The World Wide Web
It leaves no sign of its past self behind
The problem with trees
The business case for craft
Growing in the correct way
We are working against the grain of the wood
Shortlist of interesting spaces
The internet grew by breaking
Your new electronic microscope
- ââCandideââ
More that can be done
Web trails
Microcosm
Dame Wendy Hall, at the University of Southhampton, sought to extend the life of the link further in her own program, Microcosm. Each link made by the user was stored in a linkbase, a database apart from the main text specifically designed to store metadata about connections. In Microcosm, links could never die, never rot away. If their connection was severed they could point elsewhere since links werenât directly tied to text. You could even write a bit of text alongside links, expanding a bit on why the link was important, or add to a document separate layers of links, one, for instance, a tailored set of carefully curated references for experts on a given topic, the other a more laid back set of links for the casual audience.
On Technology
As we look back 10 years from now, the web is going to be the defining technology, the defining social moment for our generation.
I think itâs going to be huge.
A web of books
A proof of concept for an RSS-like books feed
Thinking through building some kind of âweb of booksâ I realized that we could use something similar to RSS to build a kind of decentralized GoodReads powered by indie sites and an underlying easy to parse format.
I created a proof of concept by converting my own bookshelf into a JSON file https://tomcritchlow.com/library.json.
If you think of several sites publishing their bookshelf as a library.json file you can imagine a bookshelf âfeed readerâ that letâs you keep track of friends bookshelves
Eggs, Easter and poached
When a site is done with care and excitement you can tell. You feel it as you visit, the hum of intention. The craft, the cohesiveness, the attention to detail is obvious. And in turn, you meet them halfway. These are the sites with the low bounce rates, the best engagement metrics, the ones where they get questions like âcan I contribute?â No gimmicks needed.
What if you donât have the time? Of course, we all have to get things over the line. Perhaps a challenge: what small thing can you incorporate that someone might notice? Can you start with a single detail? I didnât start with a poached egg in my breakfast, one day I made a goofy scrambled one. It went on from there. Can you challenge yourself to learn one small new technique? Can you outsource one graphic? Can you introduce a tiny easter egg? Say something just a little differently from the typical corporate lingo?
The vast open seas
We didn't have Google in the early days. Other search engines like Lycos, Excite and Northern Lights did exist but were nowhere near as efficient as modern search engines. Finding something you were interested in was not as simple as typing a few words and getting to that information in one click.
No, the web was much more of an adventure. It was a place that you wandered to discover new areas, like exploring the vast open seas. A new virtual space that lead to all kinds of strange, interesting, exciting places. This is what the web was like, at least, in our collective imagination.
It can also be art
It is worth remembering a website does not have to be a product; it can also be art. The web is also a creative and cultural space that need not confine itself to the conventions defined by commercial product design and marketing.
If you run a website
If you run a website and you put official share buttons on your website, use intrusive analytics platforms, serve ads through a third-party ad network or use pervasive cookies to share and sell data on your users, you're contributing to a user-hostile web. You're using free and open-source tools created by thousands of collaborators around the world, over an open web and in the spirit of sharing, to subvert users.
What do we want the web to be?
Do we want the web to be open, accessible, empowering and collaborative? Free, in the spirit of CERNâs decision in 1993 or the open source tools it's built on? Or do we want it to be just another means of endless consumption, where people become eyeballs, targets and profiles? Where companies use your data to control your behaviour and which enables a surveillance societyâwhat do we want?
gridless.design
AÂ Website by Donnie D'Amatoget rid of the grid
Blasphemy, I need structure and order!"
The web is good at these things, just not in the ways that designers have been accustomed to working. We'll take a look at how we got here and how we might change our perspective. Let's think outside of the grid and allow other guidelines to provide a comprehensive layout.
The Website Obesity Crisis
AÂ Talk by Maciej CegĹowski- ââThe Taft Testââ
Web Design - The First 100 Years
AÂ Talk by Maciej CegĹowskiA Brief Rant
An Essay by Bret VictorAgainst an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
An Article by Parimal SatyalWe are quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it.
Web Design is 95% Typography
An Article by Oliver Reichenstein95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.
Why Do All Websites Look the Same?
An Article by Boris MßllerOn the visual weariness of the web.
