David Cole

What I'm Looking for in Design Writing

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 13:38:00 -0700

If you follow me on Twitter, you might’ve noticed that I’ve been kinda grumpy about a number of the design articles that have been going around in the past few months. It made me wonder what exactly I’m hoping to get out of my design reading. I realized in the shower today that I’m mostly looking at design writing across three spectra: consistency, fidelity, and determinacy.

The first is fairly straightforward: consistency of thought. Does a consistent thesis or set of theses emerge? This seems basic, but it’s amazing how often design writing fails this test. Very often, design writing will contradict itself just a few sentences later. I think some designers think of themselves more as artists than inventors, and shy away from any notions that box design in. (Related: I think this has led to a bloating of what comprises the domain of design. Not everything is a design problem. If it were, then design would cease to be a useful term.)

The second is the fidelity of the idea. Maxims like “good design is unobtrusive” might be true in nearly all cases, but a statement so broad is bound to have exceptions. A counter-example here is a stop sign, where obtrusion is the whole point. A higher fidelity restatement of the maxim could include a principle defining such exceptions. I’m not suggesting that’s what Rams should have said — it wouldn’t be nearly as catchy. And that’s the important thing: there is no intrinsic quality associated with an idea’s level of fidelity. It’d just be a substantially different maxim if it were phrased like, “Good design is unobtrusive, every single time, seriously every time, SERIOUSLY NO EXCEPTIONS.”

Finally, the determinacy of the idea. Is the idea useful? Does it convert to practice and how well? “Good design is unobtrusive” is true in, say, 99% of all cases. But how about “Good design is as little design as possible”? I’d say this is true much less often. Consider software meant for working professionals, where edge cases can really matter. That said, an idea that bears fruit 70% of the time can still be useful.

Generally, you can increase the determinacy of an idea by increasing the fidelity — but that’s not always true. You can think of fidelity and determinacy as dampeners: they won’t make an idea better, but they determine how and when the idea can be deployed in practice.

I didn’t write this to call anyone out. Rather, I wanted to sort out what I look for so that I may be sharper with my own writing.

SuperPaint, one of the earliest computer graphics systems. The...

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:40:00 -0700

SuperPaint, one of the earliest computer graphics systems. The UI above, the hardware below. Found these while looking up history on primitive pixel drawing. Check out this little story from that page:

In the earliest days of SuperPaint, the runcode hardware wasn’t yet working, so all paint brushes were one pixel wide (and any height)! Artist Fritz Fisher had taken a job as a night guard at our building in order to be near the system, and images like this one often greeted us in the mornings. When Fritz wasn’t guarding or painting, he read Gravitation by Misner, Wheeler, and Thorne to pass the time.

That seems like a guy worth tracking down.

Hello, late night Tumblr pals. You are my dearest readers, so I...

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 22:27:00 -0700

Hello, late night Tumblr pals. You are my dearest readers, so I would like you be the first to know first that I am teaching a product design class in San Francisco. There are two dates: 6/19 and 6/26. You may sign up here, if you like. I’m very excited, myself.

Here’s the course description:

Investment in design is at an all-time high, and as designers we’re increasingly finding ourselves in leadership positions. We have the opportunity to create change at a massive scale, but to get there we must learn to expand the scope of our concerns, and reexamine how we spend our energy.

In Principles of Product Design, I’ll look at what differentiates product thinking from traditional experience design, and how the two fields work together. I will focus on how to think about design, not what to think. Subjects will range from the strategic to the tactical, from identifying market fit, to working with data, to maximizing design returns.

This class is for UX designers learning to think from a product standpoint.

I’m already working on the class, and I think it’s my best educational thing so far. I have priced it at a friendly $20.

Yesterday’s post originally had a bunch of silly trivia...

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 07:47:00 -0700

Yesterday’s post originally had a bunch of silly trivia about NASA and SETI mixed in. It was a mess, and the post is much better without it. But, I love SETI, so I thought I’d share some of that random junk:

Do you know about the Arecibo message? It’s a radio signal that was sent out to space, on the off chance that extraterrestrials were/are listening. Encoded are key math and science figures, to demonstrate our intelligence. It also contains the above map of our solar system, minus the coloring (that was added by me). As a pixel art nerd, this is both more primitive and more powerful than any other pixel drawing I can think of.

It’s not a modern idea: Carl Friedrich Gauss wanted to plant trees in a pattern that illustrated the Pythagorean theorem, in case anyone checked us out from above. Joseph Johann Littrow wanted to dig canals in geometric patterns, fill them with kerosene, and set it on fire.

