The eyes of a traveler We’ve all heard that travel broadens the mind. But beneath this cliché lies a deep truth. Things stand out because they’re different, so we notice every detail, from street signs to mailboxes to two you pay at a restaurant. We learn a lot when we travel, not because we are any smarter on the road but because we pay such close attention. On a trip, we become our own version of Sherlock Holmes, intensely observing the environment around us. We are continuously trying to figure out a world that is foreign and new. Too often, we go through our day-to-day life on cruise control, oblivious to huge swaths of our surroundings. To notice friction points – and therefore opportunities to do things better – it helps to see the world with fresh eyes. When you meet creative people with lots of ideas constantly bubbling to the surface, you often come away feeling that they are operating on a different frequency. And they are, most of the time. They have all their receptors on — and frequently turned up to eleven. But the fact is, we are all capable of this mode. Try to engage a beginner’s mind. For kids, everything is novel, so they ask lots of questions, and look at the world wide-eyed, soaking it all in. Everywhere they turn, they tend to think, Isn’t that interesting? rather than, I already know that. By adopting the eyes of a traveler and a beginner’s mindset, you will notice a lot of details that you might normally have overlook. You put aside assumptions and are fully immersed in the world around you. In this receptive mode, you’re ready to start actively searching out inspiration. Richard Saul Wurman, Understanding Understanding Like designing things for the first time travelcliché
The language itself has been weaponized It’s quite difficult, to fight back against the seeming wisdom of axiomatic “truths,” when the language itself has been weaponized through the power of pattern. Through rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and consonance. The last time I was in England was at the invitation of Nomensa, to give a talk at a conference wherein I encouraged the audience to discard an axiom that I feel has done users of the English language more harm than good through endless and glib repetitions. Like “Curiosity Killed The Cat,” “You Are Not Your User” sounds so good that we keep on saying it, without appreciating what we’re reifying through repetition. The pleasure of repetition, the pleasure of pattern matching, the pleasingness of Kuh Kuh Kuh consonants on the one hand, and of the round vowelly Yuh Yuh Yuh on the other make these things we say seem true because they sound and feel so good to say. Dan Klyn, Sermon for WIAD Bristol 2021 understandinggroup.com repetitiontruthlanguagecliché
The debris of someone else's thinking A cliché isn't just a familiar, overused saying. It's the debris of someone else's thinking. Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing cliché
The way an oyster does A Fragment by Kay Ryan www.csmonitor.com Her poems, [Kay Ryan] says, don't begin with a simple image or sound, but instead start "the way an oyster does, with an aggravation." An old saw may nudge her repeatedly, such as "It's always darkest before the dawn" or "Why did the chicken cross the road?" "I think, 'What about those chickens?' " she says, "and I start an investigation of what that means. Poets rehabilitate clichés." poetrymeaningcliché
Beyond Artboards An Essay by Chuánqí Sun medium.com The Pursuit of Lossless Design-Development Handoffs. Can't developers just see?We are the ones who paved the pathUntil we get there processinterfacesdesign
Can't developers just see? We designers love artboards. From rough UI sketches to high fidelity mockups, we see ourselves as visual artists expressing ideas on artboards that have a pre-defined width and height. To start a new project, we declare the size of the artboard in the first step. What about responsive design? Not a problem! We diligently design on three artboards — one for mobile, one for tablet, and one for desktop — with content elegantly adapting, scaling, reflowing, reordering, and reprioritizing. We proudly hand off the artboards to developers while patting ourselves on the back: this is how responsive design should be done. After weeks of arduous engineering, the product finally comes out. We find, to our great dismay, that some copy is hanging off the grid, the focal point of the hero image has been cropped out, the font sizes don’t even come close to the type ramp. What went wrong? Can’t the developers just see everything on all those artboards? Nope. Start drawing, then put the box around it
We are the ones who paved the path No matter how many screen sizes our artboards account for, some user’s browser will break loose from our prescription. With users resizing, rotating, and zooming the screen, new devices stretching, squashing, curving, and cutting (e.g. the speaker area in iPhone X) the screen, the sizes become infinite. Good luck making an artboard for each one of them. Artboards are a lossy format. Using artboards in a handoff is a lossy process. When we pitch a finite number of plans against an infinite number of situations. We inevitably get in-betweens. Once there are in-betweens, there are unknowns. Once there are unknowns there is guesswork. Once there is guesswork, there are surprises. Engineers take the path of least resistance. We are ones who paved the path. gridless.designChanging Our Development Mindset
Until we get there As a designer, learn writing HTML, or better still, semantic HTML. If coding up the entire design is too hard, try coding up one component at a time, and not worrying about CSS. The HTML alone will prove invaluable for developers to understand the content structure. In addition, you are forced to optimize the information architecture as you work out the code from content. If coding by yourself is out of the question, pair up with the engineer who will receive the design. Work closely with him or her to prototype the design, validate responsive behaviors, and obtain feedback on the feasibility. Don’t call it an iteration until the design has seen played with in code. As a manager for large enterprise, co-locate your designers and developers, encourage interdisciplinary learning, understand that each minute spent on coding before the handoff translates to ten minutes saved from changing and fixing issues after the handoff. As a stakeholder in the handoff meeting, give the designer a thumbs-up when he or she demos live code running in browsers in place of mockups on artboards. That’s a design champion you are looking at. html