Jason Fried in Why is Business Writing So Awful?, a good post on caring about the words you use to describe your product:

Unfortunately, years of language dilution by lawyers, marketers, executives, and HR departments have turned the powerful, descriptive sentence into an empty vessel optimized for buzzwords, jargon, and vapid expressions. Words are treated as filler - “stuff” that takes up space on a page. Words expand to occupy blank space in a business much as spray foam insulation fills up cracks in your house. Harsh? Maybe. True? Read around a bit, and I think you’ll agree.

I have a new favorite TextExpander snippet. Whenever I type /adhominem it now gets replaced with:

I will be happy to debate this further once you’re willing to respond using DH4 or higher: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

As an added bonus this sentence is less than 140 characters so it fits nicely into a tweet. You’re welcome.

I just started reading Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design. I wanted to wait for the physical book but my patience failed me so I accidentally started reading the eBook today.

I’m only about 20% through but I can already wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the bigger context and purpose of design. In fact, one of the core ideas that Frank wants to get across is why we should care about more than just technique:

The relationship between form and purpose”Š”…”“”…”ŠHow and Why”Š”…”“”…”Šis symbiotic. But despite this link, Why is usually neglected, because How is more easily framed. It is easier to recognize failures of technique than those of strategy or purpose, and simpler to ask “How do I paint this tree?” than to answer “Why does this painting need a tree in it?” The How question is about a task, while the Why question regards the objective of the work. If an artist or designer understands the objective, he can move in the right direction, even if there are missteps along the way. But if those objectives are left unaddressed, he may find himself chasing his own tail, even if the craft of the final work is extraordinary.

Seriously, just buy the book.

I’ve had quite a few questions about my reading/sharing/writing workflow in recent months, so I thought I’d write down what I do just in case it has some broader appeal. In this post I will outline the process and tools I use for reading on the web (and taking action on the good stuff). We all have to find our own way on the web, of course, but maybe there’s something here that resonates.

First, it’s important to say a little bit about why I spend so much time tweaking and improving this workflow. All of the process work is just a means to an end. And the end is to never stop learning new things. I like how Michael Schechter puts it in Finding Your Passion For Learning:

Today, I read more than I ever have before. Today, I crave new topics to dive into. Today, I love learning more than I have any time of my life. While I’m not always the best at learning what I should, I’m continually discovering and constantly seeking new ideas.

I couldn’t agree more with that sentiment. I read so much because I’m incapable of keeping my curiosity at bay. What ultimately drives me is a need to get better at what I do because I know I still have so much to learn.

So, let’s get to it. My workflow has two main phases, and I’ll discuss each in detail:

1. Inflow is about the process of finding and reading good articles on the web.
2. Outflow is about choosing the most appropriate ways to save and/or share the good stuff.

Inflow

As the old saying goes: Garbage In, Garbage Out. We are in a period of constant content bombardment, and unless we find ways to focus only on things that are worth our time, we’re going to be lost at sea. The process for disseminating good content is actually pretty easy once you get into a groove. It’s finding the right things to read that is the constant struggle. I use two main sources for finding things to read, and both requires continuous tweaking.

RSS feeds

RSS is dead, apparently. Well, maybe if you have 80,000 followers on Twitter and only care about major tech stories that’s true. But I don’t have that many sources following me, and I care about too many off-the-highway things to be able to rely solely on Twitter for news. If I only relied on Twitter, I most likely wouldn’t see posts from authors I love who only post infrequently.

I use Reeder on Mac and iOS devices to keep up with the feeds I subscribe to. I spend quite a bit of time adding new feeds and removing feeds I’m no longer interested in. I organize feeds in folders like Design, User Experience, and Coding. I also have two folders with must-read blogs that are always at the top: Favorite tech and Favorite Design and UX. These are the folders I make sure I check in on if I don’t have a lot of time. There’s a lot of churn as I learn more about what I like and read - I add and remove feeds in these two folders all the time.

Twitter

I envy people who treat Twitter like a river they can just dip their toes into every once in a while. I get nervous if I miss a few tweets, so I’m not able to follow more than about 250 people. This isn’t personal, it’s just how I choose to use the service. I like the way Chris Bowler puts it:

One fact that I do my best to keep in mind is this: there are two very different ways to use Twitter. Option A is as a social tool to interact and joke around with others, to connect. Option B is to use it as a source of sharing information, usually in the form of links to content or pithy blurbs of opinion.

Some people like the service for one, but not the other. Some people manage to strike a lovely, harmonious balance between the two. The catch is that ”” in my opinion ”” we mostly want to follow folks who use the service in the same way we do.

I use Twitter mostly for Option B, so those are the kind of people I follow. So, even though I do a little less shuffling on Twitter than I do on my RSS feeds, I do make some changes once in a while to adjust the type of content that comes into my stream. I also use Twitter lists extensively, mostly to keep up with people who are Option B users but extremely frequent updaters (and therefore too noisy for my main stream).

