Kyle Baxter in Programming Literacy:

I love the trend toward trying to teach people who aren’t going to necessarily develop software for their occupation how to think like programmers do. The sort of things you learn “” breaking a larger problem down into smaller problems, thinking very precisely and step-by-step, thinking about things as a system “” are skills that are widely applicable and useful. It teaches you how to analyze a problem, how to move from “we want this accomplished” to “to accomplish this, we are going to break it down into these pieces,” and it teaches you how to see how systems work. Both are incredibly powerful.

Baxter makes a good point that’s often missed in the “Should Designers learn to code?” debate. In many cases, learning to code is not about being able to build products. It’s about learning how to think better. And that’s a skill that we all need.

My wife recently asked me why designers hate Comic Sans so much. I waffled my way through an answer with phrases such as “abomination” and “hideous atrocity”, but I just sounded like I have some deeply buried psychological issues that will take years of therapy to address. Well, I’m happy to say that I’ve found the perfect answer to this question – and in the most obvious place: Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style:

Letterforms have tone, timbre, character, just as words and sentences do. The moment a text and a typeface are chosen, two sets of habits, or if you like, two personalities, intersect. They need not live together contentedly forever, but they must not as a rule collide.

Letters are microscopic works of art as well as useful symbols. They mean what they are as well as what they say.

Typography is the art and craft of handling these doubly meaningful bits of information. A good typographer handles them in intelligent, coherent, sensitive ways. When the type is poorly chosen, what the words say linguistically and what the letters imply visually are disharmonious, dishonest, out of tune.

So the next time someone asks me about Comic Sans, I will simply pull out this quote and talk about the disharmony between the typeface and the text it tries to represent. Well, unless it’s a lemonade stand poster.

(image via PassiveAggressiveNotes.com)

Gruber already linked to this, but I can’t help myself – I have to do the same. Craig Mod wrote one of my favorite essays of the year so far in The Digital↔Physical: On building Flipboard for iPhone and Finding Edges for Our Digital Narratives. It’s an essay that makes me elated and jealous at the same time – which is what all great writing makes me feel like. Elated that someone was able to capture an emotion we all feel on a subconscious level, but no-one has been able to describe accurately – until now. And jealous, because damn – I wish I wrote this:

Ther’s a feeling of thinness that I believe many of us grapple with working digitally. It’s a product of the ethereality inherent to computer work. The more the entirety of the creation process lives in bits, the less solid the things w’re creating feel in our minds. Put in more concrete terms: a folder with one item looks just like a folder with a billion items. Feels just like a folder with a billion items. And even then, when open, with most of our current interfaces, we see at best only a screenful of information, a handful of items at a time.

He goes on to describe some of the unintended consequences of digital work:

When all the correspondence, designing, thinking, sketching “” the entirety of the creative process “” happens in bits, we lose a connection. It’s as if all that process is conceptually reduced to a single point “” something weightless and unbounded. Compounded over time, the understanding of where one is as a creative in a digital landscape collapses to the just-a-little-while-ago, the now, and maybe the tomorrow.

I won’t spoil the solution he came up with. Just go read the story.

Alistair Fairweather wrote a good article about Pinterest and Instagram called A picture gets a thousand likes. He presents a theory on why these sites are so popular:

But what unites Pinterest and Instagram is their simplicity. You can add photos, comment on them and “like” them. That’s it. No apps, no games, no location based check-ins – in short, no clutter.

I agree with Fairweather on the role simplicity plays in the rapid rise of these networks. He goes on to link these sites to creativity:

But what both Pinterest and Instagram tap into is our almost universal need to create. With Instagram this is more literal: you take a photo of your surroundings and share it with the world. With Pinterest you are essentially sharing someone else’s images – but the act of choosing is a form of creativity. Pinterest users compete to construct the most beautiful mood boards, agonising over which photos to include and exclude.

I agree that it’s a need to create that drives people to these sites, but I think they’re successful because they provide a platform that’s built on a very effective false promise of creative pursuit.

I believe these sites give users the illusion that they’re creating something without the necessary work that is required to make something good. Sharing pictures is effortless. And if we know anything about online behavior, it’s that people hate doing actual work when they can just click a button instead. In fact, Mashable recently said the following about Facebook’s “frictionless sharing”:

Facebook felt constrained by the Like button because it was an implicit endorsement of content. Facebook wants users to share everything they are doing, whether it’s watching a show or hiking a trail, so it decided to create a way to “express lightweight activity.”

So in essence they’re saying that clicking the Like button is too much of a commitment for people; the action is too heavy. In their view, we need something a little more indifferent and “lightweight”. Pinterest and Instagram are sufficiently “lightweight” when it comes to sharing. You just pin a photo, or if you’re really ambitious, you take one and apply a filter to it. You could argue whether or not that action constitutes “a form of creativity”, but I’m pretty sure which side of that argument Tolkien would have taken.

So why is this a big deal? I fear that the behavior on sites like these is moving us ever closer to a post-literate society:

Literacy: the ability to read and interpret the written word. What is post-literacy? It is the condition of semi-literacy, where most people can read and write to some extent, but where the literate sensibility no longer occupies a central position in culture, society, and politics. Post-literacy occurs when the ability to comprehend the written word decays. If post-literacy is now the ground of society questions arise: what happens to the reader, the writer, and the book in post-literary environment? What happens to thinking, resistance, and dissent when the ground becomes wordless?

