Russell Ivanovic dispells the myth of Android screen fragmentation:

Seems like a lot of variation, right? The part that might confuse most non-developers, is we lay everything out at ‘1x’ or ‘1dp’. So on the iPhone you can have a 320×480 pixel iPhone 3G, and a 640×960 iPhone 4, but the interface itself doesn’t change, it’s still 320×480. You don’t have to re-lay out any buttons or do a custom interface for it. All you do is provide higher resolution assets to make things look crisper. The same is true on Android.
Android has come a long way.
If they ever decide to get rid of that awful Helvetica/Arial-mutant-lovechild Roboto, I might actually switch off iOS.
Ha. Who am I kidding, no I won’t.

In the morning, we wake up, get ready, have breakfast, and we’re out the door. That’s our morning routine. When we do this, our bodies are performing duties it knows to do. We don’t necessarily think about each step, it just happens. While our bodies are performing these routines, our minds are working on situations, problems, and ideas. This is good, we need more of this throughout our day. The more structure we make for ourselves, the more we allow our minds to roam freely.
—Mister Perez, Create Daily, Publish Weekly

taken from the Washington Post

This rush to use the phone as a camera has meant that phone makers are keen to improve their product (so as to compete effectively with it against each other) and as a consequence they overtake the incumbent camera makers in quality as well as quantity.

The same phenomenon was experienced by fixed component “Hi-Fi” audio products. The quality of mobile music was poor but it was convenient and convenience translated into consumption and consumption translated into quality improvement and eventually the evaporation of usage of the traditional category.
—Horace Dediu, Competing effectively against your most potent competitor

Sanderson thinks it’s more a case of evolving than dying. Talking to theObserver last week, he suggested there are now two types of hipster: “Contemporary hipsters – the ones with the beards we love to hate – and proto-hipsters, the real deal.” And herein lies the confusion.

“Historically, proto-hipsters have been connoisseurs – people who deviate from the norm. Like hippies. Over the years, though, they inspired a new generation of young urban types who turned the notion of a hipster into a grossly commercial parody. These new hipsters want to appear a certain way, to be seen to be doing certain things, but without doing the research. So they appropriated the lifestyle and mindset of a proto-hipster.”
—Morwenna Ferrier, The end of the hipster: how flat caps and beards stopped being so cool
I still think the term ‘hipster’ is silly because it doesn’t mean anything.
Let me rephrase that: hipster means so many things to so many people it has lost it’s meaning. Depending on who I’m hanging out, they’ll point out different types of people they think are hipsters. Based on anecdotal evidence, I can only conclude hipsters are non-conservative people, who might or might not dress in a quirky fashion. They also might or might not have beards and might or might not have dark-rimmed glasses. And suspenders.
Whenever someone says they’ve spotted some hipsters, there’s always a strong whiff of cynicism that comes with it and too much cynicism is not healthy.

No shit:

This week Michael and Bryan discuss car alarms, avoiding tourists in New York, the bull$h!t term “authentic digital design”, Bryan’s continued distaste for iOS 7, the relationship of effort to making art and why copyright laws suck.
Weekly Exhaust, Episode 7

—from Battle Angel Alita, by Yukito Kishiro

—the best movie ever

Given the surge of multimillion-dollar auction records boasted by Christie’s and Sotheby’s on an almost monthly basis, how do the auction houses justify lobbying against a bill that might pay artists for their works? When Art F City asked a Christie’s spokeswoman, she insinuated that successful artists simply don’t need more money: “European studies have shown that resale royalty schemes provide support to less than 5% of working artists, and the artists receiving royalties tend to be those commanding the highest prices on the primary market.”

Sure, for most artists, large secondary markets are a best case scenario. But only a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry would force us to re-examine a kindergartener’s understanding of ethics. Whether artists are successful or unsuccessful, making millions or pennies, they deserve to share in the money their work generates. “The A.R.T. Act won’t benefit every artist, unfortunately, but this is not an anti-poverty program,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), sponsor of the failed 2011 Equity for Visual Artists Act, told me over the phone. “This is a fairness and equity program. Just because we can’t bring in everybody doesn’t mean we should bring in nobody.”
—Whitney Kimball, Shouldn’t Artists Benefit When Their Paintings Auction for Millions?

