2020

A foggy Christmas

📷

The loss of creative people is complex. If we have nothing to do with a creator in person, then our grief is often more to do with the loss of potential future output—the books unwritten and songs unsung. But we are not our work. It is a part of us, but not the whole of us. Certainly no substitute for the love we give—or are unable to give—to our children. No shortcut to understanding our innermost selves, or what we meant to the people who loved us.

mind the gap

An introduction to object-oriented UX and how to do it This is how my brain works.

I’m jealous of Mo Willems’ notebooks

mornin'

Commuting from home mug

Things I liked this week story machine, TIL, known dude, winter books, monkey men, and more

Somethings I liked this week ghost kitchens, mystery seeds, reading highlights, memorable passwords, hockey on a mountain, and more

Somethings I like this week (since it’s Friday in the US).

space, vikings, quiet internet, tactical IA, vaccine fiction, optimism, —, and more: thingstoclick.substack.com/p/somethi…

So I’m trying out Substack if you would like to subscribe for a weekly dose of links.

Frank Moth’s post cards from the future are amazing example:

Runners.

An evening walk, lots of crunchy leaves and some ghosts.

Saying goodbye to summer:

• Sunny Waves
• Morning vibes /via culture study
• The last cone of the summer

And hello to Fall (and spooky season):

• Fall In an oldie, but a goodie (very pre-covid vibe though if that kind of thing makes you sad/nervous).
• Small Seasons to track the seasons within the seasons.
• Some autumnal splendor.
• 31 spooky movies for kids/teens
• henrifilm’s photos are on the spooky side.

• Word Notebooks & Pilot G-2 mini pens
• Tune In, Zone Out, a playlist by Aquarium Drunkard, has been a good work companion this week
• The last gig of the Beastie Boys, only up for a short time
• The Tweak New Twitter extension is nice
• Gelatinous Cube by Andy Helms
• Typography on Pencils

keanu.gif

Twitter adds all those numbers to the end of usernames

[Shot by Ned is a painting by Peter Brown] (https://www.mallgalleries.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/conversations-prize/shot-ned)

Don’t draw the UI, draw the priority instead meaning you should " … write a humble list of priorities for every project: most important info at the top -> least important info at the bottom. So instead of trying to figure out the order of the information in a component—like a card or a table or what have you, we should use this content audit to help define the visual priority of each bit."

A first person video of walking in a heavy thunderstorm at night in NYC is much more intersting than it sounds.

/via chris glass

Landsburg continued to photograph the eruption until the last possible moment, leaving himself enough time to wind up his film into its case, place his camera in its bag, place that bag into his backpack, and lay his body on top of the bag as the final protective layer against the shower of magma and ash. (source)

/via tecznts

What it’s like to live in an isolated mountain cabin at the end of an abandoned logging trail.

Now, instead of finished plans, designers must create possibilities for others to design and make; designers must build flexible platforms, defined by patterns and rules for interaction and rules for changing the rules. Instead of making decisions about what and how, designers facilitate conversations about why and who.

— Hugh Dubberly

About Feeds hopes to ‘…become the default “Help! What is this?” link next to every web feed icon on the web.’

The Architecture of Information “collects examples of intriguing information structures from the web and beyond.” Always into anything Jorge Arango does.

What the recommended videos look like on other people’s YouTube home pages.

Related to the above, Rabbit Hole is a podcast about what the internet doing to us.

The origin of the Success Kid photo.

The half-life of 90s music.

A primer on affordances in digital work.

A set of tiny icons for use in your next project.

Concept artist Ismail Inceoglu creates intricate sci-fi and fantasy scenes.

Just a polar bear floating in a lagoon.

After listening to Stay Down, Man it sounds like Dan Reeder and I have had similar friends in our past.

Watercolour paintings of TV and movie sets Example:

Shadrach Radio on Spotify. A crunchy mix of 90s music (Ween, Beasties, Primus …) if that’s your thing, enjoy.

