Jeff J. Lin looked at the life of director Ang Lee and pulled out some insights on what it takes to be successful. This part from Ang Lee and the uncertainty of success talks about the long periods of non-success that often occur:

If you’re an aspiring author, director, musician, startup founder, these long stretches of nothing are a huge reason why it’s important to pick something personally meaningful, something that you actually love to do. When external rewards and validation are nonexistent; when you suffer through bouts of jealousy, wondering “How come so-and-so got signed/is successful/got a deal/etc?”; when every new development seems like a kick in the stomach, the love of what you are doing gives you something to hang onto.

Much is made of genius and talent, but the foundation of any life where you get to realize your ambitions is simply being able to out-last everyone through the tough, crappy times — whether through sheer determination, a strong support network, or simply a lack of options.

Related, Paul Tough’s thesis on how children succeed:

Noncognitive skills, like persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence, are more crucial than sheer brainpower to achieving success.

Jason Cavnar wrote a great piece for VentureBeat called Why developers should start choosing conscience over profit. He urges us to be Makers, not Takers:

Makers choose their work based on impact and happiness. They recognize the truths in the work of people like Daniel Pink and Simon Sinek — that income does not generate happiness or enjoyment, nor alleviate sadness or stress. They concern themselves with doing work that is important. With thinking about what moves society forward. With jobs and startups and weekend hacking and open-source contributions to things that have a real-world impact. They introduce and push fundamentally new technologies.

It reminds me of Matt Gemmell’s Makers and Takers:

People who make things, or Makers, contribute something to the universe. Makers are people like writers, musicians, artists, architects, software engineers, carpenters, and the chap at the coffee shop who makes your morning latte. He has a skill, and he applies it to create something that makes your day a little bit better. […]

When I’m choosing who to spend time with, or seek inspiration from, or learn from, or adopt as a role model, I’m exclusively looking at Makers. The fire and water, rather than the mere pipework. The lightning, not the rod. Surround yourself with Makers.

And one more, just for good measure. Here’s Mike Monteiro in Design Is a Job:

I urge each and every one of you to seek out projects that leave the world a better place than you found it. We used to design ways to get to the moon; now we design ways to never have to get out of bed. You have the power to change that.

So there you go — some nice midweek inspiration.

I really enjoyed Michele Catalano’s Grimes, Pop Music, and Cultural Elitism, which starts with this quote from Clare Boucher (better known as Grimes):

I don’t see why we have to hate something just because it’s successful, or assume that because it is successful it has no substance.

It’s an article about our tendency to look down on pop music (and the people who like pop music), but it points to a much broader cultural phenomenon:

The elitism one shows when they dismiss pop music as vapid and those who like it equally vapid is a detriment to any open conversation. The defenders of pop – myself included – are often put on the defensive, made to offer up excuses as to why we like what we do. No one should have to defend their musical choices. No artist who worked hard to get where they are should be roundly dismissed because their music doesn’t fit some elitist standard.

This kind of elitism is something we all have to watch out for. I will probably never switch away from my iPhone, but that doesn’t mean that Android users are undiscerning losers. The best phone is the phone you like the best. That’s all there is to it. As hard as it can be sometimes, we have to decouple the things people like and don’t like from their value as human beings.

Richie Siegel in Facebook Isn’t Worth It:

With Facebook acting as the gauge of social worthiness in the twenty-first century, it’s time we realize that a lot of what we hoped Facebook could accomplish was unrealistic and impossible. Facebook is not going to keep your friendships going, no matter how much effort you put into it. Only humans, talking and being with other humans, can develop meaningful, lasting bonds. You can have all the friends in the world on the internet, but once you step away from your computer, only reality remains. 

That’s his conclusion following a long argument that’s well worth reading.

