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JVL
Discoholic 🪩
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d e v o n
if i look back, i am lost
noise dept.
Game of Thrones Daily
Janaina Medeiros
tumblr dot com
Show & Tell
shark vs the universe
Andulka
⁂
taylor price
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Kiana Khansmith
DEAR READER
pixel skylines
seen from South Korea
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@verbagetruck
Podcasts for Designers and Developers. Level up your career.
I sat down recently with the hosts of Design Details—‘a show about the people who design our favorite products’—to talk about content and design and constructive criticism and all kinds of other fun things.
Taking a cue from Transcendentalism, we can write—and rewrite—our own history through the decisions we make about language in our products.
Change the industry by imagining it differently: I wrote a piece for The Manual about the shifting narrative of “content” and the role of writers in design (hint: writers are to the industry now what designers were in the ‘80s).
With bonus Emerson and Ben Franklin to remind us of everything we never knew we forgot about iteration and self-making.
WTF is Stellar?
Like, besides a decentralized distributed database? Excellent question. Hopefully this does a better job of helping you out.
Nominally, this post is about diversity in tech; really, it’s about how discomfort can be our most profound source of in…
The reminder that I’d like to shout from a San Francisco rooftop, if I could shout for paragraphs:
Let’s not forget that if tech industry culture is a paean to anything, it is environmentalism — the belief that our environments, the objects and circumstances that surround us, contribute to who we are and what we do. Diversity initiatives are based in the idea that diverse teams develop more inclusive, creative strategies and, in the end, build better products that work for more people.
But if we feel the need to espouse core, irreconcilable differences between the sexes or races, claiming that these differences predetermine our behavior and strengths, then we don’t actually believe we can cultivate an environment that empowers all contributors. In that case, we should give up on our fancy offices and transparency policies and coffee walks and mentoring programs, and all just go home.
Photo: Rico Castillero
Contribute to style-guide development by creating an account on GitHub.
Good writing is the sum of many technical decisions.
It’s a thrilling time to be a word person. As writers become an increasingly indispensable part of the design process, we need to make the labor behind narrative more transparent—which is why I’m drafting v1 of Stellar’s voice + style guide in GitHub.
Stellar is an open-source financial network, so it’s in our organizational spirit to be open and collaborative. We’re open about our code, and I also want to be open about how we develop voice and tone and make stylistic decisions.
Star the repo to save it, or watch it to receive notifications as the style guide evolves.
This was my big break three years ago, after taking on tons of work I hated just so I could say I had some experience. Thanks, @wilshipley.
Light at the end of the morning walk to the shuttle: coffee.
I am not a shuttle fan—I think it's an easy way for Silicon Valley to prop up a corporate lifestyle that depends on a suburban landscape while exploiting a proximate urban one, and do remind me to tell you about the time that the unemployed man at the bus stop asked me if I was waiting for the "white bus" and how could he apply for a job at the end of one of the white bus lines, too—but there's so much strange beauty in the dirtiest details.
How to design the voice of a product and the style guide that holds it together
In my never-ending quest to theorize about the work that i do, I've been writing a series of posts for re:form, a sponsored collection on Medium that is "a field guide to the designed world."
The series is on narrative UX, or the role of words in product design. The first post asked, what is narrative UX? The second discussed one of the major sentiments in the industry that leads to an inconsistent narrative in products. This third piece is a style guide guide.
How dorky do you have to be to enjoy writing style guides so much that you write a style guide guide? I fear the answer is "very," but I did it anyway. It's a difficult problem, how to design a product voice and then lay down the rules to govern it. I hope this post demystifies that process a bit.
The critical (and underrated) role of words in design
I've been thinking lately about how we throw around the term "storytelling" in the tech community. I've also been thinking about how to describe more precisely what I do as the word person on the product design team at Evernote. What I came up with is "narrative UX," and the piece linked above, in Medium's collection re:form, is an early exploration of the concept.
Sometimes theorizing about what you do can be as much fun as doing it.
In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair.
—R. W. Emerson, Nature
Hoodie, yoga pants, coffee, morning writing. You know the drill. This Tuesday morning, I devoted a couple of hours to revising an academic journal article. Itâs hard pouring time into unpaid writin...
