It’s not fashionable any more to have heroes. In fact, I’m scared to admit that I like anything, because I just never know if maybe, for some reason, we’re supposed to complain about that thing instead. Look at the response to App.net, for example. Much of it has been positive, but there is also an awful lot of snark and sarcasm out there — much of it from people I like and admire. So I’ve resisted the urge to confess that I backed the project, and that I like the Alpha product so far.

It’s become really hard to know what we’re allowed to like online.

I don’t remember exactly when I started to read John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, but I do remember that it had an immediate and profound effect on my view of online publishing. His efficiency with words gave me an appreciation for what web writing could be, and I started to dissect every post to try to learn as much as I could. Gruber and Merlin Mann did a talk about blogging at SXSW 2009 where they discussed the idea of Obsession times Voice:

Topic times voice. Or, if you’re a little bit more of a maverick, obsession times voice. So what does that mean? I think all of the best nonfiction that has ever been made comes from the result of someone who can’t stop thinking about a certain topic — a very specific aspect of a certain topic in some cases. And second, they got really good at figuring out what they had to say about it.

That talk — along with Gruber’s site — got me thinking: I wonder if I could do something like that? I have so many Obsessions. Could I maybe find a hidden Voice somewhere in those obsessions? It’s after hearing that talk that I decided to start taking this site more seriously. And even though Daring Fireball probably gets the equivalent of my monthly traffic in about an hour, this has still been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. It has opened so many doors and enabled me to meet some wonderful people.

Why is it that we reach for the comforts of collective cynicism whenever someone who is not in our inner circle of coolness tries to do something new or different? In the case of App.net, someone just raised more than $500,000 from end users to build a product that’s trying to compete with Twitter. Why can’t we just, for a few moments, look past everything that might be wrong with the idea, and appreciate what an enormous accomplishment that is?

You don’t have to like Dalton Caldwell or App.net. You don’t even have to be quiet about not liking them. Really — it’s ok to not like things. But don’t be a dick about it.

Gruber linked to me once on Daring Fireball. Hey, so what if I printed out his post and framed it? I still remember opening my RSS reader on the morning of Thanksgiving 2011, and falling out of bed when I saw my name on Daring Fireball. I was floating on air for weeks. It wasn’t about the traffic — it was Thanksgiving so there was pretty much no one online. The reason I was so happy is that John Gruber — someone I decided I want to impress with my writing — noticed something I wrote, and put it on his site. Since I really want to make this thing work long term, that was the biggest encouragement I could have received.

I took the opportunity to write to John to thank him not just for the link, but for the impact he has on my writing. Here’s one part of what I said:

I appreciate and learn so much from your approach to writing — you’re authentic and to the point, which is in such contrast to much of the web. Thank you for showing so many of us aspiring writers that we don’t have to sell our souls to have an audience.

He emailed back:

Great note. Thanks!

—J.G.

The response couldn’t have been more Gruber. Even in a short email, a regular dash just isn’t good enough. It’s em dashes all the way for the guy whose Obsession times Voice is about the quest for perfection in everything we do.

I know it’s not fashionable any more to have heroes. But this week App.net got funded, and Daring Fireball turned 10 years old. So roll your eyes if you must, but I’m just going to say it.

I backed App.net, and John Gruber is one of my heroes.

A couple of articles caught my eye today because they tie in well with my Intuition vs. Science in design post from yesterday. In Design and uncertainty Ellen Beldner writes about an essential characteristic for every designer: acknowledging that your assumptions will be wrong more often than not. She also makes a great case for usability testing:

The problems come when you don’t admit, as a designer or product person, that intuitions based on your mom or yourself may or may not extend to what most other people actually do. So a designer who seems like a hotshot Howard Roark out of college may be great for that one particular project. But when you ask him or her to work on a design for a domain that they don’t “intuitively” understand (since they don’t have years of experience being within that particular community) they’ll flail if they don’t know how to turn to research and data to inform their opinions.

I also love John Lilly’s advice to design like you’re right; listen like you’re wrong:

You should always design the product you think/believe/know is what people want — there’s a genius in that activity that no instrumentation, no data report, no analysis will ever replace. But at the same time you should be relentless in looking at the data on how people actually use what you’ve built, and you should be looking for things that show which assumptions you’ve made are wrong, because those are the clues to what can be made better.

This all comes back to that necessary balance between science (hard data) and intuition. Usability testing and contextual research help us understand unfamiliar domains enough to kick off the design process. Intuition lets us meet those users’ needs in creative ways. And analytics, combined with qualitative user research methods, help us figure out where we got it wrong and how we can do better.

There are many kinds of people trying to make a living online. There are those who love retail and want to use the Internet to find efficiencies in merchandising and supply chain management. There are those who love the preciseness of search algorithms and want to do everything they can to figure out how to level up in that game. There are those who see the potential of selling “eyeballs” to advertisers and are desperately trying to grab enough of our attention to make that work.

Those are all perfectly fine ways to spend your days. But it’s not what drives me.

Then there are those who love the web. They understand that it’s people all the way down. That the real value of the things we make is in the shared experiences we get to have. They are passionate, critical, creative, opinionated, and cynical. Sometimes arrogant and not nice — but never apathetic. Never lazy enough to let something they care about get away with being less than great.

Those are the people I stand with.

We believe that the quality of what we put out there reflects on all of us. Flipboard and Clear make us all look good. Color makes us look like idiots, and we can’t stand it. When our own work doesn’t live up to our standards of quality for whatever reason, we lose sleep over it. We can’t shut up when we see the Internet being used as a game to be won, an endless well of content to “repurpose” for a quick ad buck, a way to trick people into clicking a link they don’t want to click on. It makes us obnoxious, yes, but we can’t just stand there and do nothing. For we will not have that sh*t. We will not have it.

