One year ago I left the internet. I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked meaning. I thought it was “corrupting my soul.”
— @teck
Posted 3 weeks ago
Posted 2 months ago
48 kilometre thread
Californian artist Pae White has just arrived at Peckham’s South London Gallery with an installation made up of a 48 kilometre network of threads.
Posted 2 months ago
Let’s talk about timeless design.
March 22, 2013 at 9:04 am
I have a pet peeve when it comes to describing design (or any kind of creative work). The word “timeless” makes my skin crawl, like that scene in Indiana Jones where he has the snakes and creepy crawlies all over him and he’s all like “Oh God! Snakes!” but you totally saw it coming because he said he hated snakes maybe ten minutes before that.
Allow me to complain in bulleted points:
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I read an iPhone app review earlier this week that said the app’s design was “timeless.” And I went, “Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha.” The app was quite pretty. And Lord knows there’s plenty of good things about iPhones, apps, stores, and design. But an iPhone app is about as timeless as an ice cream cone given to a chimp on a hot day.
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It irks me that we’re throwing around the word “timeless” all willy-nilly. At this point, “timeless” is hyperbole for something with a shelf-life of a couple years. This bag of Doritos? Timeless.
Our sense of time is all out of whack. When people link to older blog posts and articles, they’ll maybe call it “timeless” or say some other inane thing like, “Old, but good!” Two years old isn’t old! A two-year-old can’t even wipe his own ass.
Let me let you in on a little secret: if you are hearing about something old, it is almost certainly good. Why? Because nobody wants to talk about shitty old stuff, but lots of people still talk about shitty new stuff, because they are still trying to figure out if it is shitty or not. The past wasn’t better, we just forgot about all the shitty shit.
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Ironically, most timeless design looks like it came from the 1962 Graphis Annual. It’s good stuff worth mimicking, but it sure isn’t timeless.
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I think “words” mean “things.” So when you say something is “timeless,” do you really mean it is not affected by the passage of time or changes in fashion? Would it spoil your day to say that timeless design is currently in fashion? (That doesn’t even make sense.) Regardless, perhaps you truly mean to say that a design is fundamentally sound, or that it is sturdy, or well-built. All great things.
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Why is timeless design always the goal? What’s wrong with making something look like it was made when it was made? Why do designers all of a sudden want to exist outside of time, like Scott Bakula in Quantum Leap? We’re already thirteen years into the 21st century, and I still don’t know what the hell is going on. One day you’re playing laser tag, the next Google’s making spy glasses to secretly record video of all your hot air balloon rides.
Other people: can you help me understand what is happening in this world of ours? I want to know what technology is doing to my brain. How do I stay human in a digital world? I want to understand what all this technology does to my expectations of myself, other people, and the world. None of this is timeless. These problems are right now.
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Some might say that this blog’s design has some “timeless” qualities. I will let you in on a secret: I am lazy. I want to make as few decisions as possible, but I want those choices to be good ones. I don’t add cruft, because I’d have to make the cruft so that I could add it. And then I’d have to decide where it would go, when all I really want to do find that chimp with the ice cream cone and hang out with him.
Thank you for reading my measured critique. Have a timeless day.
(Source: frankchimero.com)
Posted 2 months ago
via thisistheverge
Zoom
Obsessed with the Now: Douglas Rushkoff and the threat of ‘Present Shock’
Douglas Rushkoff is a man ready to talk. As a media theorist, he has a lot of ideas about everything, and he’d like to share them with you. His new book, Present Shock, is his effort to describe “right now,” whatever that is — and how we deal with it. What’s most surprising about the book is perhaps the fact that he wrote it all. He mentions the difficulty he had, with all the hustle and bustle of current society distracting him, and is very grateful to any theoretical reader for ignoring that noise long enough to make it through all 266 pages. It’s entirely counter to the way he sees our society exchange and consume information these days. (“A book? Really? How anachronistic!”). He assumes you’re much more likely to receive its ideas in a blog post or magazine review — much like this one you’re about to read.
