When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.
—Paul Graham

Some variation of this statement happens in almost every conversation we have with potential vendors, “Wow… you guys really care about design.” And while statement is deadly true, what they typically mean is, “Wow… you guys really care about the way things look.” Veneer. Window dressing. Aesthetics.

But we mean what Steve means:

Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

And:

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Because we know that:

Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.
—Jeffrey Zeldman

And:

The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to ‘tidy up’ the mess, as opposed to understanding it’s a ‘day one’ issue and part of everything.
—Tom Peters

And we believe:

Before you can execute the design, you’ve got to live the design problem.
—Kathleen Brandenburg

Because:

People ignore design that ignores people.
—Frank Chimero

And then we try to live all that out in such a way that:

Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.
—Joe Sparano

I hope we’re succeeding. Miles to go before we sleep.

Talent doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Within a team context, employees add or subtract value. You have to determine how much value each employee adds, and what idiosyncrasies are worth tolerating for the good of the mission.

A company is a team effort and, no matter how high an employee’s potential, you cannot get value from him unless he does his work in a manner in which he can be relied upon.
—Ben Horowitz, When Smart People are Bad Employees

If I’m the most brilliant and talented developer or designer (or assistant or strategist) on the team, but I’m unreliable, I’m subtracting value. I’m a minus. I sabotage the group effort. Sometimes shining accomplishments can outweigh (or at least outshine) unreliability in other areas, at least for a season. But eventually I put the mission in debt. Longterm there’s no correlation between value to the team and an inability to meet deadlines.

FIG. 1:

I’ve learned this the hard way. I’m 31 and I have two severance packages under my belt, so these thoughts are as much for me as anyone else. I’ve often put my teams (and my clients) into debt due to my own unreliability. It throws shrapnel. It hurts everyone—the mission, teammates, the relationships represented, and my own reputation. It costs.

There are any number of reasons why it happens. Taking on too much work. Lack of interest. Laziness. Mishandled time estimates. Ignorance. Naiveté. Poor habits. Procrastination. Chuck Close talks about the amateurness of delaying work while waiting for inspiration:

If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lighting to strike you in the brain, you’re not going to make an awful lot of work.

Sometimes you can get away with waiting on the perfect storm. Sometimes waiting is part of making. But only sometimes. Only occasionally. Because talent and unreliability can’t coexist in the same employee without eventually putting a team in the red. There’s simply too much to do. If there wasn’t, you wouldn’t need a team.

FIG. 2:

There’s no overlap. At least not for the long haul. Highly talented reliable employees are highly valuable team members. They keep the team in the black. But a less-talented reliable employee can often add more long-term value to a team environment than a flaky hero. (No matter how many super powers they have).

At some point in my erstwhile post-college semi-career as a musician I had an epiphany: the people I was opening for, the good ones, weren’t filling their headphones with the songs of their peers. They weren’t listening to us. They were devouring Bill Withers melodies, Motown arrangements, Lindsey Buckingham guitar wizardry and any number of decidedly non-current sources of inspiration. They were archeologists. Alchemists.

Guys like me were listening to whatever was in fashion. We were getting our inspiration thirdhand, riffing off the riffers, skimming the top. And it was evident in our output because we could only dispense what we knew, and what we knew was a shadow of what was.

Everybody ought to listen to Benny [Carter]. He’s a whole musical education.
—Miles Davis, interview with Down Beat (May 25, 1961)

Benny, “King” to many jazz musicians, had been a professional sideman, bandleader, and composer for 20 years before Miles moved to New York, beginning his ascent to household notoriety. For all of Miles’ innovation (and there was plenty) he still looked back for inspiration. The good ones always do.

The revelation continued to have ripple effects for me in all manner of creative endeavors. It followed me into graphic and web design where I saw world-class designers drawing inspiration from the pioneers of the field—Bauhaus typographers, Swiss grid masters, iconic 1960s corporate identities—and using what they excavated from the vaults, using secondhand inspiration, to build something new and innovative.

Take typography: I could spend a day browsing the web for modern takes on vintage lettering and type treatments. I’d end up with hundreds of browser tabs full of clever letterforms, oddly-endearing ligatures, interesting logo lockups, font pairings and pixel perfection. A wealth of inspiration.

Or I could go outside and find the real thing:

Photo credit: Arik’s Foxy Lady from perennial favorite Naz Hamid

Originality is occasional. Secondhand inspiration can do wonders in the hands of craftsmen. But thirdhand inspiration is always slightly blurry around the edges. It lacks focus. Young muses rarely deliver what they promise. Energy gets lost in every creative exchange, like a game of Telephone. The universe favors entropy.

As poet Saul Williams says about modern hiphop MCs:

Perhaps we should not have encouraged them to use cordless microphones for they have walked too far from the source and are emitting a lesser frequency.

Go back, further, to the source. Then go forward.

If you are a Maker Of Things, any variety of things, you should read Derek Sivers’ excellent article 6 Things I Wish I Knew the Day I Started Berklee from a talk he gave to incoming first-year students at Berklee College of Music in 2008. It doesn’t matter if you’re a musician; this is wonderful, concise advice on improving and doing great work.

You’re surrounded by distractions. You’re surrounded by cool tempting people, hanging out casually, telling you to relax. But the casual ones end up having casual talent and merely casual lives.

Casual Talent = Wasted Talent

Stay offline. Shut off your computer. Stay in the shed. When you emerge in a few years, you can ask someone what you missed, and you’ll find it can be summed up in a few minutes. The rest was noise you’ll be proud you avoided.

