1. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
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  15. Arango, Jorge 4
  16. architecture 110
  17. art 86
  18. Asimov, Isaac 5
  19. attention 17
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  25. Behrensmeyer, Anna K. 7
  26. Bjarnason, Baldur 8
  27. Blake, William 5
  28. blogging 22
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  30. Boeing, Geoff 7
  31. boredom 9
  32. Botton, Alain de 38
  33. Brand, Stewart 4
  34. Bringhurst, Robert 16
  35. Brooks, Frederick P. 22
  36. Broskoski, Charles 6
  37. brutalism 7
  38. building 16
  39. bureaucracy 12
  40. Burnham, Bo 9
  41. business 15
  42. Byron, Lord 14
  43. Cagan, Marty 8
  44. Calvino, Italo 21
  45. Camus, Albert 13
  46. care 6
  47. Carruth, Shane 15
  48. Cegłowski, Maciej 6
  49. Cervantes, Miguel de 7
  50. chance 11
  51. change 16
  52. Chiang, Ted 4
  53. childhood 6
  54. Chimero, Frank 17
  55. choice 8
  56. cities 51
  57. Clark, Robin 3
  58. Cleary, Thomas 8
  59. Cleary, J.C. 8
  60. code 20
  61. collaboration 18
  62. collections 31
  63. color 23
  64. commonplace 11
  65. communication 31
  66. community 7
  67. complexity 11
  68. connection 24
  69. constraints 25
  70. construction 9
  71. content 9
  72. Corbusier, Le 13
  73. Coyier, Chris 4
  74. craft 66
  75. creativity 59
  76. crime 9
  77. Critchlow, Tom 5
  78. critique 10
  79. Cross, Nigel 12
  80. Cross, Anita Clayburn 10
  81. css 11
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  84. cycles 7
  85. Danielewski, Mark Z. 4
  86. darkness 28
  87. Darwin, Will 10
  88. data 8
  89. death 38
  90. Debord, Guy 6
  91. decisions 10
  92. design 131
  93. details 31
  94. Dickinson, Emily 9
  95. Dieste, Eladio 4
  96. discovery 9
  97. doors 7
  98. Dorn, Brandon 11
  99. drawing 23
  100. Drucker, Peter F. 15
  101. Duany, Andres 18
  102. Eatock, Daniel 4
  103. economics 13
  104. efficiency 7
  105. Eisenman, Peter 8
  106. Eliot, T.S. 14
  107. emotion 8
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  110. Eno, Brian 4
  111. ethics 14
  112. euphony 38
  113. Evans, Benedict 4
  114. evolution 9
  115. experience 14
  116. farming 8
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  118. features 25
  119. feedback 6
  120. flaws 10
  121. Flexner, Abraham 8
  122. food 16
  123. form 19
  124. Fowler, Martin 4
  125. Franklin, Ursula M. 30
  126. friendship 6
  127. fun 7
  128. function 31
  129. games 13
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  132. Garfunkel, Art 6
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  134. geometry 18
  135. goals 9
  136. Gombrich, E. H. 4
  137. goodness 12
  138. Graham, Paul 37
  139. graphics 13
  140. Greene, Erick 6
  141. Hamming, Richard 45
  142. happiness 17
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  144. Harper, Thomas J. 15
  145. Hayes, Brian 28
  146. heat 7
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  148. Herbert, Frank 4
  149. Heschong, Lisa 27
  150. Hesse, Herman 6
  151. history 13
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  153. Hofstadter, Douglas 6
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  156. Hoyt, Ben 5
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  159. humanity 16
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  161. Huxley, Aldous 7
  162. hypermedia 22
  163. i 18
  164. ideas 21
  165. identity 33
  166. images 10
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  168. information 42
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  170. innovation 15
  171. interaction 10
  172. interest 10
  173. interfaces 37
  174. intuition 8
  175. invention 10
  176. Irwin, Robert 65
  177. Isaacson, Walter 28
  178. Ishikawa, Sara 33
  179. iteration 13
  180. Ive, Jonathan 6
  181. Jackson, Steven J. 14
  182. Jacobs, Jane 54
  183. Jacobs, Alan 5
  184. Jobs, Steve 20
  185. Jones, Nick 5
  186. Kahn, Louis 4
  187. Kakuzō, Okakura 23
  188. Kaufman, Kenn 4
  189. Keith, Jeremy 6
  190. Keller, Jenny 10
  191. Keqin, Yuanwu 8
  192. Ketheswaran, Pirijan 6
  193. Kingdon, Jonathan 5
  194. Kitching, Roger 7
  195. Klein, Laura 4
  196. Kleon, Austin 13
  197. Klinkenborg, Verlyn 24
  198. Klyn, Dan 20
  199. knowledge 29
  200. Kohlstedt, Kurt 12
  201. Kramer, Karen L. 10
  202. Krishna, Golden 10
  203. Kuma, Kengo 18
  204. language 20
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  207. light 31
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  209. love 26
  210. Lovell, Sophie 16
  211. Lupton, Ellen 11
  212. Luu, Dan 8
  213. Lynch, Kevin 12
  214. MacIver, David R. 8
  215. MacWright, Tom 5
  216. Magnus, Margaret 12
  217. making 77
  218. management 14
  219. Manaugh, Geoff 27
  220. Markson, David 16
  221. Mars, Roman 13
  222. material 39
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  224. McCarter, Robert 21
  225. meaning 33
  226. media 16
  227. melancholy 52
  228. memory 29
  229. metaphor 10
  230. metrics 19
  231. microsites 49
  232. Miller, J. Abbott 10
  233. Mills, C. Wright 9
  234. minimalism 10
  235. Miyazaki, Hayao 30
  236. Mod, Craig 15
  237. modularity 6
  238. Mollison, Bill 31
  239. morality 8
  240. Murakami, Haruki 21
  241. music 16
  242. Müller, Boris 7
  243. Naka, Toshiharu 8
  244. names 11
  245. Naskrecki, Piotr 5
  246. nature 51
  247. networks 15
  248. Neustadter, Scott 3
  249. Noessel, Christopher 7
  250. notetaking 35
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  252. objects 16
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  256. Ott, Matthias 4
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  260. patterns 11
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  326. Smith, Cyril Stanley 29
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  328. Smith, Rach 4
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  342. Ström, Matthew 13
  343. style 30
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  348. Sōseki, Natsume 8
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Design

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  • Doing nothing with precision

    For his part, Gehry has noted in defense of his recent museum extravaganzas: "artists want to be in an important building, not a neutral one." At Dia:Beacon, Irwin pursued the opposite logic. As Govan has pointed out: "The money was spent to make it look like nothing was done to the building." Or, as a partner from Open Office observes: "We talked often about the idea of doing nothing with precision. Do it right and they'll never know we were here." As one critic has written, what the result showed was, as he puts it, "Irwin's unwavering conviction that museum spaces should serve the art and not the other way around."

    Matthew Simms, Robert Irwin: A Conditional Art
    • space
    • architecture
    • art
    • design
  • 104. Site Repair

    Problem

    Buildings must always be built on those parts of the land which are in the worst condition, not the best.

    Solution

    On no account place buildings in the places which are more beautiful. In fact, do the opposite. Consider the site and its buildings as a single living ecosystem. Leave those areas that are the most precious, beautiful, comfortable, and healthy as they are, and build new structures in those parts of the site which are least pleasant now.

    Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein & Sara Ishikawa, A Pattern Language
    1. ​​Einmal Ist Keinmal​​
    2. ​​Repair​​
    3. ​​But then the knoll was gone​​
    4. ​​Composition and revision​​
    5. ​​Rethinking Repair​​
    • building
    • making
    • design
    • repair
  • The Design Squiggle

    A Website by Damien Newman
    thedesignsquiggle.com
    Image from thedesignsquiggle.com on 2020-05-13 at 2.59.19 PM.jpeg

    The Design Squiggle is a simple illustration of the design process. The journey of researching, uncovering insights, generating creative concepts, iteration of prototypes and eventually concluding in one single designed solution. It is intended to convey the feeling of the journey. Beginning on the left with mess and uncertainty and ending on the right in a single point of focus: the design.

    1. ​​Design skirmishes​​
    2. ​​Wonder Plots​​
    3. ​​Embracing the mess​​
    4. ​​The Design Diagram​​
    5. ​​On Greatness​​
    • design
    • process
    • creativity
    • iteration
  • A late change in requirements is a competitive advantage

    A Quote by Mary Poppendieck
    1. ​​The State of Agile Software in 2018​​
    2. ​​Yagni​​
    3. ​​Complete and consistent requirements​​
    4. ​​Welcome changing requirements​​
    • agile
    • software
    • design
  • It passes by the river

    "Artists need to be in there from the start, making the argument for quality. The key to this thing is, for example, if you give an engineer a set of criteria which does not include a quality quotient, as it were—that is, if this sense of the quality, the character of the place, is not a part of his original motivation—he will then basically put the road straight down the middle. He has no reason to curve it. But if I can convince him that quality is absolutely a worthwhile thing and we can work out a way in which the road can be efficient and also wander down by the river, then we essentially have both: he provides his sort of expertise in that the road works, I provide quality in that it passes by the river. In that way, art gets built into the criteria from the beginning rather than being added on afterward."

    Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
    1. ​​We want you to work with an artist​​
    2. ​​The problem with ornament​​
    • quality
    • design
    • function
    • collaboration
  • The differences in intentionality

    [Marc] Treib summarized Irwin's views on conditional art as follows: "One does not start with a personal vocabulary or manner to be adapter to each situation. Thus, given the differences in intentionality between art and design, the artist and the designer will 'plow different furrows seemingly in the same field.'" This is an important point since it gets at the difference that Irwin sees between art and design, the first of which is predicated, as he says, on the opportunity to deal with each situation freely and without constraints, and the latter, which is restricted in many ways from the outset by functional, stylistic, and economic concerns.

    Matthew Simms, Robert Irwin: A Conditional Art
    • constraints
    • art
    • design
  • The situation talks back

    As the designer shapes the situation in accordance with his initial presentation of it, the situation “talks back” and he responds to the situation’s back-talk. In a good process of design, this conversation with the situation is reflexive. In answer to the situation’s back-talk, the designer reflects-in-action on the construction of the problem, the strategies of action, or the model of the phenomena, which have been implicit in his moves.

    Donald Schon, The Reflective Practitioner
    1. ​​What's wrong with the rational model​​
    2. ​​What the prototype tells you​​
    3. ​​Expressing ideas helps to form them​​
    4. ​​The idea grows as they work​​
    5. ​​Drawing as a means of thinking​​
    6. ​​Four principles​​
    7. ​​Writing, Briefly​​
    • design
  • The minimum condition

    When a device is so designed that its component parts are only just strong enough to get the intended result without danger of failure, we may say it is in its minimum condition.

    I suspect that the functionalists sometimes meant by functional design simply design aimed at the minimum condition for a device. In that case 'form should follow function' would mean that every system should be in its minimum condition, thus having certain limitations imposed on its form.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    1. ​​Form follows function​​
    • function
    • constraints
    • design
    • minimalism
  • Eating your own dog food

    Eating your own dog food or “dogfooding” is the practice of using one's own products or services. This can be a way for an organization to test its products in real-world usage using product management techniques. Hence dogfooding can act as quality control, and eventually a kind of testimonial advertising. Once in the market, dogfooding can demonstrate developers confidence in their own products.

    Wikipedia
    en.wikipedia.org
    1. ​​Designer, implementor, user, writer​​
    2. ​​The reflective craftsman​​
    • quality
    • products
    • design
  • Between the two spaces

    It is widely accepted that creative design is not a matter of first fixing the problem and then searching for a satisfactory solution concept; instead it seems more to be a matter of developing and refining together both the formulation of the problem and ideas for its solution, with constant iteration of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation processes between the two “spaces” – problem and solution.

    Nigel Cross & Kees Dorst, Co-Evolution of Problem and Solution Spaces in Creative Design
    • design
    • making
    • iteration
  • The game discovering itself

    We like to think about this process as the game discovering itself over time. Because as iterators, rather than designers, it’s our job to simply play the game, listen to it, feel it, and kind of feel out what it seems to want to become - and just follow the trails of what’s fun.

    Seth Coster, Crashlands: Design by Chaos
    www.youtube.com
    1. ​​What the prototype tells you​​
    2. ​​Follow the fun​​
    • design
    • making
    • iteration
  • Substance over style

    By the 1930s, the teardrop shape, known since the turn of the century to be the form of least resistance, was incorporated into Boeing and Douglas aircraft, and, being the contemporary artifact that best symbolized the future, the airplane set the style for things generally. The most static of mundane objects were streamlined for no functional purpose, and chromed and rounded staplers, pencil sharpeners, and toasters were hailed as the epitome of design.

    ...Though all design is necessarily forward-looking, all design or design changes are not necessarily motivated by fickle style trends. The best in design always prefers substance over style, and the lasting concept over the ephemeral gimmick.

    Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things
    • design
    • style
    • fashion
  • No more than a sketch

    The quality of a musical performance depends on the performers as much as on the score. The performers are said to be interpreting the score, but in fact they are adding intention of their own to those of the composer, recognizing that no score can in practice ever fully express the intentions of a composer, that it can never be more than an indication, a sketch; and no designer can in practice ever produce more than a sketch.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    1. ​​The work is what it means​​
    2. ​​The meaning of music​​
    • design
    • making
  • The pernicious issue with pangrams

    Screenshot of www.typography.com on 2020-05-26 at 10.49.18 AM.png

    The far more pernicious issue with pangrams, as a means for evaluating typefaces, is how poorly they portray what text actually looks like. Every language has a natural distribution of letters, from most to least common, English famously beginning with the E that accounts for one eighth of what we read, and ending with the Z that appears just once every 1,111 letters. Letter frequencies differ by language and by era — the J is ten times more popular in Dutch than English; biblical English unduly favors the H thanks to archaisms like thou and sayeth — but no language behaves the way pangrams do, with their forced distribution of exotics. Seven of the most visually awkward letters, the W, Y, V, K, X, J, and Z, are among the nine rarest in English, but pangrams force them into every sentence, guaranteeing that every paragraph will be riddled with holes. A typeface designer certainly can’t avoid accounting for these unruly characters, but there’s no reason that they should be disproportionately represented when evaluating how a typeface will perform.

    Jonathan Hoefler, Text for Proofing Fonts
    www.typography.com
    1. ​​Embracing Asymmetrical Design​​
    • typography
    • language
    • design
  • On Criticism

    People are being counted on to do specific pieces of the puzzle. And the most important thing I think you can do for somebody who’s really good and who’s really being counted on is to point out to them when their work isn’t good enough, and to do it very clearly, and to articulate why, and to get them back on track. And you need to do that in a way that does not call into question your confidence in their abilities, but leaves not much room for interpretation.

    Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview
    • design
    • work
    • critique
  • We are working against the grain of the wood

    A woodworker works along the grain of the wood to prevent splinter. A butcher slices across to the muscle fiber to improve tenderness. A sailor trims the sail to balance the lift and drag from the wind. When we respect the material, the material pays us back in convenience, safety, and efficiency.

    Good web design requires the same understanding of and respect for the materials. And that material is the browser, along with its semantic HTML, default styles, and standard behaviors. But the wide use of design software such as Figma, Sketch, and AdobeXD has trivialized the nuances of such material into “canvases” or “artboards” of pre-defined sizes. The convenient styling and manipulation of pixels and objects have disguised the hierarchy of the DOM, the constraints of the device, and the personal preferences and browser setting from real users. Dishonest tools encourage dishonest design.

    We are working against the grain of the wood.

    Chuánqí Sun, A case against "pixel perfect" design
    1. ​​The Web's Grain​​
    2. ​​What the brick really wants.​​
    3. ​​What the material wants to be​​
    • material
    • www
    • design
  • Embracing the mess

    Design is non-linear. At Figma, we often talk about “embracing the mess,” and that really means leaning into the chaos and complexity that makes the design process what it is. Even once you have the seedling of an idea, you need to explore and iterate, then pull back and evaluate to see what’s working and what’s not. Sometimes you’ll scrap an idea after a brainstorm session, and other times you’ll get pretty far with a concept, but still need different perspectives and input to move forward.

    Yuhki Yamashita, A Q&A with Figma's VP of Product
    1. ​​The Design Squiggle​​
    • design
    • making
    • iteration
  • You can almost tell which software they were designed in

    Tatiana von Preussen, cofounder of London practice vPPR Architects, says that certain software comes with constraints that encourage a particular style:

    “Something I’ve noticed with new buildings is that you can almost tell which software they were designed in. For instance, if you take Revit, it’s very hard to freely create non-orthogonal, non-linear geometries, and it’s very easy to create repetitive elements, so it lends itself to a particular way of building.”

    Nick Jones, Back to the Drawing Board
    1. ​​Every Tool Shapes the Task​​
    • constraints
    • tools
    • design
  • The boldest decisions

    In retrospect, many of the case studies have a striking common attribute: the boldest design decisions, whoever made them, have accounted for a high fraction of the goodness of the outcome. These bold decisions were made due sometimes to vision, sometimes to desperation. They were always gambles, requiring extra investment in hopes of getting a much better result.

    Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Design of Design
    1. ​​Design with courage​​
    • design
  • Design with courage

    1. Make a bold decision (that is controversial).
    2. Make a mistake (as a result of a bold decision).
    3. Challenge “conventional wisdom”.
    4. Challenge authority (that preaches conventional wisdom).
    5. Challenge hierarchy (that perpetuates conventional wisdom).
    6. Ignore the committee (and the need to converge).
    7. Decide who your clients are (and aren’t).
    8. Ignore clients that aren’t (especially those who pay the most).
    9. Cultivate clients if none exists (instead of compromising your design).
    10. Be a generalist (and ignore your job title).
    11. Be a specialist (who specializes in being a generalist).
    12. Design things from scratch (and build them yourself from scratch).
    13. Design things that no one wants (yet).
    14. Design freely (and think freely).
    Chuánqí Sun, The vanishing designer
    1. ​​The boldest decisions​​
    • design
  • What the problem is

    Sometimes the problem is to discover what the problem is.

    Gordon Clegg, The Design of Design (Cambridge Engineering Series)
    1. ​​The heart of systems engineering​​
    2. ​​Complete and consistent requirements​​
    • problems
    • design
    • ux
  • Complete and consistent requirements

    An architect who needs complete and consistent requirements to begin work, though perhaps a brilliant builder, is not an architect.

