Blog!
Clippings from around the web curated by me, Lenny Sirivong, a Madison, WI based Interface Designer & Developer.
I recently left my position as Senior Software Engineer for User Experience to focus on making great stuff for the web.
Need an interaction designer or web developer? Go ahead,
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.
One of the more surprising things I’ve noticed while working on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup ideas are. In this essay I’m going to demonstrate this phenomenon by describing some. Any one of them could make you a billionaire. That might sound like an attractive prospect, and yet when I describe these ideas you may notice you find yourself shrinking away from them.
Don’t worry, it’s not a sign of weakness. Arguably it’s a sign of sanity. The biggest startup ideas are terrifying. And not just because they’d be a lot of work. The biggest ideas seem to threaten your identity: you wonder if you’d have enough ambition to carry them through.
I tried to make my presentation explicitly (and perhaps exaggeratedly) personal. I wanted to work at a company that liked me exactly how I am, and I don’t consider myself a very good employee. I have a very specific relationship with my work, my coworkers, and my bosses. I get upset easily, I have an anti-authoritarian streak, my interests wax and wane unpredictably, I swear a lot. Yet, they still wanted me, and it’s not totally clear to me why.
Peers can have expensive expectations. Peers need you not only to buy an iPad, but also to believe in the magic of it. Peers need you not only to go and see Sleep No More, but also to be overwhelmed by it and hungry to see it again. Peers need to cut your hair and they need to charge you a bit more for it, because peers need money to buy an iPad and to see Sleep No More. The circularity of peerage quickly becomes exhausting, and does so at a considerable cost. Anyway, I really enjoyed the $12 haircut I got on Monday. I’ll probably get a $35 or $40 haircut when I feel like having a pretty girl shampoo my head, rather than a burly Russian.
Brian Suda for .net mag:
Spider graphs, sometimes called radar graphs, are rarely as well done as the ones for worldshapin by Carlo Zapponi and Vasundhara Parakh. This site looks at different countries and their attributes such as; education, health, population and so on. By plotting this on a spider graph in the round, you can easily compare how “well-balanced” are countries. With nice transparencies and soft edges, you are worried less about the exact values and more about the intercomparison.
“The whole purpose of making a newspaper’s visualization highly interactive is you could look at that data and say, ‘Yeah, but‘,” he said. If a reporter presents a conclusion from data, a reader should be able explore more data to challenge that conclusion, he said. Sure, news organizations publish interactive infographics, but they are interactive only insofar as they were designed. With Weave, a single visualization lives in a bigger, more collaborative and connected universe of data.
Something I had a fuzzy idea of and wanted to tackle, but I lack a lot of data viz understanding (in terms of building a tool for it). Glad an open source tool is out there making progress. I’m looking forward to contributing.
via @brainpicker
Somewhere in this process, you will come face-to-face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy.
This happens when the complexity of building out the design is greater than the certainty that it’s the right design. For example, if it takes 2 hours to style up a component but only 3 minutes to work out that it’s the wrong element, then you’re making shitty trade-offs.
Let’s add “Certainty” to our list of design principles, shall we?
Via @thoughtbot > @joelgascoigne
Animations in UI via iamdanw
Scorekeeper for Playbook. Very thoughtful design, I especially like the sound engineering, it’s similar to the Wii sound effects but different enough to have its own personality. From @MattRix over at Magicule
via usersillusions
Your mind subconsciously interprets this line drawing of an impossible cube as a three-dimensional object, even though it is not actually possible for such an object to exist.
More great “optical illusions” over at optillusions. Great for a laugh. Looking for an optical illusion in something that doesn’t have an illusion has a confusing, stumbling effect as the mind pieces together what is wrong with the image that is actually right.
“For a moment I think it isn’t going to work, and then you can actually see the idea leap the synaptic gap from a problem, to a problem to be solved.”
“[I]t’s so hard to admit our own fallibility. It’s so uncomfortable. And Archie Cochrane understood this as well as anybody. There’s this one trial he ran many years after World War II. He wanted to test out the question of, where is it that patients should recover from heart attacks? Should they recover in a specialized cardiac unit in hospital, or should they recover at home? All the cardiac doctors tried to shut him down. They had the God complex in spades. They knew that their hospitals were the right place for patients, and they knew it was very unethical to run any kind of trial or experiment.
Nevertheless, Archie managed to get permission to do this. He ran his trial. And after the trial had been running for a little while, he gathered together all his colleagues around his table, and he said, “Well, gentlemen, we have some preliminary results. They’re not statistically significant. But we have something. And it turns out that you’re right and I’m wrong. It is dangerous for patients to recover from heart attacks at home. They should be in hospital.” And there’s this uproar, and all the doctors start pounding the table and saying, “We always said you were unethical, Archie. You’re killing people with your clinical trials. You need to shut it down now. Shut it down at once.” And there’s this huge hubbub. Archie lets it die down. And then he says, “Well that’s very interesting, gentlemen, because when I gave you the table of results, I swapped the two columns around. It turns out your hospitals are killing people, and they should be at home. Would you like to close down the trial now, or should we wait until we have robust results?” Tumbleweed rolls through the meeting room.
…It feels so much more comfortable simply to lay down the law. Cochrane understood that uncertainty, that fallibility, that being challenged, they hurt. And you sometimes need to be shocked out of that. Now I’m not going to pretend that this is easy. It isn’t easy. It’s incredibly painful.
Definitely going to steal this bait and switch technique some time.
(Source: blog.marksoper.net)
Hamm’s Beer sign, circa 1960
“A series of holes punched in the metal and backed with small varicolored lights allows a changing night sky. The word “Hamm’s” appears and then is followed by blinking stars in colors of yellow, blue, pink and red. Finally, a graded row of 4 beer glasses lights up. Circa 1960.”