Rediscovering the Small Web
An Article by Parimal Satyal- ââThe vast open seasââ
- ââThe gatekeeperââ
- ââIt can also be artââ
Design Links & Learning
AÂ Blog by Nick TrombleyCollections of articles, links, and other material from around the web, relevant to software design and engineering.
Snipping the dead blooms
AÂ Quote by Robin SloanI recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that's about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden â you're snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I'll see something really old on my site, and I go, âyou know what, I don't like this anymore,â and I will delete it.
But that's care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, âis this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?â Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn't have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they're both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.
What shape is the internet?
AÂ Gallery by Noah VeltmanAccording to patent drawings, it's a cloud, or a bean, or a web, or an explosion, or a highway, or maybe a weird lump.
Downsides of the internet
An EssayThe type of nitpicking behavior that I mentioned earlier, is especially problematic since it often causes the loss of writerâs authenticity. With time, these criticisms cause one of the following:
- The writer stops publishing their work.
- The writer stops reading comments and minds their own business.
- The writer learns their lesson and sands off their edges in order to fit better in the society du jour.
The larger the writerâs audience, the more likely it is for the writer to pick the last option and tone down their voice. You can experience this first hand when reading the essays of prominent bloggers. Their early work is usually interesting and fun to read, which naturally brought a large audience to their doors. But the more the show goes on, the more they will waffle around the topic, since with a large enough audience every thought will be misunderstood and nitpicked mercilessly.
Make Free Stuff
At its very core, the rules of the web are different than those of ârealâ markets. The idea that ownership fundamentally means that nobody else can have the same thing you have just doesnât apply here. This is a world where anything can easily be copied a million times and distributed around the globe in a second. If that were possible in the real world, weâd call it Utopia.
âŚResource Scarcity doesnât make sense on the web. Artificially creating it here serves no other purpose than to charge money for things that could easily have been free for all. Why anyone would consider that better is beyond me.
Thoughts On Shitpost Diplomacy
An Article by Tanner GreerThat our diplomatâs first impulse is to resort to a self-defeating meme speaks to a broader problemâthe sort of cultural problem instinctual reactions to crisis make most clear. This is a problem of an entire generationâmy generation. We are a people that retweets when we could be reading. The minds of best and our brightest have been poisoned by ratios, âgod tweets,â and memes. We came of age on Twitter, Tumblr, and 4chan, and still see the world through their frames. We find it harder and harder to distinguish the actual from the image; we struggle to disentangle perception management from problem management. This is what it looks like when the terminally online ascend to positions of real responsibility. Welcome to the age of shitpost diplomacy.
Spatial Web Browsing
An Article by Maggie AppletonThere are some new apps appearing that offer alternative ways of browsing the web...This canvas-based approach adds spatial dimension to the web browsing experience; they allow us to arrange browser windows above, below, to the left, and right of other browser windows.
The same way we're able to put an open book next to a piece of paper and below a row of sticky notes in meatspace. Arranging objects in space to create groupings, indicate relationships, and build hierarchies is one of those classical human skills that never goes out of style.
- ââSpatial Interfacesââ
- ââSpatial Softwareââ
drawing.garden
AÂ Website by Ben MorenGardening, but with emojis and less time.
Plain old webpages still matter
An Article by Felix PleĹoianuIt's empowering to see just how far you can go with a website you can, in a pinch, create or modify with nothing more than Notepad. Not to mention all the new people it can reach without the overhead of bloated server software slowing it down and inflating the code.
Don't let others speak for you on the web. You deserve better.
Million Short
AÂ WebsiteMillion Short makes it easy to discover sites that just don't make it to the top of the search engine results for whatever reason â whether it be poor SEO, new site, small marketing budget, or competitive keywords. The Million Short technology gives users access to the wealth of untapped information on the web.
- ââMarginalia Searchââ
Menus, Metaphors and Materials: Milestones of User Interface Design
An Article by Boris MßllerStudents traditionally learn art and design by studying the masters, analyzing, sketching and interpreting the grand visions of the past. In doing this, they get to understand the ideas, concepts and motivations behind the visual form.
In user interface design, this practice is curiously absent.