    Mark W. Maier & Eberhardt Rechtin, The Art of Systems Architecting
    1. ​​What the problem is​​
    2. ​​The heart of systems engineering​​
    3. ​​A late change in requirements is a competitive advantage​​
    • architecture
    • design
  • Composition and revision

    Revise at the point of composition.
    Compose at the point of revision.
    Think of composition and revision as the same thing.

    Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing
    1. ​​104. Site Repair​​
    • design
  • Head and hand

    The blueprint signaled a decisive disconnection between head and hand in design: the idea of a thing made complete in conception before it is constructed.

    Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
    1. ​​The preliminary sketch​​
    • design
  • Blueprints

    Blueprints lead to the making of things that are abstract, not always based on reality. Once something becomes abstract, it breeds disconnectedness — separation and the inability to connect with our surroundings. People buy houses from blueprints, but then don't like the actual house: "What on earth is this? I had no idea it was going to be like this...etc."

    Christopher Alexander, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth
    1. ​​Maps and observation​​
    2. ​​The preliminary sketch​​
    • making
    • design
  • Half of design is facilitation

    At least half of the work of design is not design, because design isn’t just "making things"—it’s making things with other people, many of whom usually aren’t designers. This is true any time you’re working with others from a domain outside of your own. Communicating ideas, marshaling stakeholder consensus, soliciting and incorporating feedback, and redefining problems that weren’t fully known at the start are all the non-design work of design, what we might generally call "facilitation."

    Brandon Dorn, Collaborative Information Architecture at Scale
    www.viget.com
    • design
    • communication
  • Conway's Law in action

    To talk about the visual design of the Facebook feed, or the navigation, or the microcopy, to talk about any aspect of Facebook’s product design, is to talk about symptoms rather than deeper issues, motivations, processes, and incentives.

    It would be like talking about Donald Trump’s website—a critical analysis Vinh suggests—instead of the nature of his political will or lack thereof.

    Brandon Dorn, One Designer's Response to Khoi Vinh's Complaint
    medium.com
    • politics
    • design
  • Starved for good journalism and criticism

    Imagine for a moment if Kimmelman–or any architecture critic–was also a practicing architect, building enormous commissions for corporations at the same time he writes his columns. If this were the case, you’d probably come to one of two conclusions: either the writer in question was not a serious critic, or that the art form itself is not very serious. You might also stop to think how much poorer we would be without the contributions of his independent voice to the discussion of the craft.

    That is exactly the situation that the design profession finds itself in today. We are lucky to have designers actively sharing knowledge, but we’re starved for good journalism and criticism.

    Khoi Vinh, Design Discourse is in a State of Arrested Development
    www.fastcompany.com
    • architecture
    • critique
    • design

    ...the idea of someone spending their days writing reviews of brand identities, design systems, app experiences, and the design of new products seems far-fetched.

  • Hand and brain design

    So what does hand and brain design look like?

    In every feedback conversation, one person is the hand. That’s the person doing the design — they’ll leave the meeting and go back to their computer and fire up a dozen Adobe apps. The other people in the room (virtual or otherwise) are the brain. Regardless of their skill in design, it’s their job to give the hand some constraints to work within.

    But not to tell them exactly what move to make.

    Matthew Ström, The hand and the brain
    matthewstrom.com
    • design
    • constraints
  • Preparing a stage

    When a client arrives at my studio, my job consists of preparing a "stage" for the length of time he desires, whether it be for a day or years, it is irrelevant in the end. A stage in which he can move under the sun "as if he were at home," though he walks stuttering at first before learning what will come in the script, be it kind or not, and which he will repeat a thousand times until he tires. When he tires, a panel is disassembled to readapt the children's room, the roof is demolished to make a study, the façades are decorated and life continues unperturbed.

    Smiljan Radić, The Circus
    • design
  • From body to body

    During the design process, the architect gradually internalizes the landscape, the entire context, and the functional requirements as well as his/her conceived building: movement, balance and scale are felt unconsciously through the body of the observer, the experience mirrors the bodily sensations of the maker. Consequently, architecture is communication from the body of the architect directly to the body of the person who encounters the work, perhaps centuries later.

    Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses
    1. ​​In the walls and mosses​​
    • making
    • design
    • time
    • communication
  • The computer creates a distance

    Computer imaging tends to flatten our magnificent, multi-sensory, simultaneous and synchronic capacities of imagination by turning the design process into a passive visual manipulation, a retinal journey. The computer creates a distance between the maker and the object, whereas drawing by hand as well as working with models put the designer in a haptic contact with the object, or space.

    Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses
    • tools
    • design
    • drawing
  • The deeper unconscious intentions

    Some time ago, a friend insisted that people should not listen to practicing architects or read what they write. According to him, the lack of logic in our discourse, the incongruity of our words, and the overzealousness in readings brought about by the biographical revision of our work were of little value.

    In his book The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa approaches it from the opposite direction, but ultimately gives the same advice:

    The verbal statements of artists and architects should not usually be taken at their face value, as they often merely represent a conscious surface rationalization, or defense, that may well be in sharp contradiction to the deeper unconscious intentions giving the work its very life force.

    Smiljan Radić, No Objection to the Moon...
    1. ​​The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses​​
    • design
    • art
  • Guided by image

    In our minds, the drawings we had originally made for the columns and capitals were no more than first approximations of the final shapes. We assumed that we would work out the real shapes during construction, and left the inaccurate approximations on our drawings, just for the sake of the building permit. Fujita, used to working with architects in System B, assumed that whatever was on our drawings must be what we wanted, and must be implemented as drawn.

    Anybody who was making those column capitals, if they had seen this "double" capital, and had been free to make something harmonious, would have done it differently. But Fujita's people, in System B, did not know how to be guided by reality. They were guided by "image".

    So Fujita, in this situation, was not free to respond in a natural way to what they saw. They were trapped by the image-making process they were used to. But because of this, they doomed their own carpenters to a pretentious kind of slavery, producing whatever silly images they were told to do, without being able to ask themselves whether they were beautiful, and unable to use their own sense of reality to make them better.

    Christopher Alexander, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth
    1. ​​Maps and observation​​
    • design
  • Let the goals suggest themselves

    There are several ways to start the design process, depending on your nature and needs. You can start out by defining your goals, as precisely as possible, and then look at the site with these goals in mind. Or you can take the site with all its characteristics (both good and bad), and let goals suggest themselves. Of the two questions—"What can I make this land do?"—or—"What does this land have to give me?"—the first may lead to exploitation of the land without regard to long-term consequences, while the second to a sustained ecology guided by our intelligent control.

    Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture
    1. ​​Do not propose solutions​​
    • goals
    • design
    • sustainability
  • Design is a connection between things

    The core of permaculture is design. Design is a connection between things. It's not water, or a chicken, or the tree. It is how the water, the chicken and the tree are connected. It's the very opposite of what we are taught in school. Education takes everything and pulls it apart and makes no connections at all. Permaculture makes the connection, because as soon as you've got the connection you can feed the chicken from the tree.

    To enable a design component to function efficiently, we must put it in the right place.

    Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture
    1. ​​To call each thing by its right name​​
    • design
  • Knowing the design

    Knowing the design can tell you much about the designer; and knowing the designer can tell you much about the design.

    Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies
    • design
  • Design skirmishes

    it is apparent that the unfolding of the design process assumed a distinctly episodic structure, which we might characterize as a series of related skirmishes with various aspects of the problem at hand.

    As the scope of the problem became more determined and finite for the designer, the episodic character of the process seems to have become less pronounced. During this period a systematic working out of issues and conditions took hold within the framework that had been established. This phenomenon is not at all surprising when we consider the fundamental difference between moments of problem solving when matters are poorly defined and those with clarity and sufficiency of structure.

    Within the episodic structure of the process, the problem, as perceived by the designer, tends to fluctuate from being rather nebulous to being more specific and well-defined. Furthermore, moments of "blinding" followed by periods of backtracking take place, where blinding refers to conditions in which obvious connections between various considerations of importance go unrecognized by a designer.

    Peter G. Rowe, Design Thinking
    1. ​​The Design Squiggle​​
    • process
    • design
  • Any imaginable shape

    The thing which sharply distinguishes useful design from such arts as painting and sculpture is that the practitioner of design has limits set upon his freedom of choice. A painter can choose any imaginable shape. A designer cannot.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    • constraints
    • design
  • Every exit is an entrance somewhere

    everyexit.png

    At the Ace Hotel in New York, a required exit sign over a door was an eyesore, and a stark contrast from the considered, detailed wall where it was mounted. Rather than accept the wart as it was, the sign was embraced as a chance to create an experience for the hotel’s guests by integrating the exit sign into the space. Now, surrounding the sign are other letters painted on the wall in a similar condensed style.

    Every requirement is an opportunity for delight, even the ugly ones. Sometimes the creative treatment of these warts are the most enjoyable parts of a design.

    Frank Chimero, The Shape of Design
    • constraints
    • design
    • exits
    • transitions
  • Beyond improvement

    In so many ways Dieter Rams’s work is beyond improvement. Although new technologies have since offered new opportunities, his designs are not undermined by the limits of the technologies of their time. The concave button top, designed to stop your finger from slipping as it made the long travel necessary for earlier mechanical switches, does not point to obsolete mechanisms. Instead, it reminds us how immediately and intuitively form alone can describe what an object does and suggest how we should use it.