(link via Ben Brooks)

120 days. That’s how long it took for the term Flat Design to go from cutting edge to extremely uncool. On September 25, 2012 the LayerVault team introduced Flat Design in their post The Flat Design Era:

We interpret recent shots taken at skeumorphism as a sign of the coming of “Honest Design.” Much like we were not too long ago, designers working for the web are getting fed up with the irrational, ugly shortcuts being praised as good design.

On January 23, 2013 Cole Peters pronounced the term dead in Flatliners:

However, it seems that fervour I mentioned has taken a turn for the worse over the past little while, switching gears from enthusiasm, straight into full-blown fanaticism. And while the topic has borne a few great articles, ideas and interfaces, the bulk of the conversation around flat design tends to mimic with unfortunate precision the lack of depth the movement is built around.

So, it’s time for us to find a new thing to argue about, I guess. But before we do, let’s remember something Wells Riley said at the height of the Flat Design debate. In Less Aesthetic, More Design he argues that a more accurate term would be Flat Aesthetic, and then concludes:

Flat aesthetic is great. Skeuomorphism is fine too. It’s even okay to gush over sexy UI on Dribbble and explore aesthetic fads in your own work. Just don’t forget the other 90% of what makes a design comprehensively great.

Design is a form of problem solving. Never forget that.

Preach it, brother Wells.

I can’t shake this feeling that this might be the year that quitting social networks goes mainstream. We’re not even through January, and already the posts are flooding in. Here’s Brent Simmons in Brave new network: Why I hope Apple never releases a smart watch:

I want to stay human, in other words. I want to like things in the thousand different ways there are to like things, rather than just click on a Like button. I want to say and think things that take more than 140 characters.

I want to not take a photograph, because no picture, no matter how beautifully filtered, can express what it’s like for one person to walk in the woods alone. I need to remember.

And here’s Keri Maijala in Why I’m not on Facebook:

I felt bad about myself after browsing Facebook.

I get that Facebook is like a reverse funhouse mirror that makes everything look better. It’s a sublimely distorted world filled with families and trips and drinks and straight white teeth. And I was just as guilty of perpetuating that myth, carefully choosing photos and crafting updates that supported how I wanted to be perceived: Happy, healthy, independent, adventurous, courageous, and with straight white teeth. Only half of those things are true. And ultimately, I found I felt depressed after browsing Facebook.

Or as Alex Charchar said on Twitter recently, we’re starting to get bored by our distractions. I think that’s a good thing, though. Boredom leads to creativity.

I know I just wrote about coffee, but this one is too good not to link to. In Coffee and the Art of Customer Happiness Mathias Meyer writes about the similarities between making coffee and developing software:

Baristas are geeks, just like we are. They love talking about the latest toys, about which espresso machine is better than the other, they compare paper filters with cloth, and they take detailed notes on the different aromas of coffee when they’re cupping it.

The craft of coffee making is quite fascinating, both from the perspective of precision and customer care.

Mathias discusses familiar topics like metrics, continuous delivery, and custom vs. off-the-shelf software, and what the art of coffee can teach us about each. Great article.

(link via @bb)

Original American Airlines logo designer Massimo Vignelli comments on the redesigned logo:

Styling is very much emotional. Good design isn’t—it’s good forever. It’s part of our environment and culture. There’s no need to change it. The logo doesn’t need change. The whole world knows it, and there’s a tremendous equity. It’s incredibly important for brand recognition. I will not be here to make a bet, but this [new logo] won’t last another 25 years.

Dustin Curtis on the redesign:

It is too bad that such a great, enduring identity was placed into such careless hands. […] After forty-six years, one of the finest corporate brands in history has been reduced to patriotic lipstick.

Paul Ford, last December, in The Emergence of Crowdsmashing Logos and Rebranding:

People don’t like their stories messed with. You expect a certain continuity, and when the opposite happens—Dylan going electric, season two of Friday Night Lights—you react out of proportion to external measures of the offense but very much in proportion to the internal anxiety and anger you might feel. […] It’s not just that some lines and colors have changed—possibilities have been taken away. No wonder people want to go to their windows and yell “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take gradient blends anymore.”