To those who make a living online because they love the web: I stand with you.

If you secretly enjoy snarky writing as much as I do, you should read Paul Constant’s post called Yesterday, I Went to the American Idol for Startups. It Made Me Want to Die. It’s a scathing and funny rant about lazy, unimaginative use of language in business, and yet he ends with quite a poignant remark:

You can do anything you want with an idea. It can be as big as you want. It doesn’t have to solve a minor problem that nobody ever really realized was a problem. It doesn’t have to fit into something the size of a button crammed into a “folder” the size of a button on a screen the size of a playing card. But everywhere I look, I see tiny little ideas, ideas that are almost petty in their inconsequentiality. And I come back to those cliches, and I think the real problem is in how little thought goes into the language these people use. When the language you employ to communicate your ideas is small and boring, your ideas are going to be small and boring. And when all your ideas are small and boring, your future gets dimmer and dimmer and more claustrophobic until it’s finally just a pinpoint of light on a dark screen, in danger of going out at any time.

Aaron Swartz discusses the possible problems of relying too much on scientific decision-making in Do I have too much faith in science?:

If you’re struggling with a decision, we’re taught to approach it more “scientifically”, by systematically enumerating pros and cons and trying to weight and balance them. That’s what Richard Feynman would do, right? Well, studies have shown that this sort of explicit approach repeatable leads to worse decisions than just going with your gut. Why? Presumably for the same reason: your gut is full of tacit knowledge that it’s tough to articulate and write down. Just focusing on the stuff you can make explicit means throwing away everything else you know—destroying your tacit knowledge.

My initial reaction was probably similar to yours. Something like this:

As expected, many commenters on Aaron’s post vehemently disagrees with him. Joe Blaylock asks:

You seem to take a narrow view of what science is and how it’s done. Is this rhetorical? Are you representing an extreme reductivist worldview to try to make a point?

gwern tells an interesting story to make his/her point:

‘One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.” God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”’

To bring this debate over into the world of design, I like Dmitry Fadeyev’s description of the different approaches as Primal (intuitive) vs. Cerebral (scientific). He concludes:

The best work is probably a combination of the two forces: restraining the primal force enough to yield a useful product that performs, but not ignoring it altogether so that the more basic human element is satisfied too, both in the creator and in the user.

Dmitri explores this theme more in his essay The Cerebral Designer:

Likewise, primal and cerebral design instincts are complements, not opposing forces. They are concerned with disparate goals which is why neither is better at achieving what the other sets out to do. If the design is driven only by the cerebral creative instinct, it will be too plain. If it is fully primal, it will not be very good at fulfilling its function for it would be more of an illustration or an ornamental piece than a design. Instead, if the primal is restrained by the cerebral but not yet fully killed, we arrive at a design that is functional, structured, pleasing to the eye and a joy for the designer to create.

I guess as designers we’re lucky. Instead of having to pick extreme points of view in an argument, in many cases the easy way out (calling for a middle ground) is also what’s best for our work. That is certainly the case here. We can combine things like A/B testing (within limits) with an intuitive humanity to design memorable, usable experiences.

I agree with Ian Storm Taylor¹ — stay away from #000000:

When you put pure black next to a set of meticulously picked colors, the black overpowers everything else. It stands out because it’s not natural. All of the “black” everyday objects around you have some amount of light bouncing off of them, which means they aren’t black, they’re dark gray. And that light probably has a tint to it, so they’re not even dark gray, they’re colored-dark gray.

Read his post for the very interesting full argument.

Dmitry Fadeyev reflects on the purpose of writing in Give Sight:

Meaningful writing has a purpose beyond that of simple entertainment or of generating conversation. Its purpose is to improve society, to improve our life, by teaching us certain truths that the author has learned. John Ruskin puts it well in his essay on books, Of Kings’ Treasuries, by saying that good books give us sight. By teaching us what to look for, and the value of those things, we learn to tell apart the good from the bad, to pass better judgements using our sharpened vision. We grow and become wiser. And that is the only sort of writing that ever improves us as people because all the rest, information and entertainment, it just passes by and leaves us in the same state that we are when we first come into contact with it.

I completely agree with this viewpoint, and that results in a constant struggle as I try to weigh the demands of long-form writing with the demands of, you know, having a day job. The compromise that many of us in this situation goes for, to keep the much-needed momentum of writing going (what Alex Charchar calls “act the pro”), is to share links and quick thoughts, interspersed with some long-form writing when inspiration and a brief excess of time collide.

I’m particularly self-conscious about the dangers of this approach after reading Marcelo Somers’s piece The Linkblog Cancer:

Our job as independent writers isn’t to be first or even to get the most pageviews. It’s to answer the question of “so what?”. Taken as a whole, our sites should tell a unique story that no one else can, with storylines that develop over time that help bring order to the chaos of what we cover.

That’s what I want to happen here, but I know I often fall short. I’ll keep doing it though, because I have hope that, taken as a whole, there is a thread running through the links I post and the essays I write, and that when I look back at it in a few years, that thread will spark some new and interesting ideas. We’ll see.

Jim Dalrymple in Apple’s motivation for suing Samsung:

I’m not going to say that Apple doesn’t care at all about keeping its secrets, but this is a case of dealing with the lesser of two evils. Sue Samsung now and show some old prototype photos, but stop them from copying future products; or let them continue copying. […]

Although none us know for sure what [Apple’s future] products are, if they are truly disruptive, like the iPhone and iPad, it’s in Apple’s best interests to stop Samsung now. This will effectively cut off the worst offender of companies copying its products in their tracks.

Jim clearly has a bee in his bonnet about the Apple v Samsung case, and it makes for some excellent writing and analysis. In fact, I think The Loop is by far the best site to stay up to date on what’s happening in this case.