These three areas — the domain, the eye/brain, and the implementation — intertwine with each other. A single element may have conflicts in one area or all three at the same time. Much of the work designing interfaces involves teasing apart these conflicts in order to solve the right problem. Is the action correct, but it’s too hard to find? That’s a conflict with the eye/brain. Is the screen clear and simple but it doesn’t show the right information? That’s a conflict with the domain. Does it take too long to get feedback from a common action? That might be an implementation problem.
Month: December 2011
Quick 50 Writing Tools [PDF]
This list of writing tools is a great help. You can also get it in text form here.
You can’t spend all day in an open-sourced, all-sharing, peer-to-peer network and not begin to think that the rest of your world should also operate in the same way.
Keep it small. Keep it simple. Let it happen.
The Cult of Done
I posted something on this before, but I found a pictoral version of the message as well as the text the image is based on.
The Cult of Done Manifesto
- There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
- Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
- There is no editing stage.
- Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
- Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
- The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
- Once you’re done you can throw it away.
- Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
- People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
- Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
- Destruction is a variant of done.
- If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
- Done is the engine of more.
via Bre Pettis
The Supercut
Kevin Kelly has some insights on how the new genre of supercuts will work behind the scenes to keep movies and videos fresh by pointing out the absurdity of repeated phrases, camera shots, and situations.
As super cuts become more common — and become part of the cultural vocabulary — I think they will help keep cliches from getting old, and will help creators and the audience perceive recurring patterns in rapid turnaround. They will act as keen proofreaders and critics.
I can only hope he’s right. But even if supercuts don’t help Hollywood get rid or their cliches, at least the assembled cliches can be entertaining.
via KK.org
Facebook In ’90s (Seinfeld)
The fallen nature of man is gender-neutral. Some men are pigs, and some women are liars. Current sexual harassment law deals justly and effectively with the former at the cost of allowing the latter to do great harm to innocent men. The presence of both sexes in the workplace makes necessary some combination of laws, policies and customs to regulate sexual behavior on the job. But the principle of heads-she-wins-tails-he-loses does violence to both justice and equality.
James Taranto, from Sexual Harassment Stories.
Tool-Makers
The world is full of great tools. With them anything is possible. But the paint brush does not make the painter. The pen does not make the poet.
Tools are inanimate object and are completely useless unless there is someone to use them, to animate them.
And who makes those world-changing tools?
Those who make tools have a high calling. The work they do enables the rest of us to create. The tool-maker gives a gift to us all.