I'm guest blogging this week over at PhDs At Work about what I do as a writer and content strategist for startups. Tune in for discussions of industry nomenclature, the art of transferable skills, and (sigh) billing and negotiation.
Been away too long.
One year later: I'm exhilarated and terrified and grateful, which is perhaps precisely as it should be. The world feels full of possibility.
"This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant."
—HDT, Walden
Step 1: Coffee. Be civil, be urban.
Step 2: Farragut Square. Damn the torpedoes!
Step 3: Brainstorm. More Post-its.
I’ve been thinking about the word “provincial” lately. It has negative connotations: a rube, someone of narrow scope and mind. At its best, “provincial” feels like a quainter, more polite way to describe an unsophisticated rustic than “bumpkin” (or “unsophisticated rustic,” for that matter).
I love my corner of the Mission in San Francisco. Particularly when I’m working from home, I can go for days at a time without leaving a ten-block radius. There’s coffee, sandwiches, a good bar, yoga, a park, and a well-stocked corner store—the owner of which makes remarkably good baba ganoush—not to mention cafés and restaurants all within easy reach.
Isn’t the option to exist provincially, to live locally without navigating massive expanses in a car on a daily basis, one of the great boons of the city?
Two weeks ago, I participated in 24-Hour Bookclub for the first (but certainly not the last) time. The group, organized by Diana Kimball and Max Temkin, reads a book in 24 hours and discusses it on Twitter. The book for October 20 was The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network by Kate Losse. This particular installment of binge reading also featured a Google+ Hangout discussion with the author (who, in case you're wondering, is delightful).
In short, the "reading flashmob" as its organizers refer to the bookclub, brings together distant compatriots in reading for real-time discussion.
In The Boy Kings, Losse recounts her experience as an early "non-technical" employee at Facebook. The author left a graduate program at Johns Hopkins, and the book benefits from her academic background in theory and interpretation. The memoir touches on the physical and economic geography of Silicon Valley, patterns of casual sexism in tech culture, the social network as simulacrum, and the politics of belonging. It is playful and incisive, with references, overt and implied, to Baudrillard, Foucault, Haraway, Said, Pynchon, Fitzgerald, and others.
In its refusal to take tech culture's democratizing narrative at its word—in its dedication to "read" the narrative critically—Losse's book is precisely what that culture needs.
Since devouring The Boy Kings, I haven't been able to stop thinking about the parallels between American Transcendentalism and Silicon Valley. This is an occupational hazard, of course, since there are few things I know as much about as Thoreau and Emerson and Alcott and their various attempts to put Transcendentalist ideals into practice, but it might just be my next writing project.
Last week I spoke at BlogHer PRO in a breakout session on key content platforms. It was great fun to engage with a roomful of writers. I've always veered towards a conversational tone in public speaking, but over the course of the event it occurred to me that I'll probably never read a paper to an audience again.
I've given talks at dozens of academic conferences, where the emphasis is on articulating a complex, nuanced argument, often by reading a paper. A well-delivered academic talk is one in which the speaker reads fluidly, lays out a clear argument grounded in existing scholarship, offers an innovative contribution, and doesn't lose the listeners in disciplinary minutiae. Bonus points for consistent eye contact with the audience and a conversational aside or two. This sounds like a heady, dry experience—and it often is—but good conference papers are remarkable in their ability to expose you in 20 minutes or less to astonishing depths of research and specialized thinking.
The challenge at industry conferences is also to convey information in the form of an argument, but to do so in a dynamic, conversational form. When there's no podium or table on which to place 7 to 10 typed pages, or the expectation that you'll read for 15 to 20 minutes, you're forced to just talk.
I believe in conversation as a means both to convey complexity and to combat the tendency towards isolationist processes that can characterize the scripts of specialized thinking. There's a reason that we are currently obsessed with building tools that encourage conversation: it offers a viable collaborative model for sorting through the flood of new knowledge and information in our media-rich world.
The last great surge of the art of conversation took place in tandem with the surge of popular print culture in the first half of the nineteenth century. More written and visual materials were available more cheaply than ever before. We're currently experiencing a surge in online content platforms that host or curate media of all kinds: words, sounds, photographs, videos. We wield these vast quantities of media, art, stories, and life more effectively—we learn more—when we talk to each other.