kadavy's comments

I realize Paul is doing it for the sake of learning, but that seems like an insane amount of consideration to display and bandwidth.

I remember seeing an article that argued that you should just serve up big images, and that slow cellular data networks scale down and optimize images pretty well already.

Basically it argued that it wasn't worth the trouble. Even with some Googling I can't seem to dig it up.

Thoughts on this, anyone?

Actually, I get better results with http://lmgtfy.com/?q=picnichouse+mason

I redesigned my blog recently[1] and purposely made the type slightly bigger than intuitively felt comfortable. The funny thing is, plenty of people complain about it being too big, but nobody complained when it was way too small.

[1] http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/reverse-engineering-redesign/

Hey, thanks for mentioning "Design for Hackers" (I wrote it).

I'm a bit late to the thread, but if anyone wants to get a sampling of the approach that I take to explaining design check out some sample articles I linked to on http://designforhackers.com

I talk about design more abstractly than most, but I try to keep it entertaining. More than anything I want you to see differently.

I also occasionally send out emails. If you sign up on that site I already have some queued up for new subscribers.

Sacha Greif also sends out some good emails: http://sachagreif.com and of course there's http://hackdesign.org (I'll even be doing a lesson on there eventually)

By the way, just noticed a similar "hanging indent" method on the author picture on the 37Signals blog: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3442-the-design-roulette

Looks good! I love those short lines of text ;)

Hey Kevin, think of it as akin to "hanging punctuation." Since the photo is a circle, I consider its visual "edge" to not be its literal edge.

Notice also how the edge of my face sits along the imaginary line of the left margin.

Thanks for checking it out and commenting, and good work with HackDesign!

The one killer application of Google Glass will be using it as a second monitor in a cafe. That would be entirely worth looking ridiculous.

I'd be interested to hear some specific ways that Brian defined and maintained this company culture. For example, what was one vision of environment, vision, or values, and how did that affect an instance of hiring or process?

Awesome to hear all of that. I'm so glad that it's been helpful. That's why I do it, after all!

Thanks for recommending "Design for Hackers!" (I wrote it)

I think your advice is good. So much design is really about thinking. If you have a clear picture of what the experience is like for your user, and can create some wireframes or pencil sketches based upon that, then it makes the following steps much easier.

I just found this on the "DecidingToBeBetter" subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/DecidingToBeBetter/comments/12jh16/p...

One comment: '"Permission to suck" is quite the erotic sentence :)'

Love that Ira Glass video. Very relevant to this concept.

> particularly to fail in public

This reminds me of when I learned to dance Salsa, and more recently, Tango.

It's a far more public failure than writing a blog post. Your body – the very thing that experiences the embarrassment of failure – is your instrument when dancing. To add insult to injury, you're failing in front of a never-ending stream of women.

But, thankfully, sucking is temporary and life is long.

EDIT: I'd like to add that life is much, much, better when you know how to dance.

Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job comes to mind. They make an art of "sucking."

Lou Reed has a horribly sucky singing voice. I love him for it.

Good points. Part of being okay with sucking is that if you're okay with sucking – you're more likely to be okay with shipping.

The surprising thing I've found about being okay about sucking at writing is that often the "barf drafts" (as I call them) that seem god-awful when I'm actually writing them, turn out being pretty darn good when I revisit them.

I've been playing guitar for 13 years, and I still am not very good.

A breakthrough for me though, was when I stopped obsessing over getting every note right, and instead focused on strumming the right chords. Then, I found playing much more enjoyable, and it was easier to play whole songs and sing.

Once I got that down, I was able to move on to more complex things. Like many things, it helps to embrace your suckage with musical instruments.

Hehe, I was just describing what my friend said about meditating. I did, in fact, tell her that it wasn't really about thinking about "nothing." Talking about the specifics of meditation wasn't really my aim here :)

If distribution was the problem, wouldn't this be taken care of by having a huge group of indie filmmakers banded together.

I'm feeling very naïve about the movie industry here – is what we're describing simply a movie studio?

Fair point :)