Tuhin Kumar

Amazing Amsterdam

Tuhin Kumar — Sun, 21 Jan 2018 19:50:00 -0000

Over the winter break we travelled to Prague and Amsterdam. We ended up staying in Amsterdam for over 3 weeks due to delays in our US visa interviews. We stayed in an Airbnb near Haarlemmerstraat in the Jordaan district.

We loved everything about Amsterdam. In our short time there it ended up becoming one of our favorite cities in Europe — YES, it beats Paris for us. The city itself is charming to death with its gorgeous canals and narrow streets. Add to that the straight forward yet friendly people of Amsterdam, great shopping avenues and delicious food and we have the making of a really unique yet familiar cityscape.

Here is my foursquare lists to eat, play and shop in Amsterdam:

Walk. Walk. Walk some more.

Walking and biking are two of the best ways to explore Amsterdam. Since we were traveling with our puppy, we mostly walked around.

Canals

Hard to miss them. Hard to not fall in love with them.

Lights and plants

It seems that with over 9 months of gloomy grey season the Dutch seem to have perfected the art of making everything feel cozy. Its very common to see homes overflowing with indoor plants and great light setup. The outdoors have a similar vibe with string lights for the holiday seasons and small planters outside doors to make everyday walking feel like a joyous act.

Friends at Framer

I met with friends at Framer. They have a really sweet setup in De 9 Straatjes. It reminded me of how everything felt like one big family in the early days at Pulse.

Coffee culture

I am talking about the normal coffee shops. Not the other kind Amsterdam is famous for. Pretty much like most of mainland Europe, espresso based drinks are the norm. It’s much harder to find shops that do drip style of coffee.

Here are a few worth checking out:

De Koffieschenkerij — Get a sweet cake and enjoy the coffee in a beautiful courtyard along the canal.
TOKI — Small and often crowded shop in Jordaan
Bocca — Great coffee and minimal space with tables to work from for longer hours
Screaming beans — In De 9 Straatjes area and great place to rest and grab a drink

One sunny day

Our entire stay had one good sunny day. The buildings we used to see every day in the grey daylight suddenly looked brighter and happier. We explored the Vondelpark on that day.

Unique food spots

Amsterdam has a lot of great food spots. I enjoy a good pizza over a Michelin star meal on any given day. Here are some really unique food spots we found:

La Perla — Get the one with spicy oil and end the meal with Tiramisu. The staff here was in love with Waffee on the multiple occasions we went there.
Foodhallen — A warehouse turned food court. Every city has one. This is Amsterdam’s take on the concept.
Raïnaraï — Algerian cuisine by the plate. The owner is a jolly fella.
The Lebanese Sajeria — Great wraps for on the go
Chocolatl — Great collection of chocolates, very knowledgeable owner and the best hot chocolate I have had in my life.

Shopper’s paradise

While there is no shortage of great shopping spots in Amsterdam, the few that I would recommend because of their unique collection are the following:

Didato — Great collection of brands including Maison Margiela, Versace, Moncler etc.
Concrete — Streetwear with style including amazing stuff from the UK brand Maharishi
Tenue de Nîmes — Go here for the Denim collection
Prjct AMS — Unique material for everyday wear with style
Mascolori — Shoes with unique patterns.

We loved every moment in Amsterdam. So much so that we are actively thinking of making it the layover city on our frequent trips to India. Maybe one day we might even move there, if we can learn to love with the sun for most of the year.

The Philosophy behind Design

Tuhin Kumar — Sun, 11 Oct 2015 08:00:00 -0000

Also known as the things that will never be in a spec doc but are inherently present in any craft.

Almost every designer who has worked with a diverse group of collaborators in a team will find the following situation familiar. The situation is one where at some point during product development, some aspect of design is brought into question and there is not really a logical rationale behind it. By logical I mean something that directly ties to a product goal the entire team agreed upon. Something explicitly mentioned in the product spec (by spec I am referring to anything that lies between ‘a one-liner of what you want a product to do’ to ‘those dreaded 50 page documents that some teams still work with’.

It is not that the decision is illogical, quite the contrary actually. It is rooted in the designer’s fundamental beliefs, their philosophy of how something they bring into this world, needs to feel. Given how the entire valley has tricked itself that everything about our products is quantifiable, it is only expected that something as fluffy as feels is not going to fly well if you and your team do not share a similar worldview of the work.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

Over the years, I have met not just designers but engineers, PMs and all kinds of builders of products who live by the above philosophy. Every time I have worked with one, it has been a joy. And I mean joy in the true sense of the word. Blissful. Oh my God, I can do this forever JOY. Unsurprisingly, I have done the best work of my life in such settings.

After multiple attempts at recreating this on different teams I have worked with, the conclusion that I have come to is that you cannot force this (I mean you cannot but they its not a team that shares the direction of the product in a balanced way — it becomes lopsided. Design becomes a gatekeeper of sorts which is terrible in its own way.). The only control you have in creating an environment like this is picking the right people — the right thought partners to work with. It makes coming to decisions faster, seamless and honestly more fun. There is a great energy in the room when people believe in something unanimously versus when they need to be convinced about it in a meeting or review.

Design as art.

People like to label things. It makes things predictable and allow for some weird formulaic repeats to happen. Art and Design are two such labels. Art for me is anything that invokes the intended emotion from the observer. If you share that definition of art then there is no rationale reason that forces to be just about utility and business needs and cannot transcend to be art too. Our best designed products — your iPhone, a Leica camera, your favorite leather bag have an inspirational art like characteristic. So why not our digital products. If all we do is mimic the known ways of doing things, then how will we ever move forward. If we all measure the same thing, then how will anything be different.

My intention with this post is less to present a solution or that this is the only opinion that matters. But more to present an alternative, a system of belief that may be different from yours. And that’s ok. :)

Istanbul

Tuhin Kumar — Sat, 06 Sep 2014 08:00:00 -0000

I had a chance to visit the beautiful country of Turkey while attending the wedding of my friends — Erbil & Mitsue. I took this chance to explore the city of Istanbul and visit two other cities — Cappadocia and Pammukale. This post focuses on Istanbul. I will write about the other two in a separate post soon.

In case you are interested in the list of places to go, here is a Foursquare list. All the 400+ photos taken are on Flickr.

It’s a city that reminded me a lot of India. Everything from the way people walked on the street to the shops on each side of streets were reminiscent of India. As a tourist, it was fascinating to see European and Asian culture infuse so seamlessly in the fabric of the city.

Let’s start with the old side of the town, where I was staying.

The Grand Bazaar/Kapalıçarşı

It is a really huge and covered marketplace with over 5000 shops. It also features in a lot of scenes in Assassins’ Creed, if thats your thing.

The lights were mesmerizingly beautiful and in abundance in the Grand Bazaar shops. Walking inside the Grand Bazaar makes you feel like a time traveller or to be precise, makes you feel as if the place is stuck in a different time. It is easy to get lost but eventually you find your way to an exit nearby.

Hagia Sophia

A church at one point, a mosque at another and now a museum — Hagia Sophia is a breathtaking structure and a feat of architecture given it was built between 532-537.

Basilica Cistern

This is located southwest of Hagia Sophia and it makes sense to cover them together along with the Blue Mosque. The cistern looks eerily beautiful and the floors are slippery.

Blue Mosque (Sultanahmet Mosque)

I did not end up going inside the mosque because of lack of time (and frankly having seen too many similar structures) but did take a trip around the campus that surrounds the mosque.

Turkish bath

There are numerous Turkish bathhouses in Istanbul. They range from expensive ones to relatively cheap ones. I would recommend to try this at least once if you have never been to a bathhouse.

Topkapı Palace

Topkapi Palace is huge and I would not recommend spending a whole day for it — especially if you are short on time. I ended up spending a lot of time in the gardens and the amazing view of Bosphorus that it affords.

The palace has multiple sections and levels , including a garden— all beautiful.

Spice Bazaar (Mısır Çarşısı)

Almost like a younger cousin to the Grand Bazaar, the Spice Bazaar is smaller and newer.

Galata Bridge

The bridge connects the old part of the town to the other side. It makes for a great place to swing by during sunset to watch the golden light as well as see the buzz of the crowd. During the day they have boats that sell fish sandwiches which are great.

Bosphorus by the boat

A boat ride of the Bosphorus is a great way to spend the evening in Istanbul. The temperature is just right and the lights of the city, make it an experience not worth missing.

Galata Tower

This tower provides one of the best views of Istanbul. It gets really cramped at the top where you have to basically keep revolving around the tower to make sure people there are never too many people at the top.

Right around Galata tower are lots of small cafes and the entire neighborhood is really charming to explore especially as the sun sets down.

Turns out the real beauty is the tower itself once the lights have been turned on. Here are a few shots of the Galata Tower during twilight.

Dolmabahçe Palace

This is the other big palace from the Ottoman empire. It was closed the day we went. Either that or I could not figure out where the entrance was.

I am not sure what this clock says, but I love everything about it, from the typeface used for the digits to the design of the dial.

Rainbow Stairs

This was the one of those spots that was hard to find because it really is literally just a bunch of stairs painted in rainbow colors. It is essentially the street stairs that link Findikli district to Cihangir (the location of Gezi Park).

Karaköy

The Karaköy neighborhood is pretty much the closest to a “hipster” neighborhood that I found in Istanbul. Lots of cute and interesting coffee shops and boutique stores in general.

İstiklâl Caddesi

You could call it an elegant pedestrian street that leads to something like a town square. It’s 1.4 km long and has great bars, clubs, cafes and boutiques on either side of the entire street.

Streets of Istanbul

The real magic of Istanbul lies in the idiosyncrasies seen on the streets. It’s colorful and diverse. Chaotic yet beautiful.

I am in absolute love with this man’s swagger. Those patches on his jeans, the double denim with a polo t-shirt and the look in his eyes. All perfect. All this while he is polishing shoes.

I used to play with these as a kid. This man was most likely selling them, but he was way more absorbed in the act of playing with them on his own and had little concern about actually selling those.

I am not sure what this building is. And if those clothes are for sale or just out there to dry. It is also fascinating to see a poster featuring a Bollywood actress (and a former Miss World) in the backdrop of the window.

City of Cats. And pigeons.

Istanbul has this notion of neighborhood cats that people in a neighborhood feed and take care of. This basically means cats roam the streets and are often very comfortable with new customers. As someone who was until recently scared of cats, it was a very interesting experience to be so “close” to them.

The other major part of the city animal kingdom are the pigeons. From less popular town squares to the ones where people feed them everyday, they are all over the place. The city with its architecture might also have something that helps them build their nests in safe places.