    Jonathan Ive, Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible
    • design
    • perfection
  • Seeing and feeling

    Learning to design is, first of all, learning to see. Designers see more, and more precisely. This is a blessing and a curse—once we have learned to see design, both good and bad, we cannot un-see. The downside is that the more you learn to see, the more you lose your “common” eye, the eye you design for. This can be frustrating for us designers when we work for a customer with a bad eye and strong opinions. But this is no justification for designer arrogance or eye-rolling. Part of our job is to make the invisible visible, to clearly express what we see, feel and do. You can’t expect to sell what you can’t explain.

    This is why excellent designers do not just develop a sharper eye. They try to keep their ability to see things as a customer would. You need a design eye to design, and a non-designer eye to feel what you designed.

    Oliver Reichenstein, Learning to See
    1. ​​For one who can see​​
    • seeing
    • design
    • ux
  • Scenery

    What is designed and made outlasts the people for whose profit and for whose use it was made.

    We may think we are designing furniture of motor cars, but we are not. If we are designing a motor car for one man, we are designing scenery for fifty thousand others.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    1. ​​And thus the heart will break​​
    • design
  • Over-imagination

    An architect intent on being different may in the end prove as troubling as an over-imaginative pilot or doctor. However important originality may be in some fields, restraint and adherence to procedure emerge as the more significant virtues in a great many others.

    We rarely wish to be surprised by novelty as we round street corners. We require consistency in our buildings, for we are ourselves frequently close to disorientation and frenzy.

    Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
    1. ​​The signature​​
    • design
    • novelty
  • The spiral model

    The spiral shape certainly suggests progress. It associates successive repetitions of the same activity. The geometric shape is easily understood and memorable. The model emphasizes prototyping, starting with user-interface prototypes and user testing long before an operational prototype is possible.

    Since a development model is principally used by developers, I believe having it designer-centered is entirely appropriate. With Boehm and against Denning and Dragon, I advocate frequent but not continuous interaction with representative users, with successive prototypes as the vehicles.

    I strongly believe that way forward is to embrace and develop the Spiral Model.

    Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Design of Design
    • design
  • Intuition and systems

    Systematic design excluding intuition yields pedestrian follow-ons and knock-offs; intuitive design without system yields flawed fancies. How to weld intuition and systematic approach? How to grow as a designer? How to function in a design team?

    Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Design of Design
    • design
    • teamwork
  • We hear a voice whisper

    The Shakers have a proverb that says, “Do not make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both, do not hesitate to make it beautiful.” We all believe that design’s primary job is to be useful. Our minds say that so long as the design works well, the work’s appearance does not necessarily matter. And yet, our hearts say otherwise. No matter how rational our thinking, we hear a voice whisper that beauty has an important role to play.

    Frank Chimero, The Shape of Design
    • beauty
    • design
  • Cardinal sin

    Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design.

    The duty of industrial design is first and foremost to users and the users are, generally, human beings, with all their complexities, habits, ideas and idiosyncrasies.

    Sophie Lovell & Dieter Rams, Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible
    • ux
    • humanity
    • design
  • A certain kind of world

    Perhaps more directly than with the Braun products, my furniture arose from a belief in how the world should be ‘furnished’ and how man should live in this artificial environment. In this respect, each piece of furniture is also a design for a certain kind of world and way of living, they reflect a specific vision of mankind.

    Sophie Lovell & Dieter Rams, Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible
    • design
    • aesthetics
  • The evolution of Braun design principles

    1975
    Three general rules govern every Braun design - a rule of order, a rule of harmony and a rule of economy.

    1976
    The function for us is the starting point and the target of every design.
    Experience with design is experience with people.
    Only orderliness makes design useful to us.
    Our design attempts to bring all individual elements into their proper proportions.
    Good design means to us: as little design as possible.
    Our design is innovative because the behavior patterns of people change.

    1983
    Good design is innovative.
    Good design renders utility to a product.
    Good design is aesthetic design.
    Good design makes a product easy to understand.
    Good design is unobtrusive.
    Good design is honest.

    1985
    Good design is innovative.
    Good design makes a product useful.
    Good design is aesthetic.
    Good design makes a product understandable.
    Good design is honest.
    Good design is unobtrusive.
    Good design is long-lasting.
    Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
    Good design is environmentally friendly.
    Good design is as little design as possible.

    Sophie Lovell & Dieter Rams, Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible
    • design

    Note that it is not ‘innovative design is good design’, but the other way around. The order matters. Good design requires all of these things - any one of them, by itself, lacking the rest, is not good design.

  • Process vs. product

    ...more concerned with process than with product, with the actual construction of a self than with self-expression.

    Donald Richie, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics
    • design
    • identity
    • making
  • The central value for which they stand

    What I am suggesting to you is that designers ought to take the value of craftsmanship as the central value for which they stand; that in accordance with it they ought to do their work; and that they ought to use its norms in their social and economic and political visions of what society ought to become.

    C. Wright Mills, Man in the Middle: The Designer
    • design
    • craft
  • The big split

    The big split among designers and their frequent guilt; the enriched muddle of ideals they variously profess and the insecurity they often feel about the practice of their craft; their often great disgust and their crippling frustration.

    C. Wright Mills, Man in the Middle: The Designer
    • design
  • The difficulty of designing complexity

    Designers, limited as they must be by the capacity of the mind to form intuitively accessible structures, cannot achieve the complexity of the semilattice in a single mental act. The mind has an overwhelming predisposition to see trees wherever it looks and cannot escape the tree conception.

    Experiments suggest strongly that people have an underlying tendency, when faced by a complex organization, to reorganize it mentally in terms of non-overlapping units. The complexity of the semilattice is replaced by the simpler and more easily grasped tree form.

    Christopher Alexander, A City Is Not a Tree
    • complexity
    • intuition
    • design
  • Disorientation

    Warshaw: E.T. commits the ultimate video game sin: to disorient the user. And you have to understand the difference between frustration and disorientation, right? Frustration in a video game is essential. A video game must frustrate a user, but you should never disorient them.

    Peabody: Howard says that frustration ultimately creates satisfaction. It’s a huge motivator in a good game, to get better, faster, stronger. Disorientation, on the other hand...

    Roman Mars & Howard Scott Warshaw, The Worst Video Game Ever
    1. ​​To become completely lost​​
    • design
    • games
  • Routine design

    When we think of bridges, it is the dramatic and monumental long spans that come to mind first, especially the lithe suspension bridges such as the Golden Gate and the pure geometric arches such as Sydney Harbour. But the majority of bridges are not such spectacular structures. Most of them are ordinary overpasses, with spans of 30 or 40 feet, carrying roadways or rails across other thoroughfares or over small streams. You see such bridges by the dozen on any drive down the Interstate. They may be lacking in glamour, but they are more representative of a bridge builder's art.

    The engineering and construction of girder bridges are pretty routine these days, but the bridges are not quite standard items you order from a catalogue. The girders, whether of steel or concrete, are custom-build for each bridge, then trucked to the site and hoisted into place with a crane. The designer still has scope for variation and creativity, and it shows out on the highways: some overpasses are prettier than others.

    Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
    • engineering
    • design
    • automation
    • routine
  • Mechanisms and organisms

    "Kant described a mechanism as a functional unity, in which the parts exist for one another in the performance of a particular function.

    An organism, on the other hand, is a functional and structural unity in which the parts exist for and by means of one another in the expression of a particular nature.

    This means that the parts of an organism – leaves, roots, flowers, limbs, eyes, heart, brain – are not made independently and then assembled, as in a machine, but arise as a result of interactions within the developing organism."

    — Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed His Spots

    Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology
    • nature
    • evolution
    • growth
    • design
    • function
  • Perfection

    It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.

    Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars
    • perfection
    • design
    • simplicity
    • making
  • Jacked in

    In digital design, products and services are frequently imagined and implemented placelessly: as if the consumer were jacked into The Matrix, and considering this product or that product from among an infinite set of choices at an infinitely-provisioned mercantile. The things we make are good, by this way of reasoning, if they fit the market’s demand.

    Dan Klyn, Einmal Ist Keinmal
    • design
    • software
  • Transmitted through drawings

    Architecture is now only transmitted through drawings. The typical architect does not personally know how to make anything — not buildings, not windows, not floors or ceilings. He or she draws drawings. Some other organization then produces buildings from these drawings. We are, by now, so deeply enmeshed in this way of thinking, that it doesn't sound like idiocy.

    Christopher Alexander, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth
    • design
  • What to refuse to do, even for the money.

    Michael Sorkin, Two Hundred Fifty Things an Architect Should Know
    • ethics
    • design
  • The Art of Looking Sideways

    A Book by Alan Fletcher
    www.alanfletcherarchive.com
    The Art of Looking Sideways.jpg

    Cover art for Alan Fletcher's wonderfully expansive commonplace book.