- ââInterface design is ephemeralââ
- ââXerox Starââ
- ââMagic Capââ
- ââInformation Landscapesââ
- ââBeOS Iconsââ
Metaphors We Web By
An Essay by Maggie AppletonAs George Lakoff and Mark Johnson made clear in their touchstone book Metaphors We Live By, metaphors are the basis of all human thought and reasoning. The metaphors we use to speak about the web are not simply linguistic trivia â they determine how we understand it on a fundamental level. It determines what we think the web is capable of, what risks, opportunities, and challenges it poses. Which means the metaphors we use to think about the web profoundly influence what we think the web is, what we think we can do with it, and how we might change or evolve it.
âŚOut of all of these metaphors [for the web], the two most enduring are paper and physical space.
scribe.rip
An ApplicationI hadn't realized that Medium had made JavaScript a requirement to be able to read any Medium post - I'd had JS disabled for ages on Medium just because of all the extra cruft they added.
But now, without JS, you only get the first few lines of content, and the rest is loaded entirely with JS - which is...stupid.
Scribe fixes all that and focuses entirely on the author's content.
Why Would I Want to Use This?
- You believe in an open web
- You believe more in the author than the platform
- You don't like the reading experience that Medium provides
- You object to Medium's extortionist business tactics
- You're concerned about how Medium uses your data
- Other reasons
Design Systems, Agile, and Industrialization
An Article by Brad FrostIâve come to the conclusion that âenterprise web developmentâ is just regular web development, only stripped of any joy or creativity or autonomy. Itâs plugging a bunch of smart people into the matrix and forcing them to crank out widgets and move the little cards to the right.
In these structures, people are stripped of their humanity as theyâre fed into the machine. It becomes âa developer resource is neededâ rather than âOh, Samantha would be a great fit for this project.â And the effect of all this on individuals is depressing. When peopleâs primary motivation is to move tickets over a column, their ability to be creative or serve a higher purpose are almost completely quashed. Interaction with other humans seems to be relegated to yelling at others to tell them theyâre blocked.
Reading âAS PER THE REQUIREMENTSâ in tickets makes me dry heave. How did such sterile, shitty language seep into my everyday work?
How I experience the web today
AÂ Website- ââUser Inyerfaceââ
Make Frontend Shit Again
AÂ Website by Sara VieiraWe used to make websites because it was fun but at some point, we lost the way.
We need to make dumb shit!
Make useless stuff;
make the web fun again!Things that don't scale
An Article by Benedict EvansMaybe the internet is due for a wave of things that donât scale at all. In that light, Iâve been fascinated by âMorioka Shotenâ in Tokyo - a bookshop that sells only one book at a time. This is retail as anti-logistics - as a reaction against the firehose, and the infinite replication of Amazon. Before the internet that would only work in a very dense city, but, again, the internet is the densest city on earth, so how far do we scale the unscalable?
Locus. (Appwalls)
An Article by Ethan MarcotteIâve noticed a recent trend on the web â or at least, on the parts of it Iâve visited. Maybe youâve noticed it too.
Hereâs what happens: youâre on a website, and one of these little prompts pops up...[to] let you know that thereâs an app, and that the website youâre on...well, itâs not quite the app, is it?
...Sometimes, the website wants me to install the appâââno, it needs me to install the app. Itâs like a paywall, but for apps. An appwall.
In recent years, these prompts have gotten more prominent, and occasionally impassable. And I think that trendâs interesting. Why would a company promote a native app over their perfectly usable website?
It feels like a glimpse into that companyâs design priorities. And itâs possibly providing us with insight into the business value they place on the open webâââa medium thatâs meant to be accessible everywhere, on any screen, on any device.
And it really does feel like these glimpses are becoming more common.
Jacob Leech, Digital Craftsman
AÂ Profile by Jacob LeechI'm Jacob â a designer and coder who creates things with computers (Fig 1) 'Digital Craftsman' best describes my skill set.
Digital projects thrive when designers understand how they will be built. Just as an architect understands how a structure is created, the same should be true on the web.
Exit pages
An Idea by Brad EnslenToday I made an Exit page. So many people end their visit by hitting the Back button on their browser. The exit page is a last attempt to get them to explore the Blog Directory to find an entertaining blog. Or failing that to try a search on a search engine they may have never tried before.
