Things I Like
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The tension for the artist in contemporary life is the same that it has always been: How do you secure a living for yourself while maximizing your art-making time and energy?
Kleon is dead on in his rejection of the myth that artists go into recluse to create. As he rightly points out, the biggest reason why this isn't possible, is money. How do you "do what you love" and still have money to live? I rarely see the money question addressed as clearly as Kleon does here.
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We can draw our button as big or as small as we want, and it doesn’t matter—the design becomes the description of the artifact. We can express this in pictorial form, as we do in tools like Photoshop or Sketch (though now forgetting how precise we need to be, we can simply gesture at the intent), or we can write it in plain text, JSON, or some other text format. The precision is introduced by the engineer, where it rightfully belongs. After all, our designs are completely useless until they are built—what exists in the users’ hands is the final design, and nothing less.
I found a lot of the ideas in this piece super intriguing, probably because I'm in the midst of helping create a design system and going back and forth between Sketch files, which rely solely on pixels, and the system, where we aren't using pixels for things such as spacing, type, etc. It's been interesting to talk with the folks who live their lives in the pixel world and see how we meet when the system doesn't speak that exact language.
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Analog, although more cumbersome and costly than its digital equivalents, provides a richness of experience that is unparalleled with anything delivered through a screen. People are buying books because a book engages nearly all of their senses, from the smell of the paper and glue to the sight of the cover design and weight of the pages read, the sound of those sheets turning, and even the subtle taste of the ink on your fingertips. A book can be bought and sold, given and received, and displayed on a shelf for anyone to see. It can start conversations and cultivate romances.
Essays about a return to non digital forms of media come out with regularity these days, and I read them all to see what they say, this point above sums up well why I sketch on paper again and still make lists on scrap paper as well.
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Maybe most surprising, is that my posts have gotten, in my opinion, much deeper and more interesting. I used to scramble on Thursdays, trying to come up with a good blog post so I could post it at the top of Friday’s newsletter. Often I would cop out, write something quick and pat, and move on. Once I started daily blogging, not only did I have more to link to, it’s actually better stuff — some weeks I have a tough time deciding which post gets top billing in my list of 10.
I've been sketching daily for the past year and I switch up my medium or my approach or prompts, but I've noticed that doing it every day, even if for just five minutes, gets me thinking differently. Maybe I'll try blogging or posting a note every day for thirty days to see what happens.
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There is more than one kind of thought. There are thoughts you cannot complete within a month, or a fiscal quarter, just as there are thoughts that can occupy less than a vacation period, a weekend, or a smoke break. Like the spectrum of photonic behavior, thoughts come in a nearly infinite range of lengths and frequencies, and always move at the exact pace of human life, wherever they are in the universe. Some thoughts are long, they can take years to think, or a lifetime. Some thoughts take many lifetimes, and we hand them off to the next generation like the batons in a relay race. Some of these are the best of thoughts, even if they can be the least productive. Lifetimes along, they shift the whole world, like a secret lever built and placed by the loving imaginations of thousands of unproductive stargazers.
So many good things in this essay on being bored, being lazy, and letting your mind wander. As Mandy pointed out, it is a lot like Mary Ruefle's ideas on wasting time, something we fight hard against, but inefficiency isn't evil, and it isn't time wasted; it's time lived.
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Roesner was not an Orange City native. When he was a kid, his father’s climb up the corporate ladder involved moving the family every couple of years; they moved to Orange City from Minnesota when Roesner was in eleventh grade, and later his parents left again. But Roesner married a Dutch woman from Orange City, and stayed. When he got an M.B.A. and started out on the executive track himself, he decided that he didn’t want to do what his father would have done—he didn’t want to go to Beaverton to work for Nike, or to Minneapolis for a job at Target, then move on somewhere else. “I said to myself, ‘What is all this about?’ ” he says. “ ‘Is it just about me and where I can take my career, or is there something bigger?’ Here, you feel like you’re connected—that you belong someplace.”
