I made a new version of the header I use on the Astronomy and Space blog, so I thought it might be a good time for some Nostalgia1. I started saving the different versions in 2008, and here they are. There were a couple of older ones even before the March 2008 one, but unfortunately I never saved them. :(
An actual size version of the above graphic can be seen here.
Some notable milestones:
by Veidt Enterprises. Hopefully someone will get that reference. ↩
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One of the things that’s interesting about design [is that] there’s a danger, particularly in this industry, to focus on product attributes that are easy to talk about. You go back 10 years, and people wanted to talk about product attributes that you could measure with a number. So they would talk about hard drive size, because it was incontrovertible that 10 was a bigger number than 5, and maybe in the case of hard drives that’s a good thing. Or you could talk about price because there’s a number there.
But there are a lot of product attributes that don’t have those sorts of measures. Product attributes that are more emotive and less tangible. But they’re really important. There’s a lot of stuff that’s really important that you can’t distill down to a number. And I think one of the things with design is that when you look at an object you make many many decisions about it, not consciously, and I think one of the jobs of a designer is that you’re very sensitive to trying to understand what goes on between seeing something and filling out your perception of it. You know we all can look at the same object, but we will all perceive it in a very unique way. It means something different to each of us. Part of the job of a designer is to try to understand what happens between physically seeing something and interpreting it.
I think that sort of striving for simplicity is not a style. It’s an approach and a philosophy. I think it’s about authenticity and being honest. Not just taking something crappy and styling the outside in an arbitrary disconnected way.
” — Jony Ive(Source: stratechery.com)
Intuitiveness has become unhelpfully conflated with familiarity. The reasoning is simple enough: things that are already familiar don’t have to be re-learned, so we assume that they’re more “intuitive”. That’s a big assumption, but we treat it as if it’s fact.
A nuanced and very intelligent look at what Jony Ive may bring for software design by Matt Gemmell.
Dear Apple, let’s talk about photos -
Some smart ideas for helping fix the recent iPhoto sync confusion that has been brought about by the rise of iOS devices.
[video]
“Just highlighted a passage in The Golden Compass by Pullman, Philip” — Highlighted by Abhimat Gautam in The Golden Compass by Pullman, Philip
Details in the ‘Photos Every Day’ spot -
Some very nice attention to detail in the recent spot from Apple. I noticed that the camera work and the cuts are especially well done after reading this.
[video]
“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” — Richard Feynman
“Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.” —
Richard Feynman
(Really, I’m just using today as an excuse to put up Richard Feynman quotes…)