May 2013
6 posts
Weekly Reading
Here are my recommended long reads for this week:
How, When and Where Will The First Truly Great Digital Design Studio Emerge? - The digital agency landscape is changing rapidly, and small shops are ascendent. Good summary of the current landscape.
A Guide to Practical Compassion - I’m interested in all aspects of mindfulness and one area that I’ve found I really need help with is...
“Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating...”
– Creative People Say No
“AirBnb baked design in from day one — taking the time to design the entire user...”
– On-the-nose article about the increasing role of design in start ups.
Weekly Reading
Here’s a lis of the long reads I’m enjoying this week:
The Money Shot - Very interesting and in-depth profile of Instagram’s meteoric rise.
“Second Screen” Industry In Prime-Time - I’ve been fascinated by the ways in which the so-called “second screen” is both replacing and augmenting the entertainment experience. This article has numbers to back...
2 tags
Google Glass 101: How Glass Currently Works →
April 2013
3 posts
“Startups ask almost everything of you. They are entirely consuming. If you...”
– Gentry Underwood and Scott Cannon, founders of Mailbox. Via Fast Company.
2 tags
Silent Ambassador →
via swissmiss
1 tag
The Flattening of Design →
It might sound audacious to think that Microsoft, the arbiter of uncool, was at the forefront of design a few years ago. But it was. (shared via Pocket)
January 2013
2 posts
My Digital Brain - 2012 Snapshot
Every year I become increasingly reliant on digital tools for my normal day-to-day productivity. My overall organization system evolves rapidly as new tools are launched. At the moment, this is my killer toolkit for ultimate efficacy. I’m looking forward to continue to refine this in 2013!
Todo - I can’t live without this todo list. It tells me what to do and when to do it, and helps...
December 2012
3 posts
“Apparently Zaha Hadid is working on a new building in China and it’s being...”
– Pirated Architecture | Noah Brier dot Com
“The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories,”...”
– Jobs fight: Haves vs. the have-nots – USATODAY.com (via new-aesthetic)
“In the early part of this century, if you made a service that let users create...”
– Anil Dash, The Web We Lost
November 2012
1 post
Hurricane Update
Like many New Yorkers, Aaron and I were incredibly affected by the hurricane. We live in Alphabet City, which was completely flooded by East River water. In less than a half hour, seven feet of water filled our basement to the ceiling. This basement was not a normal building basement - it was fully finished, and was Aaron’s office as well as a guest bedroom. So essentially a third of our...
October 2012
1 post
“If you work in digital, part of your job is understanding how digital works –...”
– Read more at Inventionists and the perils of compartmentalization | Little Arrows
September 2012
3 posts
The Flat Design Era
layervault:
When LayerVault 2 launched earlier this spring, we believed that we were taking a risk by pursuing an entirely flat interface.
Well-loved products on the web share a similar design aesthetic, with roughly the same kinds of bevels, inset shadows, and drop shadows. For designers, achieving this level of “lickable” interface is a point of pride. For us, and for a minority of UI...
A Call to Arms for Decent Men →
Must, must read article on how and why men need to stop hating women.
Technology becomes the layer between perception... →
Over at Little Arrows, I wrote a post on how human beings have begun to use technology as a remedy for our inaccurate perceptions of reality, and question what that means for objectivity. Clickety click.
August 2012
1 post
“Human attention is a finite resource, the same way that oil is and energy is.”
– Jonathan Harris, via swissmiss
July 2012
6 posts
“At all times love and discipline have led to a beautiful environment and a good...”
– Charles Eames via swissmiss
Should Designers be Shamans or Shepherds? →
I’m considering different models for thinking of designers - and their impact on habit forming user experiences - over at Little Arrows.
“When a small team of one to a few people focus very intensely on solving a...”
– Little Arrows » The impact of team size on interface design
Becoming Free Radicals →
We really liked The 99%’s post on the working habits of “free radicals”, and wrote a bit about it over at Little Arrows.
“The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”
– Carl Jung, via swissmiss
1 tag
Welcome to Little Arrows →
I am so incredibly excited to announce the launch of my new company, Little Arrows. Little Arrows is a strategic design studio that creates elegant digital experiences.
Read more here.
June 2012
8 posts
2 tags
Transparency: Harder Than It Looks
In today’s social world, transparency is a virtue. Or at least, it should be.
Of course, it’s difficult for a business who has been operating without transparency for decades to open up its private practices to the public. And even when they make a good attempt to be more transparent, what’s under the kimono can be rather ugly.
I noticed this trend in a few links that have been...
“And you know that being a creative mind, you have to examine who you are every...”
