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bird by bird

#bird by bird #anne lamott #english roundhand #calligraphy

From Massimo, I Iearned that designing a book wasn’t about coming up with a clever place for the page numbers. He taught me about typography, about scale, about pacing, about refinement. I learned to think of graphic design as a way to create an experience, an experience that was not limited to two dimensions or to a momentary impression. It was about creating something lasting, even timeless.

Massimo Vignelli, 1931-2014: Observatory: Design Observer (Michael Beirut)

Here’s a very simple method: when you set out to make something, whether it be software or policies or mechanisms for organizing information, ask yourself what’s the worst that could happen. Imagine a powerful person, someone endowed with the right circumstances of birth such that the odds are nearly always in their favor; and imagine, also, the reverse—someone for whom discrimination, oppression, violence, and poverty are commonplace. Then optimize to protect the latter, even at the expense of the former. And do it right away: not after you scale, not after the money is rolling in, not after a leak exposes you, but now. Yesterday, even. Go.

Mandy Brown at The Pastry Box Project

Sometimes a book derails you.

theatlantic

But some are given more days than others, and I think of dying at 17, in my loudness, in my vanity, which is to say in my human youth, and I tremble. I was barely anything. I understood barely anything. When Michael Dunn killed Jordan Davis, he obliterated a time-stream, devastated an open range of changes. And somewhere on that American jury, someone thought this was justice, someone believed in the voodoo of shotguns and teleportation. Michael Dunn killed a boy, and too robbed a man of his chance to be.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, on the killing of Jordan Davis. (via theatlantic)