    1. ​​Thinking is drawing in your head​​
    2. ​​The picket fence​​
    3. ​​The chicken was the egg's idea for getting more eggs​​
    1. ​​The brain is wider than the sky​​
    2. ​​What this site is​​
    • graphics
    • design
    • communication
    • commonplace
    • style
    • collections
  • Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible

    A Book by Sophie Lovell & Dieter Rams
    www.phaidon.com
    1. ​​Beyond improvement​​
    2. ​​Cardinal sin​​
    3. ​​On display​​
    4. ​​Long-term​​
    5. ​​Humble servants​​
    1. ​​Good design is practical design​​
    • design
    • objects
    • style
    • minimalism
  • The Design of Design

    A Book by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
    www.goodreads.com
    1. ​​Design process models: A summary argument​​
    2. ​​The spiral model​​
    3. ​​A grossly obese set of requirements​​
    4. ​​Requirements proliferation​​
    5. ​​The architectural contracting model​​
    1. ​​Design System as Style Manual With Web Characteristics​​
    • design
    • software
    • architecture
    • making
    • style
  • The Nature and Art of Workmanship

    A Book by David Pye
    www.bloomsbury.com
    1. ​​That which requires caring​​
    2. ​​Mass production of variable products​​
    3. ​​From hands to machines​​
    4. ​​Employs nothing at all​​
    5. ​​What is Folk Craft?​​
    • design
    • making
    • craft
    • style
  • Inventing on Principle

    A Talk by Bret Victor
    worrydream.com
    • making
    • design
  • Beautiful Evidence

    A Book by Edward Tufte
    www.edwardtufte.com
    • visualization
    • design
    • communication
    • information
    • seeing
    • truth
  • A City Is Not a Tree

    An Essay by Christopher Alexander
    www.patternlanguage.com
    1. ​​Strands of life​​
    2. ​​Impending destruction​​
    3. ​​The right overlap​​
    4. ​​The difficulty of designing complexity​​
    5. ​​Political chains of influence​​
    1. ​​Trees and graphs​​
    2. ​​The dishonest mask of pretended order​​
    3. ​​The problem with trees​​
    4. ​​Both practical and aesthetic concerns​​
    • cities
    • urbanism
    • design
    • architecture
    • math
  • The Design of Everyday Things

    A Book by Don Norman
    1. ​​When engineers refuse to leave well enough alone​​
    • ux
    • design
    • objects
  • Notes on the Synthesis of Form

    A Book by Christopher Alexander
    www.hup.harvard.edu
    1. ​​I could do better than that​​
    2. ​​This small internal quaver​​
    3. ​​Their wrongness is somehow more immediate​​
    • math
    • design
    • architecture
    • form
    • problems
  • Winning by Design: The Methods of Gordon Murray

    A Research Paper by Nigel Cross & Anita Clayburn Cross

    A case study of the working methods of one particularly successful designer in a highly competitive design domain - Formula One racing car design. Gordon Murray was chief designer for the very successful Brabham and McLaren racing car teams in the 1970s and 1980s. His record of success is characterised by innovative breakthroughs, often arising as sudden illuminations, based on considering the task from first principles and from a systemic viewpoint. His working methods are highly personal, and include intensive use of drawings. Personality factors and team management abilities also appear to be relevant. There are some evident similarities with some other successful, innovative designers

    1. ​​You need to make the step forward​​
    2. ​​Drawing the bits​​
    3. ​​Like designing things for the first time​​
    4. ​​Wonder Plots​​
    5. ​​I never have engineers that aren't designers​​
    • design
  • 99% Invisible

    A Podcast by Roman Mars & Kurt Kohlstedt
    99percentinvisible.org
    1. ​​The Worst Video Game Ever​​
    2. ​​Some Other Sign that People Do Not Totally Regret Life​​
    3. ​​The Help-Yourself City​​
    4. ​​Lawn Order​​
    5. ​​Names vs. The Nothing​​
    • design
    • understanding
  • The Nature and Aesthetics of Design

    A Book by David Pye
    books.google.com
    1. ​​Any imaginable shape​​
    2. ​​Useless work on useful things​​
    3. ​​Presentable​​
    4. ​​The principle of arrangement​​
    5. ​​The minimum condition​​
    1. ​​More real than living man​​
    2. ​​That which requires caring​​
    3. ​​The informing idea of functionalism​​
    • design
    • aesthetics
    • making
    • style
    • craft
    • beauty
  • Design Thinking

    A Book by Peter G. Rowe
    1. ​​Ducks and decorated sheds​​
    2. ​​Clinging to ideas​​
    3. ​​A concept of style​​
    4. ​​Form and figure​​
    5. ​​Design skirmishes​​
    • design
  • A Brief Rant

    An Essay by Bret Victor
    worrydream.com
    1. ​​Like, just a post complaining that screens should be better​​
    • design
    • technology
    • www
    • interaction
    • body
  • Einmal Ist Keinmal

    An Article by Dan Klyn
    blog.usejournal.com
    1. ​​Jacked in​​
    2. ​​Immer wieder​​
    3. ​​But what if it is?​​
    1. ​​104. Site Repair​​
    2. ​​66. Holy Ground​​
    3. ​​109. Long Thin House​​
    4. ​​135. Tapestry of Light and Dark​​
    5. ​​239. Small Panes​​
    • beauty
    • craft
    • making
    • design
    • architecture
  • Understanding Understanding

    A Book by Richard Saul Wurman
    www.goodreads.com
    1. ​​A dot went for a walk​​
    2. ​​Admitting ignorance​​
    3. ​​Information imposters​​
    4. ​​Michaelangelo's hammer​​
    5. ​​I won't get​​
    • understanding
    • information
    • design
    • communication
  • Man in the Middle: The Designer

    A Book by C. Wright Mills
    www.carlosvieirareis.com
    1. ​​The old unity​​
    2. ​​Defining craftsmanship​​
    3. ​​The central value for which they stand​​
    4. ​​The star system​​
    5. ​​As if it were an advertisement​​
    • design
    • society
  • The Shape of Design

    A Book by Frank Chimero
    shapeofdesignbook.com
    1. ​​Near and far​​
    2. ​​Why we should read​​
    3. ​​We hear a voice whisper​​
    4. ​​Needs more love​​
    5. ​​One candle can light another​​
    • design
    • craft
  • Two Hundred Fifty Things an Architect Should Know

    An Essay by Michael Sorkin
    www.readingdesign.org
    1. ​​The distance of a whisper.​​
    2. ​​Corners​​
    3. ​​Want, need, afford​​
    4. ​​What the brick really wants.​​
    5. ​​Borders​​
    1. ​​136 things every web developer should know before they burn out and turn to landscape painting or nude modelling​​
    • architecture
    • design
    • collections
  • 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
  • I've designed it that way

    A Quote by Townes Van Zandt
    genius.com

    I don't envision a very long life for myself.
    Like, I think my life will run out before my work does, you know?

    I've designed it that way.

    1. ​​Your life adds up​​
    • death
    • work
    • design
    • art
    • melancholy
    • life
  • Three Perfect Tools

    An Article by Tim Bray
    www.tbray.org

    There is a particular joy in a product that just does what you need done, in about the way you expect or (thrillingly) better, and isn’t hard to figure out, and doesn’t change unnecessarily. Here are three to learn from.

    • tools
    • perfection
    • design
  • The Nature of Product

    An Article by Marty Cagan
    www.svpg.com

    Too many product managers and product designers want to spend all their time in problem discovery, and not get their hands dirty in solution discovery – the whole nonsense of “product managers are responsible for the what and not the how.”

    1. ​​On Greatness​​
    2. ​​One Of Us​​
    • ux
    • products
    • problems
    • design

    See also: "UI is not UX!" designers.

  • Was Design Thinking Designed Not to Work?

    An Article by Debbie Levitt
    rbefored.com

    Design thinking sells a fantasy. It sells you the fantasy that with some guidelines, templates, and sticky notes, you can do what IDEO does just like how they do it.

    …if it were true that design thinking lets you do what the best designers do, IDEO could put themselves out of business. If they were really selling you the absolute guide on how they solve problems, innovate, and design, you wouldn’t need IDEO. Their idea to save their business from a slump hypothetically cannibalizes their business…Unless they knew that it wouldn’t.

    1. ​​On Design Thinking​​
    • design
    • ux
  • “Design” is now “Product”

    An Article by Dorian Taylor
    dorian.substack.com

    Design has very little to do with what tools or methodologies you use, or what your job title is, or what you have a degree in, or even anything like “creativity”; design is about your relationship to constraints. Rather: to what extent are you defining constraints rather than just obeying them? Design is about taking a universe of possibilities and converging onto exactly one outcome. Being handed a set of constraints which you treat like immutable laws of physics (because many of them are) and solving within that envelope is what engineering is. To wit: what most designers are doing most of the time is actually a form of engineering, and engineers are always doing at least some design.

    This is because genuine design—the power to define constraints—is a privileged political position within an organization, and not everybody can occupy it. In other words, the “seat at the table” comes first. Design is Steve Jobs infamously dropping an iPod prototype into his fish tank, pointing at the bubbles coming out and yelling at his staff to make it thinner. It doesn’t matter what your title is; Jobs is the designer in that scenario.

    1. ​​Steve Jobs​​
    • design
    • engineering
    • constraints
  • On Design Thinking

    An Essay by Maggie Gram
    www.nplusonemag.com

    Design means something even broader now. Sometime around World War II, it came to mean making things that “solve problems.” With the influence of mid-century global social movements and the rise of digital technology, it began to mean making things that are “human-centered.” And as of recently, design doesn’t have to involve making things at all. It can just mean a way of thinking.

    Of all these developments, the idea of design as a broadly applicable way of thinking—the idea of “design thinking”—may end up being the most influential…At Stanford’s d.school, as cofounder Robert Sutton has said, “design thinking” is often treated “more like a religion than a set of practices for sparking creativity.”

