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ajdesign:

difted:

10 years (by brett jordan)

Wow

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thedailywhat:

Post-It Packaging of the day: “Vintage Twitter” by JMW — “a loving homage to Twitter, with a reminder that the short message is not a new invention,” handed out to web developers at September’s Disruptive Code conference in Stockholm.

[dyt.]

(Source: thedailywhat, via )

“Life… simplified.” — Soup von EvrydayJunglist

"If you’re in one of the non-Valley and non-Alley cities, your team will have a lower cost of living, a better quality of life and less distraction from recruiters. You’ll have the time to build an authentic culture, based on a four-year plan and loyal team members (loyal to each other)."

by Jason Calacanis in “The Trouble with Bubbles (talent, angel & incubators… oh my!)”

I usually don’t line up with Jason in a lot of his thinking but he’s a really smart and experienced guy I respect professionally. He really hit home on this one. I really hope a big decentralizing movement, creating new hubs of talent and money outside of Silicon Valley gets underway…

Is “Undesigned” the Next Great Web Trend? →

The only difference between these “undesigned” tools [Instapaper, Readability, etc…] and the Flash-addled screenjunk they replace is that one is optimized for what we want to do with text—read it—and the other isn’t. Neither is “less” or “more” designed. One is simply better designed for its function than the other.

Spot on!

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Amazing Sunset (Taken with instagram at BILD International)

wearethedigitalkids:

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”

-Chuck Close

Image from Wisdom

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jonduenas:

remixartiscollective.com

Pop (Counter) Culture

Update: After some feedback, I realized I might’ve not made clear where my analogy is. It is not between design and music, but how popularity affects the value of each. Besides, there’s plenty of bad popular music and not so much popular bad design. But that sparks the centennial discussion: is design art or science? ;)

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We all have the “hip” friend, right? The guy/gal who listens to bands nobody else has heard yet. That could also be true for any other form of art. Or politics. Or anything. But I’ll focus on music because I believe that’s where it hits the hardest.

The interesting thing is the passion they show when promoting that unknown band. They attend all their shows, they’ll spam their Twitter/Facebook account with pictures and other praises, they’ll buy their hand-pressed merchandise, etc… Or they might not go to shows or buy merchandise but will offer to send you MP3s of it because “it’s awesome”.

Then, if the band is really that good, it will obviously pick up in popularity. That’s great, right? Not for the “hip” folks. They feel ownership of that band drifting away and now everyone else hears what they thought was awesome. That doesn’t set them apart anymore. They are no longer “special”.

Social Ownership

A more interesting happens later. In the hipster brain, the band had to clearly give up making their own “heartfelt music and had to go with what the big corporate label told them to write”. Sound familiar?

I’m guilty of the same problem. I’ve done it countless times internally. I’m pretty eclectic so I do listen to pretty everything from pop to post-rock, from classical to (some, not much) rap. I have music I love in all quadrants. I have music I dislike in all four as well. Here’s an example: I love Coldplay. I’ve loved them since before they were mainstream. I watched them live in the Madison Square Garden back in 2003 and it was quite possibly one of the best concerts by all measures. They are talented musicians who write good music. My favorite album is still Parachutes but I like some songs from more recent albums. Some songs I love, some songs I don’t. That is also true about pretty much every other artist I listen to more than once. But after the band got popular, I started hearing a lot of people I knew liked them initially starting to say they “lost it”. And the “hipsters” that only heard about them after they were already popular judging them based on “pop fever”. What a sad way to (over)generalize.

Social Evil

I believe this goes back to one of the darkest aspects of our society: we don’t like other people’s success, particularly when it comes from talent not “hard work”. We want to believe that if you work more ours you’ll make more money, get promoted and become rich. We hate the fact that some people are just more talented than we are and will require less effort in order to be successful. It’s a really sad thing and also very true in the webesphere. A designer is good until he goes work for some big company we don’t particularly like. 37signals was great until they started having big clients, got a new amazing office or DHH bought a custom-made, one-of-a-kind Zonda. They got rich and popular

The Point

Seriously people: get popular, get rich, get whatever you like, or just don’t. As long as you’re doing what you love, listening to what makes you happy and are surround by those you love, you’ll do just fine. And stop hating other people’s success. That hate will infect all other areas of your life and no matter how much you work or how much money you make, you’ll never be happy.

"Mischel argues that intelligence is largely at the mercy of self-control: even the smartest kids still need to do their homework. “What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t will power or self-control,” Mischel says. “It’s much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it."

The secret of self-control : The New Yorker - Amazing article! (via Instapaper)