocity into a deep dark well of ghosts.
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You don’t lose users because you don’t tell them enough about other cool features you have. You lose them because you confuse them. Reward my actions and we can work together!
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At a time when surveys show many Americans are worried about their jobs and research shows that long hours of face time in the office are highly rewarded, workers at Patagonia set their own hours. And the company signals that it doesn’t want those hours to be excessive; The child development center closes at 5 p.m. The headquarters buildings are locked, with everybody out, at 8 p.m., and on weekends.
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Easygoing Ive morphs into Serious Ive on this point: He sees design schools failing their students by moving away from a foundation in traditional skills. ‘I think it’s important that we learn how to draw and to make something and to do it directly,’ he says, ‘to understand the properties you’re working with by manipulating them and transforming them yourself.’
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I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say that design can lead you to words, so I’m putting the fact here to register it as a possibility for others.
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I will read whatever the hell I feel like. No guilty pleasures.
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But its worth remembering that these are just implementation details. What really matters is that you’re publishing your stuff on your website. If you want to use different formats and protocols to do that, that’s absolutely fine. The whole point is that this is the independent web—you can do whatever you please on your own website.
As an aside, I've done the first two things on this list as of today. I'm slowly coming around to this idea and think it's important for me to control my web presence.
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Developer convenience is a very powerful and important force. I wish that progressive enhancement could provide the same level of developer convenience offered by Angular and Ember, but right now, it doesn’t. Instead, its benefits are focused on the end user, often at the expense of the developer.
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So this is what I try to remember when I’m deep in the muck, and I hope you’ll remember it, too. Somehow, some way, your worst moments feed your best work, and it might well take a decade to see it.
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In other words, the unfinished is far more valuable than the finished. The un-figured out far more valuable than the figured out.
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If I met me, but younger, we’d talk about the value of one thing. You have to choose one thing to do for yourself every day. No matter what practice you choose — how fulfilling or meaningful — it will sometimes overwhelm you. Choose something for yourself every day. Do it repeatedly and without fail. If you do something for yourself every day, no matter how many standoffs or negotiations or letdowns you face throughout the day, no one can take that away from you.
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In our race just to finish, we underestimate the benefits of quitting. I want to come out of the unfinished project closet. I want to consider the benefits of starting.
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We have a lot of say in who gets a voice and who doesn’t in our community. That’s a huge responsibility and a tremendous amount of power. We need to use it wisely.