The indie web manifesto
AÂ DefinitionWhile commercial websites display more and more agressive messages, target and track their users, the indie web respects the individuals, their intelligence and their privacy; itâs an open forum for thoughts and debate. While purely commercial websites turn into information and entertainment magazines, while tycoons of media, telecom, computing and military agencies fight for the control of the Internet, the indie web offers a free vision of the world, bypasses the economic censorship of news, its confusion with advertising and infommercial, its reduction to a dazing and manipulating entertainment.
136 things every web developer should know before they burn out and turn to landscape painting or nude modelling
An Article by Baldur Bjarnason- The best way to improve software UX is regular direct observation, by everybody on the team, of the work done.
- Have some personality.
- Minimalism is garbage.
- Metaphors are fantastic.
- Naming things is fantastic.
- Try to write HTML that would make sense and be usable without the CSS.
- The buyer is quite often wrong. That fact never changes their mind.
- Working on a functioning appâs codebase does more to increase its quality than adding features.
- A good manager will debate you, and thatâs awesome.
- The term âprojectâ is a poor metaphor for the horticultural activity that is software development.
All websites are just digital movie theaters now
An Article by Ryan BroderickIf I had to guess where this is all going, Iâd say that what an internet platform is actually has already permanently shifted. Instead of apps trying to dominate specific features â a platform for video, a platform for expiring content, a platform for connecting social networking, a platform for livestreaming, a platform for resumes â weâve already entered a new era of online networks where they all will essentially offer the same services and instead, focus increasingly on specific demographics.
The web in decay is the web by design
An Essay by Chia AmisolaWhen will there be a guide to best practices for archiving the web?
Will the giants responsible for the platformization of the web make the act of digital archival any easier for us?
Is it foolish for platforms like Snapchat or Instagram Stories to brand themselves as âtemporaryâ when temporariness is impossible on our internet?
Should the web exist as something organic, malleable, and destructible ââ or as an eternal timekeeper?
Is link rot more of a technological issue or a human one?
Do humans want to know themselves forever?
The Internet Is Rotting
An Essay by Jonathan ZittrainToo much has been lost already.
The glue that holds humanityâs knowledge together is coming undone.
Links work seamlessly until they donât.
And as tangible counterparts to online work fade,
these gaps represent actual holes in humanityâs knowledgeâ
they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts.The amorality of Web 2.0
An Essay by Nicholas CarrThe Internet is changing the economics of creative work â or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture â and itâs doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because itâs created by amateurs rather than professionals, itâs free. And free trumps quality all the time.
Project Xanadu
An Idea by Ted NelsonProject Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it an improvement over the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivializes our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents."
Discourse in web design
An Essay by Jason Santa MariaA website is its own, singular thing. We know it isnât a book, a TV show, a film, or a song, but our language is limited to talking about it in those restrictive boxes. A website is a mix of all of those things, and none of those things. It is influenced by place and time. A website changes with age. It can evolve and regress.
It was then I wondered if the problem wasnât that web design lacked its own EmigrĂŠ. What if we actually lacked a shared language to critically discuss web design? Art, architecture, and even graphic design, have critics and historians that give context to new work through the lenses of culture and important work from the past.
Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design
An Article by David Bryant Copeland- Content is readable on all reasonable screens and devices.
- Only hyperlinks and buttons respond to clicks.
- Hyperlinks are underlined and buttons look like buttons.
- The back button works as expected.
- View content by scrolling.
- Decoration when needed and no unrelated content.
- Performance is a feature.
Hyperland, Intermedia, and the Web That Never Was
An Article by Claire L. Evans- ââProject Xanaduââ
Human-scale digital spaces
An Article by Alexis LloydThe open web is much like emergent, unplanned cities â it happens at the scale of the individual, it allows for unexpected creativity, it gives agency to anyone (well, anyone with sufficient technical knowledge) to shape their own spaces. On the other hand, the platforms that now dominate much of the web experience are more evocative of Mosesâs planned citiesâthey often occur at the scale of the corporation, and have rigid, predictable constraints for how individuals can behave and express themselves.
Tokenize This
An Artwork by Benjamin GrosserDifferent from the typical website whose URLs act as persistent indexes to a page and its contents, Tokenize This destroys each work right after its creation. While the unique digital object remains viewable by the original visitor for as long as they leave their browser tab open, any subsequent attempt to copy, share, or view that URL in another tab, browser, or system, leads to a â404 Not Foundâ error. In other words, Tokenize This generates countless digital artifacts that can only be viewed or accessed once.