This is a lovely article about a community that isn't dying, but rather open to change and growth. It's great to read something about hope, about people caring for one another and living with one another even if they don't always agree.
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On the heels of reading Design Systems this was a fantastic talk to watch, an in depth look at using the principles Kholmatova talks about to find your own system that works for your team. Perez-Cruz walks through what didn't work and what did and how they were able to make a unified system for several very different brands. Definitely worth watching if you are thinking about how to do a design system in your organization.
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I share the disillusionment. This version of The Medium is not The Medium I want or fell in love with. This is a love story about humans connecting across continents. I want to be hopeful even at the risk of being naïve.
So many things in this essay rang true with me. And I'm with Dave, in many of the ways he talks about ethics and tooling. In my effort to keep my love for the web, I've taken to putting more and more into this site and less and less elsewhere. It's what I control.
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So if you’ve written CSS in the past, CSS today is not significantly harder to understand, and probably a bit easier. There’s just a lot more of it. You might not be able to remember every single property and value, but that’s okay. Neither can I. I don’t think many (or any) of us can hold every last tiny piece of a serious programming language in our heads, either. We know the core things, and the patterns we learned, and some cool techniques, and there are the things we always have to look up because we don’t often use them.
I can't wait to dig into the new version of CSS The Definitive Guide. CSS is more capable and lot of fun to work with as its capabilities have expanded.
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What you are referring to is the sense that one is a citizen first and happen to be a professional in one area or another, but you don’t stop being a citizen because you are a highway engineer or a professor of metallurgy, but you also don’t leave all your scientific knowledge when you are a resident in the district that is suddenly heavily influence by pollution from another plant; or, globally, from fallout or chemical pollution.
This is a great interview, thanks for the link Ethan!
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I don’t pretend that these are easy questions to answer. But if we need technology that’s not simply fast or pretty, but just, it’s worth putting AMP under a critical lens. (As well as, yes, Facebook Instant Articles, and Apple News, and, and, and.) If we fail to do that, we can’t be sure how well it measures up to our needs, much less the needs of the web as an open medium. And we definitely won’t know how well it serves entities other than Google.
Ethan, making a lot of sense about how we should think about AMP and all the things we make. It's time for the tech industry to take responsibility for how they are changing the internet and web in profound ways.
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While nothing is stopping people from finding out more information before responding, the clearest affordance Twitter has is for these “drive-by” responses (I’ve been mansplained to by many people who I presume haven’t even looked at my bio to see the “engineering professor” there before trying to school me on my research field—per Telemachus, “of me most of all”). This amplification and context collapse, coupled with the ease of replying and of creating bots, makes targeted harassment trivially easy, particularly in an environment where users can both mostly live in their own ideological bubble by following people who share their views, however abhorrent, and who can easily forget that there is a real person behind the 140 characters of text.
Another great piece from Debbie Chachra, one of my favorite thinkers and writers lately. How we build products matter and we aren't thinking about that nearly enough these days.
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“One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before,” Rosenstein says. It may or may not be relevant that Rosenstein, Pearlman and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls.
I found this article fascinating and relatable in many ways. I'm a bit older than most of the people profiled, but I too am backing way away from tech. And when I talk about it with work colleagues most are surprised. But the above quote struck me, as less and less people remember living in a less connected world what will the affect be on our society, on individuals, etc?
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When the Coen brothers were asked about their creative process, Joel Coen said, “We do a lot of napping.”
A good reminder, taking breaks can activate our process, and make us more efficient at our work.
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Twitter is supposed to be all about what’s happening right now, and its model gives users good reason to think of their tweets as ephemeral and disposable. I won’t say I’m entirely immune to that sentiment, but regular readers of this site will be unsurprised to learn that I’m more interested in Twitter as an archive, as a collection of bite-sized dispatches from events in our lives that run the gamut from mundane to sublime, which can be recombined in various ways to tell a uniquely affecting story…
This is lovely.