Thoughts on Engineering, Photography, and Design.

A subset of the Foreward in a book I’m currently reading:

In that way, this book is not unlike a more ubiquitous tool and platform, the U.S. Interstate Highway System. Today, we take it for granted, mostly, but its numbering system at one point had to be designed. At a time when telephone poles lined dirt trails, Bureau of Public Roads employee Edwin W. James and committee were asked to come up with a more expandable system as roads were growing in the 1920s. They designed what we know today as the Interstate Numbering System. Prior to that, people relied on color codes for direction. Telephone poles were ringed with color bands lined highways, corresponding to individual dirt trails across the country. As trails expanded, telephone poles became painted from the ground up, sometimes fifteen feet high, so trying to distinguish among colors became dangerous.

E. W. James changed that. He decided that motorists would be able to figure out where they were at any time given the intersection of any two highways. North/south highways would be numbered with odd numbers; east/west with even numbers; and numbers would increase as you go east and north. The Interstate Numbering System was designed for expansion, anticipating the future contributions of people, cities, unexpectedness. It’s a tool. It’s a platform. And it’s still not done nearly 100 years later.

Love that perspective. The Foreward is by Liz Danzico. The book is The Shape of Design.

Quite honestly this video blew my mind on a number of levels. As he states in the very beginning, the gist of it is:

Creators need an immediate connection to what they’re creating.

Scorekeeper is a minimalistic scorekeeping app. It has a very thoughtful UI that uses icons, color, sound, and just the right amount of animation. I love how the reordering happens a few seconds after you update the score so you can change a few at a time. Even if you don’t have a user for it, watch the video.

What’s next for camera design? Hopefully this. WVIL: Wireless Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens.

I recently purchased a very well-done (letter pressed) piece of artwork in remembrance of Apple’s core philosophy: Think Different. This refers to the infamous 1997 marketing campaign that started Apple’s march back to the top, led by Steve Jobs.

It’s a sad day.

Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.

This has affected me more than I expected. I saw a picture online of an empty “reserved” seat in the front row of the iPhone 4s announcement yesterday, and hoped it was nothing serious. Unfortunately, it was.

Steve Jobs has been an indescribable inspiration to me and everyone in this industry. He will be missed dearly.

It’s typical for all designers and creative people to hit a long-lasting wall where nothing they create seems good enough. It’s a defining period of time for a lot of careers, and if you’re going to make it in the design industry, it’s important that you fight through the crap.

Ira Glass puts this in perspective better than anyone else I’ve seen, so I’ll defer to him:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

I often come across sites and interfaces that make me question why something works the way it does, and I’ve often thought it’d be a fun experiment to try and improve that interface myself. But having not been there from the beginning, designing under the same constraints as the original designer(s), I rarely view it as fair or constructive. That doesn’t mean it still can’t be fun, though.

Like the last part of the article states, perhaps doing unsolicited redesigns is okay as long as you remind yourself that all of the original constraints have magically been lifted for your version of the design, rendering it much easier and free-willed.

All images posted to Instagram must be a squared crop before they can be uploaded. I personally think this was a brilliant move. Here’s why:

• Squares are proportionally correct. There are no misalignments or elongated edges.
• Forcing a user to choose a cropped square has somewhat of a Dribbble effect in that it demands the most interesting section of the picture.
• Squares are predictable in terms of designing an interface. It’d be hard to argue that against the fact that better designs can be built around images that are all of the same aspect ratio. Guesswork for unknown shapes creep into design decisions early and can look clunky more often than not, and when you’re dealing with something that is largely for visual purpose (i.e. photo galleries), that matters.
• Easier implementation has to be mentioned, since there’s no post-processing needed to crop images into squares.
• There are no surprises: what goes in is what comes out. The image proportions remain exactly as they were prior to upload.

I don’t know if those things were considered beforehand or if it was a side-effect of some other reasoning, but I do know that I’m glad Instagram only supports squared images. It’s one of the reasons I keep coming back.

Iterations are expensive if nothing comes out of them (and yes, sometimes that’s unavoidable). But reminding ourselves that design can (and will) always be updated helps promote a flow of constant improvements, even if they’re not perfect.

I find that asking “Is this an improvement over the last version?” instead of “Is this perfect?” yields a better release cycle and (hopefully) happier users. Let’s face it, perfection doesn’t exist, even though we all use the term (loosely). Our goal should be to release, learn, update, and release to make sure our interfaces are always trying to solve the right problems the best way possible at that moment in time.

Remember, design is never done.