Building a knowledge base An Article by Will Darwin www.willdarwin.com What is a commonplace?Curiosity spurred onInformation remixHow to be a genius commonplaceknowledge
Blogging with Version Control An Article by Will Darwin willdarwin.com I’ve been musing for a while now on the way blog posts are typically presented—in reverse chronological order. This format has never truly made sense and does not reflect the way good writing and thinking happens. ...The main issue with the ‘pile’ system is that this post is eventually buried beneath more recent pieces of writing; there is no incentive for revisiting or updating the work. Even worse, if an author does decide to unearth the piece and make some major changes, those who read the original piece are not made aware of these alterations. The sorting order is static. bloggingwritinginformation
How to Think About Notes An Article by Will Darwin www.willdarwin.com Thinking in terms of outputs Maggie Appleton's Digital Garden notetakingwritinginformation
A Dao of Web Design An Essay by John Allsopp alistapart.com What I sense is a real tension between the web as we know it, and the web as it would be. It’s the tension between an existing medium, the printed page, and its child, the web. And it’s time to really understand the relationship between the parent and the child, and to let the child go its own way in the world. Conventions of a mediumTo abandon controlThe journey begins by letting go Web History Chapter 6: Web Design wwwuxaccessibilitydesign
Conventions of a medium When a new medium borrows from an existing one, some of what it borrows makes sense, but much of the borrowing is thoughtless, “ritual,” and often constrains the new medium. Over time, the new medium develops its own conventions, throwing off existing conventions that don’t make sense. If you ever get the chance to watch early television drama you’ll find a strong example of this. Because radio required a voice-over to describe what listeners couldn’t see, early television drama often featured a voice over, describing what viewers could. It’s a simple but striking example of what happens when a new medium develops out of an existing one. filmmedia
To abandon control In print the designer is god. An enormous industry has emerged from WYSIWYG, and many of the web’s designers are grounded in the beliefs and practices, the ritual of that medium. As designers we need to rethink this role, to abandon control, and seek a new relationship with the page. The control which designers know in the print medium, and often desire in the web medium, is simply a function of the limitation of the printed page. We should embrace the fact that the web doesn’t have the same constraints, and design for this flexibility. But first, we must “accept the ebb and flow of things.” typographyconstraints
The journey begins by letting go The journey begins by letting go of control, and becoming flexible. wisdomzen