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the earlier tradition was that you'd add a pilcrow or some other distinctive mark at the start of a logical paragraph mid-line so that as little paper (which was either baby cow parchment or made of precious linen) was wasted on whitespace. For an example, look at a 42 line bible [2] or eric gill's book on typography [3].

[1]: http://www.thenewgraphic.com/2012/06/jan-tschichold-penguin-... [2]: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/gutenbergbib... [3]: http://www.olivertomas.com/books/eric-gills-an-essay-on-typo...

it's a shame that there's such a strong resemblance on first glance because i'm sure this is useful to small teams who think trello's too laissez faire and also would like a ui that acknowledges that they have to be accountable to specific time/budget constraints.

You know, i like a conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, but this seems like a genuine series of errors, intentional or not, who knows.

But, let me play a separate angle to this, which is that when I read this article, I immediately flash-backed to all the tech support calls i'd had with relatives where each of us made some mistake or made some assumption given the facts at hand. "turn down the brightness, stop using the cd drive, turn off bluetooth, limit wifi usage, oh, wait, it's plugged in? ummm... time for a new power supply then!"

I don't know why we should expect the 'average consumer' to have deep insight into the workings of batteries or electric car technology. This stuff remains new and I think the point to be gained from this article is that it's still not totally obvious what causes some failures and not others. It'd be one thing if this guy really tore into Tesla, but he seems ambivalent more than anything else.

And reading that is basically the same reaction i get from my mom about my iphone: it's nice, but it's confusing to me and i still make mistakes each time i use it—nice, but not for me.

All our tech makes some assumptions about what you know and the effort you're willing to expend to get something to work. I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to step back and say "hey, something didn't work out and maybe that's a failure of the interface or our messaging or something" rather than jumping to claims of journalistic fabrication and oil conspiracies.

That said, I don't think that many "howto design" books are all that interesting (and the best design books are mystifying in a way which defies reason), but you will find books about the nuts and bolts of design which are very good even if you're totally green to the field. The other most important thing is that you keep making things. Even little things. Make them and show them to people and get feedback. Lather, rinse and repeat.

Anyhow... You will want to specifically look for books on Typography, Color, Layout, Photography, Contrast/Scale, and Poster Design. Poster Design is actually sui generis despite appearing to be a subset of graphic design.[1]

My belief is strongly on the side of typography being the most crucial skill a designer needs (since its use of space/contrast/layout) is basically design in a micro level, rather than on the macro (page) level. The skills you pick up in typography do translate over, but it takes lots of practice. Since illustrators are readily hopping into many design jobs, our best bet is to differentiate ourselves with our exhaustive knowledge of typography.

A great book on "Book Typography" is Cyrus Highsmith's Inside Paragraphs.

A good book on "Display Typography" is Wolfgang Weingart's My Way to Typography.

Three good books on "Typographic Fundamentals" are: Ellen Lupton's Thinking With Type, John Kane's Type Primer and Erik Spiekermann's Stop Stealing Sheep (and find out how type works).

One excellent "Typographic Reference" is Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style.

One good book about "Design Process" is Nancy Skolos & Tom Wedell's Graphic Design Process.

No design book suggestion will be complete without mentioning Emil Ruder's Typographie, Josef Muller-Brockman's Grid Systems and Armin Hofmann's Graphic Design Manual.

That said, a good starter is layout/formmaking Christian Leborg's "Visual Grammar," part of Princeton Architectural Press' Design Briefs series[2] (all of which are good for skimming the next time you find yourself in a bookstore/amazon showroom).

Finally, I never realized it until I made a joke about it, but you can summarize many of the principles of good UI Design in PEP 20, which is to say that if you care about API Design and Code Cleanliness and all that stuff, then you probably already have the right attitude towards graphic/visual design. Take those principles and apply them visually when you make anything or use them as a rough litmus test for your designs then break the rules as you see fit.

Have fun! Relax. Don't Panic!

[0]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1605228 [1]: While poster design employs many of the same structural techniques as Capital-D Design, it has its own rules which are useful to know, but above all it is free to play with scale in a way which is difficult in web and book design. Still, knowing about it will inform your own work and probably make it wayyyy more fun. [2]: http://papress.com/html/book.list.page.tpl?action=seriessear...

more to the point, it's like getting arrested by a usda strike force at a buffet for eating in the kitchen after being told by the manager to that you're moving through the line too quickly. I agree that this is a disproportionate punishment, but... why are you in the kitchen again?

I would prefer that we only argue about TOS violations and the ethics of open-access journals, but instead we have to preface everything with "but look, he was only criminally trespassing because MIT changed their network access policy for community members" and that caveat by its very nature weakens the discourse around open-access journals, silly terms of service and so on.

You're right that the behavior on some level is 'technically correct' but it doesn't change Byrne's point that civil disobedience is most effective when the execution (and 'crime' committed) is unambiguous and focused.

So let's say somebody steps into your office, opens your network closet and leaves a laptop there overnight. You don't know who it is and you see it sucking down some data from some service you incidentally pay for.

