Noted

Things are not always as they seem. Artificial intelligence is like that. Steve Jobs famously directed Apple’s designers to precisely imitate the napa leather seats in his Gulfstream jet to adorn the iCal app. The result was a seemingly supple and needle stitched interface that, nevertheless, felt like glass. The interface for the iPhone was […]

One of the wonderful developments in HTML5 is the objectification of content that is inherently connected. So, we now have self-explanatory elements called section, aside, and article that are discrete, repeatable units. Each of these whole can be subdivided into parts, including a header and footer. This highly structured, predictable, and fractaline scheme has an unfortunate omission. The […]

“On the other hand, it is important that when you start to present or formulate your own views on a topic, on a strategy, on a way of thinking, that it be done with rigor. That’s where the writing comes in. Jeff Bezos, as I point out in the book, forces his senior managers to write down, in six pages, anything that they want to propose to the company. And then for meetings, he thinks of it as study hall where everyone has to be there. He maintains this policy where the first 20 or 30 minutes will be everybody reading the memo. The reason is not only to force the person writing to think clearly and logically and without gaps, but also to force everybody else to read a sustained presentation about a subject, so that everyone is not dealing with dribs and drabs of ideas that may be disconnected or unconnected.”

An excellent article on the tiny details that can make or break a design.

Creativity run amuck. This is what good viral marketing looks like.

A fascinating exploration of the art of origami, Between the Folds features exquisite works of paper art and philosophical musings on the challenge and meaning of this at once analytic and creative art form. It’s available now via Netflix streaming.

How to introduce Dieter Rams, one of the most influential designers of the 20th century — one whose clear visual language has not only defined product design for decades, but also our fundamental understanding of design’s potential and function? He’s worth giving a listen.

This season a number of philosophically arresting moments have managed to insert themselves into the television landscape. True to form, Ronald D. Moore and company continue to address contemporary political, philosophical, and religious questions in the alternate world of Caprica, territory he brilliantly charted in his groundbreaking Battlestar Galactica. If the pilot is any indication, Caprica promises to explore even more pointedly themes of religious and ethnic tolerance, terrorism, technology, and the nature of the soul. ABC’s FlashForward, clearly aimed at continuing the legacy of Lost and retaining its audience, has somewhat disappointed so far, but has nonetheless woven several provocative existential questions into its narrative, including one powerful Sartrean moment in particular. On the comedic front, NBC’s Community had the temerity to devote an episode to whether humanity is intrinsically good or evil, and did so superbly. I’ll admit to being prone to vegging in front of the tube even when the viewing is less cerebral, but a couple of these moments had me off the couch cheering for the writers.

In this new century, Web designers and developers have been on a crusade to standardize the rendering of webpages across platforms and browsers so that all comers experience the Web consistently. It is a noble ideal, and it has been a pitched battle with the continuing prevalence of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 retarding the adoption […]

It seems nigh impossible to unlearn the punctuation rules we were schooled in. For example, inserting two spaces after a period is a relic of the typewriter, a convention used to avoid the “rivers” of white space created by monospaced fonts. But though this convention has long since been deprecated, I have found it to be a fool’s errand trying to help older writers unlearn the reflexive habit of punching the space bar twice after a full stop. Nonetheless, if only in my own writing and editing, I’m on a personal mission to overturn convention, to promote using the hyphen in a way that it correctly communicates what is intended.