Bo Burnham: Inside
AÂ Film by Bo Burnham- ââIt's a beautiful day to stay insideââ
- ââWent out to look for a reason to hide againââ
- ââDon't wanna knowââ
- ââA little bit of everything all of the timeââ
- ââThat funny feelingââ
- ââPoioumenonââ
- ââBut we're not thereââ
On onion cutting
An Article by Ana RodriguesIn the television show Masterchef there was an episode where the judges did a test on what they call âbasic skillsâ. One of the judges often says that in order to be a âtrue chefâ, you must know how to quickly and finely cut onions.
...This was really bothering me and I am stubborn so I wanted to win this fake argument really badly so I looked up why the way one cuts onions is important: as it turns out, the shape and even the surface area affect the end flavour. I thought the whole âchop chop chopâ was about performance in the kitchen. Cut quickly to serve quickly! I was wrong.
Social Attention: a modest prototype in shared presence
An Article by Matt WebbMy take is that the web could feel warmer and more lively than it is. Visiting a webpage could feel a little more like visiting a park and watching the world go by. Visiting my homepage could feel just a tiny bit like stopping by my home.
The Value of a Personal Site
An ArticleA personal site offers a dedicated place to experiment across the entire tech-stack; not a deliverable for a client that is handed over and then never touched by me again. A personal site is a place to try out that new API, see what can be done with CSS, truly discover what the Web can be.
The small web is beautiful
An Essay by Ben HoytI believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the âsmall webâ as well as the small software and architectures that power it.
This used to be our playground
An Essay by Simon CollisonThere was a time when owning digital space seemed thrilling, and our personal sites motivated us to express ourselves. There are signs of a resurgence, but too few wish to make their digital house a home.
A shifting house next to a river of knowledge
An Essay by Laurel SchwulstMy website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?
Simon Collison's timeline
AÂ Website by Simon CollisonIâve shaped this timeline over five months. It might look simple, but it most definitely was not. I liken it to chipping away at a block of marble, or the slow process of evolving a painting, or constructing a poem; endless edits, questions, doubling back, doubts. It was so good to have something meaty to get stuck into, but sometimes it was awful, and many times I considered throwing it away. Overall it was challenging, fun, and worth the effort.
Front-of-the-front-end and back-of-the-front-end web development
An Article by Brad FrostA succinct way Iâve framed the split is that a front-of-the-front-end developer determines the look and feel of a
button
, while a back-of-the-front-end developer determines what happens when thatbutton
is clicked.- ââThe Great Divideââ
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 âwowâ, 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.
The User Interface of URLs
AÂ Research PaperURLs (Uniform Resource Locators) have rapidly become the standard method for specifying how to access information on the Internet. Although mostly used on the World Wide Web, URLs are also becoming more common for specifying locations for other distributed Internet services such as Gopher and anonymous FTP. Internet users see URLs both online and in print, and therefore URLs have visual interfaces. This paper gives an overview of many of the issues that concern the visual and user interfaces of URLs.
Cool URIs don't change
An Essay by Tim Berners-LeeWhat makes a cool URI?
A cool URI is one which does not change.
What sorts of URI change?
URIs don't change: people change them.Web History Chapter 6: Web Design
AÂ Chapter by Jay HoffmannAfter 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 â which define and voice and tone unique to the web â are soon joined by traditional publishers. By the mid to late 90âs, 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.
A Dao of Web Design
An Essay by John AllsoppWhat I sense is a real tension between the web as we know it, and the web as it would be. Itâs the tension between an existing medium, the printed page, and its child, the web. And itâs time to really understand the relationship between the parent and the child, and to let the child go its own way in the world.
Web History Chapter 1: Birth
AÂ Chapter by Jay Hoffmann- ââMicrocosmââ
What On Earth is a Brutalist Website?
An ArticleSome of the webâs early richness has gradually been getting lost in a sea of landing pages, hero images, sans-serifs, and calls-to-action. âWeb brutalismâ is a valid reminder that there is still a world of possibilities out there, if we are bold enough to break free of our UI kits and stock photos.