    1. ​​Was Design Thinking Designed Not to Work?​​
    2. ​​Undoing the Toxic Dogmatism of Digital Design​​
    3. ​​Sermon for WIAD Bristol 2021​​
    • design
    • ux
  • The things that you’re meant to do

    A Quote by Josh Wardle
    slate.com

    I used to work in Silicon Valley, and I’m aware of the things that, especially with games, you’re meant to do with people’s attention. You’re trying to capture as much of people’s attention as you can. So that involves things like endless play, or sending them push notifications, or asking them for sign-up information.

    And philosophically, I enjoy doing the opposite of all those things, doing all the things that you are not meant to do, which I think has bizarrely had this effect where the game feels really human and just enjoyable. And that really resonates with where we’re at right now in the world and with COVID, and then also we’re trying to figure out, what is tech? What has tech become? I think that really resonates with people, and no ads—well, no monetization. People ask me a lot about these things, and it was like, I was literally just making a game for my partner, and I made some decisions that we would like.

    • attention
    • games
    • software
    • design
  • Fermi Estimates and Dyson Designs

    An Article by Venkatesh Rao
    www.ribbonfarm.com

    A Fermi estimate is a quick-and-dirty solution to an arbitrary scientific or engineering analysis problem. Fermi estimation uses widely known numbers, readily observable phenomenology, basic physics equations, and a bunch of approximation techniques to arrive at rough answers that tend to be correct within an order of magnitude or so. The term is named for Enrico Fermi, who was famously good at this sort of thing.

    …It struck me that there is counterpart to this kind of thinking on the synthesis side, where you use similar techniques to arrive at a very rough design for a complex engineered artifact. I call such a design approach Dyson design, after the physicist Freeman Dyson, who was one of the best practitioners of it (not to be confused with inventor James Dyson, whose designs, ironically, are not Dyson designs).

    • design
    • physics
  • Primitive design

    An Article by Matt Webb
    interconnected.org
    1. I want it to feel intuitive
    2. I want any new features to be platform features, not one-offs.

    And the second of those is weird, right? It’s like sketching out a toy spaceship, having a list of rules about play, and attempting to simultaneously invent the shape of the Lego brick.

    That’s platform design I suppose. Redesigning a newspaper will mean bouncing between comps and style guides, designing both. Inventing the iPhone user interface will have seen apps and app paradigm evolving together.

    1. ​​Co-Evolution of Problem and Solution Spaces in Creative Design​​
    • design
    • systems
    • making
  • How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

    A Research Paper by Andy Matuschak & Michael Nielsen
    numinous.productions
    Image from numinous.productions on 2021-11-05 at 8.05.31 AM.svg

    Conventional tech industry product practice will not produce deep enough subject matter insights to create transformative tools for thought.

    ...The aspiration is for any team serious about making transformative tools for thought. It’s to create a culture that combines the best parts of modern product practice with the best parts of the (very different) modern research culture. You need the insight-through-making loop to operate, whereby deep, original insights about the subject feed back to change and improve the system, and changes to the system result in deep, original insights about the subject.

    • making
    • thinking
    • tools
    • design
    • feedback
    • research
    • cognition
    • technology
    • software
  • Form follows function

    A Quote by Louis Sullivan
    en.wikipedia.org
    1. ​​205. Structure Follows Social Spaces​​
    2. ​​Classical absurdity​​
    3. ​​The element becomes a sign​​
    4. ​​The requirements of economy​​
    5. ​​Against form follows function​​
    6. ​​The minimum condition​​
    7. ​​Form follows failure​​
    8. ​​The usages of life​​
    • form
    • function
    • design
    • architecture
  • Changing Our Development Mindset

    A Fragment by Michelle Barker
    www.smashingmagazine.com

    We simply can no longer design and develop only for “optimal” content or browsing conditions. Instead, we must embrace the inherent flexibility and unpredictability of the web, and build resilient components. Static mockups cannot cater to every scenario, so many design decisions fall to developers at build time. Like it or not, if you’re a UI developer, you are a designer — even if you don’t consider yourself one!

    ...Sometimes interpreting a design means asking the designer to further elaborate on their ideas (or even re-evaluate them). Other times, it means making design decisions on the fly or making recommendations based on our knowledge and experience.

    1. ​​gridless.design​​
    2. ​​We are the ones who paved the path​​
    3. ​​Embracing Asymmetrical Design​​
    • interfaces
    • css
    • design

    For a designer, it's great to know there are developers out there who embrace the fact that designs can never fully capture built reality.

  • Domain-specific vs. Domain-independent UX

    An Article by Ryan Singer
    m.signalvnoise.com

    Domain specific UX means understanding how the supply should fit the demand considering a specific situation and use case.

    On the other hand, many aspects of UX don’t require knowledge about a particular situation. They‘re based on the common constraints of human sense faculties, memory and cognition or the net of ergonomic factors around the device and the setting where it’s used. These domain independent elements of the UX are important too.

    Domain independent UX should absolutely pervade the organization. It belongs to the general skill and knowledge of each supplier at their link in the chain. It’s part of learning to be a good designer, programmer, marketer, salesperson etc.

    • ux
    • design
    • context
  • UI and Capability

    An Article by Ryan Singer
    rjs.medium.com
    Screenshot of rjs.medium.com on 2021-09-05 at 1.39.21 PM.png

    I’m very conscious of whether I am affording a feature or styling it. It’s important to distinguish because they look the same from a distance.

    ...Affording a capability and styling it are both important. But it’s essential to know which one you are doing at a given time. Style is a matter of taste. Capability and clarity are not. They are more objective. That person standing at the edge of the chasm cares more about accomplishing their task than the details of the decor.

    • function
    • style
    • design
  • Research, empathy, simplicity, speed

    An Article by Matthew Ström
    matthewstrom.com

    As Nosrat provides a simple list of essential ingredients for any great meal, can we describe a simple list of essential components for digital products?

    Here are four elements that I believe are the foundation of great digital products: Research, Empathy, Simplicity and Speed.

    1. ​​Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat​​
    • design
    • software
    • products
    • balance

    The key, Ström observes, is not simply to deploy these elements, but to find the correct balance in each case between too much and not enough.

  • Product Design Resources

    A Reference Work by Brandon Dorn
    www.notion.so

    Things I‘ve read, people I‘ve tried to learn from, and things I‘ve done to become a better designer. This is an idiosyncratic list reflecting what has helped me along the way, rather than an exhaustive list of design classics.

    Though the list leans toward theory — principles are more durable than technique — I offer a few ideas further down about how to practice design. It also leans toward information design, because the task of presenting rich, dense information in an accessible way is ultimately the task of any digital product.

    • design
    • information
    • software
    • collections
  • Forget the computer — here’s why you should write and design by hand

    An Article by Herbert Lui
    uxdesign.cc
    2021-08-27 13.47.43.png

    In the middle of the 2000s, the designers at creative consultancy Landor installed Adobe Photoshop on their computers and started using it. General manager Antonio Marazza tells author David Sax:

    “Overnight, the quality of their designs seemed to decline. After a few months of this, Landor’s Milan office gave all their designers Moleskine notebooks, and banned the use of Photoshop during the first week’s work on a project. The idea was to let their initial ideas freely blossom on paper, without the inherent bias of the software, before transferring them to the computer later for fine-tuning. It was so successful, this policy remains in place today.”

    1. ​​From the desk of: Austin Kleon​​
    • writing
    • design
    • drawing
    • tools
    • creativity
  • The right box to think inside of

    A Quote by Aza Raskin
    www.robinrendle.com

    Design is not about learning to think outside the box, it’s about finding the right box to think inside of.

    • design
    • thinking
    • creativity
  • The Design Diagram

    An Idea by Charles Eames & Ray Eames
    www.eamesoffice.com
    Image from www.eamesoffice.com on 2021-08-27 at 10.46.34 PM.jpeg

    This Eames drawing, often referred to as the Design Diagram, was created for a 1969 exhibition at the Louvre entitled, What is Design? Charles and Ray mailed it to the exhibition curator to augment their answers to a series of questions she had posed.

    1. ​​The Design Squiggle​​
    • design
    • process
    • constraints
  • Goodbye, Google

    An Article by Douglas Bowman
    stopdesign.com

    Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions. With every new design decision, critics cry foul. Without conviction, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail. “Is this the right move?” When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.

    Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

    • design
    • decisions
    • data
  • In Defence of Intuition

    An Essay by Boris Müller
    borism.medium.com

    Design, it seems, is not only becoming more methodical but also more scientific. This is not surprising. Design as a discipline has moved from “product beautification” to being a central part of product development. It has incorporated methodologies from human-computer interaction, sociology, and anthropology as well as advertising and management. And with the rise of design thinking, a wider range of professional disciplines are using creative methods.

    I don’t want to criticize design methodologies. But against the backdrop of an overly structured design process, it is important to remind our community that there is one fundamental aspect to design that cannot be formalized in a methodology. And that is intuition.

    1. ​​We feel it in our fingers​​
    • design
    • intuition
    • process
  • Beyond Artboards

    An Essay by Chuánqí Sun
    medium.com

    The Pursuit of Lossless Design-Development Handoffs.

