Sometimes I get pissed off how damn smart and talented Frank Chimero is:

There’s one particular stupid wall I’d like to focus on today: the one we built between print and digital formats. I’m skeptical, so I have some questions.

1) Why do we think they’re at war with one another?
2) Why does one need to kill the other?
3) What kinds of interesting things happen if we keep both on the table?

The main line of inquiry of my career has been about undermining that barrier between print and digital. Rather than having a division, I make things that trade across the boundary. I’m acting as a merchant, a translator, and at my worst, maybe even a smuggler.
Great piece on the creative process. I wrestled with similar issues the book I’m publishing with help from my Kickstarter backers.
I started Charms, Quivers & Parades as a poster series, and then I wondered why I was imposing these artificial boundaries on my work? Where else did my ideas want to live besides 12-inch by 18-inch pieces of paper? It turned out my project was equally comfortable in postercard format, PDF/ebook and hardcover book (at least for now, I think they’d make great temporary tattoos and rubber stamps too).
We live in a world where people love to polarize things into binary competitions.
It doesn’t have to be that way.

Matthew Weiner interviewed in the NYTimes:

I prefer print books, but I have purchased a lot of e-books. There’s an incredible power to holding the iPad or the Kindle and seeing all the choices available, but it’s a little bit like opening Netflix. It can be overwhelming and feel like a collection instead of a library. Deep down, I prefer paperbacks that I can bend the pages in, and write in with a ballpoint pen and take in the bath. Also, e-books completely nullify the adventure of used books. With a used book, I love reading inscriptions, finding business cards and notes, and constructing another narrative about who it belonged to.
Seems Weiner has the same book habits as me.

Interesting thesis by Avram Miller on what’s going to happen in September of 2015 (via Robert Cringely):

Jobs began to realize that Google could become the next Microsoft which would have the same effect that the old Microsoft had on the pre-iPhone Apple, it would cut the company off at the knees. Jobs realized that the only way to prevent that, was to put a dagger into the very heart of Google – Search. So he started up the most secret project ever undertaken at Apple. The name of the project was “Found.” Less than four people knew about Found and not one of them was a board member. Jobs understood that Search was a very vulnerable area that had no stickiness other than possibly the brand behind it. That when users did a search, they just wanted the best results.
Google is quickly catching up to Apple in the quality of their software and product design, I’d love to see Apple catch up to Google in search (Siri is part of that).
Hey, I can dream, can’t I?

Damn were cars in the 1966 Grand Prix in Monaco gorgeous—I’m talking about the look and the sound:

h/t Bryan

Poe’s Law

?uestlove

Tim Cook breaks down how they think at Apple on yesterday’s earning call, for all the ignorant analysts and investors who still don’t get it (and there are a lot of em out there):

As you probably know from following us for a long time, we didn’t ship the first MP3 player, nor the first smartphone, nor the first tablet. In fact, there were tablets being shipped a decade or so before then, but arguably we shipped the first successful modern tablet, the first successful modern smartphone, and the first successful modern MP3 player. And so it means much more to us to get it right, than to be first.
I’m looking forward to Apple’s take on what a “smart watch” is.

Yesterday I sent out a link to my Kickstarter backers to the digitial version of the book I published. The book is in PDF format. It’s “open”, no DRM protection, nothing.
I used bitly to track clicks and I watched them trickle in slowly (as expected) until around 2pm when—in a 15-minute time span—this happened:

Of the 192 total backers to my project, 106 received this link to the book. It’s possible there was a flurry of genuine activity for 15 minutes, but it looks shady. There’s no proof of referral traffic (the link wasn’t posted on another website), but it’s intriguing.
I’m not getting bent out of shape about this. If people are sharing the link, they’re sharing the link. There’s nothing I can do about it.
I myself have torrented movies, music and books from time to time, so I have to put my money where my mouth is and let it happen, if it’s going to happen.

So says Charles Bradley.
[this song is from 2007, not 1967]

via ATP

Wow, my new favorite word, antifragile (via Bombtune):

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say, chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac), the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance … even our own existence as a species on this planet. And antifragility determines the boundary between what is living and organic (or complex), say, the human body, and what is inert, say, a physical object like the stapler on your desk.
As much as I have order in my life, with my various daily routines and habits, I think I’m fairly antifragile.
I studied print design in college, became a web designer and taught myself web development after college then moved into mobile/app design in 2008 (all the while returning to web & graphic design along the way).
I lived in New York City for 4 years, then Miami for 1 year, then back to NYC for 6 years, then Los Angeles for 1 year, and now San Francisco.
I takes a lot to throw me off-balance.

April Fools!!!
Actually no, they really do.
Behind their design platform is a design philosophy.
Do tell, Samsung. You’ve piqued my interest:

Samsung strives to create a better future with our users. Thogether, we can contribute to society by creating sustainable values and bring joy and meaning to our lives. This is the design to which Samsung aspires.
Where’s the part of their design philosophy involving 132-page documents detailing how to copy the iPhone, pixel-by-pixel?
Or that new Gear smart watch with the horrendous software, how is that bringing joy to peoples’ lives?
Don’t take my word for it, just look for yourself.

Greg Hoy on the future of design/digital shops/studios/agencies (whatever the fuck you call yourself) (via A List Apart):

I recently spoke to quite a few digital design shop owners, and the consensus is that the first quarter of 2014 sucked, and for some, criminally so. Shops depleted their cash reserves, struggled to meet payroll, extended their lines of credit, and yes, downsized.
Although:
Finally, there’s this thought from another successful agency head: there is a massive amount of untapped work out there that is waiting for you. You don’t have to change a thing with your business, you just have to find it. Again, this speaks to the fact that you need to spend money on marketing. The industry has many more talented players than it used to.
One correction to on this last quote: You DO have to change your business. You can’t just throw money at marketing. You have to know how to market your company.
If you don’t know about marketing, I suggest you start reading Seth Godin’s books now.
As usual, the mutants will survive.

Thomas Frank drops a tremendous essay on the McMansion:

Inequality is the point of the McMansion, and the McMansion is also, to a certain degree, the point of inequality; it’s the pot of pyrite at the end of the rainbow of shit that we have chosen as a nation to follow. As you enter its soaring narthex of an entrance, keep this in mind: Before you, in the skim-coated drywall greatroom and the monster granite kitchen with its multiplicity of faucets and its Viking stove–this is what it is all about. This is the reward of thirty-odd years of economic policy.
There’s many great things about the United States.
McMansions are not one of them.