Web Brutalism, seamfulness, and notion
An Essay by Brandon DornHow a tool for sensemaking reconciles two distinct software design ideologies.
- ââSeamful vs. seamlessââ
- ââReveling in infrastructureââ
- ââThe brilliance of notionââ
- ââHow our understanding is workingââ
The split personality of brutalist web development
An ArticleWhen brutalist web design isnât going all in on rationalism and functionality, itâs laughing in the face of rationalism and functionality. All clear?
The term has grown to encompass approaches that are in many senses at odds with each other. Indeed, Pascal Deville, who founded the Brutalist Websites directory after coining the term in 2014, thinks the style has splintered into three micro-stylistics:
- Purists,
- UX minimalists,
- Anti-ists (or artists).
Of Note: Better Text Annotations for the Web
An Article by Brandon DornGenerally speaking (and ignoring questions of styling, API availability, etc.), an ideal Web annotation pattern follows these principles:
- Annotations appear in close visual proximity to the primary content.
- Their design neither distracts from nor hides the primary content.
- The preceding principles are followed regardless of screen width.
The only pattern Iâve found that meets these criteria is FiveThirtyEightâs.
...As it turns out, FiveThirtyEight didn't invent this pattern. It likely originated in medieval illuminated manuscripts which contain âinterleave notesâ â comments written literally between the lines.
Painting With the Web
An Article by Matthias OttSo much about [Gerhard Richter's painting process] reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material, the improvisation, the bugs, the happy accidents. There is one crucial difference, though. By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process.
The design systems between us
AÂ Talk by Ethan MarcotteIn the early days, design systems promised us more consistent interfaces, more collaborative teams, and improved shipping times. While theyâve certainly delivered on some of those fronts, theyâve introduced new challenges too. Letâs talk through whatâs working wellâand what could be working betterâas we take a closer look at the systems between us and our work.
The Web is Industrialized and I Helped Industrialize It
An Article by Dave RupertIn our cultural obsession with billionaire entrepreneurs we laud new features more than the maintenance and incrementalism work of making old features better and more accessible. Maintenance looks like red minus signs in the spreadsheet. New features look like green plus signs. New features look better on our LinkedIn profiles. New features have that pizzazz, baby.
When gardening, the building of planters and initial planting is a very short process. The majority of your time is spent nurturing and monitoring growth. I personally feel the struggle between maintainer work and new shiny feature work. I enjoy that new feature smell but I know that my day-to-day is more like a janitor on a boat mopping up someone elseâs barf. In terms of metaphors, the gardening metaphor is certainly better, and it acknowledges that design and development still tend to be more creative endeavors.
The Taft Test
AÂ Tool by Maciej CegĹowskiDoes your page design improve when you replace every image with William Howard Taft?
The life and death of an internet onion
AÂ Website by Laurel SchwulstIn her piece "A drop of love in the cloud" (2018), artist Fei Liu writes about the like/heart button as a flattening affordance of giving affirmation and love. The text-editor provides a much more expressive input.
But even people who can't communicate well because of language barriers can express love through actions, like cooking food. Can we create other "love inputs" that might allow us to "reach across the chasm of a seamless signal"?
What is expressing "real" love or affirmation about? Is it about effort, thoughtfulness, generosity, something else? What might a thoughtful or generous interface feel or behave like?
XXIIVV Webring
AÂ WebsiteThis webring is an attempt to inspire artists & developers to build their own website and share traffic among each other.
How the Blog Broke the Web
An Article by Amy HoyOn the "Building" of Software and Websites
An Essay by Dorian TaylorIâm beginning to suspect that software, and more conspicuously the Web, is fundamentally the wrong shape for the archetype of the construction project.
Every Website is an Essay
An Article by Robin Rendle"Every website thatâs made me oooo and aaahhh lately has been of a special kind; theyâre written and designed like essays. Thereâs an argument, a playfulness in the way that theyâre not so much selling me something as they are trying to convince me of the thing. They use words and type and color in a way that makes me sit up and listen.
And I think that framing our work in this way lets us web designers explore exciting new possibilities. Instead of throwing a big carousel on the page and being done with it, thinking about making a website like an essay encourages us to focus on the tough questions. We need an introduction, we need to provide evidence for our statements, we need a conclusion, etc. This way we donât have to get so caught up in the same old patterns that weâve tried again and again in our work.
