—Yossarian
via thisisnthappiness

I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services. Through successive rounds of innovation and investor storytime, we’ve trained Internet users to expect that everything they say and do online will be aggregated into profiles (which they cannot review, challenge, or change) that shape both what ads and what content they see. Outrage over experimental manipulation of these profiles by social networks and dating companies has led to heated debates amongst the technologically savvy, but hasn’t shrunk the user bases of these services, as users now accept that this sort of manipulation is an integral part of the online experience.
—Ethan Zuckerman, The Internet’s Original Sin

This home page case study by John Henry Müller is a must-read for visual designers:

We released Pack last fall with what we thought was a pretty solid homepage. It had all the bells and whistles you’d like to see on a modern product website: approachable hand written headline, custom ambient background video, playful colors, benefit-led descriptions of key features, scroll triggered animations, prominent call-to-action, charming microcopy, responsive, CSS3, HTML5, blah blah blah. All of the things.

Recently we officially switched over to a drastically simplified homepage after A/B testing for 10 days.

The results of this test were surprising and frankly: embarrassing.
User experience design, or UX design, is a necessary skill for UX and visual designers alike.
Remember what Steve Jobs said, design isn’t about how it looks, but how it works.
Pretty comes later. Make sure your shit works first.

How awesome is the Surface 3?
All you need to know is that there are now docking stations on sale. Right now!
Because, you know, that’s what I look for in a tablet.
A fucking docking station.

Image taken from Behance
via sidebar.io

Tom Hanks isn’t letting go of skeuomorphism with his new Hanx Writer iPad app. It mimics an old time-y typewriter.

Over at FiveThirtyEight, Ben Casselman drops a spoiler on the whole “disruption” thing:

Talk to anyone in Silicon Valley these days, and it’s hard to go more than two minutes without hearing about “disruption.” Uber is disrupting the taxi business. Airbnb is disrupting the hotel business. Apple’s iTunes disrupted the music industry, but now risks being disrupted by Spotify. Listen long enough, and it’s hard not to conclude that existing companies, no matter how big and powerful, are all but doomed, marking time until their inevitable overthrow by hoodie-wearing innovators.

In fact, the opposite is true. By a wide range of measures, the advantages of incumbency in corporate America have never been greater. “The business sector of the United States,” economists Ian Hathaway and Robert Litan wrote in a recent Brookings Institution paper, “appears to be getting ‘old and fat.'”
Corporate America is doing fine, but why?
Consolidation is one factor:
Large companies are becoming more dominant in part by buying up their rivals. Hathaway and Litan find that, not surprisingly, most major industries have become more consolidated over time, as Wal-Mart and Starbucks have displaced corner stores and coffee shops.4 It’s a lot harder to compete with a multi-billion-dollar multinational company than with an independent business.
This entrepreneur stuff makes me think about crowd funding sites like Kickstarter. They’re great (I’ve completed 2 successful ones), but they usually kickstart projects, not businesses.
Remember, there’s no reason to fret. Very soon we’re not going to have to work ever again.

Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice was caught on a security camera dragging his unconscious wife-to-be Janay Palmer by the hair, after knocking her unconscious, and the National Football League has chosen to suspend him for two games. Rice in fact will return to the field just in time to wear the NFL’s pink-festooned uniforms to celebrate their deep commitment to breast cancer awareness.
—Dave Zirin, edgeofsports.com
via DrewBot

Chamfered edges on the new Samsung Alpha?
Christ, Samsung. You really don’t have any shame.
At all. None.
Apple iPhone 5/5S, September 2012 (chamfered edges introduced in 2012):

Samsung Galaxy Alpha, August 2014:

I’ve been creating an icon system this week for my company. One of the icons we need is for a database.

Doing a quick search on The Noun Project (or Google Images) reveals what you’ll get: a stack of cylinders.

If you’re old enough to remember the spinning disk drives that came before solid state hard drives, you’ll have a clue to the origin of the cylindric stack.

Go back a little farther to 1956 and you’ll hit the source.

Some specs on the 305 (via Wikipedia):

• one of the last vacuum tube computers that IBM built
• It weighed over a ton
• stored 5 million 7-bit (6 data bits plus 1 parity bit) alphanumeric characters (5 MB)
• it had fifty 24-inch-diameter (610 mm) disks.
• two independent access arms moved up and down to select a disk, and in and out to select a recording track, all under servo control
• Average time to locate a single record was 600 milliseconds
• the system was leased for $3,200 per month in 1957 dollars, equivalent to a purchase price of about $160,000
• more than 1,000 systems were built
• production ended in 1961

I continue to wonder about the future of icons. How long do we represent current technologies with iconic representations of things which no longer exist or that we rarely use?

Envelopes for email. Handsets from rotary telephones for (cellular) phones, magnifying glasses, physical bookmarks, point-and-shoot cameras, alarm clocks with two bells on top, paint brushes, block erasers, reel-to-reel tapes.

—humansofny

A new American dream has gradually replaced the old one. Instead of leisure, or thrift, consumption has become a patriotic duty. Corporations can justify anything–from environmental destruction to prison construction–for the sake of inventing more work to do. A liberal arts education, originally meant to prepare people to use their free time wisely, has been repackaged as an expensive and inefficient job-training program. We have stopped imagining, as Keynes thought it so reasonable to do, that our grandchildren might have it easier than ourselves. We hope that they’ll have jobs, maybe even jobs that they like.

The new dream of overwork has taken hold with remarkable tenacity. Hardly anyone talks about expecting or even deserving shorter workdays anymore; the best we can hope for is the perfect job, one that also happens to be our passion. In the dogged, lonely pursuit of it, we don’t bother organizing with our co-workers. We’re made to think so badly of ourselves as to assume that if we had more free time, we’d squander it.
—Nathan Schneider, Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

Someone uploaded a seamless loop of the ambient sound from Deckard’s apartment in Blade Runner to YouTube.
This would drive some people crazy to listen to.
Me? I like listening to ambient/lyricless music/sound whenever I’m working on something that requires serious thinking. Kind of Blue by Miles Davis and Music Has the Right to Children by Boards of Canada are two albums I listen to all the time while I work/design/draw/think.
via DrewBot

Robin Williams, Dead at 63