Can you honestly tell me that when you discover the laptop doesn't belong to anybody in your office, you'll just step out the closet and let it continue doing it's thing while you wait for the owner to return?

It's clear nobody cares about JSTOR, what Byrne is bringing up vis-a-vis historical precedents of civil disobedience and closes with is that when you find the laptop, your real worry isn't about JSTOR's feelings, it's the subterfuge.

Why it's 'complicated' and 'sloppy' is because you now have to divorce your feelings about your network's violation from your ambivalence to casual TOS violation, which is hard.

If you want a good description of how Clinical Depression varies wildly from 'rational depression,' read the Andrew Solomon's book The Noonday Demon. It's well written and, at least for me, expanded my perspective of how little I understood of severe depression.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Noonday_Demon:_An_Atlas_of_...

For cooking most western foods, for example, i think he totally misses the mark in the pots/pans section. Having worked in a 'new american' kitchen, i can confidently say that buying cheap aluminum/stainless 8", 10" sautee pans, an 8" nonstick, a 1pt saucepan, a 2qt pot, (~$9 ea at fsw or whatever) and a cheap $30 dutch oven covers the vast majority of of cooking needs if you throw in a few pieces of steel wool and let the sheet tray pass for whatever baking.

the notion that heavy pans for 'even heat distribution' are essential is true at some echelon of gourmet cuisine, but getting to know how your pan behaves on your stove is infinitely more valuable and cost effective than buying a set of all-clads. case in point, buy a cast-iron fry pan and discover its 'even heat' characteristic still includes a hotspot right under the burner.

75% of all recipes don't require all that much, though, it's the 25% that add much of the weird equipment overhead (i'm looking at you, spring form pan!)

How will the logo appear 90% of the time? Scrubbing to 1:44 seems to give the biggest clue, which indicates that the resultant 'system' is actually a series of font choices and a logo and a system for picking out colors or images which can be used within the confines of the logotype.

Scrubbing back to ~1:30 also indicates that this will also redesign http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu which will likely be a huge improvement over the existing website that appears to have been made at the height of the xhtml+prototype.js zeitgeist.

So no, Cal isn't being rebranded, the nebulous 'UC system' is, which means that the biggest consumers of this logo will be UC applicants & employees along with secondary school juniors and seniors who are receiving either fat packets or skinny envelopes with a UC logo strategically positioned in various parts. Will this logo appear on a diploma? almost certainly not. Will it appear on a paystub or employee badge? probably?

It's frustrating that most people project their fears and worries on a graphic mark but it's even more frustrating that the author ignored the actual identity's presentation.

still, the fact that the applecare universe works like that at all is a bit disheartening especially if you have a legitimate hardware issue but an unsympathetic genius.

Isn't that the case with all contemporary art acquisitions, though? I'm reminded of this quote by Dave Hickey from Air Guitar:

"Since there is no absolute authority in the art world, or in the economic world either, we may presume that for every opinion, there is a contrary one. Thus, the social value of a work of art, or an art critic, or a theory, or an institution must be distinguished from its social virtue, since bad reviews, stupid acquisitions, and theoretical attacks, even as they question the social virtue of an object or investment, must necessarily invest it with social value. The raw investment of attention, positive or negative, qualifies certain works of art as “players” in the discourse. So, even though it may appear to you that nearly everyone hates Jeff Koons’ work, the critical point is that people take the time and effort to hate it, publicly and at length, and this investment of attention effectively endows Koons’ work with more importance than the work of those artists whose work we like, but not enough to get excited about."

I mean, give it time or ignore it, or both. All museums make questionable purchases. Being in the permanent collection is certainly a boon, but it won't change how people fundamentally feel about the art in a few generations. Maybe it'll remain successful, maybe it won't, but it certainly captures something which i guess is reason enough to acquire it.

But in any case, everyone starts somewhere and everyone's entitled to post their own 'linode post-mortem' especially if they're beginners and want to ossify their hazy thoughts somewhere. i don't begrudge the guy for just wanting to keep some record of his process and maybe some day he'll look back and edit the document to keep up with his level of knowledge at the time.

http://waxy.org/2009/07/code_rush_in_the_creative_commons/

if you haven't watched code rush yet, the annotations are really a fantastic addition to it and i'd suggest starting there instead.

edit/comment: the annotations are mostly useful, if like me, you want to rewind to some particular scene when showing part of the film to a friend. i found them pretty useful, but, ymmv :)

Why you ask? Much like API design, a logo/mascot/etc, once you commit to it, is very hard to change. People talk about software that scales, but keep in mind, identities need to scale too. The standard logo/identity course in any design program goes into this and forces you to think about identity not only as a mascot, but as a system.

This isn't to say that any of the submissions proffered wouldn't be valuable, they might be! But the whole thing that happens when you pick up a designer is that you also are implicitly asking them to research how your brand/logo appears on a shirt, on a business card, in press clippings, on sponsorship banners, and so forth.

These are all things that are incredibly easy to ignore because, unless you've done this before, it's really hard to get an identity right the first time.