And by treating web design like an essay, we can be weird with the design. We can establish a distinct voice and make it sound like an honest-to-goodness human being wrote it, too."
Quotebacks
AÂ Tool by Tom Critchlow & Toby ShorinQuotebacks brings structured discourse to blogs and personal websites.
Quotebacks makes it easy to reference content and create dialogue with other sites by turning snippets of text into elegant, self-contained blockquote components.
Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web
AÂ Book by David Weinberger
Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview
- ââOn Valueââ
- ââOn Businessââ
- ââOn Programmingââ
- ââOn Successââ
- ââOn Processââ
On Value
It was clear that [Hewlett-Packard] recognized that its true value was in its employees.
On Business
How do you learn to run a company at 21 with no business experience?
Throughout the years in business I found something, which is, Iâd always ask why you do things, and the answers you invariably get are âoh thatâs just the way itâs done.â Nobody knows why they do what they do, nobody thinks about things very deeply in business. Thatâs what I found.
Iâll give you an example. When we were building our Apple Is in the garage we knew exactly what they cost. When we got into a factory in the Apple II days, accounting had this notion of a âstandard cost.â Where youâd kind of set a standard cost and then at the end of the quarter youâd adjust it with a variance. And I kept asking, âwhy do we do this?â And the answer was just âwell thatâs the way itâs done.â And after about 6 months of digging into this what I realized was the reason you do it is because you donât really have good enough controls to know how much it costs, so you guess, and then you fix your guess at the end of the quarter. And the reason you donât know how much it costs is because your information systems arenât good enough.
But nobody said it that way. And so later on when we designed this automated factory for Macintosh we were able to get rid of a lot of these antiquated concepts, and know exactly what something costs, to the cent. And so in business a lot of things are what I would call âfolklore.â Theyâre done that way because they were done that way yesterday. And so if youâre willing to ask a lot of questions about things and work hard you can learn business pretty fast. Itâs not the hardest thing in the world. Itâs not rocket science.
On Programming
I think everyone in this country should learn a computer language because it teaches you how to think. Itâs like going to law school â I donât think anyone should be a lawyer, but going to law school could be useful because it teaches you how to think in a certain way. So I view computer science as a liberal art.
On Success
The technology crashed and burned at Xerox.
What happens is, like with John Sculley, John came from PepsiCo, and they at most would change their product maybe once every ten years. To them a new product was like a new size bottle. So if you were a product person you couldnât change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore they were the ones that got promoted and they were the ones that ran the company.
Well, for PepsiCo that might have been ok, but it turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM and Xerox.
If you were a product person at IBM, or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer? So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company isnât any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people end up getting driven out of the decision marking forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibilities and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship thatâs required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
So thatâs what happened at Xerox.
On Process
People get confused, companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success, and a lot of them think that somehow thereâs some magic in the process that theyâve created. And so they start to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long people get very confused that the process is the content.
In my career Iâve found that the best people are the ones who really understand the content. And theyâre a pain in the butt to manage. But you put up with it because theyâre so great at the content. And thatâs what makes great products. Itâs not process, itâs content.
On Greatness
Whatâs important to you in the development of a product?
One of the things that really hurt Apple was that after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease â Iâve seen other people get it too â itâs the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and if you just tell all these other people âhereâs this great idea,â then of course they can just go off and make it happen.
The problem with that is that thereâs just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts, because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it, and you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs you have to make, there are just certain things you canât make electrons do, there are certain things you canât make plastic, or glass, or factories, or robots do. And as you get into all these things, you find that designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain, these concepts, and just fitting them all together and continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover a new problem or a new opportunity to do it a little differently. And itâs that process that is the magic.
On Teamwork
What Iâve always felt that a team of people doing something they really believe in is like, is like when I was a young kid, there was a widowed man that lived up the street. He was in his 80âs, and a little scary looking, and I got to know him a little bit â I think he paid me to cut his lawn or something â and one day he told me, âcome into my garage, I want to show you something.â
And he pulled out this dusty old rock tumbler. It was a motor and a coffee can and a band between them. And he said âcome out here with me,â so we went out to the back and we got some rocks, just some regular old ugly rocks and we put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and a little bit of grit powder, and he turned the motor on and said âcome back tomorrow,â as the tumbler was turning and making a racket.
