1. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
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  15. Arango, Jorge 4
  16. architecture 110
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  25. Behrensmeyer, Anna K. 7
  26. Bjarnason, Baldur 8
  27. Blake, William 5
  28. blogging 22
  29. body 11
  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
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  42. Byron, Lord 14
  43. Cagan, Marty 8
  44. Calvino, Italo 21
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  46. care 6
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  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
  82. culture 13
  83. curiosity 11
  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
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  171. interaction 10
  172. interest 10
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  174. intuition 8
  175. invention 10
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  177. Isaacson, Walter 28
  178. Ishikawa, Sara 33
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  182. Jacobs, Jane 54
  183. Jacobs, Alan 5
  184. Jobs, Steve 20
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  198. Klyn, Dan 20
  199. knowledge 29
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  203. Kuma, Kengo 18
  204. language 20
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  206. life 59
  207. light 31
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  210. Lovell, Sophie 16
  211. Lupton, Ellen 11
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  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
  223. math 16
  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
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  248. Neustadter, Scott 3
  249. Noessel, Christopher 7
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  256. Ott, Matthias 4
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  259. Palmer, John 8
  260. patterns 11
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  321. Simon, Paul 6
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  323. Singer, Ryan 12
  324. skill 17
  325. Sloan, Robin 5
  326. Smith, Cyril Stanley 29
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  328. Smith, Rach 4
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  348. Sōseki, Natsume 8
  349. Tanaka, Tomoyuki 9
  350. Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō 15
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Taste, Sensibility, Judgment

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  • On Taste

    The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and what that means is — and I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way — in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their product. And you say “well why is that important?” Well, you know, proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books, so that’s where one gets the idea. And if it weren’t for the Mac they would never have that in their products.

    And so I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success — I have no problem with their success. They have earned their success — I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. Their products have no spirit to them, no spirit of enlightenment about them. They are very pedestrian. And the sad part is that most customers don’t have that spirit either. But the way that we’re going to ratchet up our species is to take the best and to spread it around to everybody so that everybody grows up with better things, and starts to understand the subtlety of these better things. And Microsoft is McDonald’s.

    So that’s what saddens me — not that Microsoft has won, but that Microsoft’s products don’t display more insight and more creativity.

    Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview
    1. ​​The aspiration for quality​​
    2. ​​We'll slap a little color on this piece of junk​​
    3. ​​Such an unholy alliance​​
    4. ​​Do they really need it?​​
    • taste
    • quality
  • This only proves how commonplace I am

    One is reminded in this connection of a story concerning Kobori-Enshiu. Enshiu was complimented by his disciples on the admirable taste he had displayed in the choice of his collection. Said they, "Each piece is such that no one could help admiring. It shows that you had better taste than had Rikyu, for his collection could only be appreciated by one beholder in a thousand." Sorrowfully Enshiu replied: "This only proves how commonplace I am. The great Rikyu dared to love only those objects which personally appealed to him, whereas I unconsciously cater to the taste of the majority. Verily, Rikyu was one in a thousand among tea masters."

    Okakura Kakuzō, The Book of Tea
    • taste
  • Leveling up aptitude

    Image from www.ribbonfarm.com on 2021-07-31 at 10.29.18 AM.png

    Your first short story takes 10 days to write. The next one 5 days, the next one 2.5 days, the next one 1.25 days. Then 0.625 days, at which point you’re probably hitting raw typing speed limits. In practice, improvement curves have more of a staircase quality to them. Rather than fix the obvious next bottleneck of typing speed (who cares if it took you 3 hours instead of 6 to write a story; the marginal value of more speed is low at that point), you might level up and decide to (say) write stories with better developed characters. Or illustrations. So you’re back at 10 days, but on a new level.

    This kind of improvement replaces quantitative improvement (optimization) with qualitative leveling up, or dimensionality increase. Each time you hit diminishing returns, you open up a new front. You’re never on the slow endzone of a learning curve. You self-disrupt before you get stuck.

    The interesting thing is, this is not purely a function not of raw prowess or innate talent, but of imagination and taste.