Almost everything Caity Weaver looked up on Google or Wikipedia in a week the fun parts are in the footnotes.

Sounds made by humans for your app or whatever. Pops, ticks, nudges, and more.

An old float house in the woods

Typehut another super simple blog “… or newsletter, changelog, press page, devlog, announcements, events or anything else you can imagine.”

Doomscrolling Is Slowly Eroding Your Mental Health “Each swipe through the timeline marks the end of a day of reckoning—for the state of the world at large and for the person attached to each appendage doing the scrolling.”

Analog is “a physical (paper + wood) companion for your digital tools that helps you prioritize and focus on your most important tasks.”

I wish there was a more peaceful feed reader. Something that doesn’t make keeping up with my favorite blogs feel like a chore.

So I made a little Figma prototype to illustrate the idea.

I call it MARKS and the concept is simple. A list of bookMARKS that lets you know when something is new plus gets you out into the wilds of the web to hopefully discover even more great sites.

How I envision it working: Add sites you want to keep up with, when there is something new they jump to the top of the list. When you click on the link, it’s marked as read and drops to the bottom until something new is detected.

If you like the concept, reach out to me and maybe we can actually build it!

Note: There used to be something similar to this called Rososo, also Fraidycat is close, but I want something even simpler.

Color Craft & Counterpoint: A Designer’s Life with Color Vision Deficiency is a detailed article about the life of a color blind person. I’m also color blind (red/green) and the block below about traffic lights spoke to me. I have problems when lights are blinking red or yellow late at night.

Think for a moment about ways that color is used to convey information in the world around you. One thing that comes to my mind would be traffic lights. Color is used to let drivers know how they should proceed. No additional information is provided in case a driver is color blind. Traffic lights also use two of the colors most commonly associated with color blindness: red and green. Thankfully, most traffic lights have a common form factor. The top light is red, the middle light is yellow, and the bottom light is green. Even if I couldn’t tell the color, as long as I can tell which light is lit, then I’m able to get the necessary information.

Color Copy Paste is a pretty amazing app.

Small Seasons is a nice little website listing nature’s micro seasons. We are currently in the seeds and cereals. “Praying mantises hatch, fireflies come out. Time to seed the soil.” I saw my first fireflies of the summer on my walk last night.

Kicks Condor on blogging “But it’s still worth attempting - like any creative project that might flower into something. That might actually make life worth living.”

One of the Most Striking Photos of the Mount St. Helens Eruption Was Also One of Its Biggest Mysteries wweek.com

In the interest of trying to learn #Figma I started recreating those Lego Computer #UIs that made the rounds recently. If you’d like to have a go at it, here is the link.

From the other side of the bridge interconnected.org

Walkcar is a car you can carry around like a laptop PC.

Collected Notes is another simple blogging platform.

Bear Blog is an extremely lightweight blogging tool.

Passive income for the soul “I now have several forms of passive income: writing, drawing, cooking, exercising, photography. Doing any of these things pays immediate dividends into my mind vault …”

Time for a Walk #walkdaily

Ships from Carnival, Celebrity, and Royal Caribbean now form a strange new archipelago a network of ships “spread out loosely in three groups spanning some 30 miles” west from the Bahamas

Vertical tabs in Firefox

Tab groups in Chrome

Quarantine Goals

A list of good things

A crowd sourced reading list of foundational internet writing /via Laura Olin

↑ 9-eyes.com

• I created a Spotify playlist of mostly instrumental music. Not saying it’s great, but maybe you’ll find something to add to your own “Please Lord, just let me string together an hour of focus time today” playlist.
• Kevin Kelley’s 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice is chocked full of great advice, but I think I like this one the best: “Learn how to take a 20-minute power nap without embarrassment.”
• Times Like These performed by Live Lounge Allstars (and the Foo Fighters) is great.
• Balsamiq Sans, the base font used in the venerable wireframing app of the same name, is now available as a Google Font.
• Some things to love
• An abandoned church
• An indoor garden
• “At its worst and at its best, the internet extracts humanity from users and serves it back to other users.” - Lurking