Food

The other big joy of Istanbul is the street food. Pretty much every street is filled with a kebab shop or a fruit shop or some breakfast place or a sweet shop.

Here is a small sampler of what to definitely try if you visit.

Kumpir: Baked potato
Meze: Appetizers (do try one with eggplant and yogurt)

For breakfast

Kaymak: thick cream served with honey
Menemen: scrambled eggs with pepper and tomatoes
Sucuklu Yumurta : eggs and sausages
Börek: baked pastry with meat and other fillings inside them

Pide and Lahmacun : kinds of turkish pizza
Gozelme : Turkish pastry often with spinach and feta cheese
Mantı : Turkish Ravioli
Balik Ekmek : Fish sandwich that you can find near Galata bridge

Types of kebabs

Doner
Adana
Iskinder
Kofte : meatballs
Kokoreç : seasoned lamb intestines

Büryan kebabı: a kind of Turkish version of the Texas pit barbecue

Desserts

Tavuk Göğsü: turkish chicken pudding
Baklava: you probably know what this is. Only way better.
Künefe: cheese pastry soaked in sweet sugar-based syrup

Street food

Misir: Basically corn
Kestane: Chestnuts, normally sold by street vendors

Ice Cream: It is thicker and more chewy than traditional ice cream, which also means Ice Cream vendors are known for performing lots of tricks before the ice cream you ordered is actually served.

Beverages

Turkish tea: Turkey has a great tea scene and it’s called çay

Ayran: Yogurt based drink that I ended up drinking almost with every meal.

Juice vendors/sherbet

Turkish Coffee If you have not tried this style of coffee, then you should atlas try it once. What’s Turkish about the coffee is not the beans but the process by which it is made. The coffee is filtered out of the drink by the process of sinking down and not using a physical filter.

Scottish Symphony

Tuhin Kumar — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 08:00:00 -0000

The Trip

My friend Christine & I went on a two day road trip to Isle of Skye passing via the Scottish Highlands. It probably qualifies as one of the most beautiful drives I have been on. To make things all the more breathtaking, the weather was sunny with very little sign of the oft-mentioned unpredictable rain. I hope the photographs capture a side of the Highlands that is different from the cold and harsh weather they are normally associated with.

We covered little under 500 miles in 2 days! As insane as that sounds, the drive was mesmerizing enough to make you forget the fatigue of the journey.

Edinburgh

We flew in to Edinburgh and explored the city briefly during the night. From what little I saw, it proved to exceed my expectations. It's a charming small town with gorgeous houses that all look like mini palaces.

And then there is this gorgeous building that is being sold right now. If I had that kind of money I would buy it and use it to create a Hogwarts like school.

A84 & A82

We left Edinburgh by noon next day to start our road trip. Driving via Callander, Gelncoe, Fort William and finally to our destination for the night, the town of Portree on the Isle of Skye.

Pretty Roads

The winding turns surrounded by the most beautiful nature on both sides and wild purple flowers that seemed characteristic of the terrain made for a perfect photo target.

Kissed by the beautiful sunset

Golden light of sunset makes everything in the Highlands a postcard material. Just the perfect shade of warm.

A roll of toilet paper, a bar with live music & strangers

We arrived at Portree late in the evening and went out to explore the town. We quickly realized that the whole town was only a few blocks large. Luckily we ended up finding our way to a pub with great live music and a tourists who were looking to unwind just like us. We met a French group where one of the guys had a roll of Toilet paper in his pocket. We reached a point in the night were pretty much the whole bar ended up writing notes for the dude on that sheet of toilet paper. I have not had a spontaneous fun experience like that in a really long time.

Portree

The quaint and quiet town of Portree was a pleasing sight to wake up to. It reminded me more of a tiny European town than something heavily inspired by rest of Scotland.

Around Isle of Skye

We left Portree to start our trip of the Isle of Skye. More mountains. More shades of green. And sheep. Lots of them.

We stopped at the Dunvegan Castle and spent a while admiring the life of kings and queens. Almost wishing we had a family that owned a palace similar to one we were touring.

Realizing it was 5 in the evening we decided it was time to hit the road again for we still had half of the Isle left to complete and then had to drive to Inverness, which was to be our halt for the night before our flight the next day. Luckily the sun had begun its descent which meant everything became a tad bit extra gorgeous again.

Of Sheep, Cows and Horses

We saw our fair share of animals during the trip, but it is pretty clear that if you are a sheep, then Scotland is the place to be.

Back to Portree

We finished the circle by coming back to Portree for dinner before heading our final journey to Inverness. We had the chance to see the last few minutes of sun in Portree and the town was blushing in the golden light of the evening.

Sightglass, 20th Street

Tuhin Kumar — Sat, 26 Apr 2014 11:50:00 -0000

If you are one of those people who visit the Sightglass in SOMA not just for the coffee but also for the beautiful space then you definitely owe it to yourself to visit the new one on 20th Street in the heart of Mission.

The whole place has a vibe of nordic design. From use of simple wooden furniture to the strips of wood that adorn the ceiling. Or the beehive like tiles that cover the floor. It is beautiful in every sense of the word. But also not overwhelming. Minimal but not austere.

A coffee shop or a cup of coffee for that matter is as good as the conversation that it can hold. I was meeting Keegan, who recently came back from his awesome trip around the world, so there was no shortage of things to talk about.

When I think of good Saturday mornings at coffee shops, this is close to what I imagine them being like.

The Hype of Design

Tuhin Kumar — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 10:15:00 -0000

This will be a quick one. A lot of you have read Mills Baker's Designer Duds: Losing Our Seat at the Table. It is an interesting piece, and if you have not read it, you totally should. I do not however, agree with a lot of the points or inferences. Calling some of these companies or apps as failure seems shortsighted. There are also some parts of the article that did not resonate so well with me. Here are some points, I wish the article had touched on or approached in a better way. There are lot of subtleties in issues like this, that are often glossed over, when discussed in public forum.

Naming names

First things first. It is never ok to point fingers, especially in a public forum to make your point, especially if the work is still ongoing. The examples he claims as failure are a result of hard work of teams and people on those teams. To simply declare it as a failure and call it a day, seems not only premature and shortsighted but also amateur and unprofessional. To prove the point, Mokriya, the company where the author works also worked on Hipster, an app that solved none of the problems the article seems to champion for. See how easy it is to point flaws?

“By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?” — Steve Jobs

On iteration

Talking of naming names. There is something to be said of design as an iterative process. To choose a random time as a finish line and judge a design in the binary states of success or failure is not fair to anyone. Square, by any means is not a failure of design. It is a failure of a business model whose sole validity lies in being able to scale. Who knows they might as well be on their way to find the right partnership that will enable them to scale. Regarding Paper and Carousel, being on that list was honestly disappointing. Not to say that the apps are perfect and everything mentioned in the article is wrong. But they have also been barely out there. With minimal iteration and tweaks done since the initial launch. Sure there might be problems, but they are also fixable. This is why most of digital design is more an iteration than a milestone.

Foursquare is a great example of what iteration can get you. From a mere game, it has become a standard way for millions to find cool things to do in any city. Does it not have user growth or revenue issues? I am pretty sure they have their own share of issues too. But are they a failure — Hell No!

Design is not a cure for cancer.

Or not at least in how we think of it today.

This is not simply a problem with the article but a much larger phenomenon, especially true amongst designers. Design is not a cure for cancer. It is not going to solve all your problems in one swipe of the wand. It is one of the many tools that a team has at their disposal to solve meaningful problems. Sometimes the primary motivation is to solve a business problem and to think that is somehow morally flawed is ridiculous. Design as a profession exists for this very purpose. The way design differentiates, is by finding the overlap of user needs with where there is a potential for business goals to be achieved simultaneously.

Design does not exist in isolation to just solve social problems. It is very much tied with the realities of business. See Everpix of how a well designed and thought product solving a real problem, can fail for the lack of no business opportunity existing. To say this is a failure of design, is thinking of design as a Holy Grail of all solutions. I would also urge you to read Johnnie Manzari's "When good design is not enough".

Some may argue, that design, when holistically thought through could have foreseen those problems mentioned in above articles. And yes. They are right. But then why are the examples of good looking but not thoroughly thought out apps so common? Maybe the answer lies in that coveted "Seat" that design is assumed to have.

The golden seat

A lot of the article is based on the assumption that design has a central seat at every organization. How many companies have a design equivalent for CEO, CTOs or CFOs? For design to truly have a seat at the table one should not have to think so hard for an answer to that question. How many companies have a partnership as healthy as one between Jobs and Jonny? How many even have someone with the same power and authority to command and steer a company, as Ive?

In most early stage startups I consult for, there is no “executive” team member responsible for design.

David Kaneda wrote a great article on this fallacy. Instead of trying to quote everything he said, you should simply read his version.

Questioning what a designer truly means?

What makes a person a designer? If you were to look at the majority of job descriptions, ability to use Photoshop would be pretty high on that list. Once a profession starts identifying itself with knowledge of a tool than the understanding of a process, there is serious introspection to be done.

This is where Mills' article is spot on and worth the discussion it has caused. Why are we so territorial having a Product Manager or an engineer who is great with holistic understanding of products, discuss ideas with us? Or even the assumption that it is only design's decision to make? Why do we think the title "designer" makes us any better to understand products whereas everyone else is too stupid to be heard. As long as we keep debating about titles instead of the roles or the product itself, it's a lost cause.

This is where we as an industry need to button up. How about we stop portraying Dribbble as "the place to find designers" but more the place to find visual designers. We have become too comfortable in the buckets of skills we have created. To the extent that we are having debates whether designers should learn to code. Has it ever hurt anyone to learn a new thing, if they are interested in it? Frank Chimero, wrote a long but beautiful post about these artificial divides we have created as an industry.

To conclude

As an industry we need to be less territorial and more worried about the products we are building. There is also something to be said about this being primarily an organizational discussion whose value is inherently lost on public forums because of multiple agendas that people have when reading an article like this. For some it becomes an opportunity to throw dirt at the work of others, while for others it becomes a way to show the moral high-ground that they presumably hold over others. All this ends up leaving the genuine reaction and discussion too maligned.

In closing I think there are a lot of great points raised in the original article, but also a lot of subtleties missed in the discussion. Hopefully this provides enough perspective from both sides.

Let's get back to building useful & delightful things.

For the bookshelf

Tuhin Kumar — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 18:00:00 -0000

A month back I asked around for recommendations of print based magazines. The two constraint were on frequency and content. I wanted it to be of lower frequency, so that each subscription felt like a gift, a far cry from digital. In terms of content, I wanted them to be around lifestyle, food, travel, photography or fashion. I was intentional to not ask for more design based magazine recommendation (though they ends up coming nonetheless).

