We have to rethink what it means to work and to be productive. We have to disentangle self-hatred from responsibility, self-criticism from self-care.

What does re-thinking mean in this case? Start thinking of being hard on yourself as being irresponsible. Start thinking of wasting half of your brain power on fantasies about your own destruction as self-indulgent. Conflate self-negativity with laziness. Start thinking of time for yourself as being responsible. Start thinking of a healthy mid-day meal as essential to your productivity, time away from your desk as productive.

It also doesn’t hurt to find a job doing something that you love. They say you never work a day in your life.

The periodic table of visualization methods might be of interest as well. It’s easier to see examples of the method, but light on background information.

Freelancing requires such strict adherence to toadyism, to sycophancy, to the grubbiest, lowliest submissions. It is an on-spec life and it is full of what can only be described as insane serendipity (or serendipitous insanity).

An interesting read if you’ve got any designs on being a freelance writer.

Steve Sasson created the world’s first digital camera in 1976, while working at Kodak. He discusses the development of the camera in this video.

It was a camera that didn’t use any film to capture still images – a camera that would capture images using a CCD imager and digitize the captured scene and store the digital info on a standard cassette. It took 23 seconds to record the digitized image to the cassette. The image was viewed by removing the cassette from the camera and placing it in a custom playback device.

Given Moore’s Law, they estimated that it would take 15 to 20 years before such a camera reached the general consumer. The patent file contains a description and drawings of the apparatus.

Amusing Ourselves to Death, a comic from Stuart McMillen, comparing the futures found in Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984. The comic is based on Neil Postman’s book of the same name. It essentially comes down to our society having more in common with Huxley’s vision than Orwell’s.

Hawkins assembled a team to reverse engineer the console — that is, figure out a way to make EA’s games run on Sega’s hardware without its technology or approval as a way to avoid licensing fees altogether.

The game has evolved far beyond it’s modest roots, and can be somewhat daunting to play for the first time. I find the same thing when I try to sit down with one of the newer incarnations of the NHL series, compared to the console game. In the versions I played as a kid, you could pretty much just shoot, pass and check. I imagine most of the EA sports games are like that these days, drifting more towards simulation than arcade style play.

My copy of Elliot Jay Stocks’ new magazine, 8 Faces, just arrived in the post this morning. I was lucky enough to snag a copy during the short period before it sold out. Given the nature of the online typography community, I had a feeling the limited print run would be snapped up in short order. There is still a pdf available for purchase if you’re interested.

The magazine is devoted to typography, asking eight leading designers which typefaces they would use if they were limited to just eight for the rest of their lifetime. It features interviews with Erik Spiekermann, Jessica Hische, Ian Coyle, Jason Santa Maria, Jos Buivenga, Jon Tan and Bruce Willen & Nolen Strals. It also features an introduction by John Boardley and artwork by Able Parris (available for download).

I’ve had the pdf sitting around for a couple weeks, but have avoided reading it, because I wanted to see the magazine in print first. Can’t say that I’m disappointed for waiting, there’s been a lot of care and effort put into it. Elliot has written an article about his experiences with getting it published. The magazine is gorgeous and I’m looking forward to sitting down and reading the entire thing.

It is not a list of my favorite typefaces, nor is it a list of the most popular typefaces. Instead, it is a list of typefaces that have been “important” for one reason or another. However, I am not going to provide my reasons. Instead, I am going to let the readers of this blog see if they can figure out the contribution that each of these ten faces makes. This list is not definitive. It is only a suggestion. There are several other typefaces I reluctantly jettisoned because I wanted to keep the list small.

As with any such list, there are bound to be those who agree and disagree with the typefaces. He provides the rationale for each of his choices in one of the comments.

I am not a big fan of a number of faces on my list–some I detest and others I just find ugly–which is why it is not a list about popularity or about aesthetics but about something more elusive. There is a bias in my list toward typefaces that are functional, experimental or somehow the “first”.

Alright, now you’re out of bed. You’ll work two hours later to make up for the wasted time. Or maybe you’ll just work a little harder during the day. Yeah, that’s it. Don’t work longer, work smarter. You read that somewhere.

Or your day as pretty-much freelance anything. It’s all about motivation and self-control, which can easily go flying out the window.

I don’t think a director, as often as not, knows what is going to play funny anyway. As often as not, the right one is the one that they’re surprised by, so I don’t think that they have the right tone in their head. And I think that good actors always—or if you’re being good, anyway—you’re making it better than the script. That’s your fucking job.

The article reminded me of an exam question in a human-computer interaction course that I took years ago. We were asked to describe the best user interfaces that we had encountered. I chose to describe the space-heater in my room, it was great. The machine had one button, one switch and a few LEDs. You pressed the button to turn it on. The LEDs indicated the current temperature, and you pressed the button again to cycle through them. The switch on the base allowed the heater to rotate. After moving to an exceedingly hot top-floor apartment, I no longer needed the heater. So, I lent it to a friend’s housemate, who decided to dry clothes on the wee thing. It blew up. Although she was lacking in the brain department, the girl still has all of her limbs.

I’m still a fan of minimal hardware interfaces, with Apple handhelds being the obvious example. Another one of my favourites are the basic CrockPot models — one switch with three settings (off, high, low). Although, they’ve tried to muck things up with all manner of digital crap. But that’s progress.

In problem solving, as in street fighting, rules are for fools: do whatever works—don’t just stand there! This engaging book is an antidote to the rigor mortis brought on by too much mathematical rigor, teaching us how to guess answers without needing a proof or an exact calculation.

The book is available in traditional dead-tree format and also for download under a Creative Commons license.

A video about the design ethos of Dieter Rams.

A reporter asked Steve Jobs, “How many man-years did it take to write Quick Draw?” Steve asked Bill, who said, “Well, I worked on it on and off for four years.” Steve then told the reporter, “Twenty-four man-years”. Obviously Steve figured, with ample justification, that one Atkinson year was the equivalent of six ordinary programmer years.

The main source is written in Pascal, and is quite beautiful to read — you can tell that he took pride in it. The rest of the code is written in assembler language for the 68000 processor.

New, further developed types of media never replace the existing modes of media and their usage patterns. Instead, a convergence takes place in their field, leading to a different way and field of use for these older forms.

The old doesn’t necessarily die out. In some instances, the old methods are absorbed or recycled into a new form. In others cases, those methods are refined and distilled down to their essence.

Call me a grumpy old codger, but I liked the old way better. For one thing, I used to have at least a rudimentary idea of how a newspaper got produced: On deadline, drunks with cigars wrote stories that were edited by constipated but knowledgeable people, then printed on paper by enormous machines operated by people with stupid hats and dirty faces.

The article skewers the online practice of writing headlines for machines, rather than readers. A good headline will likely garner just as much attention after being picked up by a human, and subsequently blogged, liked, retweeted and carrier-pigeoned, as it would from being a top search query.

Let the Game Continue, for those that were curious where Tetris pieces originated. The graphic is from a t-shirt by Eduardo San Gil at Threadless.