#design (34 quotes)
With today’s bloated software, making a UI more dense in time is more impactful than just squeezing more stuff onto each screen. That’s why Bloomberg’s Terminal is still such a dominant tool in the financial analysis space; it loads data almost instantaneously. A skilled Terminal user can navigate between dozens of charts and graphs in milliseconds. There are plenty of ways to cram tons of financial data into a table, but loading it with no latency is Terminal’s real superpower.
— , UI Density When deciding what you're doing, ask yourself: What are you trying to change? What is your vision for the future? What is within your abilities? What do you know about the quality of what exists today? What further research will help you understand it? What has been done before? What can you learn from those experiences? What is the market and competition like? Has anyone succeeded or failed at this in the past?
— , How to Make Sense of Any Mess: Information Architecture for Everybody Sometimes, we have to move forward knowing that other people tried to make sense of this mess and failed. We may need to shine the light brighter or longer than they did. Perhaps now is a better time. We may know the outcomes of their fate, but we don't know our own yet. We can't until we try.
— , How to Make Sense of Any Mess: Information Architecture for Everybody When people posit disability as a problem, they look for solutions. Disabled people can and do have problems, which sometimes include pain and dysfunction. However, many of our problems are social, structural, and practical problems that stem from the idea that disabled people are fundamentally flawed, unworthy of inclusion, broken, or inadequate. This is ableist thinking. We have to resist these kinds of assumptions, which produce simplistic disability stories that collapse disabled people into stereotypes.
— , Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement Nobody reads advertising. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.
— , The Book of Gossage It doesn't matter how good your engineering team is if they are not given something worthwhile to build.
— , Inspired Among the hallmarks of a charismatic brand are a clear competitive stance, a sense of rectitude, and a dedication to aesthetics. Why aesthetics? Because it’s the language of feeling, and, in a society that’s information-rich and time-poor, people value feeling more than information.
— , The Brand Gap Today there’s still a need for identity manuals and the visual consistency they bring. But consistency alone does not create a brand.
— , The Brand Gap When enough individuals arrive at the same gut feeling, a company can be said to have a brand. In other words, a brand is not what YOU say it is. It’s what THEY say it is.
— , The Brand Gap That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.
— , All Tomorrow’s Parties While the digital team is there to act as an agent of change for the organisation, that does not mean it has carte blanche to be ignorant of the current rules, much less rip up or ignore them all. If you go back to first principles, many of the most frustrating aspects of working in a bureaucracy – the paperwork, the delays, the acronyms and language – are grounded in perfectly reasonable intent. Often there are very good legal, security or moral reasons lying behind the way things are. The problem arises when wise intent is smothered by many layers of abstraction. As experienced hands within the organisation, the job of the bureaucratic hackers is to get to the bottom of the intent behind the rules, explain this to the digital incomers, and ensure that the new teams follow them to everyone’s satisfaction.
— , Digital Transformation at Scale Good digital work is a million silent nods of approval, not one loud round of applause.
— , Digital Transformation at Scale In the early days, it is more important to build good services that ship even if they don’t translate easily into common components. A service made of near-perfect parts that never actually sees the light of day is the most imperfect service of all.
— , Digital Transformation at Scale Digital transformation saves money – lots of money. It thaws frozen markets and creates new ones. It brings clarity and beauty to a jumbled mess. It delivers rewards, applause and validation. But far more important than all of those things, it makes things simpler, cheaper and faster for citizens, businesses and users.
— , Digital Transformation at Scale The digital team must avoid falling into the trap of rule-setters everywhere, which is to impose a way of doing things without providing any practical help for how to go about it. You should accompany the stick of digital standards with the best carrot you can provide, and make it easier to follow the rules than to ignore them.
— , Digital Transformation at Scale Software is not neutral. Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible.
— , Feel Free Something we don’t usually notice—but which becomes apparent if we zoom out as far as possible—is that Google Maps is giving us the world in an aggressively distorted form. Google tweaks our perception by using a version of the classic projection called Web Mercator, which is identical to its forebear save for one crucial difference. GPS receivers translate GPS data into latitude and longitude points using, as reference, an irregularly shaped model of the world called an ellipsoid, which closely approximates the actual shape of the earth. Web Mercator considers the earth to be a perfect sphere. Google Maps receives latitude and longitude computed using one model of the planet, and then does its own computation to project it onto a visual interface that uses a different model.
— , Pinpoint The work succeeds when all the cleverness and artifice have disappeared, after years of harvest and regrowth, when people begin to experience it as ambience. Any residual aura of me as artist or horticultural dramaturge will have faded. It will no longer matter. That’s when the work gets interesting…”
“Interesting, how?”
“It becomes more than ‘art.’ It becomes part of the optical subconscious. Change has occurred. It’s the new normal, just the way things are.
— , A Tale for the Time Being The Japanese are great appreciators of what they call “secret brands,” and in this too they share something with the British. There is a similar fascination with detail, with cataloging, with distinguishing one thing from another.
— , Distrust that Particular Flavor The more perfect machines become, the more they are invisible behind their function. It seems that all man's industrial effort, all his calculations and his nights spent poring over drawings, all these visible signs have as their sole end the achievement of simplicity. It is as if only the experimentation of several generations can define the curve of a column or a ship's hull or an aeroplane fuselage, and give it the ultimate, elementary purity of the curve of a breast or a shoulder. On the surface it seems that the work of engineers, designers and research mathematicians consists only in polishing and refining, easing this joint and balancing that wing until there is no longer a wing joined visibly to a fuselage, but a perfectly developed form freed at last from its matrix, a spontaneous and mysterious whole with the unified quality of a poem. It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away. At the climax of its evolution, the machine conceals itself entirely.
— , Wind, Sand and Stars It’s obvious, but perhaps worth repeating, that everything raised is raised deliberately, nothing falls upward by accident. Everything the city lifts above itself has been given thought and design. Thought and design, then allotted a secretive existence, glimpsed now and again by the streetbound.
— , Findings As to how he finds design solutions, he says the process is almost the opposite of having a “Eureka” moment. “It is more like solving a crime. The answer is there, and your job is to find it. So we go off and do bits of research that essentially eliminate suspects from the enquiry. And then you follow up leads and gradually narrow down the potential solutions. Ultimately what you’re left with is the answer. Even if you’d thought of it at the beginning of the process, you could never know it was right until the end.”
— , Thomas Heatherwick: the new Da Vinci of design If a space is private, it should not be called public, and planners should send back any application that makes this false claim. This matters because, if we are kidded into thinking that there is a civic realm that is not actually there, we will suddenly find that there is less space than we had thought for such essential public actions as protest.
— , The London River Park: place for the people or a private playground? In art the importance of the same principle is illustrated by the value of suggestion. In leaving something unsaid the beholder is given a chance to complete the idea and thus a great masterpiece irresistibly rivets your attention until you seem to become actually a part of it. A vacuum is there for you to enter and fill up the full measure of your aesthetic emotion.
— , The Book of Tea Whereas high modernism wanted to lay waste to the material past in order to re-fashion it upon rational lines, romantic modernists had a soft spot for what had gone before. They loved country churches, tea in china cups wreathed with roses, old manor houses, abandoned fishing smacks, Gypsy caravans and, just as important, the soft English rain that smudged the outlines of all these precious things. Above all, their sensibility was local. While the other modernism saw national boundaries as just one more example of pernicious Ruritanian debris, romantic moderns celebrated the way England’s crinkled coast enclosed the rooted and particular. Trees, stones, bodies, walls: these were no longer the flotsam that needed to be excluded from art. They were what art was all about.
— , Review of Romantic Moderns by Alexandra Harris