Following is a list of the ones that people recommended and looked interesting enough to me. Of these I did end up subscribing and ordering a lot, but not all. Hopefully some of these might be new or interesting to you.

Photography

Collective Quarterly — I ended up ordering the Marfa issue, which happens to be the first issue. This is unique in the sense, in that they are trying to go to otherwise, not on the radar, places. And record their journey as creatives.
Aperture Magazine
Travel Almanac

Lifestyle/Culture

Monocle — I do not know why, but I cannot get to appreciate the Monocle. It is just too much of content, and I want less. I am sure though, I am in the minority, and people love their style.
Revolv
Inventory
Elephant Magazine
This is paper — Another first issue edition. When it came to my desk, it was filled with postcards and hand drawn Thank-You. The style is unique in the sense that they go in detail around forward thinking design work of today and the nature of print forces a more thoughtful introspection.
Works that work — This is for the curious soul. They cover a lot of breadth around design related innovation and projects. Each issue is bound to have a project you always wanted to know more about or something new that is interesting to you.
Digest — This one is from my friend Elliot and his team. It focuses around creative professionals and their lifestyle. Looking closely at a particular aspect, be it different styles of beer or the gentle nudge you need to step away from the computer.
Kinfolk — Needs no introduction. Bulky but filled with short stories and photo essays.
Colors
Believer
Fringed — Not out yet

Travel

Cereal — This is one of my new favorite magazines. Simple and minimalist in design, the content is thoughtful and deeply researched. Coupled with beautiful photography, it comes highly recommended.
Boat Magazine — One city per issue. Go!

Design and process

Maker
Process Journal
Made Quarterly
Offscreen — While I intentionally wanted the recommendations to be not about design. This one from Kai is great magazine in print, about pixel folks. Each issue has close up interviews with the people behind the digital interfaces we are too familiar with.
It's Nice That
Eye

Interior

Apartamento

Food

Towards fashion

Others

Wildsam Guides — While they are not a magazine, they are a great addition to the bookshelf of anyone interested in cities and discovering the best aspects of a city.

Pasadena & LA

Tuhin Kumar — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 08:00:00 -0000

Exploring around

Last week I was in Pasadena for a work trip. This was my second time in the Los Angeles area, and considering I have still not given the films from last time to be developed, I consider it a win in my book that this post is up. This post is mostly a collection of shots I took throughout the trip and interesting places or things I saw.

I have an inherently soft spot of any irregular shaped wood table, especially the ones in natural shape of wood. This was taken at Europane bakery near downtown Pasadena.

Art Center of College of Design

I also had a chance to visit the Art Center College of Design and they had a Ray Eames exhibition going on.

The city by the night

It fascinates me how often cities have an alter ego that takes over at night. Pasadena was similar. Some shots from the night walk when out for dinner.

The following shots were me trying to use a USPS post box as a replacement for tripod to try long exposure shots. While it did not work as I had intended them to, I do find the imperfections rather charming. Also this continues to be a welcome addition to my series of blurry shots of cities that tries to see "can you capture the essence of a city in an out of focus shot?"

Last day

The highlight of my last day was visiting Mohawk, a clothing store that a friend of mine had recommended. More on that later.

Mohawk General Store

I visited, Mohawk, a super rad clothing store on Sunset Boulevard, near Silver Lake, that had some of my all favorite brands like Our Legacy, Nonnative etc. The vibe was similar to Maas & Stacks, my favorite clothing store from SF.

I ended up buying the blue ones from Revieras. While not the most comfortable shoes, they sure look great & are a solid addition for the summer wardrobe.

Check out the pics on Flickr.

Mount Davidson

Tuhin Kumar — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 08:00:00 -0000

This was my first trip to Mount Davidson, so it was a bummer that the fog was not playing nice for getting great shots. Personal highlight was having to read about coyotes on Wikipedia, because I ended up coming way too early when it was still dark, and was afraid that I might run into a coyote.

Also, I finally understand why friends are so fascinated with #thatsftree.

Making Friends

Met Tristan for the first time. We had wanted to shoot together for a while so it was great to finally meet in real life. Also met Zach Cole and Andi Teggart.

With fog showing no signs of mercy, we decided to explore the trails and see if we could get something good for the day.

Gradients with the fog

For about 15 min, Karl decided to give us breathtaking views of the city, before it covered everything again. All in all, it ended up being a pretty fun shoot because of the brief yet magnificent clearing of the fog to give a glimpse of San Francisco.

Check out the pics on Flickr or read this story on Exposure

Pencil by FiftyThree

Tuhin Kumar — Wed, 01 Jan 2014 18:51:00 -0000

Paper from FiftyThree is easily my favorite iPad app. You can guess it's importance for me from the fact that it was the sole reason for me to not get the iPad Mini and go for the Air. For the last few weeks I have been using their new product [Pencil], a beautiful stylus that is brilliantly designed.

Packaging

It comes in a cylindrical cardboard box that efficiently puts in the Pencil, spare parts like the rubber tip and a manual.

The subtle alignment of the outside print with the real Pencil inside the box is a nice touch.

Hardware

The Pencil itself is beautifully designed. I went with the walnut wood body, but there is a choice of black brushed aluminum body.

The body is well balanced in terms of weight distribution and feels good in hands. It feels like a tool that you can keep fiddling with as you are sketching or drawing.

The front tip of the Pencil itself is similar to other stylus, only rougher. The rubber end is however smoother.

In terms of size, it is longer than the other two stylus I have tried, namely the Bamboo and the Maglus stylus. It is lighter that the Maglus (which is ridiculously heavy) and a tad bit heavier than the Bamboo.

Usage

To actually use Pencil, you need to do a digital handshake with the Paper app. This gets annoying and even after using it for a while, I keep forgetting this and realizing it midway during a sketch. I wish they had found a better way to do this automatically based on proximity or some other signal.

Once the app registers the device though, it pairs beautifully with the experience of the app. There is a sense of fluidity that persists between the interface and the hardware.

Draw a line. Pinch to zoom with fingers. Move the viewfinder around using the Pencil. Sketch the details. Erase mistakes by using the other end of the Pencil, just as you would using an old-school Pencil. Or just Rewind. Use your fingers to blur things (which ends up great to create base colors or give a sense of distance). Repeat.

My biggest gripe is when the app thinks that the Pencil is my finger instead and ends up blurring a sketch instead of adding a detail. I have still not found a way around it but it is annoying to say the least.

You also need to remember that Pencil needs to be charged about a month or so. I have not yet reached that point despite my usage, but it is something that it needs to do because of using Bluetooth.

Overall, if you had to buy a stylus and use the app Paper, definitely recommend the Pencil. It is suffice to say the app and the device exist in harmony, in perfect synergy with one another.

It has helped me get back to sketching as a hobby.

Hack Design Lesson

Tuhin Kumar — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 09:15:00 -0000

Hack Design is an amazing resource for people to learn more about design via simple lessons covering different topics ranging from typography to animations in design.

I was asked to write the final lesson of the course and curated the lesson around developing self awareness as a designer.

Read the lesson here

Point Reyes

Tuhin Kumar — Sun, 15 Dec 2013 08:00:00 -0000

Just in time for the sunrise

Over the weekend Chris Connolly, Dave Johannes, Rebecca Goldman, Andrew Kim and I made an early morning trip to Point Reyes to chase the fog and shoot pretty pictures. We started off with the Monterey Cypress Tree Tunnel as our first stop and managed to reach just in time for the sunrise and barely a few minutes before the sun was blanketed away by the fog.

Among Friends

Vanishing Poles

We came across these poles that looked simply beautiful in the fog.

Oh Hello There

Point Reyes has its share of animals that surprise you by showing up from behind the fog. The fog kept playing tricks with light that made us want to stop every now and then by the road side.

The Lighthouse

We came way before the lighthouse opens up but the friendly park ranger was ok with us walking all the way to the top. So we did just that.

Indeed it is true. Everything does look prettier in the fog. Also magical & mystical. Check out the pics on Flickr or read this story on Exposure

Pescadero State Beach

Tuhin Kumar — Sat, 25 May 2013 23:52:00 -0000

Last evening, me and a bunch of other friends made a short trip to Pescadero State Beach alongside State Route 1. Got some good shots despite the foggy weather and low light including a pod of sea lions by the rocks.

What kind of a designer are you?

Tuhin Kumar — Mon, 06 May 2013 23:40:00 -0000

No! I said…what kind of a designer are YOU?

In the short time since I started designing, I have had a bunch of titles to describe my role; some I chose myself when freelancing, and some were given by the companies that I worked for. I have been a web designer, a user interface designer, an interaction designer, a user experience designer and most recently, a product designer. As I have moved from one title to the other, the industry has evolved and it is much easier to see some of those patterns in hindsight. What does your role, really encompass when you say you are a designer at a startup, or more importantly what all can it encompass that will help you be better at what you are trying to be? What does it mean to be a designer for the digital medium? What does it mean to design a digital product?

The startup is the new agency

It is not the biggest surprise that some of the finest designers of products happen to work at tech companies and startups. I would argue that a startup or a larger tech company that cares deeply about design (I can definitely attest for Facebook being one) is a better place to bootstrap your career in design than any traditional design agency. There are lot of reasons for this but the biggest and most obvious ones in my head are the breadth of projects and the quick learning curve. Today you could be designing the logo and the larger brand of the new app that is about to launch, and the next day you are back to tweaking the flow of the app based on new user testing nuggets that your CEO passed on from one late-afternoon coffee shop testing. I traded my two year course in ‘interaction design’ for a crash course in design at Pulse. Never made a better decisions in my life.

Products—not just apps or websites

What the hell do I even mean by that? Mostly that our work is no longer confined to interfaces inside a viewport in the browser or on our phones. The apps & the websites are just the means of interaction we enable. We are here to design the larger system of which the apps and websites are one aspect. It is equally our job (or should be, if it is not) to understand how they fit into the larger sphere of things. What is the product market fit? What do the release cycles of the app look like in terms of features? Does it make sense to launch feature A without sub feature 1, 2 and 3 which are part of the next release cycle? How similar do the app and the website need to be? Do they need to be optimized for particular use cases versus being at feature parity? What about our iPad app? How does the account creation flow work if a user connects via Facebook on iPhone but closes the app before they complete their profile? How do we handle this edge case if they open the app on a desktop device next? How does their data sync across platform and what are the design affordances for it? In a world of A/B tests and instrumentation of design, how do you tell the stories that need telling.