When we start talking in pictures and likes only, don’t we lose our ability to think and argue? I hope not, but scanning through Instagram and Pinterest feeds I have to wonder if this is where we’re headed. Instead of pinning pictures, my vote is that we all start writing 500 words before 8am instead.

Lis Hubert wrote a thought-provoking piece for UX Magazine called The De-Evolution of UX Design. The link-bait title put me off a bit, but I’m glad I stuck with it. It’s a well-written article that you won’t be ambivalent about – you’ll either agree strongly, or disagree strongly. In essence, Hubert laments the decline of the Information Architecture function in UX:

It’s been seven years since I took that first step into IA, and, sadly, it seems that the practice of understanding and prioritizing information before designing the interface has been abandoned. And because of that, we are facing a huge problem in the world of UX, which is, simply put, that we are devolving.

She goes over the problems of skipping the IA phase, and then offers some solutions. Her point is in line with the thoughts I shared in my World IA Day talk called A lack of UX purpose (and what we can do about it):

It seems that ther’s unfortunately plenty of UX work out there that jumps straight into wireframes without first understanding the design problem, as well as the purpose of the solution. Purpose ““ the reason for which something is done or created ““ often appears to be missing. And this is where I believe Information Architecture can come to the rescue.

So, needless to say, I’m in the strongly agree camp on Hubert’s article. But maybe you won’t be, so definitely give it a read.

Paul Scrivs in The Uniformity of the Design Community, a good post on the dangers of design trends:

This isn’t a manifesto, but merely a reminder that there are different aesthetics out there that will get the job done better. There are different designs that you still haven’t even thought of yet that will solve the problem more efficiently. There are hundreds of more designs that will tell a better story than your current design. Don’t settle on what you or the community are satisfied with all the time. Look outside of the trends and become the person that starts a new one.

Creative pursuits like design and writing are journeys in discovering how we can get better at solving problems. There’s a balance to be struck, though. We have to push ourselves beyond current trends and obvious solutions, but not so far that we end up as digital nomads – always traveling towards the elusive horizon of perfection, but never completing anything. Yes, we need to do exceptional work, but we also have to complete. Dmitry Fadeyev sums this up well in his essay On Perfection:

Instead of chasing perfection, we should be chasing completion. A work need not be prefect, but it has to be complete. Unlike perfection, completion is not about chasing an unattainable goal, it is about meeting a fixed one. There is no such thing as a perfect work, because everyone judges things differently, so there is no standard by which such a thing can be defined. There is however such a thing as great work – work that has been completed and deemed exceptional “” either by others, or by you. But this can only happen when the work is done.

Or perhaps we need to change our definition of perfection and reframe it as the process of getting a little better each time we complete something. As Khalil Gibran said:

Advance, and never halt, for advancing is perfection.

Linds Redding’s A Short Lesson in Perspective is essential reading for anyone in the creative industry – particularly those who make things for the web. He laments the loss of time to think and reflect about designs before they go out the door:

Pretty soon, The Overnight Test became the Over Lunch Test. Then before we knew it, we were eating Pot-Noodles at our desks, and taking it in turns to go home and see our kids before they went to bed. As fast as we could pin an idea on the wall, some red-faced account manager in a bad suit would run away with it. Where we used to rely on taking a break and “stretching the eyes” to allow us to see the wood for the trees, we now fell back on experience and gut feel. It worked most of the time, but nobody is infallible. Some howlers and growlers definitely made it through, and generally standards plummeted.

It’s a strikingly honest essay about the creative process and the pressures of working on the Internet today.

I have a feeling that we live too much of our lives through other peopl’s eyes. It seems as if w’ve changed our definition of what is worthy and real to accommodate an economy based on the currency of sharing. It’s an economy that measures an event’s value by the number of likes and retweets it gets. An economy that changes our decision-making because we start to seek out the things that have the highest “sharing value”, while we shun the quiet, everyday activities that make up a life.

As I graze through my Facebook feed tonight, I munch on the extraordinary and exciting lives of others. A live performance in San Francisco. A hike in Cape Town. A business success in Miami. A funny and clever thing someon’s son said. And of course, the photos. The endless, happy photos of dancing, mountains, wine, exotic travels, more wine, and lots and lots of babies. Everyone is having an amazing time in an amazing world.

Twitter shows me something slightly different. I see people who are drowning in success and ambition, and I can’t help but envy them. Through Twitter I see how smart everyone else is. And as inspirational as that is most of the time, I sometimes look at how high the bar seems to be set and then I just want to sit down and rest for a while.

Everyone knows that’s not the whole story, of course. No one says “I’m lonely” on Twitter. No one uses Facebook to post their deep, dark thoughts about marriage or parenting or work or the future or the past. We all know it’s not real but we have to keep up the facade. If one of us were to break down, we would all lose the ability to believe we are who we pretend to be, and that’s not something w’re prepared to do.

Maybe it’s time for a change. Maybe it’s time to stop consuming so much of other peopl’s perfectly manicured public lives, and start producing just a little bit more. I wonder what would happen if we measured the value of an activity not by how great the photo opportunity would be, but by what value it would add to those we’re with – our family and friends.

I guess I’m just worried that if I keep looking at my life through other peopl’s eyes, I might go blind to the things that really matter.