minimalism
Less, but better
Raw size isn't enough
Omit needless words
Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible
Morioka Shoten
Minimum
A Book by John PawsonAdd Less
An Article by Cassidy WilliamsA few people have asked me what I did to make this [website] so fast.
The answer is: nothing.
I just didn't add anything to make it slow.I kept it simple.
The pages are pre-rendered.
The CSS is inlined.
I didn't add unnecessary javascript.
The work was done before you got there.Your websites start fast until you add too much to make them slow. Do you need any framework at all? Could you do what you want natively in the browser? Would doing it without a framework at all make your site lighter, or actually heavier in the long run as you create or optimize what others have already done?
Tanikawa House
A BuildingPhotos of the Tanikawa House, designed by architect Kazuo Shinohara.
Built in 1974, this summer house materializes the act of covering a piece of earth, making it an inhabitation only by means of a roof protecting the dirt soil of the ground. The house lies on a slope in a middle of a wood and grows through an exposed timber frame structure which supports a large pitched roof. Under the roof, a minimal section of the house located on a side hosts some specific living functions concentrated on two floors: a bathroom, a kitchen, a bedroom and a staircase. This section lies in parallel to the main “earth room” (or “summer room”) and overlooks it.
Do We Need This?
An ArticleUltimately this redesign has been a study in less, trying to dig deep and find out what it is I actually want for this site. A momentary visual “wow”, or quality content that is worthy of your attention? I decided on the latter, with less visual clutter it is far harder to try obscure bad or shallow writing behind a veneer of pretty images and effects. Posts may take longer to write but I hope this new design will push towards content that is worthy of your time.
Product vs. Feature Teams
This article is certain to upset many people.
Empowered product teams
When I wrote about the virtues of empowered product teams, I was referring to what I’ll continue to call here as product teams. Specifically, they are cross-functional (product, design and engineering); they are focused on and measured by outcomes (rather than output); and they are empowered to figure out the best way to solve the problems they’ve been asked to solve.
Viability, usablity, feasibility
In an empowered product team, the product manager is explicitly responsible for ensuring value and viability; the designer is responsible for ensuring usability; and the tech lead is responsible for ensuring feasibility. The team does this by truly collaborating in an intense, give and take, in order to discover a solution that work for all of us.
However, in a feature team, you still (hopefully) have a designer to ensure usability, and you have engineers to ensure feasibility, but, and this is critical to understand: the value and business viability are the responsibility of the stakeholder or executive that requested the feature on the roadmap.
What went wrong?
If something ships from one of the companies I advise, and it is virtually unusable because of poor design (which as we all know occasionally does happen), you can bet I go directly to the designer and ask how this happened? It is absolutely on the designer to ensure this does not happen, so something went wrong.
Similarly, if the product ships and performance is terrible you can bet I go directly to the tech lead with the same question.
And most frequently of all, if something ships and the analytics show that it’s either not being bought or not being used, or it turns out that it violates some business constraint like compliance or privacy, you can bet I go right to the product manager with that question.