…[In] situations where the product is facing an incumbent and there are complimentary network effects, it’s simply not enough to launch a well designed product. - Johnnie Manzari

Iterations

For most cases in the past, designing something meant working with a client on a project for a few weeks and giving a ‘final deliverable’ and working briefly with the engineers in some case. The client could always hire for the next project, but as far as the old project was concerned, that was it. Welcome to the world where the job is never done. The job really starts from What we are trying to build and ends on how what we released has been performing—which is arguably for as long as the product exists. Are there any major drop offs in the funnel? With tools of today, it is easier than ever to be in the know of the story that data has to tell about the product. What about the things that are not working as you had hoped, can we do a quick revision and submit to App store in 2 days? The feedback loop is shorter and tighter. This also means we have to be okay with things not being perfect. This one in particular is at odds to the perfectionist in us. The thing that makes it better to wrap our heads around is that you have forever to make it perfect. Keep iterating.

Prototyping

When you see a live, polished, interactable demo, you can instantly understand how something is meant to work and feel, in a way that words or long descriptions or wireframes will never be able to achieve. And that leads to better feedback, and better iterations, and ultimately a better end product. - Julie Zhuo

This is a medium that is not static. This is a medium that enables affordances that other mediums of the past did not. This is a medium for which photoshop should not be the end, but merely a milestone in the journey of creation. Use what you are comfortable in, Quartz, Framer or good old HTML/CSS/JS. The end goal is to get more insight and feedback and be able to better envision how the design works and not just what it looks like. Use all means necessary and at your disposal.

Own the product: Being proactive & executing

This might seem like an odd item to add to the list, but of all the above mentioned qualities, this has to be the one that is the most important. Gone are the days when someone will be carrying over a spec document of project requirements and leaving it on your desk for you to look at. You are responsible for the product. Think of it like your own baby. Does it need caressing, go do it. Nobody will be sending you emails about it, but it is implied that this is YOUR job. Worry less about the ideal process and more about the outcome—the impact. Hack your way around traditional UX practices that make it feasible for a 2 person design team to do everything from user research to communication design, while always knowing the magic sauce is the product and it’s execution and not the process. Maybe even ditch the traditional notion of UX for a far more opinionated product. Follow what works for you and your product.

We don’t have our journal of record, our vocabulary is splintered and vague, our processes are inconsistent, but this is the beginning of something important. - David Cole

The field of designing digital products has just begun to come together. There are common grounds and there are disagreements. New mediums are being added, while old ones fade away. In the coming years, what do you want to see when you look at your phone or through a pair of glasses or glance at your watch or stare at that screen that mimics the TV in your living room? What kind of products do you want to design for this medium?

What kind of a designer will you be?

Originally posted on Medium

#nofilter

Tuhin Kumar — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 20:00:00 -0000

Originally posted on Medium

Isn’t it ironic and amusing at the same time that we live in an age when #nofilter is almost a badge of honor for a media? A sign of pride shouting this is the moment as it happened—nothing tampered. Take it for its flaws and it’s charm. Remember it forever, for this is how I want you to remember it.

That brings me to memory. Remember what it was like when memory was the only way to remember the past and thereby forget it? Sure people used to write diaries and take photographs, but those were few and far. What your first date was, was not based on a photo on your timeline, but just in a hazy yet cherished corner inside your brain. It’s almost as if memory has a way of applying a filter of it’s own. Making everything so charming, just like the filters.

In our minds we can toy with memories and relive them, perhaps smoothing the rough edges a bit to make the thought more pleasant to hold. Complete video documentation of our lives seems harsh and too true to the details, unlike the comforting, hazy, quality of a true memory. — Kyle Meyer

With the tools of today, we started down the road to preserve ‘all’ moments. Creating timelines, profiles that are in a way a public version of journals—of our memories. For one and all to see. Maybe even judge. Maybe that’s why we needed filters. To make the moment feel more beautiful than it really was—to give it that hazy quality of memory, as Kyle puts it. To make it magical. To make what had now become permanent, pretty. But what fun would it be if life were all but a series of magical moments.

Sadly, this also means that all we cherish are pretty pictures and happy thoughts with a shade of vanity. Because who would want to know about how low you feel right now. Our profiles are not really us, but just how we want others to see us. There is something that is not right here. Something has to give in. Change. Evolve.

Does this change look like the flood of ephemeral networks we have been seeing lately? I really doubt that. I often wonder if Snapchat and others are an over-correction. A generation-wide knee jerk reaction due to the side effects that nobody had planned for. I don’t have an answer. But I do wish for a more casual sharing and more #nofilter shots in my feed.

Naysayers

Tuhin Kumar — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 21:04:00 -0000

“By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?”

This quote from Steve is my standard response to naysayers. People whose only job is to find faults in efforts of others. This is the veil behind which I hide the rush of anger in those situations. I wish I had to use it less often though.

Update: People pointed me towards Roosevelt's “The Man in the Arena“

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Pulsar — Rethinking RSS

Tuhin Kumar — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 22:14:00 -0000

For the last two years, I have been thinking a lot about content. How people consume news, discover it and more importantly what the future of content most probably looks like. RSS is a major part of how the content gets distributed around. In many cases — for news apps like Pulse, Flipboard etc — it might be abstracted from the users, but at the end of the day it is an integral part. If re-imagining RSS as the syndication layer is on your task-list, then some of the ideas around rethinking RSS might be relevant to you. It is a by product of inefficiencies in the current system and unnecessary reinventing of the wheel for every startup that tries to build a news app. I am taking the liberty to assign this with a pet name — Pulsar.

A side note before we dive in. This is not about Google Reader. It has nothing to do with Google shutting Reader down — which I think was a decision that we will thank them for — because of the amazing services around content it would lead to. Be that out of frustration or necessity or both. Having made that distinction clear, let's begin.

Abstract it from end user

This is a no-brainer. All that the end user should ever need to care about is the name of the publisher/blogger/writer they want to stay updated from. The process should be as simple as typing the name in search box or just clicking on add source button under the publisher logo. No feed urls, not API endpoints. Never.

Truly real time

RSS was never truly real time. There were projects like ‘pubsubhubbub’ to make it seem real time, but that never truly happened. It was always a few minutes behind which makes it almost useless for anyone who wants to be on top of news. Also in the age when Twitter and Facebook are the Way to discover news for most people, why this is important, especially if you are trying to build a reading experience, is not hard to fathom. Giving publishers the power to push content or information about new content is a strategic advantage over other large scale syndication & content infrastructures — assuming you are not the only one building such a thing.

A content API for publishers, not just a document syndication format

Today, content is a commodity. There are multiple places people can read the same content. Which means there is a lot more information around the core content that services can use and create better experiences for publishers. Some of them, in no particular order, are below:

Main article & summary
Revision history/updates
Media associated with text — video, audio and photos (intentionally separated)
Publisher info
Author info
Number of shares (Facebook, Twitter and other networks)
Number of reads (polled or real time)
Entities referenced in the article (people, places, events, things)
Related articles from same/other publisher
Pre reading for an article
Further reading for article
Discussions
Semantic information to convey and use branding and templates for different content types

Think of what the exchange format looks like

I am not an API designer or an engineer, but I am not sure if XML is still the best interchange format for this purpose or what we are aiming for this to be. Content today is much less about being a single document and a lot more about the data around it. Something like JSON might serve us better based on the above listed requirements.

Entities and commerce hooks

Can you make it easy for publishers to syndicate context around articles. Be that around related stories or be that around more information about the people mentioned in an article. If a story about the revolution in Syria is syndicated via your API, would not it be amazing if the reader has easy access to find out more about some key entities like leaders referenced in the article? It could even be something as simple as a link to a Wikipedia article. Another one is the commerce hooks. Often articles have links to buy things or recommend gadgets. Can there be a unified payments API that makes it simpler for publishers for all kinds and types to process payments without having to leave the app they were accessing the content from? The app developer would merely have a request handler or callback URL for certain types of links and the API handles everything else.

Security credentials

Extending the last point to premium subscriptions. Can this new format make it easier for publishers to syndicate premium content rather than force them to the limited options of paywalls or a Newsstand model on iOS?

A two way exchange

If the last few pointers are any indication of the direction I would ideally dream for this, then it is clear that this would benefit from being a two way exchange. Publishers should not only be able to use this to send information and content, but also be able to receive useful information like user's device type, maybe even information about identity, location etc after due permissions have been given by the user. It is not hard to imagine of exciting possibilities that begin to emerge when articles can be sent in real time and the publisher knows my location. Am I the only one getting excited at the thought of publishers playing with certain aspects of articles in real time depending on geolocation, time of the day etc?

Discussions

So far the discussions on the web around articles have not been a smooth experience. Leave alone the point about the quality of these discussions. Every publisher has their own discussion platform. Worse yet, news apps often are ambitious to try their own discussion platform. Sadly RSS does not syndicate these discussions with the main article and frankly it was never designed to. It is so broken that we have a startup like Branch, that is trying to make the two totally separate and promote discussions as a content form of its own. Would this change if discussions travelled with the content, no matter where it was made accessible?

A dashboard for Publishers

If Google's treatment of it's feed related products is any indicator, then Feedburner is on it's way out. A company or tool that makes it easier for publishers to have all of their content related data in one place irrespective of whether it is being viewed on publisher's site or being viewed on a third party app, is a huge and complex opportunity in itself.

An experience that matches the content

This is probably a designer's special request more than something truly broken with RSS. I feel the future of clutter free reading experience cannot simply be a visually stripped, almost un-styled blob of text that Readability, Instapaper and Pocket are pushing for. The experience of reading an article in the Economist magazine is different from the experience of reading a story on GQ. Can these intangible aspects of experience be syndicated with the help of typography, color, font styles and maybe even a few templates for different content types? Can our content API be the channel for this syndication?

There are a ton of other aspects of problems with RSS that I may have missed. Some that I might not even be aware of. I will keep updating this entry as I think of more. If you feel there is something that can push the craziness of this idea further and in the right direction, let me know. If you are thinking of working on this and want to chat more, I would love to brainstorm more.

Who knows, maybe the person who creates the next syndication platform is reading this in some news app via RSS! That would be mildly ironic now, wouldn't it?

Feedback & Fidelity in Design

Tuhin Kumar — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 13:36:00 -0000

You are on your way to work and waiting at the traffic signal. As you look aimlessly across the street thinking about a design problem you have been struggling with for weeks, you have the Aha moment. There is a fuzzy solution to the problem, hovering in your head, and you think it's a pretty decent one. You rush to the office and start cranking some rough mocks — something just one notch higher in fidelity than the typical wireframe — so that by the time rest of the team is here you have something to bounce ideas off. Sure there are interactions whose implementation is fuzzy at the moment, but you say to yourself, "that comes way down the line, finding the basic flow of things and aligning it with what we are trying to do is far more important for now". As soon as everyone is in, you ask them to gather around your desk and go on to talk about your ideas. During the explanation a team member asks ‘how does the animation work in landscape mode on the iPad’.

