Keenan Cummings:
You can’t own style. Style is commodity. Own an intelligent process for making decisions and you’ll have a defensible and competitive advantage.
Lukas Mathis:
It’s easy to take «consistency» to mean that everything should be the same. That’s wrong, however. Consistency also means that different things should be different, to prevent people from forming wrong expectations.
In their paper titled The Aesthetics of Reading, Kevin Larson and Rosalind Picard present their findings on the effects of typography on reader mood and cognitive performance. They conducted two studies, each involving 20 people. The participants were divided into two groups of 10 and were given 20 minutes to read a specially typeset issue of The New Yorker on a tablet device. One of the groups got a badly typeset version (using Courier, with spaced out words), the other a properly typeset one.
Interesting findings. Bottom line: typography matters.
“Most artists and designers I know would rather work all night than turn in a sub-standard job. It is a universal truth that all artists think they a [sic] frauds and charlatans, and live in constant fear of being exposed. We believe by working harder than anyone else we can evaded [sic] detection. The bean-counters rumbled this centuries ago and have been profitably exploiting this weakness ever since. You don’t have to drive creative folk like most workers. They drive themselves. Just wind ‘em up and let ‘em go.”
Jason Santa Maria interviewed by The Great Discontent, great as always:
I’m sure that I’m romanticizing it as I’m getting older, but when you’re a kid, everything seems possible. When you think about doing something, the time between thinking about doing it and actually doing it is usually very brief. You say, “Hey, what if I do that?” and then you’re doing it. As an adult, you think, “I want to do this thing,” or, “I want to make something.” Then you start gathering resources and devising a plan, but then you get tired because you’re old and want to lay down. There’s something about that childhood idiocy that I often think back on and love.
Jason Fried:
Clay explained it in a way that I’ve never heard before and I’ll never forget again. Paraphrased slightly, he said: “Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.”
What an insight. He continued to talk about the power of questions. Questions are your mind’s receptors for answers. If you aren’t curious enough to want to know why, to want to ask questions, then you’re not making the room in your mind for answers. If you stop asking questions, your mind can’t grow.
Tina Roth Eisenberg aka swissmiss shares her insight about her business Tattly which just turned one year old yesterday. All seven of them are great advices, two of my favorites were:
Don’t outsource things you care about.
Grow a thick skin + hustle.
Just read the rest of them here. Come on now, hustle.
Marco Arment wrote this two years ago:
I never make technology-buying decisions based on future promises, rumors, or potential. I let other people be the bleeding-edge extremely early adopters, and I stick with what I know will work and stay out of my way. I don’t buy things that are “getting better”, because they usually don’t. Whatever caused them to be lacking in their current release will usually prevent them from being great in future releases.
I buy things that are great today. They’re usually things that have been great since day one.
This will holds true to other things in lives.
A courtly and stylish man of wit and charm, Mr. Pininfarina taught car body design at his alma mater for several years, and was often invited to speak to engineering and design groups in the United States. On one visit in 1981, an interlocutor asked, “What makes a good design?”
He replied with a long list of criteria, including “good harmony, classic style, proportion, grace — and honesty,” adding with a small smile, “Then, if you have good taste, the battle is won.”
Good taste, indeed. Also see his legacy in pictures.
John Scalzi quotes a few one-star reviews of Redshirts, his latest bestseller. And he says:
It’s part of the territory, and the sooner one as a creator comes to grips with it and accepts it as part of the process, the better off one will be. I think as a creator you owe your audience your best efforts, but if at the end of your best effort some of them are still not happy, the best response is, oh, well, maybe next time. You will never make everyone happy. If you try, you’ll likely create something mediocre, and then nobody will be happy. Least of all you.
(via Brent Simmons)