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Craig Mod

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  • To Make a Book, Walk on a Book

    An Essay by Craig Mod
    craigmod.com
    Image from craigmod.com on 2020-08-11 at 10.08.03 AM.jpeg

    The ability of the physical world — a floor, a wall — to act as a screen of near infinite resolution becomes more powerful the more time we spend heads-down in our handheld computers, screens the size of palms. In fact, it’s almost impossible to see the visual patterns — the inherent adjacencies — of a physical book unless you deconstruct it and splay it out on the floor.

    1. ​​Koya Bound​​
    2. ​​How I Wrote Shape Up​​
    • design
    • typography
    • understanding
    • publishing
    • walking
  • Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump

    An Article by Craig Mod
    craigmod.com
    1. ​​It begins with craft​​
    2. ​​Penn Station​​
    3. ​​Edges​​
    4. ​​The business case for craft​​

    Our software feels less refined as our hardware achieves platonic ideals.

  • Thanks Doc

    An Article by Robin Rendle & Craig Mod
    www.robinrendle.com

    A couple of months back, Craig mentioned in a video that he has a doc filled to the brim with snippets of text—nice words, compliments, and thanks that had been sent his way for his work. Whenever someone says something nice he just copy/pastes it into that doc.

    It sounds silly at first and perhaps a little egotistical. Behold! I have a document that proves how great I am!

    But I started doing it just to see what it feels like and…hey…actually? It’s so great! When I’m feeling low (often) or whenever the world feels unstable (extremely often) it’s so very nice to return to a few kind words about my work. It reminds me just how much these words of praise mean, it reminds me that I ought to pass that favor along.

    1. ​​Good Things​​
    • happiness
    • work
    • friendship
  • Delight is constraints, joyfully embraced

    An Article by Craig Mod
    craigmod.com
    Image from craigmod.com on 2021-12-06 at 8.18.04 PM.jpeg

    And what is delight? For me, delight is born from a tool’s intuitiveness. Things just working without much thought or fiddling. Delight is a simple menu system you almost never have to use. Delight is a well-balanced weight on the shoulder, in the hand. Delight is the just-right tension on the aperture ring between stops. Delight is a single battery lasting all day. Delight is being able to knock out a 10,000 iso image and know it'll be usable. Delight is extracting gorgeous details from the cloak of shadows. Delight is firing off a number of shots without having to wait for the buffer to catch up. Delight is constraints, joyfully embraced.

    • photography
    • constraints
    • joy
    • craft
  • Fast Software, the Best Software

    An Essay by Craig Mod
    craigmod.com

    I love fast software. That is, software speedy both in function and interface. Software with minimal to no lag between wanting to activate or manipulate something and the thing happening. Lightness.

    Software that’s speedy usually means it’s focused. Like a good tool, it often means that it’s simple, but that’s not necessarily true. Speed in software is probably the most valuable, least valued asset. To me, speedy software is the difference between an application smoothly integrating into your life, and one called upon with great reluctance. Fastness in software is like great margins in a book — makes you smile without necessarily knowing why.

    • performance
    • software
    • ux
  • Looking Closely is Everything

    An Essay by Craig Mod
    craigmod.com
    Image from craigmod.com on 2021-03-02 at 11.45.16 AM.jpeg

    Kambara, detail by detail.

    I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh is to get good at both paying attention and nurturing compassion; if you don’t notice, you can’t give a shit. But the huh is only half the equation. You gotta go huh, alright — the “alright,” the follow-up, the openness to what comes next is where the cascade lives. It’s the sometimes-sardonic, sometimes-optimistic engine driving the next huh and so on and so forth.

    1. ​​A little dose of time travel​​
    1. ​​Pointing at things​​
    2. ​​One brick​​
    3. ​​I recommend eating chips​​
    4. ​​Haven't you noticed?​​
    5. ​​The Student, The Fish, and Agassiz​​
    • interest
    • attention
    • seeing
    • curiosity
  • Ri — The Distance Walked in an Hour

    An Article by Craig Mod
    craigmod.com
    Image from craigmod.com on 2021-02-25 at 10.05.32 AM.jpeg

    A ri is a unit of measure, it’s about how far a person can walk in an hour at a reasonable pace. It clocks out at roughly 3.93 kilometers.

    Remnants of the ri system are scattered along the old roads of Japan. During the Edo period, ri were marked recurrently by hulking earthen mounds that flanked the road — ichi-ri zuka, “one-ri mounds.” There are only a handful of “originals” left. When you pass one with an old cypress or oak growing from its center it becomes a tiny moment of celebration.

    • walking
    • scale
  • A Need to Walk

    An Essay by Craig Mod
    craigmod.com

    Walking intrigues the deskbound. We romanticize it, but do we do it justice? Do we walk properly? Can one walk improperly and, if so, what happens when the walk is corrected?

    • walking
    • thinking
    • urbanism
    • discovery
  • Life as Protest

    A Fragment by Craig Mod
    craigmod.com

    I’ve written this before but I constantly need to remind myself of it, so, once again: A certain kind of work, lifestyle, mode of living — in and of itself — is protest. That is, work that is curious and rigorous is implicitly an antipode to didactic, shallow bombastity. It is inherently an archetype against bullshit. That to be committed to this work or life of rigor (be it rigor focused on “art” or, as they say in Japanese, sakuhin, or family or athleticism or whatever), and to share it with the world is to opt-out of being paralyzed by idiocy, and help others who may be paralyzed find a path back to whatever fecundity of life it is that they deserve.

    • life
    • work
    • society
  • Koya Bound

    A Book by Craig Mod
    walkkumano.com
    Screenshot of walkkumano.com on 2020-08-11 at 10.02.26 AM.png

    Koya-san — home to esoteric Buddhism — is the name of a sacred basin eight hundred meters high and surrounded by eight mountains. It is roughly one hundred kilometers of trails north from the Kumano Hongu Taisha shrine in Wakayama, Japan. Though the name of the basin is often incorrectly translated as Mt. Koya in English, Mt. Koya is only one of the eight peaks, and is remote from the central cluster of temples.

    We walked towards Koya-san, but we did not touch Mt. Koya.

    1. ​​To Make a Book, Walk on a Book​​
    • writing
    • photography
    • walking

See also:
  1. walking
  2. craft
  3. software
  4. performance
  5. photography
  6. work
  7. attention
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  9. business
  10. www
  11. writing
  12. design
  13. typography
  14. understanding
  15. publishing
  16. life
  17. society
  18. thinking
  19. urbanism
  20. discovery
  21. scale
  22. time
  23. interest
  24. seeing
  25. curiosity
  26. ux
  27. constraints
  28. joy
  29. happiness
  30. friendship