Ugh! You don't know. You are not even sure if that animation is the best animation at this stage. We have barely started thinking about the product and someone on the team asked a question meant for way later. Best case, you tell them that can be figured later. Worst case, the idea doesn't fly even when it could have been the one of the best solutions. In all cases, you lose momentum, because someone decided to ask a question, give feedback, for a different stage of fidelity in design.

It’s easy to critique color when you’re discussing layout, typefaces when you’re choosing border-radii, and copy when your exploring interactions. -Dustin

This happens so often that I have lost count of meetings I or other designers I talk to have been in where this led to more circling around ideas around the core problems, only to come back to the original one. This is not the same thing as trying 10 different ideas to find the best solution to a problem. This is having to look around for different solutions for the sake of looking because the last good idea was shot down before it had a chance to stand up on it's feet. Momentum is one of the best things for any product design process. It helps you from straying around the wrong path, or losing your core vision, or trying to solve too many things in the first release. This is why projects with no deadlines are often one of the most difficult ones. Because you then have to come up with some other form of milestones to maintain the momentum. Asking the wrong questions at the wrong fidelity or giving the wrong feedback kills momentum like nothing else.

Trying to resist the urge of asking questions or giving feedback at the wrong fidelity requires discipline, understanding and experience. But far more than that it requires immense trust in people who are trying to solve the problem, the designers, the engineers and everyone else on the team — each one of us. You need to trust that your designers, and the team at large, is capable of finding how that animation would work in landscape when the time comes for it. For now focus on getting the flow right.

So the question is how do you know what stage of fidelity you are at in the cycle. It differs from team to team, and the path you take to the end product. Here are some of the most common stages of fidelity I have come across. (This is an over-simplified model and a fair amount of overlap happens from time to time)

Product Exploration

You are still exploring the idea and how to implement it. You want to help creatives showcase their talent. But how?

Would it be a blogging platform? Would it be a photo gallery? Would it be more like a portfolio? Hmm…portfolio sounds interesting. What if we can add community aspect to it? That sounds like a good problem to solve.

This is the product exploration stage. You don't know what the product is at this point. Don't try to open photoshop or sketch interactions at this point. Most importantly don't ask the designer to create some mocks to see how this idea holds. It's like expecting the chef to give you Crème brûlée when all you tell them is that you are hungry, and then getting disappointed when they serve Lamb chops instead.

Sketching & Flows

Sweet. You know the idea you want to work on. You know what kind of people need this to exist. You know what their needs are, what the pain point of current solutions are. Now you want to come up with a solution that solves these pain points and also encompasses what you envision this product to be in the long run.

Sketch a lot of stuff. Think about what the overall flow of the user in your system looks like. Think about each screen in this system. Can some screens be combined? Would some screens be served better if they were separated into two distinct steps? What are the goals of the user at each stage. What are their expectations? Does the UI allow the affordances for those goals? Awesome! You are a step closer to your product's basic version.

Visual Design of the Interface

So now that the overall flow is all done, time to add a coat of paint to your idea. This is when most people open photoshop. You play around with visual relations between entities on each screen. By this time you are well aware of the overall flow that you know where the user comes from and where they can go to from this screen. So it is easier to design for continuity. Each screen begins to feel connected because of the homework you did with the last stage.

You typically worry about things like text color, button colors, grid, typography etc at this stage. Should you use an on–off switch or can you have something more fun like a slider to control the state? If the product has user uploaded content, you try to use the actual content instead of placeholders to see how the UI holds itself. Are there special edge cases you need to solve for. How does the screen look when there is no user data. (‘what happens when there is no user data’ should ideally have been solved in the last stage, but it is totally fine if you started thinking about it now too. Like I said, a lot of overlap happens). You should ideally also have the final copy in place now. This way you know if some screens are looking heavier or have way too much text. This is where you make decisions like 'can we replace that paragraph of text with a banner image instead?' But for all practical purposes and because of the way teams are generally organized, the copy comes more towards the end. Often that's ok, and sometimes, cause of a few last minute tweaks.

Your product has now started to look useful and beautiful.

Interactions & Animations

This has a lot of overlap with the last stage of visual design. There is a lot of back and forth because by changing visual style of some elements, the otherwise not so great animation, starts to shine. Often though, this begins after a basic amount of visual design has happened for most of the apps. How does the new view come in? Does it slide up or does it flip over the current view?

Once again, this is an over–simplified approach and there is often a good deal of back and forth happening. Also a lot of individual stages have a lot of sub–stages that happen in parallel. For example choosing typefaces and the button colors. The trick is to focus on one of them at a time when deciding which one works better and preferably with the most plausible candidate of the other kind. So if you are confused about choosing between Elena and Tisa on one hand and a green or orange primary action button on the other, then maybe try choosing them independently and without worrying about the orange button on the upper-right corner of the mock when you are deciding the typefaces.

When feedback and fidelity in design are calibrated against each other it makes the overall process lot more efficient. It helps the team as a whole thinking about the same problem at one time. The result is not just more ideas but people being more receptive to crazier ideas because they would have, most likely, thought about it at some point themselves.

Building a better blogging platform

Tuhin Kumar — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 09:09:00 -0000

Note: I wrote this answer on Quora a while back.

I love writing and there are a ton of things that can be done to change and improve the state of blogging platforms drastically.

Here are some that I feel are important:

A standardized format for individual entries across all/most blogging platform. For most geeks this is Markdown. With the advent of Dropbox and other Cloud services something as simple as a .txt file could become that format.
A simpler way to write: It is funny that most of today's blogging platform's text editor is more powerful than some word processors. It needs to be simplified. I really like what Svbtle by Dustin Curtis is trying to be and lot of the finer ideas behind it.
Mobile version: No, I do am not expecting someone to write 500 word articles on mobile (tablets excluded) but it should be able to jot down thoughts or just snap a picture and post it.
Make it easy to "embed" my social content: I would prefer this to be inherently built in the app in a fashion similar to Storify so that I can quickly choose a picture I just uploaded to Instagram and make it the latest post on my blog. Or an answer I just wrote on Quora?
Showing other relevant content from the blogosphere: If I am reading or writing a blog about a topic, why can the blogging platform not show me what my friends have written about it OR make it easy to do prior research.
Democratize Art Direction: Till now art directed or uniquely styled entries for each post have been done by designers mostly. Why can this not be made universal? Jux does this at a basic level for content writers but this really should be more simple. It should essentially be drag and drop.
Social: The whole social angle in today's blogging systems is "start from scratch". But why not make it easy or maybe just possible to include users/things/references in posts. Kind of like Quora.
Search: For most blogging platform the search is broken. Make it better?
Comments: I do not wish to open a can of worms but the comments on the web are broken. This is the biggest reason I do not have comments on my own site, even if I am losing on a ton of meaningful conversation.
Central CMS for Enterprise: While not a current problem but you could think of a dashboard for small companies to maintain their Twitter/Facebook and Blog. While this is not directly related to the question, but if you think of twitter and facebook timeline as evolved form of communication in post blogging world, then it makes sense.
Analytics: It is kind of funny how analytics have not yet become a part of blog engines. Why do I need to add a script from Google Analytics. I understand the part about focus but it is still complicated for non geek users. Also if this were a part of blogging engine, it would be far more powerful IMHO. Example, people reading. People who quoted the article or a part of it. Mentions on Twitter etc.
Discovery: Writing a blog post is one part, but can the blogging platform make it easier for others to discover what you wrote, without the constant expectation of writing more?
The CMS and the Blog should be one: You should feel as if you are writing ON YOUR SITE, for only then can your words do true justice to how people will read/experience the content. Here is a first draft of what I plan to make my blog's CMS as. I am sure you can simplify it further with more javascript magic. For now I still have to add custom CSS links and tags to apply non default stylings to blog posts but this should be simpler.

Maybe find a niche for longform content: While not a CMS' fault, the world can do with more longform bloggers. So maybe the blog can help in that. Say allow for rumination of ideas or celebrate longform with the theme and templates that it comes with.
Better Typography: How about smart quotes, en and em dashes and a bunch of other smaller stuff like paragraph indentation, rhythm of typography. An average person should not have to worry about this when writing. It should just work

These are some I can think of right now. I will keep adding more as I think of them.

The Great Age of Unbundling

Tuhin Kumar — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 09:00:00 -0000

A while back when I wrote about "Content in a digital era", I touched briefly on the idea of unbundling. It's not a novel idea, I am pretty sure you have heard of it before, in one form or the other. The more interesting aspect is what it means and the doors of opportunities it opens up.

This historical premise of bundled content/commodity has a lot to do with the ownership of resources for production and distribution. Thanks to the digitization and accessibility to a decent internet infrastructure, a lot of those age old constraints have been lifted.

Publishing and music are obviously the first of the many age old institutions to feel the repercussions of this transition. iTunes and now apps like Spotify & Rdio let you buy songs instead of albums, an idea that would have easily made you a subject of mockery, a few years ago. News apps, social media and more importantly the web makes it possible to read that one article from the New Yorker without having to subscribe to the entire magazine publication.

But those are only two of many other institutions waiting to be deconstructed and unbundled. We are already starting to see the cracks show up in the TV industry, most recently with Netflix's House of Cards and in general with the rising population of cable cutters. You do not need to pay a monthly fee to watch your favorite shows. Education is at the cusp of a massive transformation thanks to the unbundling of a traditional degree into individual courses.

So why am I talking about all this? Probably because I think there is a huge window of opportunity there. Telephone carriers, food, banking etc are many of the other monolithic organizations where we do not even know what this unbundling would necessarily look like.

Another amusing side effect is that while all this granular choice is great for many consumers, it is also a bit too much for some. So it makes sense for a host of new companies to show up who focus around "re-bundling" of these atomic units for your convenience while adding heterogeneity to the mix. Radio apps for music, Curated content blogs, box subscriptions of goods are the flip side of this transition.

So when thinking of something that tries to change a whole industry, this is an interesting lens through which to look at the problem. Are you the one unbundling or the one re-bundling the atomic units. Either way, welcome to the great age of unbundling.

What's Next

Tuhin Kumar — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 19:00:00 -0000

On April 24th, 2011, I wrote my first email to folks at Pulse expressing my interest in joining them. After 1 year, 9 months and 21 days of working here, it is finally time for me to move on to new adventures. And boy what a ride it has been. We grew from over 4 million users to now over 20 million users. More than 4 billion stories have been read on Pulse so far! I thank all my co-workers at Pulse, and all of you, who use Pulse, for making this journey so memorable for me. Akshay and Ankit, co-founders of Pulse, deserve a special mention for trusting in me as a designer and literally bringing me to the Valley. This experience has truly been phenomenal.