For the first time, the question “I wonder who else hates this?” has an immediate answer, and people who see the arc of their lives flattened by bad branding can find each other and grieve over the lost logotypes of youth.

I’m not saying I like the American Airlines rebrand. But boy, does the response once again show how the Internet is an incredible tool for collaborative outrage.

I’ve lost count of the number of people who sent me Julian Baggini’s excellent essay The art of coffee last week (I guess my Instagram feed makes my feelings about coffee pretty clear). It’s a truly great article, going far beyond coffee to the essence of craftsmanship, and the things we value. Here’s Julian on the “perfection” of Nespresso capsules that is hard to match consistently by human baristas:

Surely we appreciate the handmade in part because it is handmade. An object or a meal has different meaning and significance if we know it to be the product of a human being working skilfully with tools rather than a machine stamping out another clone. Even if in some ways a mass-produced object is superior in its physical properties, we have good reasons for preferring a less perfect, handcrafted one.

And further on:

There is plenty that we should happily allow to be mechanised, for the obvious benefits that brings. But there is plenty else we will continue to prefer to be handmade, because what matters is not just the result, but the process by which you get there. Humans are imperfect, and so a world of perfection that denies the human element can never be truly perfect after all.

The article got me thinking once more about the concept op craft as it relates to design and related fields. In 2008 Alan Cooper brought the discussion about craft in design to the forefront with his IxDA keynote An Insurgance of Quality1. He argues as follows for the value of craft in Interaction Design:

Best to market, particularly in high tech, comes about only through craftsmanship. And craftsmanship is all about quality. The goal of craftsmanship is to get it right, not to get it fast. The ultimate measurement of craft is not speed. It’s quality. How good is it. It’s a pure measurement. And a delightful measurement. Craftspeople do it over and over, until they get it correct. And in their training, in their apprenticeship, they build things over and over, learning how to do things correctly, so they can bring enormous expertise to create successful products, and thus the training of craftsman is a long and drawn out personal process.

In Craft in Interaction and Service Design Peter Merholz uses Instapaper as an example of an app that practices this kind of dedication to quality:

Instapaper shows the power of approaching experience design as a craft, as opposed to some kind of massive organizational process. As Marco hones his craft, he is able to evolve the experience over time. Too often companies launch something and then move on to whatever’s next. Instapaper shows what happens when you go deeper and deeper and deeper into something. Unlike Microsoft or Adobe, who simply tack on features with every new release, Marco, instead, refines the design, honing it, polishing it, like his app is some jewel. I’d love to see companies approach service design the way Marco has. It would require a fundamental shift in how they work, but the results could be quite beautiful.

Unfortunately, we live in an environment where most software isn’t designed in this way. In The Thread Dmitry Fadeyev discusses what usually happens in design projects:

The designer’s creative instinct often tries to express itself outside of this frame [of focusing only on conversions] and just as often gets shot down by project managers and marketers who disregard all aesthetic value apart from that which drives higher conversions. Three things are killed in the process. […] The second is the pleasure that people receive from coming into contact with beautifully crafted goods, especially works that infect the viewer with an emotion that the maker wanted to communicate.

It becomes clear from these articles that one of the essential elements for developing one’s craft is time. Time to do things over and over, to make mistakes, to learn, to fail, to try again, to get frustrated, and to become exceptional through small victories. But as I wrote in Who has time for that?, that’s just not how business works these days. Most companies work more the way DHH advises against in Your life’s work:

Working people to death to ship any one feature or product is a poor strategy, as it reduces the capacity to ship the next feature or product (burn out, build-up of bad rush practices). It’s far more important to have a system for shipping that improves over the long term than one that heroically manages one monster push.

