2012

Fantastic commentary regarding Instagram’s clarification of its controversial (if not unexpected) policy changes:

If anything, this whole episode is a demonstration of the slippery charms of tone of voice. The terms and conditions were an example of clear language being used to convey information as simply as possible – it just happened to be controversial information.

The ‘clarification’ is an example of tone of voice being used to obscure and mollify. Almost like a filter applied to a photo, giving it nice fuzzy edges and an air of authenticity.

Peter Saville talks about the genesis of his cover for Unknown Pleasures and its enduring appeal.

Jason Santa Maria:

Ratios and baselines grids can be too rigid for the inherently flexible nature of the web. Just because something works at one size doesn’t mean the same ratio will be appropriate at larger or smaller sizes.

I often design websites to a vertical rhythm, even though maintaining it can be difficult during development. Jason’s arguments made me realise that this practice goes against the grain of the medium; something I discourage in The Web Aesthetic. I need to let go of my baseline grids.

Bruce Lawson followed up on my brief thoughts with his own, having attended Adobe’s ‘Create The Web’ event in London. As I suspected, some of the code produced by Edge Animate isn’t pretty, and there’s some weird messaging around browsers not based on WebKit. Yet he agrees that overall, this is the right strategy for Adobe.

Rian van der Merwe for A List Apart:

A “shiny citadel” from far away, as The Guardian once wrote, up close Brasília has “degraded into a violent, crime-ridden sprawl of cacophonous traffic jams. The real Brazil has spilled into its utopian vision.”

This problem echoes across today’s web landscape as well, where the needs of ordinary users spill constantly into designers’ utopian vision. All around us we see beautiful, empty monuments erected not for their users, but for the people who built them – and the VCs who are scouting them.

‘Digital Brasílias’ is a great term for all the beautiful – yet ultimately useless – products emerging from the Valley. Product discovery can help us not only design things better, but design better things.

Knate Myers stitched together this wonderful time-lapse video, using photographs taken from the International Space Station. The music is Sunshine (Adagio In D Minor) by John Murphy.

Roger Ebert on the recent shootings in Aurora, Colorado:

This would be an excellent time for our political parties to join together in calling for restrictions on the sale and possession of deadly weapons. That is unlikely, because the issue has become so closely linked to paranoid fantasies about a federal takeover of personal liberties that many politicians feel they cannot afford to advocate gun control.

Dalton Caldwell:

We’re building a real-time social service where users and developers come first, not advertisers.

Our team has spent the last 9 years building social services, developer platforms, mobile applications and more.

We believe that advertising-supported social services are so consistently and inextricably at odds with the interests of users and developers that something must be done.

Help us create the service we all wish existed.

Putting my money where my mouth’s been for the last few years, and backing this audacious project. I hope it succeeds.

Derek Powazek:

Every community-based site in the history of the web has essentially been a stab at creating a social network. Most of them fail as businesses, with the rare exception of small, lucky communities that become self-sufficient but not exactly prosperous. What if that’s just the way it is?

CEO, Tony Fadell on Nest’s first advertising campaign:

We hope the video allows people to take a brief pause in the day and to see the world through fresh eyes. And we hope it brings a smile to their faces too.

I enjoyed Anna Debenham’s excellent response to Marco Arment’s ridiculous assertion that every web designer needs to buy a retina MacBook Pro:

If you’re a web designer, you really, really need to get a cheap Dell monitor so you can see how bad your site looks on it and fix it.

The games are so close, I can almost taste them.

Jeffrey Zeldman:

A million people in Silicon Valley walk into a bar. No one buys anything. Bar is declared a rousing success.

Adrian Short:

I view the latest announcement from Twitter to independent developers with a suspicion bordering on contempt. Delivering a consistent Twitter experience is a comprehensive rejection of everything that Twitter has stood for and that has made Twitter great.

Twitter’s original decision to scale the business before working out how it would make money seems to be backfiring. It turns out all the things that make Twitter a great product, fly in the face of what’s needed to generate revenue. This is especially true given its pursuit of an ad-supported business model – a strange choice when many would happily pay to use it.

I’ve always felt the idea behind Twitter would have been more successful in the long term if it had been designed more like a protocol rather than a product. By taking the route it did, it’s destined to become another service on the web that will ultimately fade into obscurity.

Twitter could have been the new email. Instead it’s likely to become the next Myspace.

Sam Biddle:

Everything new from Google is prima facie fantastic, and served with the best intentions. Google is a monolithic company, sure, but it’s filled with geniuses who want to make your life easier through technology. Nobody’s faulting their ambition, or questioning its motives. But we have to wonder: Are these new things meant for regular people, or the data-obsessed, grace-deficient Silicon Valley nerd vanguard?

Khoi Vinh:

Several times a year, Apple rolls out hardware products that are, in terms of pure design smarts and innovation, leagues beyond what their competitors are capable of. Their machines are more beautiful, better built and, admittedly, longer-lasting than just about any other high tech hardware out there. But if the durability of, say, a Dell laptop is two or three years, and if Apple’s hardware improves on that two or even three times, it’s still not doing that much better than the mean. What would be really impressive is an iPod or iPhone that lasts for decades.

I felt an immediate and desperate yearning for the new MacBook Pro when it was unveiled, as I do after many of Apple’s product announcements. Yet I soon realised that I can wait a little longer before upgrading my current set-up. In fact, I’m finding myself looking at people using older Apple hardware with increasing admiration.

As such, I’m not sure I buy into Khoi’s argument. Apple product can last if treated with care, and those scratches perhaps highlight a problem with our own attitudes, not Apple’s.