I just finished reading a great essay by Rick Webb on the post-scarcity economy of the future.
What happens when capitalism is so efficient that us humans are no longer needed to keep the money machine running?
Webb digs in:

The key here, to me, is to start thinking about how economics would work when we decouple labor from reward. Does that make a system inherently communist? I don’t think it does. People work. They get paid. It is market driven, and not centrally planned. In reality,the market already basically dictates this, for who can claim that a Wall Street banker works more than a teacher? The only thing we really need to do is take this to a logical extreme: that people can still get paid doing zero work. This fear seems to be at the heart of most people who say that Europe is communist: if we give people so much welfare, some of them might stop working! Quelle Horreur!

It seems to me that with the rise of machines and robotics, advances in mining technology, energy technology (both fracking and green energy technologies), the obesity epidemic in the US, etc., that there are plenty of reasons to believe that we may be at the beginnings of a post scarcity economy. We have a surplus, no doubt. Of course, we still have legions of people in the world that are starving, and even people still here at home. But we actually have the capacity to feed them, to feed everyone, even now, even if we don’t have the will. It’s not a matter of scarcity; it’s a matter of the organization of labor and capital.
I lost some interest in the middle during all the Star Trek talk, but if all you read are the first and last sections of his essay, you’ll be good (I read through all 20 minutes of it).
As my fellow Exhauster Bryan noted, this is the kind of thing that makes the GOP shit their pants.

—Me, I said this. Maybe it’s time the Supreme Court rethought handing down its decisions a week before we’re supposed to be celebrating as one nation.

The redesign of Design Observer is truly a missed opportunity.
As with anything design-related, the problems are all in little details.
Here’s a list of problems that caught my eye (top to bottom, left to right):
– Is the black tray at the top necessary for 2 measly links? Seems a bit much.
– The scrolling news marquee at the top is abruptly cropped about halfway across the width the the site, why?
– Sometimes ads are necessary, but does MailChimp have to take up that much room at the top? Christ.
– The lefthand navigation. What is that, 6-point type? Again, why?
– Rolling over blog posts on the homepage reveals a blog post summary. No animation, just a jerky jump-out.
– Why are the ‘Creative Opportunities’ in white text against a light grey background? I can read them, but it’s approaching the edge of readability.
– Because the header is over 250 pixels tall, the scrollable area for the mere three articles is extremely small.
– Even though the website is over 1,000 pixels wide, it feels extremely stuffy and cramped because of all the poor design decisions made. The stacked logo feels cramped, the lefthand navigation feels cramped, the height of the header makes everything below it feel cramped.
– Most disappointing is the lack of sophistication to the typography
I could go on and critique the rest of the site, but you get the idea.
Clearly Design Observer is comprised of some heavyweights in the world of graphic design but traditional graphic design is very different than web design.
It reminds me of when Michael Jordan tried his hand at minor league baseball. Sure, he did ok, but it was anything close to his achievements in basketball.

The Verge takes a look into the thinking behind the ‘material’ design philosophy for Android:

What is software made of?

The answer came from a design exploration, when Jon Wiley, principal designer for search, and his colleague Nicholas Jitkoff were looking at the now-ubiquitous cards that Google started using in Google Now. They looked at those sliding cards and wondered: when you swiped one away, what was underneath?

“It sounds like such an innocent question,” Duarte says, “and yet it was such a powerful spark.” It led the team to come up with a new way of thinking about the software elements we use and (virtually) touch every day. Instead of just talking about pixels on a screen or abstract layers, the team imagined that these cards and the surfaces they slid around on were actually real, tangible objects.
Software imitating tangible objects. This doesn’t sound like “authentically” digital design does it?
Or does it?
I thought Microsoft was leading the way into the future of software design with Windows Phone and their flat approach. Right? Right?
The answer is: it doesn’t fucking matter. Oh and if anyone tries to use the term “authentically digital design”, punch them in the face and explain to them that term does not exist. Also, to be clear—flat design is not a philosophy, it’s an aesthetic. Like the decision to wear Italian leather dress shoes every day or Chucks (disclosure: I wear Chucks every day).
The answer to Google’s sharp work for their Material Design is that it is both authentically digital AND skeuomorphic. Heresy! Oh no he dih-ent!
Operating systems, mobile applications, ATM screens and every other piece of software with a user interface was made so that human beings could interact with them. Computers, on the other hand, operate using zeros and ones. Everything else we humans build on top of those zeros and ones is made for us to communicate with them.
Software and user interfaces can be neither authentically or inauthentically digital. Software either well-designed or poorly designed.