marco:

I get these questions frequently. Keep in mind that I only “got started” programming once, and that was a very long time ago during which I was primarily thinking about which girls I liked (since I was 13 years old). But here’s how I think it works, especially for adults coming to programming for…

viafrank:

Late last week I started drafting a list of my favorite things on the web from this year. After a review of the list, I realized most of it was droll, forgettable, ephemeral, and not really worth documenting in the grand scheme of things. Basically, it mattered at the time of its release, but time had not treated these things well: they were more flow than stock.

My top two choices, however, stood tall as perhaps the best stock I’ve had the pleasure of reading on the web, both in terms of their scope, but more interestingly about how they treated their content and audience. There’s a pattern here that I enjoy. I’d like to introduce you to them, and hopefully in the process make a bit of a point about the direction I want the web to take in the next year. I’m optimistic.

Top Two Things on the Web in 2010

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“Typography is how language looks.”
—Ellen Lupton

I’ve been spending a lot of time with typography recently and I think I’ve come around to the view that great design often begins with type selection. Most webpages are still primarily written content, not interfaces of pure symbols.

One of the…

My father always told me that the day we stop learning is the day we die. I wrote this as a sort of preparation for my 35th birthday last week. Some of these are poignant, others are simply trite; I attribute the latter to my growing sense of sentimentality as I age. That, and I need an editor.

…

This is long. I apologize. In that big advice post, I said keep one fiction and one nonfiction book on your nightstand. Nonfiction can give us the truth about what is happening in the world. Fiction can give us the truth that won’t fit in nonfiction and the truth that is happening inside of us.

I’m not as well read as some, but here are a few titles that I quite enjoy. This is a half-baked reading list, and I am sure I am omitting many wonderful things on my own shelf which I can not see right now. For this, I apologize too.

• The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp

  If you come to this book correctly, it will teach you more about process than any design book could. It’s written by a choreographer, and it isvery tempting to consider design a choreographic art of content and concept. Anyway, if there are ideas and areas that seem to overlap between her experience and yours, there’s a high probability of truth, because, you know, unrelated fields and such, right?

• Ways of Seeing by John Berger

  This book is pretty much the cornerstone of any collegiate class on aesthetics. It’s great (albiet written in the 70s and dated in some aspects), but it’s easy to find applications of the ideas presented within to our current visual climate. This is the book that was ported from the original television series by the BBC. The television series is available to watch online as well, and I would suggest that over the book, if only for Berger’s vigor and intensity. But, buy the book too. Why not, for $5 used on Amazon? If only to fulfill your liberal arts student obligations…

• The Elements of Style by Strunk & White

  You should already have this. What, you don’t have this? Get with the program, kid. Learn the rules, then selectively break them.

• Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

  Oh, lordy! An economics book! Oh, the terror! But, this is good. If only to get a grasp of how folks respond to incentives and to develop a latticework of how people make decisions to hang your design choices upon… If you go to a state school instead of an art school, make friends with an economics student. You’ll get into all sorts of fun arguments when your two hyper-idealistic outlooks clash with one another, and that friction is a wonderful thing. (But, buy each other a beer so you don’t hate one another at the end of the day.)

• Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan

  It’s easy to take things for granted, especially when you view them out of context of the time they were made. I wasn’t a big Woody Guthrie fan until I realized, “Oh my god! This guy was painting ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ on his guitar and singing right wing/left wing/chicken wing when folks were singing gospel tunes and picking dirt out of their toes in the Dust Bowl.”

  That’s kind of like McLuhan. It’s easy to think of the idea of a global village as ho-hum, or you might think the influence of electronics and mass communication have on our lives is an easy concept to wrap your mind around. But geez, to forecast so much of this in the technology’s infancy? I mean, sometimes it’s just uncanny, almost like the dude invented a time machine in the future, jumped back to the past, wrote a couple books, and then vaporized in some sort of space/time rip. Maybe.

  Anyway, this particular book is a gem because it takes dense ideas and makes them presentable through juxtaposing image and type, and fully leverages the power of design. (It was designed by Quentin Fiore.)Working on an updated version of this is one of my dream jobs. (But, the other part of me says it should be left untouched.) Pick one up, and get an old copy. (Read as: don’t get a new one because you’ll get it with that crappity crap David Carson cover that makes it look like some sort of stupid Nine Inch Nails album.)