Posted 2 months ago
via sprawsm
Scheduling
I’m the first to admit we’ve had a tough time with scheduling, and running several projects in parallel in the past. We’re a small team, we’re usually overbooked, and there’s always more work to be done than time permits. You know the story.
2012 has been the year of process for us. We’ve worked hard to develop a good, solid process from getting new business, signing up new customers, and handling ongoing long–term projects and retainer contracts.
The “Project a Day” Split
A couple of months ago we tried something new: we started assigning projects to weekdays, meaning we take a project, and decide which days of the week we’ll be working on it. This is something that we’ve picked up from Rendered Text, and apparently programmers have been doing this for a while now.
So, if we’re running — say three projects at the same time — this means that one project will get e.g. Monday and Tuesday, one will get Wednesday, and the third will get Thursday and Friday. The split can be more complex if more people are involved, projects’ budgets get calculated in, but for the sake of simplicity in the example above I was assuming: 1 project = 1 person/team.
The benefits of this approach:
- much less context switching, and more uninterrupted time for focused work (equals better quality),
- better organization (less organization and management, really),
- better team communication,
- smoother workflow with the customers,
- project pace is more clear and more predictable,
- far less urgencies (and illusions of urgency),
- often a better deal for our customers since they are getting billed at a day rate which is billed as five hours, but we do a full day’s work,
- less complicated billing, estimation, etc.
One key benefit of this approach, is that it gives us — the designers — much needed time for our decisions to form and mature.
The Downsides:
- not all customers are willing to accept this approach,
- smaller projects tend to feel stretched over perhaps unnecessary length of time to some customers.
From our experience people who have issues with this system are either looking for a rush job, don’t understand the importance of time in the design process and value it enough, or both.
The truth is no application, tool, or a manager will get you out of the dreaded situation where two urgent projects overlap, and you need to juggle additional iterations, or changes in direction when you didn’t expect them to pop up. Planning and a solid schedule will; fact.
The first thing we’ve done when we implemented this workflow is that we’ve notified our existing customers of the change, and made sure they are OK with it. This is really important since the change isn’t only on our part, they need to adapt to this new kind of collaboration as well.
On the last day of working on the project for the week, we will usually send off some deliverables, and then the customer has a couple of days to offer feedback, and we usually use the downtime to go discuss changes, plan the next iterations, etc. It is very important to emphasize that we only limit the production work to certain weekdays, communication goes on throughout the week.
Since we’ve been doing things this way for a couple of months now, we couldn’t be happier with how things are going. If you are running a small shop, or you’re freelancing, consider this approach, you might be surprised how a little discipline pays off.
Posted 2 months ago
via sprawsm
Clients: All They Do Is Care
Clients sometimes as it turns out have an amazing ability to hinder the ability of the designers they employ to do the job they were actually hired for. I am not sure if this problem is present in any other industry, but ours.
Constant involvement, overthinking, and their inability to distance themselves from the problem at hand makes it a real challenge to work with them successfully. With some people, it really is “my way or the highway”, which is a sad defense mechanism, when you really look at it.
In this situation, the designer has to understand that most likely all the client is doing is care. They care about their business and probably just want to help, or be useful. They see letting go of control as a potential for things to go wrong.
Sometimes they don’t express it in this way, but ultimately, that’s what it is, they want what’s best for their business.
The problem boils down to:
- they don’t trust you know their business well enough, or
- they don’t see you as competent enough to do what they hired you for, or
- they don’t articulate the problems well enough for you to understand them, or
- they don’t place enough value in what you do, and they hired you for your pixel pushing abilities,
- etc.
The Bottom Line
The client needs to understand the value you bring to their business, they need to respect the terms under which you can deliver your best work, and they need to let go of their stranglehold of every minor decision that needs to be made for the product.
They need to understand they hired you for a reason, and you need to realize you have a lot of responsibility in your hands for that matter.
Act, and bill accordingly.
