Details
The subtlest slightest kinds of differences
I am here
Scoop it up and whisk it away
It's not just a little thing
Good for the next man
Feeble and ugly
Rain Chains & Musical Drains
Conversations, not commandments
Good software comes from a vision, combined with conversations not commandments. In a craft-focused environment, care for efficiency, simplicity, and details really do matter. I didn’t leave my last job just because I wanted to make something new. I left because I wanted to make it in a way I could be proud of.
Modularity
One of the most pervasive features of these buildings is the fact that they are “modular.” They are full of identical concrete blocks, identical rooms, identical houses, identical apartments in identical apartment buildings. The idea that a building can - and ought - to be made of modular units is one of the most pervasive assumptions of twentieth-century architecture.
Nature is never modular. Nature is full of almost similar units (waves, raindrops, blades of grass) - but though the units of one kind are all alike in their broad structure, no two are ever alike in detail.
The same broad features keep recurring over and over again. And yet, in their detailed appearance these broad features are never twice the same.
Designing detail
My heart belongs to the details.
I actually always found them to be more important than the big picture.
Nothing works without details.
They are everything, the baseline of quality.Truly functional design only comes from the most careful and intense attention to detail.
Although he did not directly design all products and even had very little to do with some of them, he constantly encouraged tiny improvements that could make a good design better. This attention to detail ranged from the acuteness of angles in forms; the size, feels and distances between switches; the integration of handle fixings; the placement and nature of graphic elements on the products themselves and extended to product photography and packaging.
Designing detail is about achieving a fine balance in all aspects and areas of the product, including those external to the object.
Incidental details
In these journals lay the incidental details by which a book can be differentiated from a set of scientific articles. Such incidental details can become ends in themselves.
What you have observed closely
Drawing requires that you pay attention to every detail—even the seemingly unimportant ones. In creating an image (no matter how skillfully), the lines and tones on the paper provide ongoing feedback as to what you have observed closely and what you have not.
A cumulative effect
It is a cumulative effect, this character. It results from the combined impact of the design of a great many separate things, none of which is so very atrocious but too many of which are flatly negative, wanting. The design of each single thing in the environment, however small it may be, is really important.
A few millimeters apart
Aesthetes force us to consider whether happiness may not sometimes turn on the presence or absence of a fingerprint, whether in certain situations beauty and ugliness may not lie only a few millimeters apart, whether a single mark might not wreck a wall or an errant brush stroke undo a landscape painting.
The inner nature of material
The work of an artist in getting the details that he wants is greatly facilitated if he selects a material whose inner nature makes it want to take the desired shape.
Theatre Epidaurus, Greece, 330 BC
Mounting the massive cut stone stairs [of the amphitheater], we note the way in which the overhanging front edge of each seat folds down to form the first step up to the next section, the second step being the front edge of the foot space of the next set of seats. This detail is complemented by the way the undercut beneath the front edge of each seat is curved rather than sharp-edged — a detail that, being hidden in the shadows, is first revealed by our touch. An equally subtle detail is the way each stone seat is lifted slightly above the level of the foot space behind it, so that one does not set foot on the surface upon which others sit.
Warmed by the afternoon sun
Textbooks on water-system engineering state that supply mains are generally installed on the north side of the street in the Northern Hemisphere and on the south side in the Southern Hemisphere, so that the sun will warm them. In both hemispheres they are supposed to be on the east side of north-south streets, on the premise that the afternoon sun is warmer than the morning sun.
We must get our hands dirty!
We must get our hands dirty!In every work of architecture, the construction details are the heart of the project, and the true makers of the project are the ones who make the details, who make the materials directly, and who are not afraid to get dirt
under their fingernails.
Eggs, Easter and poached
When a site is done with care and excitement you can tell. You feel it as you visit, the hum of intention. The craft, the cohesiveness, the attention to detail is obvious. And in turn, you meet them halfway. These are the sites with the low bounce rates, the best engagement metrics, the ones where they get questions like “can I contribute?” No gimmicks needed.
What if you don’t have the time? Of course, we all have to get things over the line. Perhaps a challenge: what small thing can you incorporate that someone might notice? Can you start with a single detail? I didn’t start with a poached egg in my breakfast, one day I made a goofy scrambled one. It went on from there. Can you challenge yourself to learn one small new technique? Can you outsource one graphic? Can you introduce a tiny easter egg? Say something just a little differently from the typical corporate lingo?
Cloudbusting
An Article by Daisy AliotoIt is fun to revisit memories this way, a digital stamp in my weather passport, where everything can be contained in a forecast and Stockholm sits between Vilnius and London by sheer chance. It has also been a way to feel close to people I love while traveling, to know whether it is raining where they are.