• The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda

  Maeda outlines 10 principles (I wouldn’t call them laws) of simplicity. It’s a quick and breezy read, with tons of insight per word. You should read it online, because, one, it’s free, and two, the book, while a beautiful design specimen, can sometimes feel a bit inflated to generate enough pages to warrant a book.

  This is simplicity at its best: as a call towards making things more human and humane.

• Design As Art by Bruno Munari

  Ok, ok. You got me. This has everything to do with design. But, BUT! Riddle me this: why haven’t you read it? Why don’t more people read it? There aren’t many pictures, but screw designers with picture addictions. For truth, this is better than most design books that you can buy, each chapter is an individual essay, so it’s easy to pick up and read and put back down, and the sucker fits in your back pocket. This is like the original design-writing blog, and it is the best design blog ever. Just go buy it. Why isn’t this required reading for every design seminar ever, ever, ever?

• Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

  So, a neuroscience book? Okay, one, the brain is awesome, and two, if your thesis statement is that creative people in the humanities usually make meaningful insights about how the brain operates through art and then the scientific community later produces studies that verify… holy-cow-gee-whiz, I am going to snatch that book up and devour it like some sort of seagull shoving a fish down its gullet.

  I demolished this book the first time through. Also, everything good in WIRED is usually by Lehrer. Also also, the dude’s what? 26? 27? Let’s all hang our heads in shame while we eat a ham-and-swiss Hot Pocket while sitting in a bean bag chair in our parent’s basement.

• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  If you have read The Little Prince, you are shaking your head in agreement. If you have not, just trust us on this one, okay?

• Read a Book that Changed the World

  It doesn’t matter. Take your pick. They’re cheap. And usually available for free online. Pick up your shiny iPad or Kindle and search the store and see if you can nab it for free-ninety-nine. I’m talking Silent Spring, or Common Sense, or The Origin of Species, or Paradise Lost, or The Republic, or The Iliad, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Or Shakespeare, or Divine Comedy, or Moby Dick, or 1984, or Don Quixote, or Walden. These are the books that define who we are as humanity. And we should cherish them and consume them, if only to be in the presence of something bigger than all of us for a little bit.

• Read a Book that Changed You

  By this, I mean the books that everyone reads at some point when they are in high school and it changes a little bit of who they are or how they look at the world. Frequently, they are things like Slaughterhouse Five, or Catcher in the Rye, or Franny and Zooey, or Of Mice and Men, or Animal Farm, or The Giver, or To Kill a Mockingbird, or Pride and Prejudice.

  These are the books that have sentimental power over us (or at least myself) because they feel like the first documentation of how it feels to be yourself. Someone is speaking to you that knows you better than yourself. These books are the first things you choose to like and believe in, they are works that you can own yourself, and you chose it, and it is not given to you from any one else. “This is mine,” you say, and that is true, like this book helped to unbury something hidden inside of yourself that had always been there.

  If you have read one of these before, read it again and see if it has the same effect, and think about how you are more angry now than you were back then, or how your angst has subsided, or think about how you feel less lonely now or more lonely, or think about how time has changed you. Maybe see the times where you pull out something new from the pages that you were not able to grasp before.

  By revisiting something that has not changed you can see how you have changed. Think about how reading a book like this is like putting another notch in the door frame where you measured your growth when you were growing up. Look at how far you have come.

  These books are litmus tests for friends. For me, if Franny and Zooey changes a little piece of you, I will probably be friends with you. These books never stop having an affecting power over us.

  “Let’s just try to have a marvelous time this weekend. I mean not try to analyze everything to death for once, if possible. Especially me. I love you.”

  “And so it goes.”

Goodbye, Reading Rainbow. From NPR’s article, emphasis mine:

…

What a shame. Reading Rainbow was a relic of an old world. A world where asking “Why?” was just as important as “How?” Seems that the more complex we make our lives, the more everyone feels we need to explain the How. It’s been a…

bobulate:

“Become an instant expert,” dares the FiveBooks site. And here’s how:

Every day an eminent writer, thinker, commentator, politician, academic chooses five books on their specialist subject. From Einstein to Keynes, Iraq to the Andes, Communism to Empire. Share in the knowledge and buy the books.

Find interviews and tailored lists from Tyler Cowen on Information, Jeremy Mynott on Birdwatching, Alain de Botton on Illuminating Essays, Dorothy Rowe on Lying, Jonah Lehrer on Decision-Making, Rebecca Goldstein on Reason and its Limitations, Claire Ptak on Cakes, and countless more. Instant expertise.

