Things I Like
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In other words, by thinking about the needs of the small screen first, you can layer on more complexity from there. And if you’re hearing shades of mobile first and progressive enhancement here, you’d be right: they’re treating their markup—their content—as a foundation, and gently layering styles atop it to make it accessible to more devices, more places than ever before.
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He found ways of making yoga more accessible to non-bendy newcomers, developing methods for using props like belts, straps, and blocks—or, in the early days, bricks and pieces of wood—to get people into positions. Even in the hippy-filled 1970s, he was making the practice more mainstream.
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I think for many of us Twitter started as the porch—our space, our friends, with the occassional neighborhood passer-by. As the service grew and we gained follwers, we slid across the spectrum of privacy into the street.
Side note from me: I do a lot to make twitter remain a bit more porchlike for me. Muting words, people, and hashtags like mad, following a smaller number of people, and not feeling compelled to check it all the time.
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This is not a world where you can simply express love for other people, where you can praise them. Perhaps it should be. But it’s not. I’ve found that people will fear your enthusiasm and warmth, and wait to hear the price. Which is fair. We’ve all been drawn into someone’s love only to find out that we couldn’t afford it. A little distance buys everyone time.
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Will they give me one hour of housecleaning in exchange for the poetry reading? Or wash the car just one time a month, for the turtles? No? I understand. But at 80, will they be proud that they spent their lives keeping their houses cleaner than anyone else in the family did, except for mad Aunt Beth, who had the vapors? Or that they kept their car polished to a high sheen that made the neighbors quiver with jealousy? Or worked their fingers to the bone providing a high quality of life, but maybe accidentally forgot to be deeply and truly present for their kids, and now their grandchildren?
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Increasing creativity will happen naturally as we tame the multitasking and immerse ourselves in a single task for sustained periods of, say, 30 to 50 minutes. Several studies have shown that a walk in nature or listening to music can trigger the mind-wandering mode. This acts as a neural reset button, and provides much needed perspective on what you’re doing.
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As Anil points out, our lives are shaped by all sorts of unspoken social agreements. Allowing organizations or powerful actors to undermine them for personal gain may not be illegal, but it does tear at the social fabric. The costs of this are, at one level, minuscule, but when added up, they can cause a serious earthquake. Is that really what we’re seeking to achieve?
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We don’t want a culture of designs being “thrown over a wall” to a dev team. We don’t make “high fidelity mock ups” or “high fidelity wireframes”. We’re making a Thing, not pictures of a Thing.
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I don’t mean to say that I think people don’t pursue this career because they doubt their own exceptionalism, but that they don’t pursue it because they have no ambition of joining a cult.
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For a community that understands the essential value of open source, there’s a distinct lack of respect for openness in the way they relate to the city. Re-engaging with the public realm is the most fundamental tool that companies (and groups of companies) have to connect with the public, to understand needs more holistically, and to convert that understanding into longterm public and private value.
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And—because of the negative stigma around responsive design and performance—they had suddenly become a little more interested in this performance stuff than they had been in the past. The myth wasn’t causing harm; it was opening the door to a more intentional approach to web performance.
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My tolerance for learning curves grows smaller every day. New technologies, once exciting for the sake of newness, now seem like hassles. I’m less and less tolerant of hokey marketing filled with superlatives. I value stability and clarity.
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One thing I am pretty sure of though, is that having a fast, accessible, user-friendly site can reflect incredibly well on a company, and I’d love to see more guidelines and expectations that prioritize these aspects of a service as branding requirements in addition to the usual visual details.
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Ideally everybody involved are multi-disciplinary to an extent, T-shaped in their range of skills (a designer should have enough familiarity with CSS to allow them to style a page using developer tools, for example).
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The obscurity and arbitrariness are very much by design, and is why explainer posts are supposed to be so valuable. Having engineered an unfair situation, insiders then offer secret guides to winning it.