Ryan Singer:

What is at the core of an interface design? I think of the design not as a collection of screens or buttons or pixels, but as a collection of jobs that the user wants to do. In this article I want to give you a feeling for how to think of interfaces as made up of jobs, each with a beginning, middle and end.

I first read this in his site Felt Presence, now he repost it in Medium. Medium have been killing it lately, so many smart people started publishing their writing there.

Fontcast is Fontshop’s short video interview series about typeface designer, and it’s now back on screen after a long hiatus of 5 years.

The latest episode is a good one, featuring Georg Seifert the designer and developer of Glyphs a font drawing and authoring software for Mac which is still in my wishlist.

Now I kinda hoping they would put it out as an RSS feed and have it as a self-respected podcast, so I wouldn’t missed it.

Jason Kottke on the Apple Watch:

The promise of the Apple Watch is to make it more convenient to send & receive notifications and quick messages, although many of the reviews make it clear that Apple hasn’t entirely succeeded in this. In the entire history of the world, if you make it easier for people to do something compelling, people don’t do that thing less: they’ll do it more. If you give people more food, they eat it. If you make it easier to get credit, people will use it. If you add another two lanes to a traffic-clogged highway, you get a larger traffic-clogged highway. And if you put a device on their wrist that makes it easier to communicate with friends, guess what? They're going to use the shit out of it, potentially way more than they ever used their phones.

This made me think, also applies to any technological progress, time will tell how Apple Watch will fare.

Also as an aside there’s an Apple II Watch, so nerdy and cool.

The original purpose behind the creation of the typeface Haas Unica was to provide a sympathetic update of Helvetica. But now the font designer Toshi Omagari has decided to make this typeface his own and has thus significantly supplemented and extended it.

It’s Neue Haas Grotesk + Helvetica + Univers so it’s called Neue Haas Unica, get it? Silly name aside, I like it, it’s sturdy and versatile, a great riff from the original typefaces, a great remix that blends the best of both Univers and Helvetica.

Nishant Kothary:

We’re punching ourselves in the, well, gut, by continuing to pit intuition against data. It’s not one or the other. It never has been, and as much as we try to sell the narrative, it never will be. They are both mandatory in sound decision-making.

As of my previous note on the optimization of everything. Nishant points out that the data and intuition dichotomy have no merit. We should view them as equal, data and intuition. Using both would do wonders with the design and engineering decision. Read the whole piece, it’s short and well worth your time, even the comment thread.

CSS Sans is a very intriguing and poetic project, I wanna make something like this, a long term but simple project that evolve with the internet, like an organism.

The thing I hate about our work that it can never be a fossil, it just dissapear or worst become irrelevant.

Virginia Heffernan for the NYT Magazine:

A Sucker Is Optimized Every Minute.

For optimizers, all values flatten: There’s optimal at one end and the dread suboptimal at the other. This can be freeing for those who get worked up by emotional, political or moral language. In theory, through optimization, arguments can be dispassionately adjudicated and then resolved without tears. You find Inkwell, the true black-and-white Instagram filter, beautiful? Sorry: Instagram photos filtered with the purplish monochrome Willow get way more hearts than Inkwell photos. I’m just saying. I mean, it’s just data.

A witty and sobering article, pointing out our insatiable hunger for data, data, and more data. Knowing the metric for everything and the value of nothing.

Is this the future that we want to build?

I have been catching up to past episodes of Radiolab and this one caught by attention, I listen to it a couple more time to understand it better, it’s about online interaction and how Facebook run some experiments to better “engineer” social interaction, fascinating to say at the very least and well worth your eardrums.

Also start listening to some Radiolab now it’s that one of the best podcast out there, and If I may recommend an episode to start your journey to the wonderful storytelling chops of Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich with this episode on color and also the one linked above.

Sacha Grief’s new gig is a good one, a guide for building a great community. The site also looks great. Definitely on my reading list, and yours should too.

Some of my friends have asked me why did I pick yellow as the main color of my site. My answer is simple, yellow is the most cheerful and the most luminous of all the colors of the spectrum. It’s the color that captures our attention more than any other color.

Just look at the Squarespace’s Cover Pages landing page looks like, Meerkat the video streaming app that have been making waves lately, and also my new favorite site The Thread. All of them are yellow, gorgeus and cheerful, so cheers!