(thx, jason)

bobulate:

Alain de Botton on distraction:

One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.

The obsession with current events is relentless:

We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties — something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows. We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture — and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.

We need to diet, he advises. And indeed, if we do not dwell on both on what is extraordinary about the ordinary and that there could be — at any moment — risk of volcanic proportions, we will go assuming that tomorrow will be just like today. Through stacks of unread books, seas of feeds, people, invitations, events, and unanswered emails, if we stand still long enough, if we listen and look, if we pause, we see that nothing is ever the same again tomorrow. And that is mostly extraordinary.

Design does not equal client work.

It’s hard to make purple work in a design. The things your teachers tell you in class are not gospel. You will get conflicting information. It means that both are wrong. Or both are true. This never stops. Most decisions are gray, and everything lives on a spectrum of correctness and suitability.

Look people in the eyes when you are talking or listening to them. The best teachers are the ones who treat their classrooms like a workplace, and the worst ones are the ones who treat their classroom like a classroom as we’ve come to expect it. Eat breakfast. Realize that you are learning a trade, so craft matters more than most say. Realize that design is also a liberal art. Quiet is always an option, even if everyone is yelling. Libraries are a good place. The books are free there, and it smells great.

If you can’t draw as well as someone, or use the software as well, or if you do not have as much money to buy supplies, or if you do not have access to the tools they have, beat them by being more thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is free and burns on time and empathy.

The best communicators are gift-givers.

Don’t become dependent on having other people pull it out of you while you’re in school. If you do, you’re hosed once you graduate. Keep two books on your nightstand at all times: one fiction, one non-fiction.

Buy lightly used. Patina is a pretty word, and a beautiful concept.

Develop a point of view. Think about what experiences you have that many others do not. Then, think of what experiences you have that almost everyone else has. Then, mix those two things and try to make someone cry or laugh or feel understood.

Design doesn’t have to sell. Although, it usually does.

Think of every project as an opportunity to learn, but also an opportunity to teach. Univers is a great typeface and white usually works and grids are nice and usually necessary, but they’re not a style.

Take things away until you cry. Accept most things, and reject most of your initial ideas. Print it out, chop it up, put it back together. When you’re aimlessly pushing things around on a computer screen, print it out and push it around in real space. Change contexts when you’re stuck. Draw wrong-handed and upside down and backwards. Find a good seat outside.

Design is just a language, it’s not a message. If you say “retro” too much you will get hives and maybe die. Learn your design history. Know that design changes when technology changes, and its been that way since the 1400s. Adobe software never stops being frustrating. Learn to write, and not school-style writing. A text editor is a perfectly viable design tool. Graphic design has just as much to do with words as it does with pictures, and a lot of my favorite designers come to design from the world of words instead of the world of pictures.

If you meet a person who cares about the same obscure things you do, hold on to them for dear life. Sympathy is medicine.

Scissors are good, music is better, and mixed drinks with friends are best. Start brave and brash: you can always make things more conservative, but it’s hard to make things more radical. Edit yourself, but let someone else censor you. When you ride the bus, imagine that you are looking at everything from the point of view of someone else on the ride. If you walk, look up on the way there and down on the way back. Aesthetics are fleeting, the only things with longevity are ideas. Read Bringhurst and one of those novels they made you read in high school cover to cover every few years. (Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby.) Stop trying to be cool: it is stifling.

Most important things happen at a table. Food, friends, discussion, ideas, work, peace talks, and war plans. It is okay to romanticize things a little bit every now and then: it gives you hope.

Everything is interesting to someone. That thing that you think is bad is probably just not for you. Be wary of minimalism as an aesthetic decision without cause. Simple is almost a dirty word now. Almost. Tools don’t matter very much, all you need is a sharp knife, but everyone has their own mise en place. If you need an analogy, use an animal. If you see a ladder in a piece of design or illustration, it means the deadline was short. Red, white, black, and gray always go together. Negative space. Size contrast. Directional contrast. Compositional foundations.

Success is generating an emotion. Failure is a million different things. Second-person writing is usually heavy-handed, like all of this.

Seeking advice is addicting and can become a proxy for action. Giving it can also be addicting in a potentially pretentious, soul-rotting sort of way, and can replace experimenting because you think you know how things work. Be suspicious of lists, advice, and lists of advice.

Everyone is just making it up as they go along.

This about sums up everything I know.