Horace Dediu tries to figure out how we’ll figure out if the Apple Watch is a success:

1. Language. Measure whether “Watch” will come to mean “Apple Watch”. “Phone” has come to mean not only “smartphone” but also all mobile/cellular phones and not just things used for calling but things used for all manner of information. This is a great test because the theft of semantics can only be accomplished through a degree of ubiquity of influential mindshare. Incidentally, the brand may well have been designed to do just that.
2. A measurable and significant reduction in the use of the iPhone. The Watch peels off uses from the iPhone and therefore the more it peels off, the less remains. However, that which remains will be more uniquely valuable to the incumbent. This is the process of carving and erosion that the PC experienced vs. mobile devices in general.

“The theft of semantics.” I love that phrase.

via Lifehacker

Taken from the National Archives

via Twitter

Illustrator Jon Contino was interviewed by The Great Discontent:

I started freelancing immediately after college. When you leave school, you’re conceited. I saw other people who were making money and I thought, “I’m better than those guys and I’ll make twice as much as them.” I tried the freelance thing, but I couldn’t get it together–I had no clients and no money. I ended up taking a job at a local agency that served only financial advisors and every client wanted the same thing done in the same way. It was very limiting and I was out of there after two months. The next job I took was for a print broker that did design on the side. Everyone who worked there was a designer, but the majority of their money was made from designing and printing club fliers, so it wasn’t the exact position I was looking for. I also took on some pet projects and got a taste of doing some cool stuff and actually making money. About a year after that, I decided to open up my own studio and try my hand at it because I was done working for someone else.

I love origin stories.

Contino is one of my favorite illustrators, but even guys at the top of their game like him had to start somewhere.

via Laughtard

via Sad and Useless

Chart via NetMarketShare via CNet

I’ve been pointing this out to people ever since I learned about it in my college graphic design class 20 years ago.

I’m amazing how many people still have never seen the arrow.

A common response after pointing out the arrow is, “Wow! So that arrow is deliberate?”

Yeah, you see, graphic design is about composition. Negative and positive space working together to activate the page or the screen you’re looking at, making you an active part of the message decoding…. ah, nevermind, you don’t care.

via Brand New

At The Verge, Vlad Savov on the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge:

I am not, however, convinced that the S6 Edge is the future. Despite my best intentions and great excitement, I have not been able to shake the initial impression that the Edge is ergonomically busted. In my time using the handset, I’ve consistently pressed on-screen buttons with my holding hand — because the metal sides are so thin they are almost nonexistent — and found myself growing anxious about holding it just the right way. Yes, it’s very much like the iPhone 4 Antennagate debacle, though unlike that hardware issue, there’s a software fix that Samsung could perform to rectify things: just make the side screens insensitive to touch input when the display is on.

The Galaxy S6 Edge also doesn’t play too nicely with Google’s Material Design. Samsung has my eternal appreciation for following Google’s lead in moving to a cleaner, more minimalist interface, but Material Design emphasizes flatness and geometric regularity, which the Edge’s warping side screens disturb. They create a sort of vignette effect on white pages and are a hindrance rather than a help when editing photos.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Only a nerd would get excited about a collection of useful .htaccess snippets, all in one place, on GitHub.

Microsoft is an odd bird.

Their new Surface 3 doesn’t come with a ($129) Type Cover even though every advertisement and press shot features the Type Cover.

If I wanted to buy the Surface 3, I would assume it came with the Type Cover.

And I would assume wrong.

—Typeface Mechanics: 001

The big change that digitization made was it made it much easier to apply a single color scheme to a bunch of different scenes at once. The more of a movie you can make look good with a single scheme, the less work you have to do. Also, as filmmakers are bringing many different film formats together in a single movie, applying a uniform color scheme helps tie them together.

One way to figure out what will look good is to figure out what the common denominator is in the majority of your scenes. And it turns out that actors are in most scenes. And actors are usually human. And humans are orange, at least sort of!

—Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue

The “Stupid manager theory of company failure” (and its corollary, the “Smart manager theory of company success”1) remains the most popular, perhaps even the most universally accepted theory of management. Book after book, thoughtful article after article alludes to this theory and whenever a company is perceived to be under-performing, all fingers point to the leadership with demands for blood letting.

This is not a new phenomenon. When catastrophe strikes, as a thoughtful species, we have always asked for leaders to be sacrificed. In Europe during the Iron age leaders were sacrificed when crops failed. In South and Central America leaders were ceremonially tortured for similar reasons.

Of course most crop failures were due to weather phenomena and the anointed leadership had nothing to do with these causes. Nevertheless ancient correlation analysis would have revealed the pattern that good leadership meant good weather and bad leadership meant bad weather.

There was a balance to the downside however. When times were good the leadership enjoyed luxuries and praise. This was the essential deal societies made: we’ll keep you in riches and allow you to be idle as long as times are good but ritualistically slaughter you when times are bad. We’ll declare you “chief magical officer” and place all our faith in you. But, of course, if you fail, we will will be vengeful.

—Horace Dediu, Haunted Empire