Jeff Bezos’s wealth gave me carpal tunnel syndrome

I was reading my state’s Covid-19 recovery plan and was curious about the contact tracing part. Specifically, the job of contact tracing, so I looked up the job posting:

Are you a self-motivated, people person looking to make meaningful contributions through work that impacts the nation? NORC is hiring interviewers to serve as Contact Tracers for the Maryland COVID Link initiative. These Contact Tracers will play a key role in the state’s effort to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. This opportunity will allow interviewers to contribute to the fight against the disease while working from home as part of the Contact Tracing Call Team.

I’ve always been interested in how “things” (organizations, tools, industries, processes) work. I suppose that is why I dig my job so much. Curiosity aside, this “thing” may save our collective asses in the coming months.

louie zong

Finding Our Way is a new podcast on design leadership with Jesse James Garrett and Peter Merholz

Paul Ford

Music to listen to while wandering in a dungeon

There is a face house in Japan

A SCHOOL BUS jumping over a whole bunch of motorcycles

[What a beautiful map of California] (https://mobile.twitter.com/geo_spatialist/status/1251671066164056065) including clouds drifting off the coast

One Way to Potentially Track Covid-19? Sewage Surveillance sounds promising

The Sidewalk Weekly podcast is an interesting and light look at urban tech news

Roam is a super nerdy (I mean that in the best possible way) note taking tool that allows multiple ways to interconnect your thoughts

↑ Current mood, photo by Patrick Joust

• I just finished The Winter People, a creepy book that toggles between two families, one in 1908 and one in modern times, living in the same haunted/cursed farm house.

• I just started Terriers on Hulu. It’s like a less psychedelic Big Lebowski meets 80s/90s detective show.

• These little animated excercising stick figures are awesome, bonus points for an excercise regime you can do in a “postage-stamp flat”

• I wonder if I could get a bunch of these mini-offices, one for each family member

• The humble text field gets some design love

• Whereby, a Zoom alternative

• A rainy night in some Portuguese village

• Stories to wash your hands by

• What a strange sea beast

“These days do feel long, but the year will be short.” - Emmet Connolly

Larry David

MapLab: A Shrinking Mental Map

“Under quarantine, the map of my world has shrunk in distance, but if I try hard enough, maybe it doesn’t have to shrink in detail.” 

An interesting nugget from Advice from Ten Years of Leading Remote Teams:

Just doing my part to prevent doomscrolling with these short videos and pretty pictures:

Nightime in Pittsburgh // wave forms from a drawing machine // one foggy night // shaking nails, stick with it // tracing murmations

The 404 page for the Information Architecture Conference is fun:

Trains in Motion is a series of photos by Aaron Durand. /via Present & Correct

Still Hiring lists companies with open positions for those job hunting in these tough times. Looks like everything from grocery stores to marketing agencies are listed.

Peel Tridents are tiny little cars from the 60s // a map showing river basins in Florida // photos of the remote town of Norilsk in Siberia // tiny 3D scenes from pop culture // MD Eight is a font that seems to go with clackity keyboards + beeps and boops // commuting now

The Short Story Club is like a book club, but for short stories. RSVP, read a short story, and join a live discussion with the author on Zoom. First up, a story from Cory Doctrow. Plus proceeds go towards getting masks to healthcare workers. In.

U.S. Digital Response is looking for volunteers to help State and Local governments with technical support for their COVID-19 response. Types of skills sought include: UX research/design, content strategy, front-end engineering and more.

An integration loop

Really dark mode

Abandoned is a calm (to me) documentary series that “… explores abandoned places with the people who love them long after the lights have gone out.”

A nice conversation with InVision’s Mike Davidson

“The photographs of Joshua Dudley Greer are like small novellas that contain pathos, humor, and unfinished stories.”