So, what's next?

I am happy to announce that I will be joining the design team at Facebook. I will be working with many of my favorite designers and few good friends and will continue designing products that impact countless people every day.

I am excited.

Ephemeral Apps

Tuhin Kumar — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 19:00:00 -0000

Which of the apps we use and love today will be around in a year from now. 5 years? 10 years?

As designers, engineers and entrepreneurs, who spend most of our time crafting digital products, how often do we pause and reflect to ask this about our work?

Now that I have a few years of work behind me, I have started thinking about this stuff a lot more. How many of the things I worked on when I had just started designing for a living are still around? Not a lot of them. And that’s sad.

Sad not because they were a thing of beauty and should have stayed longer or because I had spent so much time working on them. But sad because it means that besides self-improvement and learning, the value that I hoped to add to the world by working on them never truly materialized. Nothing. Zilch.

As craftsmen, we have a responsibility to control and shape what we bring into this world. As users we have a right to wish and hope that a service we are using to share our thoughts stays around long enough. Stays around so that we can come back to it, look back at it and cherish it. Maybe smile while doing so. Digital is a toxic environment for nostalgia to exist in. Can we do something about it?

Craft to last.

The next time we work on something, how about we ask ourselves how long in the future do we wish for it to exist. It will change the way we view our work and how we work on the things that we do. Sometimes even what we work on.

Originally written on Medium

Reflections & Resolutions

Tuhin Kumar — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 17:15:00 -0000

2012 was an amazing year. Having just moved to Silicon Valley all the way from India, I got to meet a ton of new people and make some really good friends. Many of those were people I looked up to or was inspired from, many I had never heard about but was blown away by their talents. There was a lot of learning new things. New culture, new cuisines, new country. Being so close to the the hub of technology also made me see things in a better perspective. Both good and bad. How our work shapes and impacts lives. How the valley can be insanely corrosive at it's worst and amazingly innovative at it's best. It was a year of learning.

My primary goal for 2013 is to "get better" at a lot of things. Primarily, these include programming and photography. Pangaea, a tumblr photoblog, is an attempt to push myself in that direction. Check it out when you have time. On the programming front, the goal is to be able to make stuff, ship more stuff so that it ends up in the hands of real people. Not test users, but actual people who use it. I really hate myself for coming up with ideas and then not being able to build them. I would like to change that this year.

Another one is traveling a lot more than I have in the past. Being in the valley so close to our work often forces us to see far less than we think we really do. Traveling helps me calibrate my perspective. I also like to think of it as an excuse that helps me get better at design. In the theme of better experiences and lifestyle, I would probably want to move to SF during the later part of this year. I love Palo Alto but I think I have just grown bored of the place and almost exhausted my options of things to do here.

So here is to a better life next year. Onward!

Pursuit of the Best

Tuhin Kumar — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 09:00:00 -0000

His exacting standards of craftsmanship combined with a Spartan streak made him reluctant to buy any furnishings that he wasn’t passionate about. He had a Tiffany lamp, an antique dining table, and a laser disc video attached to a Sony Trinitron, but foam cushions on the floor rather than sofas and chairs. - Walter Isaacson about Steve

Pre Reading

Some thoughts on this

I grew up in the camp of the Mediocres. Neither the camp that championed the Best nor the one that echoed the Worst. My parents would always buy something that was neither great nor bad. It was just average. Always got the job done. Over time I started gravitating towards the camp that pursues the Best. It started with clothes I would buy as a kid. Then went on in the bike I wanted as my first bike. Since then this desire to buy the best out of my available options has only increased. Fueled by purchases like my first Macbook, this is not a trend likely to stop in my life anytime soon (or as long as it is financially and logistically possible). I have not bought a car ever in my life, because I do not want to buy just about any car and cannot afford the ones I want to. Not yet.

This is crazy on a lot of levels. And this is not for everybody. Also this is not for everything in life. It does not mean when I buy a set of scented candles, I keep researching for days. However, it does apply to anything I am passionate about or care enough about or would be using daily. Pursue the Best for anything that matters to you, and embrace mediocrity for everything else that you cannot.

The other thing that is a by product of pursuit of the Best is the joy every time you use that product. When setting up my apartment in US, I went for the Zeppelin Air speakers. I fell in love with them the moment I saw them and still love them after months. It costs only slightly less than my TV but boy you should see my face every time I use it. I smile. That is what the Best gets you. (On that note it is easily not the absolute best speaker out there, but definitely something in the high end of what I was willing to spend on a speaker). It sounds highly materialistic but as a designer I find it necessary that I continuously reduce the mediocrity around me. Be that in my own designs or the products I use. It is not about being pretentious. Really. Rest of my apartment is still an Ikea shop. Just so you know. But then there is that one Aviator table from Restoration Hardware that I need to buy one of these days. Some day. That is the never ending pursuit of the Best. It never ends. There is always something better. Something else around that has a better alternative.

Unless you are a billionaire who can afford just about anything, this pursuit also leads to a self imposed minimalism. One that is based in the simple irony that you cannot afford the best of everything you would like to own. So instead of just buying anything that gets the job done, you don't. Often this is highly impractical for operational and social reasons. I find this by-product actually very useful and in some odd way - liberating.

Partisans of the worst won’t give a shit if someone drops a dish while people are hanging out in the kitchen. They can push their crappy bicycle to the limit without worrying if it gets scratched — without even being too concerned about it getting stolen. - An argument for The Worst

I find this argument amusing for a lot of reasons but mostly for the simple one that I find it akin to saying one should always buy cheap cars over a BMW or a Mercedes. To each their own I guess.

Hey, sometimes you want to have a conversation with your family every night at the dinner table for a month about what makes the perfect washing machine. Sometimes you just want clean socks. - Wilson Miner

In the end it is not a binary state of things. The pursuit of the Best is just that. The pursuit. The pre and the post. One that starts with doing basic research on the subject matter and continues well after having bought the object in question. Permeating in every moment you use the product. It is this process that many of us find amazing. It is a continuum. An optimization of initial research vs long term annoyance that comes out of everyday use of the product. We all start somewhere on that scale of the Worst to the Best, but I do feel I am in the camp that strives to push towards the Best vs one that actively strives for the Worst.

It's the same reason we refactor our code. Redesign our sites. Release updates to our apps. The pursuit to be better. The pursuit of the best.

Post Reading

Facebook post by Boz

Great Designers

Tuhin Kumar — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:00:00 -0000

Great products don't spring from great designers like Athena from the skull of Zeus; instead, they were usually the result of a lot of trial and error, missteps and blind alleys, and hard work and deep thinking. There's no secret sauce. Great designers aren't those with the most natural talent, or the smartest, or can draw the best. Great designers are those who've designed great products, period. And the only way to design those is the hard way. And while you might have a vision of how the product should be right from the start, it takes a lot of work to get it right. You have to explore. You have to prototype. You have to test. You have to see it live. You have to see someone using it. Only then do you get a refined design. No one gets it right the first time. - Dan Saffer

When I had just started designing, I did not know this. How could I? I had never gone to an art or design school. I did not have a fancy degree in new media design or anything that would qualify me to have any idea of how it is done. I was simply a student at an engineering college who loved to design (at least what I thought design was at that point of time). I thought everyone who was a great designer today must have learnt it at school. That everyone who was any good must have read lots of books so that they knew how to come up with great designs. For of course my designs were shitty. God I still feel they are shitty when I look at my designs from six months back.

So I did what any person in my place would do. I kept asking every good designer for tips. Tried to strike a conversation with anyone who would talk back. I even managed to get blocked on Twitter by a few who are now very good friends of mine. Just so that I could learn a bit more than what I had the day before. I asked around for books, magazines and read every design blog religiously. While it did help, my designs were no close to being good, forget greatness.

I still do not know what it was, but one day, I just got fed up and thought to myself, maybe whatever little I know, is probably enough for me to start taking smaller projects. Just to see if I had improved. That was the best decision I had ever made.

It turns out, by far the best way to be a great designer is to start being one. Go out there and design. Find something that sucks? How would you change it? What if you could think of some constraints that the original designers had. Does your solution still work? Keep doing this again and again. You will fall, and hurt it will. You will have moments when you would feel you are the worst designer ever. I still do on most of the days. But there is no other way to do it. If you want to be the very best at what you do, just go out and do it. Keep doing it till you say 'Huh! That kinda looks rad'.

Also, no matter how good you get, there will always be someone who is better than you. Always. And that's ok. That is important because it makes you tick. As long as it is about you being great and not about being better than somebody.

Imagine. Implement. Iterate. Improve.

Coming up with ideas

Tuhin Kumar — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 09:00:00 -0000

“Just think about it deeply, then forget it…then an idea will jump up in your face.” - Don Draper, Mad Men

Over time I have found this to be one of the best ways to trick my brain into coming up with an idea. When faced with a problem that I need to solve, I often work on it for a day or two, using almost all the creativity and logic I have. The process for that is best explained in this hack from Frank Chimero. Then I just stop thinking about it. At least actively spend any time thinking about it. Then in one of those duller moments of everyday monotony, the idea presents itself. Seriously, that is the secret. I like to call it fooling my brain into coming up with ideas.

Pauca Sed Matura

Tuhin Kumar — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 10:10:00 -0000

Silicon Valley is obsessed with Facebook-esque mantra of "Done is better than perfect". While it might be heresy but I beg to differ. Done is better than perfect until it is not. More importantly let us stop using it as a scapegoat for shipping crappy products.

Do a few things and do them well. Instead of taking short cut in every feature you are trying to build how about you cut down on the number of features and build the selected few in the best way possible. The only race is one to give the best experience to the user. Not the one regarding number of features available or that imaginary deadline to meet. When you approach the act of creating products with this perspective that whatever reaches the consumer is the best and nothing short, it is the stuff great products are made of. It is what empowers the moments when people use your product and say "Holy shit".

Between the compass and the clock, startups often favor the clock vehemently. I sincerely believe this is us doing disservice to the cause we stand for. Especially when it comes to design, this clock based approach is almost fatal to crazy ideas. If coming up with a mock within a deadline is the only goal worth pursuing, then it is not surprising that a majority of apps and websites today follow a cookie cutter practice of patterns and design, just like the 100 others before them. Aim for solutions, not mocks. Obsess over details, big and small.

The user experience simply has to be up to base standard in order to ship, no matter how trimmed down the feature is. -Ryan Singer

Let's aim for less but perfect. Few but ripe. Pauca sed matura.