Also, why's it gotta be an animal? What ever happened to those insanely geometric but disturbingly sinister-looking corporate logos from back in the day? ;)

    a) browser support? (this still matters to lots of people)
    b) _some_ notion of its exposed api. (what am i getting myself into?)
    c) what happens when i buy this (can i get support, what's the licensing?)

isotope.js makes a pretty good case for charging for a jquery plugin, but it not only has a good demo, it also has docs and makes it abundantly clear that you're paying to use this on a client's website (go nuts on your own stuff). I don't know how successfully it works, but it makes as much sense as charging for fonts, so I suspect a fair number of people actually pay up even though the majority of jQuery plugins are free.

Good luck, but don't forget the humble web-portfolio developer out there that is legitimately wondering if they can justify this purchase (i.e. is it easy to use, can i extend it to use two images, will it work on the browsers my client wants, etc.)

edit, typo fix

If it seems alarmist, it's because scott spends so much time on the (frankly creepy) exposition and leaves his actual thesis as fairly shallow itemized points.

Those 37 signals pages that everyone raves about or really any other website that uses full-bleed photography use really good photography.

The photo doesn't have to be of you, but if it is, i'd seriously consider having a friend take a photo of you during golden hour (or at least during the day) with a sharp lens. Expect to do a bit of touching up anyway and make sure everything feels decadent.

If you've got a good photo, it's pretty hard to muck it up with type. Case in point: look at almost all album art (or fashion magazines) for proof of this.

I think what's lost in this is the fact that architecture, once constructed, is fixed in space and barring any unforeseen disaster, is necessarily used on a daily basis by a group of people. It is often prohibitively expensive to raze a structure and start anew, is that a constraint we have in web design?

Architecture fosters an ongoing relationship that evolves over time: shock turns to acceptance, cleverness becomes irritation, etc. The relationship between the thing and its consumers is no different between architecture, the abandoned ipod or even the humble webpage, but we adjust our expectations differently based on how quickly we can replace them.

Fadell's point in the article, i think, is that we shouldn't expect all consumer products to be disposable, which is why i think he uses architecture as his foil.

I think it's unfair to say that web design as thing doesn't fit into the environment or that it doesn't have lasting beauty, but it certainly doesn't generate the sort of physical artifacts that people romanticize in any of the other graphic arts. You can yank a poster off a bulletin board and hang it on your wall, but you can't very well do the same with a website. Let's be honest, that page might not even be there tomorrow.

Finally, are zines timeless? Newspapers? Posters? Movie advertisements? Craigslist? By what metric do we assign that label? Why? Are they really timeless? Don't they all echo the hopes and fears of their times?

epub is basically a simple variant of html that uses xml to deal with chapters and assets. You zip the whole bundle up and rename it and bam! epub!

http://blog.threepress.org/ is probably the best and most useful resource for learning about this sorta thing, half of the stuff is random tech and the other half is stuff to get it done.

another thing: amazon's kindlegen is actually a great resource if you're targeting that platform. You can generate a mobi file pretty easily and their example is actually incredibly resource-rich.

But really, the whole thing is just a webpage wrapper with limited css and no js, so go nuts and have fun.

1. i've known traditional print designers that have jumped headfirst into html/css/js/etc and many of them have left behind artifacts that still live on the web: blogs they've themed, mini web apps, random code snippets, their own web portfolios, etc. investigate these and see if they mesh with what's on their portfolio or what they claim about themselves.

2. formally trained designers have had lots of experience with critique (and, by proxy, one hopes, critical thinking). Lots of crit is bs, but i tend to favor designers who are thoughtful and can back up their work critically or be honest about their motives.

3. you can assign "design tasks" if you want, but you need to be clear about what you're measuring and how your questions elicits that. If you're having trouble picking a design task, try a classic system design task (let's design usb from scratch...) and then see what that measures and if you can find some analog in your own problem domain.

4. the process is not foolproof and you will likely turn away very qualified people regardless of your metrics.

5. be clear about what you're looking for: do you want somebody that makes stuff look totally sweet, or somebody that solves problems well, or a person that codes monday, designs tuesday, and then specs out a new feature on wednesday... be realistic about your expectations.

6. people interpret the term 'designer' in a bunch of ways. lots of people take this to mean: "i can think about user flow, use visio to make wireframes, etc" and others take this to mean "how can this look awesome." others take this to mean "i thought through where a menu tree went in an enterprise java application" and others take this to mean "i make graphics design, do you need a logo?" and some others are like the wolf from pulp fiction, they just fix underspecified problems and are good brainstormers. none of these are better than others, they all are useful for different reasons and end-results.

but what i'm saying is "you want a designer? why?" be honest about what specifically motivates your desire to hire a full time designer. this will make any interview you run easier to evaluate as a success or failure.

i personally value anyone that can articulate what they think about those redesigns, either like or dislike, thoughtfully without buzzwording me to death and without parroting rhetoric.

you're describing "culture fit", which, while valuable, isn't a good metric for evaluating a designer's skill at... designing.