So I came back the next day and what we took out were these amazingly beautiful and polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in â through rubbing against each other, creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise â had come out as these beautiful polished rocks.
And thatâs always been my metaphor for a team working really hard on something theyâre passionate about. Itâs that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together, they polish each other, and they polish their ideas. And what comes out are these really beautiful stones.
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 whoâs really good and whoâs really being counted on is to point out to them when their work isnât 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.
On Help
Microsoftâs orbit was made possible by a Saturn V booster called IBM.
On Taste
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and what that means is â and I donât mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way â in the sense that they donât think of original ideas, and they donât bring much culture into their product. And you say âwell why is that important?â Well, you know, proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books, so thatâs where one gets the idea. And if it werenât for the Mac they would never have that in their products.
And so I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success â I have no problem with their success. They have earned their success â 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 donât have that spirit either. But the way that weâre 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 McDonaldâs.
So thatâs what saddens me â not that Microsoft has won, but that Microsoftâs products donât display more insight and more creativity.
On Technology
As we look back 10 years from now, the web is going to be the defining technology, the defining social moment for our generation.
I think itâs going to be huge.
On Tools
I read an article when I was very young in Scientific America. It measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet â you know, for bears and chimpanzees and raccoons and birds and fish â how many kilocalories per kilometer did they spend to move? And humans were measured too. And the condor won, it was the most efficient. And mankind, the crown of creation, came in with rather an unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list.
But somebody there had the brilliance to test a human riding a bicycle, and it blew away the condor, all the way off the charts. And I remember this really had an impact on me, I remember thinking that humans are tool builders, and we build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities.
And to me â we actually ran an ad like this, very early at Apple â the personal computer is the bicycle of the mind. And I believe that with every bone in my body, that of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near if not at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented, and I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time where this invention has taken form.
On Theft
How do we know whatâs the right direction [for computers to take]?
Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then trying to bring those things in to what youâre doing.
Picasso had a saying: âGood artists copy, great artists steal.â And we (at Apple) have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. And I think part of what made Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to have been the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hasnât been for computer science, these people would all be doing amazing things in life in other fields. And they brought with them â we all brought to this effort â a very liberal arts air, a very liberal arts attitude, that we wanted to pull in the best we saw in these other fields into ours.
On Expression
There was a germ of something there. And itâs the same thing that causes people to want to be poets instead of bankers. I think thatâs a wonderful thing, and I think that same spirit can be put into products, and those products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit. If you talk to people that use the Macintosh, they love it. I mean you donât hear people loving products very often. But you could feel it, there was something really wonderful there.
So I donât think that most of the really best people that Iâve worked with have worked with computers for the sake of working with computers. They work with computers because they are the medium that is best capable of transmitting some feeling that you have that you want to share with other people. And before they invented these things, all these people would have done other things. But computers were invented, and they did come along, and all these people did get interested in them, either in school or before school, and said âHey, this is the medium that I think I can say something in."
On Talent
I observed something fairly early on at Apple, which I didnât know how to explain then, but Iâve thought a lot about it since. Most things in life have a dynamic range in which [the ratio of] âaverageâ to âbestâ is at most 2:1.
For example, if you go to New York City and get an average taxi cab driver, versus the best taxi cab driver, youâll probably get to your destination with the best taxi driver 30% faster. And an automobile; whatâs the difference between the average car and the best? Maybe 20%? The best CD player versus the average CD player? Maybe 20%? So 2:1 is a big dynamic range for most things in life.
Now, in software, and it used to be the case in hardware, the difference between the average software developer and the best is 50:1; maybe even 100:1. Very few things in life are like this, but what I was lucky enough to spend my life doing, which is software, is like this.
So Iâve built a lot of my success on finding these truly gifted people, and not settling for âBâ and âCâ players, but really going for the âAâ players. And I found something⌠I found that when you get enough âAâ players together, when you go through the incredible work to find these âAâ players, they really like working with each other. Because most have never had the chance to do that before. And they donât work with âBâ and âCâ players, so itâs self-policing. They only want to hire âAâ players. So you build these pockets of âAâ players and it just propagates.