Sidenote:

I came across the phrase while exploring one of the earlier iterations of Storylane by my friend Matej.

I am afraid

Tuhin Kumar — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 14:00:00 -0000

I am afraid that I will not live long enough to see all my dreams come true. I am afraid that one day I will not be fit enough for everything that I did not do.

I fear there will come a day when I wil need help. I fear I might be alone when I take my last step.

I fear I will have enough money but not someone to spend with. All the happiness but not someone to share with.

I am afraid that one day I will wish I had done things differently when I could. I am afraid of the things I haven’t yet done too.

I fear I have not been a good friend, worse still, I am not sure, I have learned my lesson yet.

I fear there are things I will never have. I fear I don’t value enough the ones I have.

Fearless I am not. I am afraid.

Originally posted on Medium

The joy of being amazed

Tuhin Kumar — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 14:00:00 -0000

Being amazed is a feeling that I hope I never have enough of. This is the story about one such moment of amazement.

About 10 months ago, just before I was about to leave India, I visited my grandparents to bid farewell. One summer afternoon, my grandmother or ‘nani maa’ as I call her (nothing special just the Hindi word for grandmother), and I were sitting on the porch talking about what it is I do to earn a living. This was not the first time I had been asked this question, especially by her, but in the past I had often dodged it, thinking it would be too hard for me to explain and for her to understand. I did not know where and how to begin explaining that I design app interfaces for a living, to a person who barely knows what a computer is.

So here is what I do. I take an iPad out of my bag, open a piano app and hand it over to her. She holds it for a moment trying to guess what this thing is supposed to be, like a cat who just saw a ball of wool. Simply staring at it.

I hold her hands and make her tap the screen. The sound of the note fills the void. She gasps in surprise and half afraid tries it by herself this time. The same note, the same gasp! She looks around the device to ensure where the sound is coming from. She asks me to fetch her glasses. She wears them and goes on to play some Indian classical tune that she used to play as a kid on her big piano. That is when it hits her. This is the future. I simply tell her, these are the kinds of ‘things’ I make. She smiles and a single drop of tear rolls down her cheek.

I have never seen someone so amazed. That look in her eyes of what she just witnessed was brilliant and perfect. A small piece of aluminium and glass that she could hold in her hands and play her favorite tunes on was just…magical. She had just taken a huge leap leaving behind an entire era of big computers or PCs. To her this was what came after huge pianos and analog devices. I don’t think there is any other word to describe it besides magic. She spent the whole afternoon playing with more apps on the iPad.

I often wonder if kids of today will have something that they would be this amazed by once they are old. Or that if we as creators of these tools understand this delicate fabric of magic and happiness that we weave by enabling people to do magical things in their own small and unique ways.

I don’t think I can ever forget that amazement that I witnessed in that brief moment during that summer afternoon in my grandmother’s eyes.

I hope I have something that amazes me as much when I grow old.

Originally posted on Medium

Content in a digital era

Tuhin Kumar — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 09:00:00 -0000

Let's talk about content. Not just news but content at large. Imagined, written and discussed. How people discover content, consume it, and eventually what they do post-consumption. Over the years almost all of our means of interacting with content have become digital. Print is not dead (and for that matter I do not think it will ever be dead, instead become more of a novelty) but it's influence and prominence has diminished. Newspapers and magazines have given way to apps, blogs and online news communities. What does all this mean for content? Let's think of this less as crystal gazing and more as a wish list, a dialogue between you and me, a catalyst of transition. Let's begin.

The Content is a commodity

To understand how the content is affected in the digital realm let us try to look at the process of creation briefly. If we look closely, a few key players emerge. Namely the author/creator, the publisher and the reader. The author's role is to create. Capture thoughts and imagination into a narrative in the form of words, picture or motion. The role of the publisher is to provide a platform for this to happen. Also to provide an umbrella of a familiar brand in case the author's identity is not enough to carry the purpose of the content (This is a huge over simplification of the economics and operations involved). And at the end we have the reader or the consumer. It might feel off to see the reader as a key player in the process of creation, but the purpose of a work is to be consumed. The purpose of speaking is to be heard, of writing to be read. The reader is the purpose of the creator's creation, the goal is that in consuming this content, the reader will be entertained, educated and maybe even in the slightest way evolved, intellectually. If the author is lucky the work may stir the reader to change in a small way. The role of the reader is to ensure the work reaches it's purpose and in some cases be the purpose.

In the digital realm, the role of author and more so the reader is elevated significantly, while that of the publisher as what it has meant in the past continues to evolve into something else, more as advisors than gatekeepers. In today's world the platform needed to say something is a commodity, a marketplace open and accessible to any one willing to put in considerable effort and time. Not all will, but it is easier than ever for those who wish to.

Any author can indeed publish their own work but not all authors will have the resources, time, energy or just plain desire to become a publisher. There is talk of diminished value of publishers in the face of digital books, but the reality is that publishers are as necessary as ever. However, their roles have shifted. Their value lies as community builders, curators and editorial advisors. Not just deep-pocketed gatekeepers and financiers to the mythical land of printed matter, national distribution systems and physical shopfronts. / Craig Mod

Sorry for the tangential rambling, now back to content. We are beginning to see the signs of the amazing fluidity of content. Be that sites like Quora or individual bloggers or publishers themselves as a brand who have their content syndicated across sites and apps. Ubiquity of access marked by democratization of content is in very early stage as of now. However, the big players are warming up to this. For example the Wall Street Journal app or site is not the only way to read their content. The same is true for New York Times. Others following suite is a matter of time.

It also calls for better methods for this synergy and syndication. RSS has long been the de facto for formless content but can we come up with something better, more suited to the new kinds of content and technologies beyond plain text or embeds? Can we figure out better ways to syndicate the form for definite content? Can this syndication happen without making the content lose context in any fashion? Can this amazing example of content choreography from ESPN be experienced in place other than the original without losing the value that is added by the form and design? Words are only a part of the experience of reading, the type, images, and as things go digital, the interaction within the original elements and new ones as a result of consumption (highlights, discussions etc.), are the others. How can we get better at this? Or maybe the answer for publishers lies in this well thought interplay between words, images and interactivity while formless content is the one that gets syndicated. Who will build an open framework or a Content API, if you may call it that, which forms the link between reading, discussions, related content and numerous other possibilities. Not all in one place but all within reach - united.

There’s art in each individual system, but there’s a much greater art in the union of all the systems we create. / Dave Winer

Another aspect of this mixing or in some cases regurgitation of content and ideas is that more and more ways to cluster content around themes, events and formats will show up. Medium is just one such player to try clustering at a core product level, but the idea of discovering content based on subjects or tags is something that we will and should explore more. For when you come across something that you truly like, the first reaction is how do I find more of this? Till now the way to do that was to add the RSS feed of the source or follow the author on some social network hoping they have more of what you liked in the first place. While that works, often it does not. Which brings me to the next discourse. Sources.

No more silos of content

I believe I am not alone in thinking that the whole notion of accessing content in silos called sources/publications feels archaic. A remnant of our analog past, if you may. I still remember when as a child, my parents subscribed to 3 different national newspapers and over 6 magazines. It almost feels that when we shifted gears to digital, someone asked, how can we make these digital and since the restrictions of physical space were lifted, we started a micro revolution of creating/downloading the app for each one or downloading an aggregator to access all of them in one place. The problem is that we never questioned ourselves, how does digital change the way we can consume news/content?

For starters, we do not need every story from a publication. We only need stories that we will enjoy reading or need to know because of the information in them is really important. This paves way for a possibility of using interests, and preferred publications as a means to recommend and figure out what articles you might enjoy from other sources. At the same time, it also embraces simplicity by having a singular view of content that's relevant to you, allowing for deeper exploration as an when needed or desired but never required. Good, relevant content should find the reader instead of the reader having to search the content universe. A lot of this we already do unconsciously with a source focused consumption approach, by skimming or dismissing a story even before we finish reading the title. Surely this is the first thing that a truly digital content consumption medium needs to address. If we are still skimming every story from each source we might be interested in, then what did we gain over the analog way of consumption?

When I shared this article with a friend for her thoughts and opinions, she said, this phenomenon is similar to how iTunes led to the unbundling of music. Which seems like a simpler analogy compared to my convoluted narrative. (The idea that a reader is able to and should in appropriate cases influence the article in a small way, as it happened with me and my friend is further explored towards the end of this article)

In a similar vein, to be able to read that one article on a premium source, should not mean you need to buy an yearly or monthly subscription. This is also the biggest reason, publishers are not so excited about this shift. Many of them are still busy paving cow paths, creating digital newsstands as the future of consumption. They are still charging money from loyal users instead of rewarding them. However, some publishers are beginning to see this and adapt accordingly. Even most news aggregators of today have chosen to continue down this source based path than rethinking consumption of content in a digital medium. Again it is easy to point fingers but a lot is a result of the existing and age old notions of content, which does not change overnight.

The bigger issue for magazines is that they - like papers - insist on seeing themselves as product. They believe their value is intrinsic to that product (thus, people should pay for it). I've long argued that if magazines saw themselves instead as communities of interest and information, they'd have been far better positioned for the net. If they had seen it as their mission to connect people, they'd have been in a better position strategically in terms of "audience" engagement and in terms of generating data that would make their advertising propositions more effective, targeted, and valuable. / Jeff Jarvis

But for the readers, this atomization is brilliant news. Also for authors, this means that each piece of content has to have a merit of it's own instead of link bait or sensationalism.

At a pace you can appreciate it

Content should always feel like a gift, not a burden. To turn it into a gift, we need to start focusing on ways to control the flow. / Joshua Gross

Knowledge, not information. The amount of content that we come across today is almost unmanageable. We need to figure out better ways to control this flow of information. Yes, I want to discover amazing content, but before seeking for more as the obvious pursuit, can we do a better job at efficiently consuming what we already are exposed to, knowingly or otherwise?

Going back to the responsibilities of the reader. A major one was being the purpose of creation. To speak in simple language, when you come across a piece of content, you should feel good about it, appreciate it and if worthy, further propagate it.

Are we fulfilling that role in its true capacity? Has the ability to access any content become a hurdle towards this romanticized goal for appreciation and intellectual stimulation? We have less time to reflect upon what we consumed because we have already moved on to the next thing.

We have started to see efforts to modulate this continuous noise into periodic and meaningful signals. Most prominent ones being Facebook Top Stories, Twitter Email Digest, The now defunct Tputh, Evening Edition or the Next Draft. Apps like Readability and Instapaper strive to add order, timeliness and rhythm to the chaos in which we come across content. But they are just the first lot, many more are yet to be born.

