The mortifying ordeal of being known A Fragment by Tim Kreider opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com Years ago a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom. There is no way I would ever make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but I understand its terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known. lovehumanity
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. Sophie Lovell & Dieter Rams, Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible The details of construction details