Anyway, the guy that created the Arecibo message, Frank Drake, is also the mind behind the Drake equation, which attempts to estimate the number of detectable ET civilizations. It’s kinda bogus, but kinda not. It does raise an earnest question: if the odds of alien intelligence are so high, why haven’t they done what we’ve done: shoot sweet pixel art out into space for detection by other life?

There are a lot of theories, but one that science fiction loves is the zoo hypothesis: that ET life are simply watching and waiting. Two of my favorite pieces of science fiction, 2001 and Star Trek, both share this as their central premise. In 2001, the triggering event of ET intervention is man’s arrival to the moon. In Star Trek, the Vulcan race came to Earth only after we discovered the technology for interstellar travel. The Federation itself continued this nonintervention policy.

It won’t surprise you to learn that Carl Sagan had his hand in much of the above, and his depiction of all this, Contact, is one of my favorite movies, even though it really is super bad in most ways.

Bonus: The New York Times, in 1835, called reports of bat-men living on the moon “probable and possible.”

In February I moved back to Mountain View, where I grew up. You...

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 10:04:59 -0700

In February I moved back to Mountain View, where I grew up. You probably recognize that name because Google has its headquarters here. This wasn’t the case when I was a kid, so I still think of it as a NASA town.

It’s fun growing up in a NASA town. Every 8-year-old in America wants to be an astronaut, of course, but how many tour their neighborhood wind tunnels, or get their freeze-dried ice cream directly from the source? I never went to Space Camp (far too expensive), but I had the opportunity to be jealous of those in my class that did.

There’s an incredible hangar visible from anywhere in the north half of the city: Hangar One. Every year we’d go there to climb inside the cockpits of planes, and watch the Blue Angels pull tricks. It’s, apparently, one of the largest freestanding structures in the world.

The air shows stopped in the ’90s, and now the building is being stripped to its frame. For some understandable reason, you know, like asbestos.

I now live on the same block as my childhood apartment building. My elementary school is right around the corner. They’ve built walls around the school, to convert it to a private day care for Google employees. It still has one of the best views of Hangar One, though.

It has a Death Star II quality: this massive metal structure, permanently looming in the distance, half in pieces. Except, Hangar One is under deconstruction. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have offered to pay to install new paneling, in exchange for the ability to store their private jets there.

Californian idealism and Leland Stanford get a lot of the credit for Silicon Valley’s rise, but it’s more accurately traced back to the military. Most seem to prefer the version of the story where our weird little industry is thanks to some brave frontier academia. But, having grown up here — between the industrial parks of NASA, the Naval Air Force, Lockheed Martin — I’d say the grosser, meaner history is worth remembering. Plus, NASA is still pretty cool, I think.

Photo

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:34:00 -0700

Excerpts from the crossword puzzle I made

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 20:19:53 -0700

I stopped selling the crossword puzzle I made, so I figured I’d share some of the better clues. This was, basically, a bunch of jokes for myself. I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who could’ve solved this whole thing (I think Tag got 99% of it, though). Not sure whether to be proud or apologetic about that.

4A: Taking direction — ABACK
24A: Napster successor — KAZAA
64A: Subject of a Supermanning, according to Soulja Boy — AHO
76A: Method man? — ACTOR
77A: Apple layer — IOS
8D: Google’s forgotten Wikipedia-alike — KNOL
13D: How razor handles are sold — ATALOSS
23D: Gun you pump — BICEP
25D: They once used 100% of the world’s CD manufacturing plants at once — AOL
26D: Infocom magnum opus — ZORK
31D: Like a full bosom — AMPLE
42D: Does what Nintendoesn’t — SEGA
47D: Half of a Law & Order scene change — DUN
57D: Apple commentator — ISAAC

The theme clues:

17A: Fraternal members of 40A — HAMMERBROS
21A: Projectile member of 40A — BULLETBILL
30A: Rotten member of 40A — GOOMBA
53A: Bashful member of 40A — SHYGUY
60A: Nepotic member of 40A — BABYBOWSER
65A: Leashed member of 40A — CHAINCHOMP
11D: Cloudy member of 40A — LAKITU
51D: Volatile member of 40A — BOBOMB
40A: Parent organization of 11D, 17A, 21A, 30A, 51D, 53A, 60A, 65A — KOOPATROOPS

And my great colossal failure:

63D: Streaming music service for nurses, say — RNIO

That one was printed with an apology next to it.

David's Believe It Or Don't

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 17:47:00 -0700

A baby pig is called a piglet — no, really! Pig-let.
We call movies “movies”, like to contrast them with pictures that don’t move… in 2012 we still do this, and all signs suggest we’ll still be doing this in 2013!
There’s a Hyundai in my apartment parking lot that has an alarm that goes off hours at a time for no reason and the fucking owner doesn’t do anything about it.