    1. ​​Can't developers just see?​​
    2. ​​We are the ones who paved the path​​
    3. ​​Until we get there​​
    • process
    • interfaces
    • design
  • The Hot Potato Process

    An Article by Dan Mall
    danmall.me
    Image from danmall.me on 2021-08-10 at 9.44.22 PM.svg

    The big misconception I’ve seen designers and developers often fall victim to is believing that handoff goes one way. Designers hand off comps to developers and think their work is done. That puts a lot of pressure on the designer to get everything perfect in one pass.

    Instead, great collaboration follows what Brad Frost and I call “The Hot Potato Process,” where ideas are passed quickly back and forth from designer to developer and back to designer then back to developer for the entirety of a product creation cycle.

    1. ​​Just-in-time Design​​
    • design
    • process
    • collaboration
    • products
  • Designing with code

    An Article by Matthew Ström
    matthewstrom.com

    Recently I’ve had a few opportunities to use code to create design. In two of my bigger projects at The Wall Street Journal, writing code has led to new ideas. Problems that typically plague early designs — e.g. “how does this look with real content?” — are easy to solve. By exploring visual ideas directly in code, I’ve started to see the amazing potential of code as a design tool.

    1. ​​Colophon​​
    2. ​​Painting With the Web​​
    3. ​​I never have engineers that aren't designers​​
    • code
    • design
  • Pair Design: Better Together

    A Book by Gretchen Anderson & Christopher Noessel
    mmbolg.files.wordpress.com

    Pair design is the counterintuitive practice of getting more and better UX design done by putting two designers together as thought partners to solve design problems. It’s counterintuitive because you might expect that you could split them up to work in parallel to get double the design done, but for many situations, you’d be wrong. This document will help explain what pair design is, how it works, and tour through the practicalities of implementing it in your practice.

    1. ​​It involves two brains​​
    2. ​​A distinct and complementary stance​​
    3. ​​Gens and synths​​
    4. ​​We come as a team​​
    5. ​​Starting off with pair design​​
    • design
    • collaboration
  • AI-driven "Design"?

    An Article by Jorge Arango
    jarango.com

    Like a programming language interpreter, GPT-3 translates the designer’s intent from a language they’re already familiar with (English) to one they need to learn (Figma’s information architecture, as manifested in its UI.) This can be easier for a new/busy designer, much like Python is easier and faster to work with than assembly language.

    But that’s not “designing” — at least not any more than compiling Python code is “programming.” In both cases, all the system does is translate human intent into a lower level of abstraction. Sure, the process saves time — but the key is getting the intent part right. I’ll be convinced the system is “designing” when it can produce a meaningful output to a directive like “change the product page’s layout to increase conversions.”

    • ai
    • design
    • intent
    • abstraction
  • Asynchronous Design Critique: Getting Feedback

    An Article by Erin Casali
    alistapart.com

    Getting feedback can be thought of as a form of design research. In the same way that we wouldn’t do any research without the right questions to get the insights that we need, the best way to ask for feedback is also to craft sharp questions.

    • feedback
    • iteration
    • design
    • collaboration
  • Why YKK zippers are the brown M&Ms of product design

    An Article by Josh Centers
    theprepared.com

    A ‘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.

    1. ​​All the way through​​
    2. ​​The Cycle of Goodness​​
    • design
    • details
    • quality
  • littlebigdetails

    A Blog by Floris Dekker
    littlebigdetails.com

    Little 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.

    1. ​​Essential vs. nice to have​​
    • details
    • microsites
    • whimsy
    • design
  • Broken world thinking

    A Fragment by Amanda Menking
    www.arenasolutions.com

    Consider, for example, how “broken world thinking” can benefit product design. What if the person (or team) who invented a new technology collaborated with the person (or team) who would one day repair the same technology? What if the innovation stakeholders and the infrastructure stakeholders collaborated closely with the end users? What if every new product designed by a technology company was designed in such as way as to factor in what happens to the product after planned obsolescence?

    • technology
    • repair
    • products
    • design
  • A Mindful Mobile OS

    An Article by Clo S.
    thistooshallgrow.com

    I read and loved Potential's "iOS 15, Humane" proposition. Published earlier in June by co-founders Welf and Oliver, it tackles how iOS could help us better protect our attention.

    As a designer who cares about and writes about digital wellness, I'm profoundly aligned with their suggestions.

    1. Persuasive design
    2. Disclosure requirement
    3. From infinite feeds to pages
    4. Was this time well spent?
    5. Regret tax
    6. Conditions of use
    • morality
    • ethics
    • ux
    • software
    • design
  • Embracing design constraints

    An Article by Adrian Roselli
    adrianroselli.com

    Constraints have been shown to generally improve innovation. Giving targets and parameters helps ensure a team is working in unison. Identifying what is out of bounds can further focus that team.

    • design
    • constraints
    • accessibility
    • function
  • Internal design teams and thought leadership

    An Article by Jorge Arango
    jarango.com

    The design industry is an ecosystem. External design teams provide critical functions beyond augmenting internal design resources. Thought leadership — pushing the field’s boundaries — is indeed one of them.

    Many practices and tools we take for granted — journey maps, personas, conceptual frameworks — were pioneered and/or popularized by ‘outies.’ Most of the field’s foundational books and blogs are by people outside ‘client’ organizations.

    This isn’t because internal designers aren’t as clever or dedicated as their external colleagues. (Many ‘innies’ are former ‘outies.’) It’s because internal design roles are structurally misaligned with public thought leadership.

    • design
    • ux
  • Pictures of Websites

    An Article by Matthew Ström
    matthewstrom.com
    Image from matthewstrom.com on 2021-03-15 at 10.45.36 AM.jpeg

    When I was a product designer, people would ask what I did for a living, and sometimes I’d answer “I draw pictures of websites.”

    Sure, I could just say “I design websites.” That’s true. The end result of my work is (hopefully) that a website looks better, works better, or results in better outcomes.

    But most of my day isn’t spent looking at the website, or working on the code of the website, or manipulating the website directly in some way. It’s spent in Figma or Sketch, drawing pictures of how I think the website should look and work.

    Through some kind of alchemy, the pictures I draw have an impact on the finished website. But they’re not all the same.

    • design
    • drawing
    • interfaces
  • René: A Product Design Tool

    A Tool
    rene.jon.gold
    Screenshot of rene.jon.gold on 2021-02-19 at 2.32.42 PM.png
    • tools
    • design
  • Web History Chapter 6: Web Design

    A Chapter by Jay Hoffmann
    css-tricks.com

    After the first websites demonstrate the commercial and aesthetic potential of the web, the media industry floods the web with a surge of new content. Amateur webzines — which define and voice and tone unique to the web — are soon joined by traditional publishers. By the mid to late 90’s, most major companies will have a website, and the popularity of the web will begin to explore. Search engines emerge as one solution to cataloging the expanding universe of websites, but even they struggle to keep up. Brands soon begin to look for a way to stand out.

    1. ​​A Dao of Web Design​​
    • www
    • ux
    • interfaces
    • design
  • 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.

    1. ​​Conventions of a medium​​
    2. ​​To abandon control​​
    3. ​​The journey begins by letting go​​
    1. ​​Web History Chapter 6: Web Design​​
    • www
    • ux
    • accessibility
    • design

    John Allsopp's essay is one of the seminal works in the history of the web. He asks us to embrace fluidity, adaptability, and change within this new medium.

  • Design Discourse is in a State of Arrested Development

    An Essay by Khoi Vinh
    www.fastcompany.com

    [Designer News] is good, useful content, but most of it is written by designers themselves. Taken as a whole, it’s also a useful illustration of something vital that our industry lacks: balanced, insightful, independent writing that critically evaluates the profession.

    1. ​​Starved for good journalism and criticism​​
    2. ​​The allure of clicks​​
    1. ​​Undoing the Toxic Dogmatism of Digital Design​​
    2. ​​One Designer's Response to Khoi Vinh's Complaint​​
    • design
    • critique
  • Copying (is the way design works)

    An Essay by Matthew Ström
    matthewstrom.com
    Screenshot of matthewstrom.com on 2020-10-29 at 10.09.45 AM.png

    This is a very short book about copying. Its contents, unless otherwise noted, are licensed under CC-BY SA 4.0 (more on that in a bit). You can download, copy, remix, excerpt, change, and repost it however you see fit.

    1. ​​What's love got to do with it?​​
    • design
    • theft
    • copying
  • Design Leadership Truisms

    An Article by Peter Merholz
    www.petermerholz.com
    PEOPLE ARE NOT THEIR JOB TITLES.
    TEAM MEMBERS ARE NOT “RESOURCES”.
    PEOPLE WORK BEST WHEN THEY CAN BE THEIR FULL SELVES.
    YOU CANNOT CALCULATE AN ROI FOR DESIGN.
    FRAMING THE PROBLEM IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN SOLVING THE PROBLEM.
    (DESIGN) LEADERSHIP IS MORE TALKING THAN DOING.
    YOU’LL DO A BETTER JOB IF YOU LIGHTEN UP
    IF YOU HAVEN’T PISSED SOMEONE OFF, YOU’RE NOT DOING YOUR JOB RIGHT.
    NO ONE OUTSIDE YOUR TEAM UNDERSTANDS WHAT IT TAKES TO DO GOOD WORK.
    THE OUTCOMES ARE BETTER WHEN EVERYONE IS A DESIGNER.
    AGILE TRANSFORMATIONS ARE HOSTILE TO GOOD DESIGN.
    WHAT A DESIGN TEAM NEEDS MOST IS A CLEAR SENSE OF PURPOSE.
    YOU ARE ON THE FRONT LINE OF A GLOBAL WAR FOR TALENT.
    EVERYONE APPLYING FOR A ROLE HAS AN INFLATED TITLE.
    INTERVIEWS ARE A POOR WAY OF ASSESSING CANDIDATES.
    DESIGN EXERCISES ARE A BAD INTERVIEWING PRACTICE.
    YOU WILL NEVER HAVE ENOUGH DESIGNERS.
    YOU WILL NEVER HAVE ENOUGH TIME.
    THE SKILLS THAT GOT YOU HERE ARE NOT THE SKILLS THAT WILL CARRY YOU FORWARD.
    