Be sure to read the comments and Khoi’s follow up too.

Jack Cheng:

Timely not real-time. Rhythm not random. Moderation not excess. Knowledge not information. These are a few of the many characteristics of the Slow Web. It’s not so much a checklist as a feeling, one of being at greater ease with the web-enabled products and services in our lives.

I like the sound of the Slow Web.

I’m stupidly excited to be working with Phil, Jeremy and the rest of the Clearleft team on MATTER, a new home for independent long-form journalism focused on the big issues in science and technology. We had our first workshop this week, and the neutrons are already firing about some of the possible directions we can this.

Oliver Reichenstein:

Social media buttons are not a social media strategy, even though they’re often sold that way. Excellent content, serious networking and constant human engagement is the way to build your profile. Adding those sleazy buttons won’t achieve anything.

I approve of this message, which might seem ironic coming from a peddler of social media icons. Perhaps I should include this health warning in the accompanying ‘Read Me’ file.

Tim Jackson:

The care and concern of one human being for another is a peculiar “commodity.” It can’t be stockpiled. It becomes degraded through trade. It isn’t delivered by machines. Its quality rests entirely on the attention paid by one person to another. Even to speak of reducing the time involved is to misunderstand its value.

A wonderful collection of filmed pastiches of classic artworks. If you don’t recognise them all, Hilário Pereira has a cut of the video that names each painting.

Jonathan Harris:

These vignettes draw comparisons between software and medicine – in their dual capacities to heal and to hurt. They explore the nature of addictive technologies in relation to business, the power that software designers are presently wielding over the masses, and a new way of imagining companies: as medicine men for the species.

This is essential reading for anyone designing software. Essential.

A short yet entertaining TEDx presentation by Joe Smith on how to dry your hands using only a single paper towel.

Pascal Altena:

In this article, I’ll cover the techniques I use to make images load fast on a webpage.

A beautifully succinct yet informative article that begs to printed out and stuck on the wall next to every web developer.

David Heinemeier Hansson:

Sure, people are being employed, money is changing hands, but come Monday morning, the hangover is that we spent a bundle to build a lot of shit that’s not going anywhere. As a result, we missed out on doing other worthwhile things. All those smart and talented heads, and all those benjamins, didn’t progress the economic base in a way we’re going to care about tomorrow. And that’s a damn shame.

Put another way, “the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads” – that’s the view of Jeff Hammerbacher, an early employee of Facebook.

Barebones is an initial directory setup, style guide and pattern primer intended as a starting point for my own web development projects. I’ve made it available on GitHub so that others can use it in their own projects too. Anna has written more about the release here.

Charlie Brooker:

The Olympic rings have been whored around so much they’ve become valueless: a status symbol for a few corporations to tote like a badge for several weeks, impressing almost no one except themselves.

Increasing commercialism of the games threatens to undermine the Olympic movement.

Felix Salmon:

Andreessen’s entire fortune has been built on the greater-fool theory: if you build something trendy enough, there’s probably going to be a huge lumbering company out there somewhere willing to overpay for it.

I know many who would agree with this assessment.

Bret Victor talks about why he is motivated to create creative tools, during his presentation at CUSEC 2012:

Ideas are very precious to me, and when I see ideas dying, it hurts. I see a tragedy. To me it feels like a moral wrong, it feels like an injustice. And if I think there is anything I can do about it, I feel it’s my responsibility to do so. Not opportunity, but responsibility.

He also asks a good question; what’s the guiding principle behind everything you create?

(Via Tim Van Damme)

Best news I’ve heard all year.

Paul Krugman:

We seem to be turning into a country where crony capitalism doesn’t just waste taxpayer money but warps criminal justice, in which growing incarceration reflects not the need to protect law-abiding citizens but the profits corporations can reap from a larger prison population.

Scary yet unsurprising story about how organisations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are not only supporting, but writing wholesale legislation to benefit their corporate benefactors.

Of course, if it’s happening in the US, it’s happening here in Britain too. Indeed, I was reminded of this fascinating article by Adam Curtis, which charts the rise of the political ‘think tank’:

If you go back and look at how they rose up – at who invented them and why – you discover they are not quite what they seem. That in reality they may have nothing to do with genuinely developing new ideas, but have become a branch of the PR industry whose aim is to do the very opposite – to endlessly prop up and reinforce today’s accepted political wisdom.

Our political leaders are no longer interested in the concerns of the electorate and increasingly led by lobbyists – regardless of what destruction (societal, economic, environmental…) may result from their policy suggestions.

It surely can’t carry on like this, can it?

Ben has posted his photos from our recent US road trip; five states, four days, three nights, two drivers, one misbehaved passenger.

Eliel Saarinen:

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

Nelson Minar:

I refuse to give in to a cynical view of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto; that ethos was very real, a sincere and important guiding principle. And if a big company like Google can’t avoid being evil, then what world-changing enterprise can? But I think Google as an organization has moved on; they’re focussed now on market position, not making the world better. Which makes me sad.

Google is too powerful, too arrogant, too entrenched to be worth our love. Let them defend themselves, I’d rather devote my emotional energy to the upstarts and startups. They deserve our passion.

Sound familiar? As much as I despise Facebook, Google isn’t any better behaved. In fact, its crimes are often far worse.

I still have a Google account, although the only services I rely on are search and Reader. DuckDuckGo is looking like a promising replacement for search, but nearly every decent RSS reader still syncs with Google Reader (even if through unofficial and undocumented APIs). As soon as that changes, my Google account will be deleted.

A truly stunning timelapse of Yosemite National Park, a collaboration between Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty. More information about the project can be found at http://projectyose.com/.