"What would be your dream setup?"

Frank Chimero

Hence, one of the primary roles for an iPad application like Flipboard becomes to evoke a feeling of having made tame, the unfiltered. In concrete terms: we must smartly curate raw streams. And raw streams of data are starting to grow wider and deeper just beneath the surface of almost all digital reading experiences.

Physical books and e-books are both text at their cores. Book designers long ago established rigorous rules for laying out text blocks so they disappear to the reader. They took pride in turning the physicality of a book into a tool for efficiently and elegantly getting information into the mind of the reader. As any good typographer knows: the best typography goes unnoticed. Our e-readers seem to have forgotten this heritage. They've forgotten that their core purpose is simply to present text as comfortably as possible; to gently pull the reader into the story. Every other aspect of experiencing a book is predicated on this notion.

A great way to build software is to start out by solving your own problems. You'll be the target audience and you'll know what's important and what's not. That gives you a great head start on delivering a breakout product.
The key here is understanding that you're not alone. If you're having this problem, it's likely hundreds of thousands of others are in the same boat. There's your market. Wasn't that easy?

Your brain’s a piece-of-shit writer. I know this, because mine is too. So, let me assure you that there’s no point in waiting for your brain to start making the clackity noise for you. It can’t. That’s all on you, and on me, and on each of our extant fingers.

If I’m not laughing at your joke, complimenting your insight, or leading the Standing O for something you spent 10 seconds pecking up on your phone, it may not be because I don’t get it; it may be because I think we’re both capable of better and just need to find the courage to say so. In as many characters as it takes.

Is innovative
Makes a product useful
Is aesthetic
Makes a product understandable
Is unobtrusive
Is honest
Is long-lasting
Is thorough down to the last detail
Is environmentally friendly
Is as little design as possible

Maybe they need to get all of their kitchen staff together and invent a whole new way to eat soup. Could we suck it through straws that are made out of crackers? Could we drink it out of a sippy cup? Is the spoon good enough? Are people tired of using spoons? Has the new generation moved on? Is this soup social enough? Maybe someone should innovate and give people better ways to share their soup with one another?

Find a subject you care about
Do not ramble, though
Keep it simple
Have guts to cut
Sound like yourself
Say what you mean
Pity the readers

Answer these questions:
What problem does your app solve?
What products have you seen that perform a similar task?
How do successful apps present information to users?
How can you build on what works and make it unique?
What value does your app bring to your audience?

Such books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator's particular interests. View Original Website

In a village, there is a male barber who shaves all and only those men who do not shave themselves. Who shaves the barber?

Authorship may suggest new approaches to the issue of the design process in a profession traditionally associated more with the communication rather than the origination of messages. But theories of authorship also serve as legitimising strategies, and authorial aspirations may end up reinforcing certain conservative notions of design production and subjectivity - ideas that run counter to recent critical attempts to overthrow the perception of design as based on individual brilliance. The implications of such a re-definition deserve careful scrutiny. What does it really mean to call for a graphic designer to be an author?

If there were ever an opportunity for graphic design to be more involved with content, the World Wide Web is it. With the computer functioning as the great visual equalizer, content instead of form is what ultimately may come to differentiate and qualify Web sites.

In this iteration of the book, the only labor required to produce it is the labor required to write it and distribute it. The labor of giving it one of its many potential forms is either frontloaded to the device manufacturer or offloaded to the readers themselves as a set of user preferences or stylesheets.

For years people have declared that print is dead, but perhaps these are now its final days.

It is certainly true that most graphic design is collaborative in the sense that designers are supplied with content by writers, photographers and illustrators. And it’s for this reason that graphic designers are rarely credited with anything beyond the transmission of their client’s messages. It is widely believed that graphic designers have no authorial voice. Graphic designers make the glass, not the wine.

Everyone always talks about confidence in believing what you do. I remember once going to a class in yoga where the teacher said that, spirituality speaking, if you believed that you had achieved enlightenment you have merely arrived at your limitation. I think that is also true in a practical sense. Deeply held beliefs of any kind prevent you from being open to experience, which is why I find all firmly held ideological positions questionable.

The librarian isn't a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.
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The library is no longer a warehouse for dead books. Just in time for the information economy, the library ought to be the local nerve center for information.