As with most technology, this is artistry by committee. There is no Thomas Cole waiting in the wings. But someone has to animate the stars, to decide when to streak one across the screen–to play god in our pockets.
The other way to build a massive tech company - doing it slowly
A Podcast by Howie LiuI like to think about the early years of [Airtable] as not only a great time for us to be patient and to get a lot of details right in the product. I think some of those details had to be done in a slow, deliberate way with a small team. You can't necessarily parallelize the design and development of a really detail-oriented product.
Care for the Text
An Article by Robin RendleWhenever I’m stuck pondering the question: "How do I make this website better?" I know the answer is always this: Care for the text.
Without great writing, a website is harder to read, extremely difficult to navigate, and impossible to remember. Without great writing, it’s hardly a website at all. But it’s tough to remember this day in and day out—especially when it’s not our job to care about the text—yet each and every <p> tag and <button> element is an opportunity for great writing. It’s a moment to inject some humor or add a considerate note that helps people.
…These are the details that make a good website great.
Intelligent arrows
A Fragment by Chris CoyierReminds me of a little feature I like in Notion where if you type dash-arrow (like ->) it turns into → — but intelligently — like it doesn’t do that with inline code or a code block.
Subtilitas
A BlogSUBTĪLITĀS (latin; noun f., 3rd):
fineness of texture, logic, detail; slenderness, exactness, acuteness; sharpness : precisionI recommend eating chips
An Essay by Sam AndersonJoin me. Grab whatever you’ve got. Open the bag. Pinch it on its crinkly edges and pull apart the seams. Now we’re in business: We have broken the seal. The inside of the bag is silver and shining, a marvel of engineering — strong and flexible and reflective, like an astronaut suit. Lean in, inhale that unmistakable bouquet: toasted corn, dopamine, America, grief! We are the first humans to see these chips since they left the factory who knows when. They have been waiting for us, embalmed in preservatives, like a pharaoh in his dark tomb.
Why YKK zippers are the brown M&Ms of product design
An Article by Josh CentersA ‘pro tip’ for evaluating the quality of a piece of gear is to look at the small details, such as zippers and stitching. Cheap-minded manufacturers will skimp on those details because most people just don’t notice, and even a cheap component will often last past a basic warranty period, so it’s an easy way to increase profits without losing sales or returns.
If a designer does bother to invest in quality components, that’s a tried-and-true sign that the overall product is better than the competition.
littlebigdetails
A Blog by Floris DekkerLittle Big Details is a curated collection of the finer details of design.
As Charles & Ray Eames put it:
“The details are not the details; they make the product.”
This is intended to be a source of inspiration.
Created and curated by Floris Dekker. Alumni: Andrew McCarthy.
80/20 is the new Half-Ass
An Article by Shawn WangThe Pareto Principle is making you lazy.
Let me be more precise: The Pareto distribution is a useful model of power law effects in real life. But people are using it poorly, primarily as an excuse to be lazy.
...People forget that the devil is in the details. The first 20% everyone knows to say on Twitter. The remaining 80% is the ugly, nasty, hacky, unglamorous shit nobody talks about unless you've got time to sweat the details.
The 99% Invisible City
A Book by Roman Mars & Kurt KohlstedtMakespace.fun
An ApplicationIn today’s software, live video feeds are stuck inside static rectangles that can’t go anywhere. MakeSpace flips all that on its head. Your cursor is your live face, and you can roam free, controlling who and what you want to be close to.
The Elements of Typographic Style
Leave the road when you wish
The subject of this book is not typographic solitude, but the old, well-traveled roads at the core of the tradition: paths that each of us is free to follow or not, and to enter and leave when we choose – if only we know the paths are there and have a sense of where they lead. That freedom is denied us if the tradition is concealed or left for dead. Originality is everywhere, but much originality is blocked if the way back to earlier discoveries is cut or overgrown.
If you use this book as a guide, by all means leave the road when you wish. That is precisely the use of a road: to reach individually chosen points of departure. By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well. That is one of the ends for which they exist.
Typography exists to honor content
In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspired to a kind of statuesque transparency. Its other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superiority to fashion. Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.
Typographic style
Literary style, says Walter Benjamin, “is the power to move freely in the length and breadth of linguistic thinking without slipping into banality.” Typographic style, in this large and intelligence sense of the word, does not mean any particular style – my style or your style, or Neoclassical or Baroque style – but the power to move freely through the whole domain of typography, and to function at every step in a way that is graceful and vital instead of banal.
A state of energetic repose
Read the text before designing it.
Discover the outer logic of the typography in the inner logic of the text.
Make the visible relationship between the text and other elements (photographs, captions, tables, diagrams, notes) a reflection of their real relationship.
Give full typographic attention even to incidental details.
Invite the reader into the text.