– Riccardo Tisci (via simko)
3 tags
"Why I Left Advertising" Follow Up
I just wanted to write a quick follow-up on my post about leaving the ad industry. I wrote the post quickly last Thursday evening, and on Friday I left for a long weekend out of town with limited internet access. When I came back on Monday afternoon - all I can say is wow. Apparently the subject matter really resonated with people, because this is by far the most interaction I’ve ever had...
3 tags
Why I Left Advertising
Recently, I made the decision to leave advertising behind, at least temporarily. Yesterday was my last day at Grey.
I come from a digital product design background. Three years ago, I decided to move into the ad world. I really liked being surrounded by creative people and working across different industries, and I thought that there was an opportunity to do great digital work from within the big...
3 tags
How to write stories, by Pixar
My favorites in bold.
#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
#2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.
#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
#4: Once upon a time...
3 tags
Why do sci-fi interfaces always look so gloomy?
Still from The Avengers
Since Minority Report, major summer blockbusters have striven to include futuristic computer interfaces in their films.
I find the vision for these fascinating on a few levels. The first is the obvious fact that these they can imagine the possible without being tethered to the restrictions of our current technology.
But it’s also interesting to note that, while...
3 tags
What's Smart About SmartGlass
If you haven’t heard, Microsoft announced a new feature for Xbox called SmartGlass at E3 today. Essentially, SmartGlass is a series of apps that allow you to interact with your TV via your phone or tablet.
This is the brilliance of piggy-backing on an ecosystem that already exists, even if it’s not your own. Imagine if Microsoft had said that SmartGlass was only available on...
The collapse of complex business models →
Great article on Business Insider on the impending collapse of the television industry, which is also going to have a big impact on the ad world.
The article does a good job of echoing the point that while technology alone doesn’t disrupt business models, shifting behaviors caused by technology can be catastrophic to stodgy industries.
A few key quotes:
So, what are the key points of...
May 2012
8 posts
“The reluctance to put away childish things may be a requirement of genius.”
– Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, via swissmiss
Make Things People Want
Great presentation on why the future of marketing likes in making things that people want, not making people want things.
The Future of Marketing: Make Things People Want or Make People Want Things?
The hierarchy of innovation →
In response to Neal Stephenson, who recently wrote that the Internet may have put innovation “on hold for a generation”, Nicholas Carr posits that we’ve simply moved innovation to a different plane on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Whereas earlier innovations were about increasing survival (fire, weapons), then our safety (electricity, plumbing), we are now at the stage...
Benchmark - May 9th, 2012 →
I’m hosting a round table discussion at the Benchmark conference in NYC on Wednesday. Benchmark is the first conference focused on measuring social media results - I’ll be chatting about how to bring brand experiences to life in social. Come say hi!
Revolutionary User Interfaces →
Gorgeous museum of innovations in user interfaces - from the first calculators to the iPhone.
“Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.”
– The same can be said for innovation.
Pablo Picasso (via simko)
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did...”
– Steve Jobs, 1996 Wired Interview, via swissmiss
April 2012
3 posts
Observations from India
Aaron and I recently returned from a two-week vacation to India. I chose to travel to India because I wanted to go someplace completely different from anything I’ve experience before.
Mission accomplished. India is beautiful, bizarre, emotional, and intense. I’ve travelled fairly extensively, but I’ve never seen anything like it. So while this isn’t strictly technology...
2 tags
“Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word...”
– Clay Shirky on the future of reading.
“Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend...”
– Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’ - NYTimes.com
March 2012
4 posts
Mechanical/Digital
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the trend for gaming health via wearable computing - think Fitbit, Nike Fuelband, etc. It’s something that feels so futuristic - devices that ambiently allow us to quantify our movements.
On Saturday, I bucked the digital trend and bought my first proper mechanical watch. Automatic watches keep themselves wound through the movement of the...
1 tag
We made this, and it's not an ad →
Looks like the best presentation I missed at SXSW 2012.
View more presentations from Duncan/Channon
SXSW as pressure cooker
People are always asking what the “breakout” app of SXSW was. The truth is that, in 13 years of SXSW interactive, there have only been two big ones so far: foursquare in 2009 and Twitter in 2007.
Even with that caveat, the impact Twitter and foursquare have had on our culture are huge, so the question is worth asking: why do some apps become famous after 5 days in a town in Texas?...
1 tag
Southby
This was my fourth year attending SXSWi, which I think makes me a bit of a veteran. While what all the haters have to say about the event is true - it was indeed too crowded, too rainy, and too over-hyped - it is still the best interactive conference around, and I’ll be there next year.
I’ll be sharing a few of my key learnings over the next few days as part of my annual...
May 2011
1 post
“As information swirls all around us, we have begun to build an attention economy...”
– danah boyd 