So how can we change this, and convince both our fellow designers as well as clients (internal and external) of the value of craft in design? We’ll have to start with design schools, of course. In Craftsmanship Jon Kolko notices a dangerous trend he sees in most schools:

Based on my experience reviewing portfolios from recent business school graduates, I would argue that one of the most fundamental failings of “design thinking” education is the lack of craftsmanship. Students don’t appear to learn a honed, tacit, and careful “innate” sensibility for making, and simultaneously, they don’t appear to have developed an intimate understanding of the medium they are responsible for shaping. Instead, they are equipped with a toolkit of methods.

But we also have to be convinced ourselves that craft is important — that it has real business value because of the way it connects with people. We have to be convinced that it matters when a designer’s personality and care shine through in their work. We have to believe that people buy things not just because of the way they work, but also because of the way they were created. To drive this point home, I love Frank Chimero’s call for us to care more in his essay The Particle:

We should care more about our craft because we’re granted an opportunity to contribute to the world. We should care more about our audiences because they are the ones who give our work value. We might think that design work is about you or about me or anyone else who makes it, or maybe about the things that we make and the artifacts we produce, but don’t let this way of thinking fool you. The things we make are all just excuses to speak with one another and to help one another. We are all linked, and the things that we make for each other strengthen the invisible threads that tie us all together.

There is a part of me that will always design for the joy of making it, but I now understand that the point of it all is not for me to enjoy myself, but for the ones using whatever I make to have some sort of wonder when doing so. We are in service to those that use what we make, to the ones that listen to what we say.

This is a difficult task. We live in an age of data-driven design. Our challenge is to listen to the data and automate improvements as much as possible, but without losing the human element that we all crave so much. Let’s train ourselves to be design baristas, not just machine button-pushers who produce the same perfect, boring comps on every single project.

I’ve created a Readlist of all the articles mentioned in this post. You can send the articles to your Kindle or your mobile phone, or download an eBook. If there’s interest in this kind of thing I’ll start doing it more often, so please let me know with a quick tweet if you like this idea.

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1. It looks like the video for the keynote isn’t available any more, but here is a pretty good summary by Beau Smith. ↩

Andy Budd’s most recent contribution to The Pastry Box Project got quite a bit of traction yesterday. This part, in particular, seems to have struck a chord in our corner of the Internet:

Good design takes time—more time than most of us are allowed. […] Sadly we see too many potentially amazing designers stuck by the glass ceiling of time. So they settle on the first solution that looks viable and are never allowed to sweat the details. They are forced to rely on 1% of inspiration without the benefit of perspiration.

So this is the dirty little secret in our industry. The best designers and developers rarely have more talent. They simply have more time.

This rings true, but I’d like to expand on that and say that it’s not just a problem in our industry. Things have become very, very fast all around us, and our impatience has reached remarkable levels. We pirate movies because we can’t wait 1 minute for the anti-piracy warnings on DVDs to play through (oh, the irony). We microwave pop tarts for 3 seconds because we can’t wait for them to finish toasting. Brian Regan has a pretty funny standup bit about this (the microwave thing starts at 2:35):

Frank Partnoy sums up the consequences of our addiction to speed very well in Wait: The Art and Science of Delay:

The essence of my case is this: given the fast pace of modern life, most of us tend to react too quickly. We don’t, or can’t, take enough time to think about the increasingly complex timing challenges we face. Technology surrounds us, speeding us up. We feel its crush every day, both at work and at home.

Yet the best time managers are comfortable pausing for as long as necessary before they act, even in the face of the most pressing decisions. Some seem to slow down time. For good decision-makers, time is more flexible than a metronome or atomic clock. As we will see over and over, in most situations we should take more time than we do.

We should take more time than we do, yes. But we don’t. Because business doesn’t work that way. Technology doesn’t work that way. And, most of all, release schedules don’t work that way.

We all know the saying Fast, good, and cheap — pick two. We live in an environment where everything has to be “fast”, so we’re inevitably left with choosing between “good” or “cheap”. And guess which one we end up having to choose most of the time…