Photo

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 19:08:47 -0700

I’m pretty short on creative energy these days, so during...

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 23:26:03 -0800

I’m pretty short on creative energy these days, so during those hours of the night where I might’ve been pushing on some freelance gigs or collaborative projects, I’m instead reading more, and playing more games. For the past few months my go-to time killer has been the wonderful Brogue. ASCII-based games can be alienating, but I promise you this is darn accessible, and absolutely gorgeous for being purely text. Short sessions, packed with mystery and surprise, totally free.

Favorite Contributions on Quora

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 10:00:06 -0800

Favorite Contributions on Quora:

Sometimes I forget that my audience here on Tumblr isn’t the same as my audience on Twitter, Quora, or any of the other places I spend my time online.

You might be interested to know, then, that much of my output these days is on Quora. This won’t be a surprise to most of you, given the events of the last few months, but following me there isn’t quite like following me anywhere else. You might not be interested, to take my last answer as an example, in my explanation of Disqus comment count support in Tumblr themes.

In an effort to make my Quora writing a bit more accessible, I created a board there of my favorite contributions. You can follow it on Quora, get updates over email, or subscribe via RSS. In combing through my answer history, I discovered my best stuff is usually about video games, with a few rare design and general culture tidbits.

Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Jim Ray asks: Honest question: have you found New York, center of the...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 08:53:08 -0800

Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Jim Ray asks: Honest question: have you found New York, center of the...:

Admission: I’m a Bay Area native that’s spent the last year living and working in New York City. Interpet bias as you will, I confess to having a far more emotional tie to California than an intellectual one.

buzz:

I think part of the problem with [San Francisco] is that there’s absolutely nothing in the culture that puts the brakes on people’s narcissism. It is, by its very nature, an infinitely gentle, endlessly indulgent place that encourages people to believe at every turn that they are exceptional human beings for having been enlightened enough to make their home in God’s perfect paradise at the dawning of the Age of the Technological Aquarius.

Buzz and I talked about this over drinks a few months ago and it’s been simmering in the back of my head ever since. See, I agree with every single one of Buzz’s observations, but my conclusion is the complete opposite.

Buzz writes:

There are plenty of terrible people in New York, of course, but their narcissistic leanings tend to be kept in check by […] frankly, the willingness (some might say eagerness) of New Yorkers to censure bad behavior.

Doesn’t this promote far more homogeneity, not less?

California is gentle and tolerant, but to me that’s the more honest route. I don’t relate at all to the notion that one should be calling others out on their bullshit. Life is far too vast and one’s personal experiences are far too narrow for me to feel comfortable with the idea that anyone has it all figured out. To suggest otherwise seems like the narcissistic route.

Besides, I think there’s actually a real value to stumbling into things wide-eyed and ignorant, unsure of who and what to believe. Jeff Veen once told me that he credits a lot of his success to not knowing what he was getting into. By the time the problems inherent in type licensing and technology became clear, Typekit had enough momentum to overcome them.

More broadly, this is the reason why incumbents rarely continue to innovate. They know too much, and box themselves into predetermined modes of perception. The flip side to never saying someone is crazy is never saying they’re right.

Bay Area startups like Airbnb, Uber, Netflix, and, indeed, Square, are emblematic of this attitude. Why shouldn’t we aim our sights high and disrupt whole industries? Sure, we may have no idea what we’re doing, but Zelda wouldn’t be fun if we had complete maps of all the dungeons. This doesn’t extend from exceptionalism to me. It’s actually the opposite: an admission that all is fragile and temporary, and that small forces can be large agents of change.

Okay, I may have toppled my whole premise here with a Zelda metaphor, but it’d make me happier if we could appreciate that cities and their cultures don’t have to be better than each other. I would wager that most of us in either area are visiting the other on a regular basis, not to mention following each other, working with each other remotely, reading the same blogs, going to the same conferences, getting inspired by the same stuff. We might be on opposite coasts, but the real distance between us is shrinking. It’s probably for the best that we keep those qualities that make us unique, and come to appreciate that we may hold different parts of the Triforce but it’s only in their unison that Ganon may be slain.

I’m doing the last details on this batch of LEGO kits, the...

