There is something divine about creating. From building software to writing a book to completing a self-portrait, every act of creation is a miniature Genesis.
Speaking of doing things the long hard stupid way:
If you want to leave a fingerprint of talent on the world that lasts, get your hands dirty and practice your skill, because work that is beautiful and timeless demands dedication.
Suppose you had a luxury spacecraft spinning at 1RPM to create 0.5g using centripetal force, as is often depicted in science fiction:
I believe that the perpetually spinning views would be extremely nauseating for most humans, even for short visits. Even worse, I suspect - when it comes to the comfort of the experience - would be the constantly moving light and shadows from the sun.
If you look at the available evidence, “craft at scale” is mutually exclusive with the kind of rapid and unending growth that’s the baseline expectation for traditional startups and public tech companies.
We’d say that’s obvious in other industries. Budweiser isn’t craft beer. IKEA isn’t heirloom-quality furniture. But we tend to treat software as immune to the typical relationship between quality and quantity.
Call me Cassandra:
The way that industry incorporates design systems is basically a misappropriation, or abuse at worst. It is not just me who is seeing the problem with ongoing industrialization in design. Even Brad Frost, the inventor of atomic design, is expressing similar concerns. In the words of Jeremy Keith:
[…] Design systems take their place in a long history of dehumanising approaches to manufacturing like Taylorism. The priorities of “scientific management” are the same as those of design systems—increasing efficiency and enforcing consistency.
So no. It is not just you. We all feel it. This quote is from 2020, by the way. What was then a prediction has since become a reality.
This grim assessment is well worth a read. It rings very true.
What could have become Design Systemics, in which we applied systems theory, cybernetics, and constructivism to the process and practice of design, is now instead being reduced to component libraries. As a designer, I find this utter nonsense. Everyone who has even just witnessed a design process in action knows that the deliverable is merely a documenting artifact of the process and does not constitute it at all. But for companies, the “output” is all that matters, because it can be measured; it appeals to the industrialized process because it scales. Once a component is designed, it can be reused, configured, and composed to produce “free” iterations without having to consult a designer. The cost was reduced while the output was maximized. Goal achieved!
I’ve personally never really seen frontend as an assembly job. Lego is admittedly awesome, but for me the mental model of assembling Lego bricks in the required order until a Jira ticket can be marked as “done” feels too linear and too rigid for how I like to work. And that’s not to mention the pain that comes when you have to partially dismantle your bricks to correct some earlier misstep.
I like the pottery analogy.
I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.
Maciej lays out the case against a crewed mission to Mars.
Like George Lucas preparing to release another awful prequel, NASA is hoping that cool spaceships and nostalgia will be enough to keep everyone from noticing that their story makes no sense. But you can’t lie your way to Mars, no matter how sincerely you believe in what you’re doing.
And don’t skip the footnotes:
Fourth graders writing to Santa make a stronger case for an X-Box than NASA has been able to put together for a Mars landing.
I often use the word quality when referring to apps, products and services I hold in a high regard but another word that often comes up in this context is craft. Craft, as in something that is handcrafted where something someone spent a lot of time on and maybe even embedded their own personal touches and personality in it. Often something handcrafted feels more premium.
Design Thinking didn’t change business at all, rather it changed Design into business, adopting its language, priorities and techniques. It sold out Design in an attempt to impress those in power, and in so doing lost its heart.
A fascinating and inspiring meditation on aerodynamics.
Useful FAQs.
Your grandmother is not just a starship, she’s a highly individual starship with her own goals and needs!
I think that working on your own website can be a good Forever Project.
It’s an open-ended topic that you can explore for a long time without running out of challenges.
Also, this is spot-on:
Compare two different situations where you tell a story at a party. In the first situation, you tell the story in a corner to one or two people, who are totally interested and smiling. In the second situation, you tell the story in the center of the party with a large group of people around you, but they’re almost all bored and uninterested, talking amongst themselves and largely ignoring you. The first situation sounds better, right? Well, that’s the non-obvious benefit of blogging. There are a load of people out there blogging, and almost all of them are better writers and better looking than you. Nobody is going to read your blog about frabulizing widgets unless they really care about frabulizing widgets. So it’s not going to be a big audience, but it should be an interested audience. And I think you’ll find that you get 90% of the benefits of socialization from a handful of readers as you would get from a sea of readers.
Trys describes the backend architecture of the excellent Sofa Conf website. In short, it’s a Jamstack dream: all of the convenience and familiarity of using a database-driven CMS (Craft), combined with all the speed and resilience of using a static site generator (Eleventy).
I love the fact that anyone on the Clearleft events team can push to production with a Slack message.
I also love that the site is Lighthousetastically fast.
I had the great pleasure of visiting the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp last October. Their vast collection of woodblocks are available to dowload in high resolution (and they’re in the public domain).
14,000 examples of true craftmanship, drawings masterly cut in wood. We are supplying this impressive collection of woodcuts in high resolution. Feel free to browse as long as you like, get inspired and use your creativity.
The best podcast of last year is back for another season, this time on the Apollo 13 mission.
B612 is an highly legible open source font family designed and tested to be used on aircraft cockpit screens.
When the game developer Blizzard Entertainment decommissioned some of their server blades to be auctioned off, they turned them into commemorative commodities, adding an etching onto the metal frame with the server’s name (e.g., “Proudmoore” or “Darkspear”), its dates of operation, and an inscription: “within the circuits and hard drive, a world of magic, adventure, and friendship thrived… this server was home to thousands of immersive experiences.” While stripped of their ability to store virtual memory or connect people to an online game world, these servers were valuable and meaningful as worlds and homes. They became repositories of social and spatial memory, souvenirs from WoW.
The history of Apollo’s hardware and software—the technology, the missions, and the people; people like Elaine Denniston and Margaret Hamilton.
(The site is made by Draper, the company founded by Doc Draper, father of inertial navigation.)
Take a tour of the Lunar Module.
The LM (or “LEM”, as it’s pronounced) has the appearance of an aeronautical joke, with not a trace of streamlining. Instead, it’s an insect-like asymmetrical collection of legs, angles, bulges, and surfaces that’s very hard to visualize. Frankly, it looks like it was thrown together on a Friday afternoon by someone in a hurry to go fishing.
Ah, what a wonderful treasure trove this is! PDF scans of Apollo era press kits from a range of American companies.
Categories include:
There’s something so fascinating about the mundane details of Isolation/Quarantine Foods for Apollo 11 Astronauts from Stouffer’s.
The cosmonaut counterparts of the Mercury women astronauts: Zhanna Yorkina, Irina Solovyova, Tatyana Kuznetsova, Valentina Ponomareva, and Valentina Tereshkova.
Ponomareva recalled there being no envy between the women in the squad. According to her, it was a healthy spirit of competition. Everyone did their best to be number one, but also supported each other’s efforts.
One of those cosmonauts went to space: none of the women training for the Mercury missions did. There would be a shockingly gap of twenty years between the launch of Valentina Tereshkova and the launch of Sally Ride.