Curt Aldredge has concluded there’s no proof hollow icons are harder to interpret/recognize than solid icons:

Johnson’s warning against using hollow icons in user interfaces just isn’t supported by evidence from real users. For one thing, an icon’s style doesn’t exist in isolation, but interacts with other attributes like color to create compounding effects on usability. Furthermore, less than half of the icons in my set of 20 performed better in a solid style than a hollow style. A different set of icons would likely result in a different overall result.
Me? I don’t care if hollow icons are harder or easier to decode than solid icons.
I’ll repeat myself 50 million more times if I have to: hollow icons are not icons, they’re wireframes of icons.
Different strokes for different folks, but I think a more appropriate approach to icon design is thinning them out, not hollowing them out. Let your icons stay solid, just streamline them so there’s less area to fill in.

—Greg McKeown
via Minimal Mac

Over at Slate, Reihan Salam sees the city I live in, San Francisco, as a selfish, selfish place:

Or consider San Francisco, one of the least-affordable major cities in the United States. San Francisco’s population is about 825,000. If it had the same population density as my hometown, New York City, it would instead have a population of 1.2 million. Note that I’m referring to the population density of all five boroughs of New York City, including suburban Staten Island and the low-rise outer reaches of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. A San Francisco of 1.2 million would not be a Blade Runner-style dystopia in which mole people were forced to live cheek-by-jowl in blighted tenements. San Francisco at 1.2 million people would still be only half as dense as Paris, a city that is hardly a Dickensian nightmare.
I’m not an urban planner and I don’t have a silver bullet solution to the housing problem here in San Francisco, but something has to give. What San Franciscans have been experiencing in recent years is what cities like New York have been dealing with for decades and decades and decades.
My wife was born and raised in San Francisco proper, and agrees with me that it’s more of a suburban metropolis than a city. San Francisco needs to put on it’s big boy and big girl pants and start acting like a top tier city. A better transit system than the shitty BART we currently have, more development and more infrastructure.
As beneficial as expanded development could be for San Francisco, I can’t help but think about when—not if—the next earthquake hits the Bay Area.
Perhaps all these smart, young brains in Silicon Valley should use their collective brainpower to focus on earthquakes and not how to charge people for fucking parking spaces.

I had no idea about this:

You might be surprised to know that Facebook has an active and ongoing Artist in Residence Program. Not only that, but it’s also among the most innovative corporate art and artist programs anywhere. Now in its second year, artists have become a regular fixture around the Facebook campus. According to the program’s founder and curator, Drew Bennett, artists are active within the Facebook community during the periods of their residencies and besides making art for exhibition, display and dissemination around the campus, they also have ongoing opportunities to observe, mingle and interact with the people who work there.
Making art is a much better way to spend your time than to fuck around on Facebook.com.

David Cain noticed his spending habits changed when he returned from many months backpacking around the world:

One of the most surprising discoveries I made during my trip was that I spent much less per month traveling foreign counties (including countries more expensive than Canada) than I did as a regular working joe back home. I had much more free time, I was visiting some of the most beautiful places in the world, I was meeting new people left and right, I was calm and peaceful and otherwise having an unforgettable time, and somehow it cost me much less than my humble 9-5 lifestyle here in one of Canada’s least expensive cities.

It seems I got much more for my dollar when I was traveling. Why?
Later on he gets to the antiquated 40-hour work week bullshit we still have in the West:
The eight-hour workday developed during the industrial revolution in Britain in the 19th century, as a respite for factory workers who were being exploited with 14- or 16-hour workdays.

As technologies and methods advanced, workers in all industries became able to produce much more value in a shorter amount of time. You’d think this would lead to shorter workdays.

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.
It’s amazing how such obvious observations can be so eye-opening (and depressing).

Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how.

“When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,” said Stanislas Dehaene, a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris. “There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in your brain.

“And it seems that this circuit is contributing in unique ways we didn’t realize,” he continued. “Learning is made easier.”
—Maria Konnikova, NYTimes: What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades
Thinking and creativity intimately connected to our ability to sketch things out—to take our thoughts out of the ether and put them into the physical world. And this is not just important to “creative” types, but everyone.
I’m reminded of the slogan for Field Notes: “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”

First Round Capital has a great profile on the brand development of Harry’s (the guys behind Warby Parker).
I particularly like where they zagged to after Movember’s zig:

Last year, Harry’s launched National Shave Day on December 1 to much fanfare — riding on the coattails of another cultural facial hair phenomena: Movember. In doing so, they appealed their target market, and not only appeared timely, but prescient. After not shaving all month, men everywhere were in desperate need of a good razor.