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:42:09 -0800

I’m doing the last details on this batch of LEGO kits, the bulk of which is the design & assembly of the instruction pamphlets. Here’s what my process looks like:

I build and rebuild the final design a few times with my hands, and I puzzle out the best way for the kit to come together. This is surprisingly hard as the right order for the pieces to come together isn’t necessarily suggested by the design itself. It needs to be a construction that is easy to visualize, and you don’t want to change the “camera” angle too much (since cubes don’t exactly imply their own orientation), which prevents a lot of what might feel natural in your hands. I then take photos of each step.
I come back to the LEGO software I use, Bricksmith, and recreate the photos in the application, snapping screenshots as I go. I then print these out.
Based on the printed diagrams, I draw the instructions. I base them on these diagrams instead of the physical LEGOs to ensure that I maintain a consistent scale and perspective. I don’t trace, so that the drawings still have that crummy look which I kinda enjoy.
I then scan the drawings and bring them into Photoshop where I can clean up mistakes and rearrange the pieces so that it looks correct. You can see that two drawings became one here, as I messed up a chunk but didn’t want to redraw the whole thing from the start. I also fade out the pieces that have already been built to help focus attention on what’s new.

Then it’s just a matter of laying these out on the page, printing, slicing, folding, and stapling. That’s also a ton of work, but not particularly interesting.

Picaro: Say Hello to Picaro

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 06:58:37 -0800

Picaro: Say Hello to Picaro:

yo-picaro:

I’m really excited to tell you about our new project: Picaro.

Picaro is a way to make and play small adventure games. They play a bit like interactive fiction with the control scheme of an old Sierra/LucasArts adventure game. If that was gibberish: the games are completely text-driven, but…

This is one of the projects I’ve been putting a lot of work into during my time off. It encapsulates a lot of what I’ve thought about for the last few years:

How to make game design accessible
How to make compelling, generative multiplayer experiences in mobile gaming
What authoring tools can learn from games
The failure of games to be short and meaningful
How I can collaborate with Joe, Casey, and Rob

Do check it out, I can’t wait to show you more.

I suspect this will reveal a lot about the project that...

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:00:29 -0800

I suspect this will reveal a lot about the project that I’m working on with Casey, Joe, and Rob. I previously linked to an early shot of the build interface, and here are some shots of the play interface, the other end of it. It won’t be a native app, but we are thinking of this as a mobile-first experience.

One of my favorite parts about doing the kits is designing the...

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:17:36 -0800

One of my favorite parts about doing the kits is designing the stamp that we put on every box.

And here they are!

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 06:04:10 -0800

And here they are!

I'm in the New York Times today

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 05:57:00 -0800

My foray into the world of LEGO was covered by the NYTimes today. It’s all very dizzying and makes me feel a bunch of different feelings about a bunch of different things.

One of the weirdest aspects is that I’m barely getting started in this medium. There are so many talented folks working with LEGO out there, why interview me? I don’t come from the AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) community but I’m starting to learn who they are and what they do and it’s lightyears ahead of my work. So, I feel a bit awkward being profiled when these guys are putting out stunning pieces only possible with years of dedication and craft. I am, comparatively, a rube.

I know some people find the taxidermy kits compelling out of a detached irony. I’ve had people ask me about them from this perspective. For myself, I was working more out of an interest in animal forms, and how they render in this geometric style. It’s not new territory for me, and I certainly admit influence from Charley Harper and Always With Honor. LEGO has a tradition of enthusiasm, and modeling kits on real subjects comes out of a genuine love for those subjects. I aspire to convey a similar enthusiasm in my work, and it stings a bit when people read it as the LEGO equivalent of putting a bird on it.

I’m not here to complain, or humblebrag, just trying to process all of this transparently. Really: this has been an overwhelmingly positive experience. It started because I wanted to experiment in selling a physical object (interactive designers tend to be jealous of print folk, in this respect). What I didn’t expect was how connected I would feel to the people who purchase kits from me. I love getting their letters — the majority of the Christmas shipments were going out to the Midwest and the South, often to women purchasing them for their hunter husbands and sons. I don’t know how sustainable it will be for me to have an apartment filled with plastic toys and packing materials, but it may be my full time gig for the next few weeks.

Onto happier things: to coincide with this piece, I’ve brought back the deer for sale and added two new kits to the shop: a bear mount, and a standing fox. I’m not sure where things are headed from here, but it’s been pretty wild.

Here are some of my recent favorite pieces from the LEGO world....

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:09:14 -0800

Here are some of my recent favorite pieces from the LEGO world. In photo order:

More on my LEGO inspiration board over on Quora.

New on the shop: Old Fashioned Pixel Art Temporary...

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 10:46:00 -0800

New on the shop: Old Fashioned Pixel Art Temporary Tattoos!

History recognizes two great eras of brotherhood: war-time sailoring and ’80s-era video arcade hooliganary. With this temporary tattoo pack, you can finally avoid wasting time celebrating these two things in separate contexts. 7 designs, sturdily printed, will surely impress your friends, flirts, and, hmm, let’s say… fathers.

(Svpply link)