The entire article is a soundbite-editor’s dream. He continues:

Do not accept their speed limit. Blow away expectations.

And:

I decided to squeeze every bit of knowledge out of [Berklee]. Nobody was going to do it for me. Do not expect the teachers to teach you.

They will present some information to you, but it is entirely 100% up to you to either make the most of it, or waste your time here, and go home and get a normal dumb job.

I am daily thankful that I don’t have a “normal dumb job” (though I’d add that the “normal” and “dumb” parts of that equation are entirely subjective—I hated doing construction growing up, but for my Father, it was a dream job. Same job, different motivations and people.) but I don’t want to rest in it.

I want to get busy getting better.

This was probably my favorite photograph I saw in 2010. I keep coming back to it. The color palette, the styling, the lighting, composition—all amazing.

There’s more excellent fashion and editorial work at Felix’s site (some NSFW images).

I love the first paragraph of this answer to the question Should user interface designers be able to build what they design? on Quora:

UI literally ‘interfaces’ between two things: software code and the human eye/brain. The whole purpose of UI is to connect code on one side and human senses on the other. So I don’t think it makes sense to call oneself an interface designer unless there is at least an understanding of how programs work, how databases work, and so on. Otherwise what is the design interfacing to?
—Ryan Singer

I feel this acutely in my 9–5 as we design and build all manner of pages, applications, systems and physical objects for thousands of people to interact with. It all comes down to people. And I’m not talking about people interfacing with things as a design problem to be solved—thanks to situational experience and the leadership¹ I’m under, I’m beginning to see it more as a gift to be stewarded.

My team* and I are designing and building solutions to bridge the gap between people and software, or people and information. We’re removing barriers, adding increasing clarity and appropriate context to these interactions. How can we possibly do that well if we don’t understand both sides of the interaction? How can I possibly design clear, appropriate user interfaces if I don’t have at least a cursory competent² understanding of what I’m building this bridge between?

*We have big plans and empty seats

1. Shane Duffey and Perry Noble in particular. ↩

2. If we use the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition as a gauge, I don’t think code competency (some perception of actions in relation to goals, deliberate planning, formulates routines, etc.) is too much to ask for from a UI designer. ↩

Well, the knee-jerk reaction is that you want to get out there and start making amazing work like all the work that you’ve been looking at while you’re at school. It doesn’t always work that way. That’s okay because it takes time to really develop a sense of yourself and a sense of your own style, a sense of your own taste, and I think it’s totally okay. There’s always time to do good work.
—Jason Santa Maria, from this On Your Way Here conversation

Patience, practice, woodshedding, and taking the time necessary to become a craftsman are highly underrated endeavors for young designers (a group I still very much consider myself a part of).

Because Paul Octavius obviously gets to have all the fun…

Whatever you choose to do in your free time you should do as a job.
—Amanda Brooks, Barneys New York Fashion Director

As with all pithy quotes, there are obvious caveats—”Gosh, I just love sitting around watching talk shows and eating filthy obscene amounts of cookie dough, someone should pay me to do this full time!”—but I largely agree with Amanda’s line of thinking. Your hobbies are, or at least help point to, what you’re passionate about. Go do that.

And besides, have you ever been to Barneys? Those people love what they do and it shows.

Thanks to @mcdzl I’ve had Adele songs stuck in my head for days. I’m not complaining.

Wondering why no one listens to your good ideas? Start making them happen and you’ll have people’s undivided attention.
—Jesse Gardner, excerpted from 30 Days Without Facebook and Twitter: What I Learned

We’re 33 days into the year. It’s been generous, inspiring, surprising, and full of hustle.

I am expectant.

Photo credit: Lake Pier from Flickr newcomer Robert Cherry

I’m rearranging/removing/restyling a few things around these parts, so if something seems off, just refresh a few times or empty your cache. I’ll try to get everything sorted out in a timely manner. Also, welcome Helvetica back to the blog.

Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.
—Alasdair Gray

Hard Ground: 78 photographs by Michael O’Brien and 23 poems by Tom Waits, designed by DJ Stout & Barrett Fry in Pentagram’s Austin office. In other words, InstaPurchase™.

The path to YouTube fame is often Familiar Tune + Odd Instrumentation = Views

On my drive to work this morning I passed a residential neighborhood and noticed a small, likely-homemade yard sign in front of a house. The template was familiar:

JOHN SMITH
HANDYMAN
867-5309

Three lines. No fluff. No flash. Just the facts.

I imagine the small town local handyman market is fairly saturated, and word of mouth marketing amongst neighbors will make or break you. But this handyman isn’t hiding—not behind another name, another location, or any number of marketing tricks.

Do you believe in your business enough to brand your own front yard?

These have both been knocking around in my head of late:

A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they’re dead.
—Leo Rosten

It is the arrogance of every age to believe that yesterday was calm.
—Tom Peters

Because if this is gonna be a Christian nation that DOESN’T help the poor, either we’ve got to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition—and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.—Stephen Colbert

Dang. If you’d told me a few years ago that some of the most insightful social and political commentary would happen on Comedy Central, I would have, perhaps appropriately enough, laughed at you.

Explorers in Vietnam have discovered a 2.7 mile long subterranean cave, “a half-mile block of 40-story buildings could fit inside.” The photos are insane in scale, and not without a bizarre otherworldly beauty.

National Geographic also has a clever interactive map of the explored sections of the cave with a 3D fly by/through. Amazing stuff.