“The holiday created more story around the brand. We had an event at our barber shop, put it on the web, promoted it on social media, and we watched the conversions explode,” says Morin. “When we tell stories that connect with people, it’s obvious. On National Shave Day we saw a 360% lift in traffic to the website.
Smart guys.

The new Android logo looks like something I’ve seen before, I just can’t put my finger on it.

—Dieter Rams

John McDuling at Quartz on the college textbook racket:

Even so, the trend is clear. College textbook prices have more than doubled since December 2001, the first month data were broken out for college textbooks. Over the same period the overall consumer price level is up just 35%.

Help may be on the way. A range of new digital entrants are offering textbooks at much cheaper prices, or even for free. In the research note, Morgan Stanley analysts point to Boundless Resources, Flat World Knowledge, OpenStax and Bookboon as notable, would-be disruptors in college textbooks.
Cheaper textbooks is a welcome disruption. Fuck the publishers.
And what do I mean by the college textbook industry being a “racket”?
From [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_(crime)): “A racket is a service that is fraudulently offered to solve a problem, such as for a problem that does not actually exist, will not be affected, or would not otherwise exist.”
College textbooks get updated every year, many times with little to no relevant updates to the content. This is all done so students have to buy the newest version every year. So textbook publishers are offering to solve a problem that does not actually exist. The existing books don’t need updating.
This is bullshit.

Robots aren’t going to replace designers, Kanye-fucking-West will:

Kanye West has offered to redesign Instagram, suggesting that it would be “a simple task” for him to beautify the popular photo app. Speaking at a seminar at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, West cited the success of his instagrammed wedding kiss with Kim Kardashian, which is already the most-liked photo in the history of the app.
West knows how to produce an album, I’ll give him that. But to consider the act of redesigning a mobile application ‘a simple task’ is insulting. Kanye knows the creative process well. Whether you’re creating music or creating a mobile applications, you have to gather resources, and then iterate and iterate and iterate until you achieve what you’re aiming for. Once that’s done you might even need to go back and refine and rework what you’ve made.
I think mobile applications suffer from the perception they’re “simple” and couldn’t be that hard to make because they’re (usually) simple to use, (usually) free to download and have small, cute little icons on your screen.
Custom iconography? Secure databases to store user accounts? Wireframes and user flows to map out the experience of the app? Interactions, animations and transitions? Quality assurance testing? Bug fixing? Image optimization, uploading and storage?
Now take all your requirements and multiple them by a potential install base of 100,000,000 (1/8 of the total number of iTunes accounts, I’m being nice).
Designing and building mobile applications is not a simple task.
But hey, it’s Kanye. I expect batshit crazy comments from him every now and then.

In a memorable scene from the 1996 comedy “Swingers,” Jon Favreau’s romantically inept protagonist, Mike, deluges the answering machine of a woman he’s just met at a bar with a spate of excruciatingly self-sabotaging messages.

If the movie were remade today, Mike would have to find another outlet for his miscues. The concept of leaving (and checking) voice mail is, to millennials, as obsolete as swing-dancing and playing NHL ’94 on Sega Genesis. That red number on their iPhones announcing how many voice mail messages are waiting? Ignored. The recording? Instantly deleted. Mike’s oral-to-aural disaster? Averted.
—Teddy Wayne, NYTimes.com

Harley Davidson has made a new electric motorcycle, but what about the grumble of a Harley?
Oh, they thought about that:

They also didn’t want to fake the roar of the engine. Instead, the engineers carefully tweaked the arrangement of the motor and the gear box until it created a sound that’s a little like a jet flying by.

This week Michael and Bryan discuss bandwidth speeds, the Amazon Fire Phone, the post-employment society of the near future, working less than 40 hours a week and still being productive as shit, more suckiness factors in soccer, molasses, Cumberbitches and why Wall Street sucks.
The episode opens with the exhaust from a 1969 Charger.
Weekly Exhaust, Episode 5
If you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, contact Michael.