Worth your time.

Michael Jurewitz:

As software engineers and designers, it’s easy to lose sight of the very human impact of the bugs we ship.

Josh Williams recaps the history of Gowalla, and what he learned from the whole experience:

Listen to your users more than the press. Don’t get sucked into the gravity hole between you and your competition. Ruthlessly run your own path, not someone else’s.

Year after year, my “best” students — the ones who are happiest and successful in their lives — are the students who were allowed to fail, held responsible for missteps, and challenged to be the best people they could be in the face of their mistakes.

James Duncan Davidson reviews the fabulous Sony RX1

Unlike any other compact out available, the RX1 doesn’t ask you to compromise on image quality. It doesn’t ask you to put up with its growing pains. It simply makes photographs that are every bit as nice as you could want and does so quietly and competently. It’s not just minimalistic and unobtrusive. It’s just amazingly capable.

I agree with every word. The photos it captures have soul, it reminds me a lot of my (brief) experience with the Fujifilm X100. I replaced my entire DSLR kit with an RX1, and haven’t regretted that decision for a single second.

Snapped some shots with the RX1 on my way home tonight (all extremely low-light). Still getting familiar with the camera, but I already know it’s special.

I started watching House of Cards last night, and had to force myself to go to bed after watching 4 episodes back to back. Really looking forward what other shows Netflix has up its sleeves.

Beautiful Disney short.

I didn’t know Aaron Swartz, but from reading all the articles in the wake of his suicide, it seems pretty clear that he was one of the good guys.

If you watch little kids, they are intensely curious, always exploring and trying to figure out how things work. The problem is that school drives all that curiosity out. Instead of letting you explore things for yourself, it tells you that you have to read these particular books and answer these particular questions. And if you try to do something else instead, you’ll get in trouble. Very few people’s curiosity can survive that.

Great interview with Loren Brichter.

I like jumping back and forth between a few different things to let my subconscious chew on one problem while my conscious works on something else.

Early November I got an email from Jay Fanelli that made my heart skip a beat. For those of you who don’t know Jay, he’s one of the guys behind the amazing shirts-for-nerds site United Pixelworkers, which has a history of working with some of the brightest designers and illustrators of our generation. He asked whether I’d be interested in designing a shirt for them, and with sweaty palms I emailed him back saying it’d be an honor.

The only design direction he gave me was “We want this design to look like it came from you.” So of course I went off and told him I’d like to explore a direction that was completely un-me: Typography.

After some thinking I made a list of everything (interface/web) design is: Balance, rhythm, iteration, considerate, humble, honest, opinionated, patient, respectful… and (most important), design comes from the heart.

After a number of failed attempts translating this typographic concept into an actual design, I let it sit for a couple of days.

When revisiting the idea a couple of days later, the last item on that list really stuck with me. Design comes from the heart. The best designers I know love what they do. More specifically, I love pixels. The seed was planted, and after thinking about it some more I decided to completely change the design direction to something really simple: A pixellated representation of a human heart.

Some Google Image-searching later I found my reference materials and went to work. I ended up with 4 different options they could pick from (I tried using as little different colors as possible), and now it’s something you can actually buy.

Crazy.

You can pre-order the shirt until Monday, January 14 at 2:00 PM EST. And while you’re there, take a look around their shop, they sell some really cool stuff.

Your loving parents and grandparents would never screw up their world and then throw you kids under the bus…or would they?

Mind-boggeling effect, so cool.

(via)

I found this TED talk after seeing the Bones Brigade (iTunes) documentary. Rodney Mullen fascinates me. He’s such a thoughtful guy, and the things he says about the skateboard community are a lot like what the (web)design community feels like to me.

Can’t wait to come back when there’s snow.

It’s perfectly healthy — encouraged, even — to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.

Trent Walton writes about the process that went behind designing Microsoft’s new (responsive) homepage. What an amazing project for a 3-man team.