Reveal the tenor and meaning of the text.
Clarify the structure and the order of the text.
Link the text with other existing elements.Induce a state of energetic repose, which is the ideal condition for reading.
Evenness of color
The density of texture in a written or typeset page is called its color.
Once the demands of legibility and logical order are satisfied, evenness of color is the typographer’s normal aim. And color in the typographic sense depends upon four things: the design of the type, the spacing between the letters, the spacing between the words, and the spacing between the lines. None is independent of the others.
A single note
The simplest scale is a single note, and sticking with a single note draws more attention to the other parameters, such as rhythm and inflection. The early Renaissance typographers set each book in a single font – that is, one face in one size. Their pages show what sensuous evenness of texture and variety of rhythm can be attained with a single font of type.
The higher courts
Refer typographic disputes to the higher courts of speech and thinking.
Type is idealized writing, and its normal function is to record idealized speech. Acronyms such as CD and TV or USA and UFO are set in caps because that is the way we pronounce them. Acronyms such as UNESCO, ASCII, and FORTRAN, which are pronounced not as letters but as words, are in the process of becoming precisely that. When a writer accepts them fully into her speech and urges readers to do likewise, it is time for the typographer to accept them into the common speech of typography by setting them in lower case. Other acronymic words, such as laser and radar, have long since traveled the same road.
An antiphonal geometry
A book is a flexible mirror of the mind and body. Its overall size and proportions, the color and texture of the paper, the sound it makes as the pages turn, and the smell of the paper, adhesive and ink, all blend with the size and form and placement of the type to reveal a little about the world in which it was made. If the book appears to be only a paper machine, produced at their own convenience by other machines, only machines will want to read it.
Sizing and spacing type, like composing and performing music or applying paint to canvas, is largely concerned with intervals and differences.
The page is a piece of paper. It is also a visible and tangible proportion, silently sounding the thoroughbass of the book. On it lies the textblock, which much answer to the page. The two together – page and textblock – produce an antiphonal geometry. That geometry alone can bond the reader to the book. Or conversely, it can put the reader to sleep, or put the reader’s nerves on edge, or drive the reader away.
Pure but silent
Architects build perfectly proportioned kitchens, living rooms and bedrooms in which their clients will make, among other things, a mess. Typographers likewise build perfectly proportioned pages, then distort them on demand. The text takes precedence over the purity of the design, and the typographic texture of the text takes precedence over the absolute proportions of the pure but silent page.
A sterile sameness
Another kind of random variation involves the interaction of the craftsman’s skill and the texture of materials. The letterforms of Griffo and Colines were cut with immense care. But the letters they cut were struck by hand in copper or brass, then cast and dressed and set by hand, inked by hand with handmade ink and printed by hand in a handmade wooden press on handmade paper. Every step along with way introduced small variations planned by no one. In the world of the finely honed machine, those human-scale textures are erased. A sterile sameness supervenes.
The computer is, on the face of it, an ideal device for reviving the old luxury of random variations at the threshold of perception (quite a different thing from chaos). But conventional typesetting software and hardware focuses instead on the unsustainable ideal of absolute control – and has been hamstrung in the past by the idea of a single glyph per character. There have been several recent attempts to introduce a layer of random variation, but all have had to work against the grain of technological development.
Waiting to repay the gift of vision
Like a forest or a garden or a field, an honest page of letters can absorb – and will repay – all the attention it is given. Much type now, however, is delivered to computer screens. It is a good deal harder to make text truly legible on screen than to render streaming video. Both fine technology and great restraint are required to make the screen as restful to the eyes as ordinary paper.
The underlying problem is that the screen mimics the sky instead of the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision – like the petals of a flower, or the face of a thinking animal, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, or in magnified small bits, like astronomers studying details. We look to it for clues and revelations more than wisdom. This makes it an attractive place for the open storage of pulverized information – names, dates, or library call numbers, for instance – but not so good a place for thoughtful text.
Respect
Respect the text first of all, the letterforms second, the type designer third, the foundry fourth.
The needs of the text should take precedence over the layout of the font, the integrity of the letterforms over the ego of the designer, the artistic sensibility of the designer over the foundry’s desire for profit, and the founder’s craft over a good deal else.
Little by little
Check every text you set to see where improvements can be made. Then return to the font and make them. Little by little, you and the instrument – the font, that is – will fuse, and the type you set will start to sing. Remember, though, this process never ends. There is no such thing as the perfect font.
An end in itself
Typography, like language, is more important to me for what it allows to happen than for anything it accomplishes on its own. I hope that in writing a book on the subject I have not given the impression that either typography or design is an end in itself.
Not as a star
But I’m warning you,
this is my last existence.
Not as a swallow, not as a maple,
not as a cat-tail and not as a star.