Welcome to this week's edition of our Quality Linkage column. Please enjoy this week’s collection of interesting and entertaining links. Pour yourself a nice beverage, find a comfortable place, and relax.
????: David Perell shares a short article on a funny paradox of creativity: “Your work is done when it looks so simple that the consumer thinks they could have done it, which means they won’t appreciate how hard you worked.”
?: In a piece for Scientific American, science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway make the case that unlimited information is transforming society in ways that we're only just starting to understand the implications of.
One of the overarching impacts we now recognize in hindsight was only weakly anticipated: that by moving matter and energy, we would end up moving information and ideas.
??: So, I already knew that there's a whole community of people who love solving Rubik's cubes, but I didn't know people were out here trying to solve 17x17x17 versions of the dang things. Deeply, deeply deranged and demented, that's all I can say.
?: For a lot of once-hopeful designers entering the startup workforce, this piece by Tobias van Schneider is all too real.
+ Also from Tobias' blog is this short post that complements the one above by David Perell nicely.
?: Outdoor photographer Alex Strohl recently rebranded and updated his “Strohl Works” online photography community into a full-fledged learning platform now known as Wildist. If you’re a photographer at any level, you should check it out. Their world-class paid workshops can teach you a whole lot about composition, storytelling, and much more.
✍️: Ugmonk is one of my favorite product brands to write about. I love Jeff Sheldon's approach to business, his design aesthetic, the whole deal. So, I took an interest when he shared the story of hiring creative writer and marketer Cole Schafer of Honey Copy to drum up something enjoyable for the company's About page.
Cole writes:
Never start an “About Us” page with “About Us”.
The quickest way to ruin an “About Us” page is to begin with the headline “About Us”. Yet, despite this, every brand seems to start their story with those two awful words.
Instead, you should write a headline that captures the reader’s attention. What I wrote for Jeff was… “I’m more so the fisherman”. Like the smell of baking sourdough, this arouses the curiosity of the reader, enticing them to read on.
??: I find this video of famous Tokyo bartende Hiroyasu Kayama making a cocktail out of hot butter oddly entrancing. Are the sound effects overdone in the mix? Is the music weirdly sensual? Is he gazing hungrily into my soul? Yes to all of the above, but watch it anyway.
??: Designer Jon Moore has created an intensely thorough Design System Encyclopedia — which you can buy on Gumroad in Airtable format — that documents more than 200 UI tokens, components, patterns, templates, and visualizations for designers to reference.
I guess you could think of it as a “lingo database” for helping designers speak the same language with one another. If you've ever wondered what terms like “chips” and “onboarding” and “drawer/accordion” are all about, this will be an invaluable resource for you. It's all very organized too — all the items within are categorized and tagged, and they feature outbound links to relevant visual examples.
Who is it for?
- Product Designers: Get inspired and be thorough while you design.
- Product Managers: Use to build and prioritize user stories.
- Developers: Understand the nuances of the design you're building.
He wrote about every single component in the collection (so... much... scrolling...) if you want to check that out. There's also a free preview of the Airtable document you can peruse.
?: On the topic of design nerdery, Austrian user interface designer Oliver Schöndorfer has started a new (English-spoken) YouTube channel called My Type that's all about leveraging typography better in your websites/apps/etc.
The first episode covers his obsession with improving the typography of the iOS time display.
Thanks Oliver, now I'll never unsee that.
Neat Stuff We've Published Recently
- Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno Garcia is kind of like American Gods but set in 1920s Mexico. Look, just read it, it's lovely.
- Stellar Factory's “Pizza Puzzles” are deliciously fun and wacky jigsaws you can assemble with your friends and family as a team.
- Relive the glory days of JRPGs with these Final Fantasy tees by Michael B. Myers, Jr.
- These “Pocket Operator” portable synthesizers by Teenage Engineering are small, ultra-portable music devices with studio-quality sound and the flexibility to make music on the go.
- CB2's marble doorstop solves a simple problem while feeling like a part of your beautiful home decor.
- You can now get your hands on Sony’s smartest headphones yet.
Got any suggestions for articles, videos, stories, photographs, and any other links you think we should be posting in our weekly Quality Linkage? Please do let us know on Twitter.