    Venkatesh Rao, Mediocratopia
    www.ribbonfarm.com
    • learning
    • creativity
    • taste
    • practice
  • Design as an engineering problem

    The Silicon Valley giants, testifying with their runaway success, claimed to have “solved” design as an engineering problem. The solution substituted the human essence of design — intuition, ingenuity, and taste— with the tangibles, measurables, and deliverables.

    Companies say they are “design-driven”, but designers are actually driven by dashboards filled with metrics like CSAT, NPS, CES, DAU, MAU. We rigorously run tests, studies, experiments as if innovative ideas are hidden in spreadsheets, waiting to be extracted by data scientists.

    Chuánqí Sun, The vanishing designer
    • intuition
    • taste
    • metrics
  • A cook with taste

    Observe the interior and exterior, the furniture and textile decoration
    following such color schemes, as well as commercialized color “suggestions”
    for innumerable do-it-yourselves.

    Our conclusion: we may forget for a while those rules of thumb
    of complementaries, whether complete or “split”, and of triads and
    tetrads as well.
    They are worn out.

    Second, no mechanical color system is flexible enough
    to precalculate the manifold changing factors, as named before,
    in a single prescribed recipe.

    Good painting, good coloring, is comparable to good cooking.
    Even a good cooking recipe demands tasting and repeated tasting
    while it is being followed.
    And the best tasting still depends on a cook with taste.

    Josef Albers, Interaction of Color
    • taste
    • color
  • Flexible imagination

    By giving up preference for harmony,
    we accept dissonance to be as desirable as consonance.

    Besides a balance through color harmony, which is comparable
    to symmetry, there is equilibrium possible between
    color tensions, related to a more dynamic asymmetry.

    Again: knowledge and its application is not our aim;
    instead, it is flexible imagination, discovery, invention – taste.

    Josef Albers, Interaction of Color
    • zen
    • taste
  • What we don't like

    A grasp of the psychological mechanism behind taste may not change our sense of what we find beautiful, but it can prevent us from reacting to what we don’t like with simple disbelief.

    Our understanding of the psychology of taste can in turn help us to escape from the two great dogmas of aesthetics: the view that there is only one acceptable visual style or (even more implausibly) that all styles are equally valid.

    Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
    • taste
  • Shorten the wings

    The labile tastes of certain decision-makers in a company are often a great burden for designers. Too many feel themselves qualified to pass judgment. And how insensitive, how superficial these judgments often are.

    Taste, believes Rams, is something that needs to be trained, since the aesthetic decisions at this level in product design are intrinsically bound to the entire form and function of the object. It would be unimaginable, for example, that the management of an aerospace company would ask the designers of a new plane to shorten the wings because they think it would make it look prettier.

    Sophie Lovell & Dieter Rams, Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible
    1. ​​Classical absurdity​​
    • work
    • taste
  • It's all just geek talk

    A Fragment by Riccardo Mori
    morrick.me

    I’m finding that many people not only have lowered their standards with regard to the user interface, but more and more often when I bring up the subject, they seem to consider it a somewhat secondary aspect, something that’s only good for ‘geek talk’. The same kind of amused reaction laymen have to wine or coffee connoisseurs when they describe flavours and characteristics using specific lingo. Something that makes sense only to wine or coffee geeks but has little to no meaning or impact for the regular person.

    The problem is that if an increasing number of people start viewing user interface design as an afterthought, or something that isn’t fundamental to the design of a product or experience — it’s all just ‘geek talk’ — then there is a reduced incentive to care about it on the part of the maker of the product.

    • interfaces
    • ux
    • taste
  • 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

See also:
  1. quality
  2. work
  3. zen
  4. color
  5. beauty
  6. design
  7. interfaces
  8. ux
  9. intuition
  10. metrics
  11. learning
  12. creativity
  13. practice
  1. Josef Albers
  2. Steve Jobs
  3. Sophie Lovell
  4. Dieter Rams
  5. Alain de Botton
  6. Paul Graham
  7. Riccardo Mori
  8. Chuánqí Sun
  9. Venkatesh Rao
  10. Okakura Kakuzō