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Here’s a happy coincidence: Jonathan Ive, the lead designer at Apple and James Whittaker, former Engineering Director at Google talk about their working environments, their process and the culture of Apple and Google respectively.
Both of them share their thoughts almost simultaneously, which is pretty rare, isn’t it? There’s only one big difference: Ive keeps navigating the ship, while Whittaker left the building.
What I enjoy about being here is there is a remarkable optimism, and an attitude to try out and explore ideas without the fear of failure. There is a very simple and practical sense that a couple of people have an idea and decide to form a company to do it. I like that very practical and straightforward approach.
There’s not a sense of looking to generate money, its about having an idea and doing it - I think that characterises this area and its focus.
The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.
You can make numerous thoughts about the sincerity of the words above and the intentions of both people. For me things are pretty clear, I trust their words, and I can now explain a bit the trajectory of Apple and Google.
It’s been a long time since I read an article which dares to show the not so polished face our industry. The thing is, are we ready to see this face or not? I’m afraid we are not.
Andy Budd writes:
I constantly see clients being sold inappropriate solutions by convincing sales people so they can meet their monthly targets. Once the project has been won it’s somebody else’s job to deal with the fall-out. Very often these sales people go in cheap to win projects and then make the money up through hidden charges and change requests.
If you’re young enough and feel lost, if you have a kid and want to help it found its way or if you just enjoy a good story this one is for you.
The wise Paul Graham shares the secrets of How to do what you love. Here’s the most intriguing part of the story:
The test of whether people love what they do is whether they’d do it even if they weren’t paid for it—even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?
In fact it seems there are many ugly websites that are extremely successful. The big question is, why?
I think Gerry McGovern has a good explanation:
In the eyes of many customers, ugly equals authentic and credible. Ugly helps you get the task completed quickly without any fuss or distraction. Ugly is going to give you the details. Ugly is not hiding anything. Ugly does not waste your time on surface images and trivial jargon and hype.
The arguement “Ugly is not hiding anything.” impresses me. It reminds me all those pointless effects, all those fluffy images that prevent us from looking at the real thing: facts. It really feels like someone tries to hide something.
I wouldn’t ever vote for an ugly website, but I can’t reject their truth.
When the best Twitter client and the best service dedicated to reading join forces then the sun of the interwebs shines a bit brighter.
Most advertisements hurt our eyes and distract us from reading. Right? Right. Until advertisers find a better way to handle their business we have the prerogative to kill those ads. Not all of them, only the worst ones. (You decide what’s good and what’s bad anyway.)
Tweetbot is arguably the iPhone app that gets the most and the best of Twitter. Readability makes reading enjoyable again. The new version of Tweetbot embraces Readability and instead of sending us to a website referred in a tweet, it shows us the relevant Readability page.
Add to this the advantages of retina display and you get an outstanding reading experience. And that’s fantastic.
This is the title of my article published today on Smashing Magazine.
In the the article I talk about some successful products and I try to see what makes them so. What can we derive from their success and how can we apply this knowledge to web design? In my opinion it all comes to three things:
This is a quite long and complicated but rewarding article. As the title says, it promises to show us the ultimate way to Web typography and I think it does. A great resource.
To become a leader sounds irresistibly sweet. Too many people dream of becoming leaders but too few can make it. Why? Because they hate solitude, no matter what they say.
Leadership and solitude seem to be two contradictory notions but they are not. No, really.
Do yourself a favor and spend the next 30 minutes of your life reading Solitude and Leadership.
The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself.
There’s a new kid on the block and I think it’s quite interesting. Its name is Instabuck and it aims to help you sell easily your digital product. “Easily” is the keyword.
Modern times imposed the use of modern products. Most of them are digital ones such as music, art, books, design themes, code and the list keeps on. Instabuck is a very simple website. However it engages a powerful mechanism which makes selling easy.
This is a project of the mighty Venture Geeks and it is developed around the Minimum Viable Product strategy. My involvement had to do with designing the main website and the available themes among others.
There are lots to be said about Instabuck, its philosophy and the design decisions, but I feel we need to give it some time to breath and evolve.
Until then I suggest you to take a look at Instabuck and become a member in case you want to sell a digital product. Registration takes seconds and the service remains free for the 7 first days. I hope you ‘ll like it.