    1. ​​Truisms​​
    • design
    • leadership
    • teamwork

    Truncated for brevity. The selection here represents those that align with my own experience.

  • What happens next?

    An Article by Laura Klein
    www.usersknow.com

    When you create an interaction for a product, you have to design more than what it looks like. You even have to design more than what happens during the interaction. You have to design what happens after the initial user interaction. And then you have to keep going.

    • design
    • ux
  • The 99% Invisible City

    A Book by Roman Mars & Kurt Kohlstedt
    99percentinvisible.org
    • urbanism
    • cities
    • design
    • architecture
    • details
  • Taste for Makers

    An Essay by Paul Graham
    paulgraham.com

    If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We need good taste to make good things. Instead of treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy abstractions, let's try considering it as a practical question: how do you make good stuff?

    1. ​​You feel this when you start to design things​​
    2. ​​Good design is simple​​
    3. ​​Good design is timeless​​
    4. ​​Good design is often slightly funny​​
    5. ​​Good design is hard, but looks easy​​
    1. ​​Beauty in flight​​
    • beauty
    • taste
    • design
  • The design systems between us

    A Talk by Ethan Marcotte
    www.youtube.com

    In the early days, design systems promised us more consistent interfaces, more collaborative teams, and improved shipping times. While they’ve certainly delivered on some of those fronts, they’ve introduced new challenges too. Let’s talk through what’s working well—and what could be working better—as we take a closer look at the systems between us and our work.

    1. ​​Systems, Mistakes, and the Sea​​
    2. ​​A Pattern Language​​
    3. ​​The Real World of Technology​​
    • www
    • systems
    • patterns
    • design
  • What the prototype tells you

    A Fragment by Matt Webb
    interconnected.org

    As soon as I make something, I think of the 100 things I want to have next. That’s why prototyping is good. You don’t need to have much imagination, you just listen to what the prototype tells you.

    1. ​​The situation talks back​​
    2. ​​Co-Evolution of Problem and Solution Spaces in Creative Design​​
    3. ​​The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth​​
    4. ​​The game discovering itself​​
    • design
    • making

    Writing here about experiments in virtual presentation / video conferencing software.

  • Design System as Style Manual With Web Characteristics

    An Article by Dorian Taylor
    doriantaylor.com

    In my opinion, what makes a designer competent is precisely their ability to credibly justify their conclusions. If you can’t do this as a designer—no matter how successful your results are—then neither I nor anybody else can tell if you aren’t just picking things at random.

    What I am proposing, then, is no less than to make a designer’s entire line of reasoning a matter of permanent record. On the surface is the familiar set of prescriptions, components, examples and tutorials, like you would expect out of any such artifact. Attached to every element, though, is a little button that says You click it, and it tells you. The proximate explanation will probably not be very satisfying, so you click on the next until you get to the end, at which point you are either satisfied with the explanation, or you aren’t.

    1. ​​The Design of Design​​
    • decisions
    • design
    • systems
    • style
  • Reading Design

    A Website
    www.readingdesign.org

    Reading Design is an online archive of critical writing about design. The idea is to embrace the whole of design, from architecture and urbanism to product, fashion, graphics and beyond. The texts featured here date from the nineteenth century right up to the present moment but each one contains something which remains relevant, surprising or interesting to us today.

    1. ​​What this site is​​
    • design
    • architecture
    • urbanism
    • graphics
    • fashion
  • What makes a good design principle?

    An Article by Matthew Ström
    matthewstrom.com
    1. Good design principles are memorable.
    2. Good design principles help you say no.
    3. Good design principles aren't truisms.
    4. Good design principles are applicable.
    • ux
    • design

    Of these, probably the most important is #3. Ström and others encourage applying the reversibility test: a principle passes the test if the opposite of that principle is something a reasonable person might believe. A principle like "make users happy" fails this test because no organization would adopt the opposite, "make users unhappy" – therefore the principle is useless for making design decisions.

  • Design principles

    A Website
    principles.design

    An open-source collection of design principles and methods.

    • design
  • Friction Logs

    A Definition
    frictionlog.com

    A friction log is a type of UX experiment where the subject journals their feelings, thoughts, struggles, joys, and any other type of emotion. The point is to surface anything that gives the user discomfort or joy so the product or feature can improve. That's what this site is all about.

    • ux
    • design

See also:
  1. making
  2. ux
  3. architecture
  4. constraints
  5. software
  6. style
  7. function
  8. process
  9. tools
  10. iteration
  11. craft
  12. www
  13. communication
  14. products
  15. beauty
  16. art
  17. collaboration
  18. interfaces
  19. perfection
  20. critique
  21. problems
  22. quality
  23. creativity
  24. understanding
  25. technology
  26. urbanism
  27. information
  28. collections
  29. systems
  30. drawing
  31. details
  32. aesthetics
  33. work
  34. teamwork
  35. minimalism
  36. seeing
  37. intuition
  38. games
  39. engineering
  40. typography
  41. ethics
  42. cities
  43. math
  44. objects
  45. form
  46. graphics
  47. fashion
  48. repair
  49. decisions
  50. accessibility
  51. feedback
  52. thinking
  53. identity
  54. exits
  55. transitions
  56. novelty
  57. complexity
  58. humanity
  59. automation
  60. routine
  61. nature
  62. evolution
  63. growth
  64. simplicity
  65. language
  66. interaction
  67. body
  68. visualization
  69. truth
  70. society
  71. commonplace
  72. publishing
  73. walking
  74. building
  75. agile
  76. code
  77. goals
  78. sustainability
  79. time
  80. patterns
  81. taste
  82. theft
  83. copying
  84. leadership
  85. politics
  86. morality
  87. microsites
  88. whimsy
  89. ai
  90. intent
  91. abstraction
  92. material
  93. writing
  94. data
  95. balance
  96. context
  97. css
  98. space
  99. research
  100. cognition
  101. physics
  102. attention
  103. death
  104. melancholy
  105. life
  1. Christopher Alexander
  2. David Pye
  3. Matthew Ström
  4. Sophie Lovell
  5. Dieter Rams
  6. Frederick P. Brooks
  7. Jr.
  8. Frank Chimero
  9. C. Wright Mills
  10. Roman Mars
  11. Brandon Dorn
  12. Chuánqí Sun
  13. Nigel Cross
  14. Smiljan Radić
  15. Dan Klyn
  16. Michael Sorkin
  17. Kurt Kohlstedt
  18. Bret Victor
  19. Peter G. Rowe
  20. Matt Webb
  21. Dorian Taylor
  22. Bill Mollison
  23. Juhani Pallasmaa
  24. Khoi Vinh
  25. Jorge Arango
  26. Ryan Singer
  27. Matthew Simms
  28. Richard Sennett
  29. Donald Richie
  30. Jonathan Ive
  31. Steve Jobs
  32. Donald Schon
  33. Gordon Clegg
  34. Kees Dorst
  35. Alain de Botton
  36. Oliver Reichenstein
  37. Howard Scott Warshaw
  38. Brian Hayes
  39. Ursula M. Franklin
  40. Lawrence Wechler
  41. Robert Irwin
  42. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  43. Damien Newman
  44. Jonathan Hoefler
  45. Edward Tufte
  46. Alan Fletcher
  47. Don Norman
  48. Richard Saul Wurman
  49. Craig Mod
  50. Murray Silverstein
  51. Sara Ishikawa
  52. Mary Poppendieck
  53. Eliezer Yudkowsky
  54. Louis Sullivan
  55. Nick Jones
  56. Seth Coster
  57. Ethan Marcotte
  58. Paul Graham
  59. Laura Klein
  60. Peter Merholz
  61. Jay Hoffmann
  62. John Allsopp
  63. Verlyn Klinkenborg
  64. Mark W. Maier
  65. Eberhardt Rechtin
  66. Josh Centers
  67. Amanda Menking
  68. Adrian Roselli
  69. Clo S.
  70. Floris Dekker
  71. Erin Casali
  72. Gretchen Anderson
  73. Christopher Noessel
  74. Anita Clayburn Cross
  75. Dan Mall
  76. Yuhki Yamashita
  77. Boris Müller
  78. Herbert Lui
  79. Douglas Bowman
  80. Charles Eames
  81. Ray Eames
  82. Aza Raskin
  83. Henry Petroski
  84. Michelle Barker
  85. Andy Matuschak
  86. Michael Nielsen
  87. Venkatesh Rao
  88. Josh Wardle
  89. Debbie Levitt
  90. Maggie Gram
  91. Marty Cagan
  92. Tim Bray
  93. Townes Van Zandt