I use the official Twitter app on Mac, and Tweetbot on iOS devices.

Outflow

Once I see an article in RSS or on Twitter that might be interesting, a very specific workflow kicks into gear as I decide what to do next.

Read it later

If I don’t have time to read an article right away, I use Instapaper to save it for later reading. From RSS, Reeder has easy shortcuts to send articles to Instapaper. On Twitter I just favorite the tweet, and then there’s an If This Then That Recipe that automatically sends the link in the tweet to Instapaper. I could send the link directly to Instapaper from within the app, but I like to save the entire tweet so that I can credit the source if I end up doing something with that content. Attribution is really important to me.

Read it now

I usually spend about 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes at night just reading and catching up. This happens either in Reeder, or in Instapaper.

Save permanently

Whenever I read something I like, I save it to Pinboard immediately. Both Reeder and Instapaper have Pinboard integration, so this is a really easy process.

I have a paid archive account on Pinboard that enables additional features like full-text search and cached copies of articles. Seriously, everything in this workflow revolves around Pinboard. I’d be lost without it. It’s a safety net of epic proportions. I go there to look for articles I vaguely remember reading and suddenly need, and it’s constantly in use when I’m writing longform pieces (like this one). If there is such a thing as a hub in this little process of mine, Pinboard would be it.

(Yes, I’m a fan.)

Do something

Once an article is in Pinboard, I do one of four things with it.

1. Do nothing

If it’s just an article I’m saving for reference, or a new method I want to try at work, I move on and don’t do anything else with the article. I might come back to it later when I’m writing something or in need of a refresher on a new design technique, but I’d say I do nothing more for about 50% of the articles I save to Pinboard.

My Pinboard saved links are all private, but if you’re interested you can get access to the private RSS feed by becoming a member of Elezea.

2. Share on Twitter

If I think an article will have broad appeal I share it on Twitter. I usually do this with Buffer. The main use case for Buffer is to queue tweets for sending at specified times, but I use it mostly with the handy “Post now” link in the Chrome bookmarklet as well as the iPhone app.

I use Buffer as my tweet app of choice because it’s the only one I’ve found that allows me to send an article’s title and custom bitly-shortened URL from Chrome or mobile Safari directly to the app for easy posting.

The only exception to this is when I read something right away in Reeder and want to share it. Reeder has really good Twitter integration with custom bitly links as well (only on iOS though - for some reason the Desktop app doesn’t allow you to use your bitly Pro account, so you can’t track your links easily).

3. Share on Tumblr

If I want to share a short quote or photo that’s not directly related to what I write about on this blog, it goes to the B-sides. I use the standard Tumblr browser bookmarklet for sharing.

4. Share on Elezea

If it’s something I’d like to add some thoughts to it goes on this blog. There’s probably an 80/20 split between quick link posts and more substantive articles like this one. I don’t know if that’s the right split, so I’d love to get some feedback - let me know if you’d like to see more/less of something.

My writing workflow is probably worthy of a post on its own, but in short, here are the apps I use:

• I use MarsEdit to post to Wordpress. For link posts there’s a very handy browser bookmarklet that grabs the currently highlighted text and adds all the information you need to just start writing.
• Instapaper recently added support for Simplenote, which in turn syncs with nvALT on the Mac. So more and more I find myself highlighting something in Instapaper on iOS, creating a new Simplenote text note, and then completing the post in nvALT on the Mac.
• I use iA Writer for longer posts.
• I write exclusively in Markdown. I use MarsEdit to post Markdown directly to Wordpress, and the PHP Markdown plugin converts it to HMTL on the site. This means that I almost never see the Wordpress Dashboard. Which is awesome.

And that’s it. Reading through this again, it suddenly looks complicated. So if you have any suggestions to improve the process, please let me know via email or on Twitter.

Here’s to learning.

The Heavy Chef asked me some questions about design (and a little bit about this site). If you’re interested, you can read the interview here. Here’s a tiny excerpt:

I think the biggest epidemic in the design world right now is that we open our design software too early in the process. We have to spend time understanding the problem and user needs first, before we grab the mouse. There are so many products out there that look great, but don’t really solve a user need.

Instead, designers should raise their voices much earlier in the strategy discussion, and bring their design thinking skills to the essential practice of finding what Marc Andreesen calls product/market fit. Oh, and we need to use more paper to share those ideas. Sketches are fantastic low-fidelity prototyping tools, and it’s cheap to test and iterate on.

Maureen Johnson on the current state of eBook pricing:

It’s coming down to a lot of bedrock issues about how you VALUE things in general. What’s the VALUE in paying more? What should electronic items cost if the physical value is largely held in the device? How do we maintain a thriving literary life in the face of these new developments? Is this a sign that publishing is an outmoded business of “gatekeepers,” or is this a rallying point to stand up and say w’re willing to pay more for things that are of value to us? 

There is no word other than delightful to describe this post. Ok, maybe informative will do as well. Also, it could do with a little less screaming in all caps. Other than that, it’s perfect.

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.

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.