If you are more interested in the concept of Slow web, here is a reading list that I will be updating as and when I come across more articles around it.

A Shared Consumption

The way we consume content is influenced by how we discovered it in the first place. A story that you stumbled upon while exploring the web versus a story that was recommended to you by a dear friend. The palette of tools available post reading shape our actions during reading. For it is only when you know and experience what is possible can you decide for yourself if the content benefits from it. A system that allows for highlighting of passages or curate content around themes is valuable only when you see the possibilities that these tools empower.

Our current set of tools around consumption mimic the past. When I read an article today, chances are that it has been read by a bunch of people similar to me (in a small way that we have the act of reading this article,and thereby an interest in what it has to convey, as a similarity). However the only way it shapes the article is by a change in the number of shares or tweets on a small button in a corner of the page. A slightly better version is when there is discussion around this article either on the page or somewhere else. But digital enables the possibility of altering the original content as more people consume it. Footnotes, side notes, highlights, non-linear narrative, real time critique, communicating with the author...the list and possibilities limited only by imagination. For the first time the marginalia has the chance to be an equal partner of the content. Each reader has the power to change the work in a small but meaningful way. Why have we been aping the past where content was this immutable and permanent entity? As a note of caution, this mutability does not equate to loss of previous versions or a unique perspective in time and space of the author. It simply refers to the additive and hopefully positive influence that a reader can have on content, that was not possible in the past.

What can we tell about a text from its notes? About readers from what they’ve left behind? And when these notes are made public — as Kindle developers and book futurists are exploring — what will emerge? How might shared reader data change readers’ annotating behavior? / Liz Danzico

We are seeing a new and relatively young lot of curators whose work is built on top of other's creations, but adding their opinions, non linear perspectives, backstories or just sharing an interesting highlight to a new audience. In a small way they have also taken the role to help others discover and thereby appreciate good content. This trend builds upon the previously mentioned atomization and universal access of content. If just an open access to links and small passages, spurred a new generation of content curators, imagine what open free access to content would do!

Looking Forward

The great opportunity, the greater confusion, and greatest of all, the lure of invention. / Robin Sloan

We are at very initial stages of truly understanding the potentials of digital content and it's possibilities. Let's ask ourselves how does digital change the role and purpose of content instead of trying to make the content digital. What an amazing time to be in where we can influence the future of content. Our books, magazines, newspapers, longform journalism, and many more yet to come shapes of content.

Content that is ubiquitous, democratized, moderated and networked.

Footnotes

Cover image with typewriter keys by Geof Wilson
Post-artifact books and publishing by Craig Mod
We could make history by Dave Winer
Why do full magazine apps not work? by Jeff Jarvis
The Slow Web by Jack Cheng
The Social life of marginalia by Liz Danzico
The other kind of iPad magazines by Khoi Vinh
In case not obvious, these are my personal opinions and not necessarily of any of the companies I am involved in.

Increasing Value

Tuhin Kumar — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0000

As the number of people using a product increases, the core experience of any single user should get better.

It is especially true and necessary for social products. Every person added to your network increases the overall experience for others. If more people does not transcend to better experience for an individual, there are two things that are off. One, the individual has little incentive to ask others (mostly friends and family) to join them on this new service. What would they gain, if more people joined? Second, it shows stagnation of experience for the user. What's stopping them from moving to a new service tomorrow if it duplicates your features and does it better? This correlation between user growth and better experience of an average user is a function of design.

For Facebook, it means when more of your friends are on it, that's a better experience.

For Twitter, more people to follow and perspectives to what's happening.

For Quora, more questions being answered, more questions being asked, voted upon. All of this makes the individual's experience better.

For Dropbox, it gets easier to share files to anyone. And there is a reward to invite someone too.

For Google, it means you can share things like calendars with anyone on the Google system seamlessly. You can collaborate on documents together.

How does your product get better for the individual as more users join the service?

Footnotes:

A product should also get better for the individual as they spend more time/effort into it.
A lot of this is the core of 'social'. It is no longer a feature, it is an expectation.
As a corollary, as more of my friends join a service, it should get better for me.

Digital Scarcity

Tuhin Kumar — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 18:30:00 -0000

"2 Billion Likes per day on Facebook. 400 Million Tweets per day on Twitter. 50 Million likes per day on Instagram."

We live, for most part, a life that is eerily being encroached by the digital. Every day we find a part of the analog being replaced by the digital. An app to replace a board game, a website to answer a question instead of asking a friend, an app to know what's happening instead of looking around and talking. As time goes by, digital, which is even today seen as a secondary dimension, will replace physical as the primary dimension in which we spend our time. I am not suggesting it as necessarily negative, merely pointing it out. Pointing it out, because as we start to put more of our time into it, we need to find a better way to tell others what is worth their time. Make it not just easier to recommend but also valuable and meaningful.

You might answer back, one can like something or fav it or share it and that is an intent of telling others, this is GOOD. This is worth your time. But I feel we have reached a stage where the sheer number of these outbound signals makes them impossible to be taken with discernment.

But it is not just WE, as the users of these systems and tools, who are to be blamed for this state of affairs. As designers and engineers of these bottomless systems, WE are equally to be held responsible. Every thing has to be made simpler, maybe dumber, optimized for one click. Like a story? Just a tap and everyone will know. Found the tweet interesting? Just a click and everyone will see it. The end goal and the most important one is MORE. To get people to do more. More likes, more favs, more reads, more shares, more comments, more hits, more tweets, more status updates. More is not necessarily good. A little bit of friction is a good thing (feel free to take it in either of the two references that came to my mind while writing this).

What is the core difference between a like, a favorite, loving something, digging it, up-voting it, pinning it or any of the other infinite pseudo means we have come up with to express recommendation or curation. We have become digital hoarders. Saving things mindlessly with hopes that we might need it someday. Sharing things without even wondering if they are worth sharing. Recommending things to others without, in many cases, even spending enough time with what we are recommending. Building things that almost embrace people being mindless, casual, and not having to think about it. Why?

At the risk of sounding elitist, I urge fellow craftsmen to build systems that make people think, ponder, wonder and admire. As a litmus test, anything that makes a person think needs to be held as necessarily better than one that does not. For what are we if not thinkers? Recommend something only if you have often gone back to in the past, multiple times. That's when you can be sure this IS great. Have you ever felt wishing for a button that shouts "THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT"? Ever tweeted something along the lines of "if you read one thing today, let it be this"? We have been designing systems over optimized for consumption and growth. The shortest path and the graph with the maximum slope is not necessarily better. We are humans, not machines or data points. It is only a shame that even a system meant to notify you that someone liked some creation of yours is optimized for quick scanning.

Think about that for a second. Here is this person expressing their appreciation of your work, however fleeting, however profound. And we consume it in a format suitable for efficiency and skimming? Does not that feel wrong?

What if you could only have 50 friends on a service?
What if those friends could only share 1 thing with you each day?
What if you could like only one thing every day?

See. See. See. See. See. See. See. Appreciate!

Recommended Reading:

Discuss:

I have started a Branch conversation about this idea. Feel free to request access by following this link and contributing to it.

The Ads They Are A Changin'

Tuhin Kumar — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 10:19:00 -0000

The new Ads from Apple have received a lot of criticism from people who consider themselves to be Apple fans. Personally I find the Ads to be in poor taste and a shift from what Apple Ads have always been about - the product. The beautiful, amazing, most awesome product Apple has ever built in it's category till they build the next one. The Ads have had one actor, the product.

But the question is are these Ads even meant for people like us? I currently own every possible Apple device in all the major product lineups except a Mac Pro. I wonder if people who are reading this post or complaining on Twitter, fall in the same category, broadly. See the thing is Apple has got us hooked. All they now need to do is keep making these products better and we will rush to buy them. The keynote, the billboards showing just an iPad are enough to get us to pay for the next shiny device. So strategically it is wiser to target those who are still on the edge. I know so many of my friends who have been pondering to get one, but can't because they are not sure if they want to invest time in learning a new OS, after having been used something else for years. Remember the average, the common world is not like us. They do not get excited to download the next OS because it has that one feature that we have really wanted for a long time.

People who have been using a PC or some other OS for years and are worried that if they buy a Mac (which they might be tempted to), they would not be able to make a seamless transition. Those people are the perfect target group for these ads. Sure the ads are not cool. They are not jaw dropping or emotional like most of the Apple ads in the recent past have been. But they get the point across. The point that help is available at the Apple Store. That Apple Store is not a place to just buy a new Mac or go for repair. But it is a place to go when you need any kind of help or advice or have the slightest doubt about your Apple device. Go find a Genius and they will help you, no matter what your problem is. That's a strong message to convoke people who are on the edge.

I would go a step further an say, that this is an Ad for Apple Store as a go to place. Advertisement about people who work at the Genius bar, and everything that comes with buying an Apple product. An Ad for the Apple way of things.

Footnotes

[1] I often visit the Youtube page of Apple to see how the Ads have evolved over the years.

[2] I think the Siri ads are meant to do something similar. I have never found it easy to use Siri because of behavioral reasons. I don't want to be seen talking to my phone and everyone around me knowing that I need to be reminded to buy grocery tonight. But the ads, showing celebrities are to remind, ingrain into us that, it's OK. It's normal. And that, it is not awkward.

[3] For the love of God, please don't raise the "This is what happens now that Steve is not around" card every time Apple does something that does not serve your misaligned sense of what Apple is supposed to do. I am pretty sure most of the folks at Apple are smart and talented enough to know how to do this better than any one of us.

Interface Inspiration

Tuhin Kumar — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 10:18:00 -0000

It is easy to mix up inspiration and imitation. Especially when the only place you are looking for inspiration is in the design of other people. Here is a quick video of a new installation of physical objects being used as a source of inspiration at the 37Signals office.

If you are interested in the inspiration vs imitation ideology, do check this talk by Cameron Moll

Make sure you read the original post.

VIA

Mediocrity

Tuhin Kumar — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 21:28:00 -0000

Every morning I take the Caltrain to get to work and then every evening I take the train back to my home. During the first few days of my daily commute, I used to notice this building at one of the stations in the route that had three logos of (most likely) web related companies.

The first day I saw them, I forgot I had seen them the next moment. Over time, everytime I looked at them, I used to recognize them, but feel nothing. This is strange because I feel something towards most of the things in my life esepcially if they happen to be related to design. I like them or hate them. But there is always a reaction, a response to the stimulus if you may say. There is always a visceral reaction to most of the things I encounter.

Each day I would wonder why? Soon the 3 logos became an object of curiosity to me. I could not find anything wrong with them, but I could not find anything great about them either. And then it struck me.

They were just average. Just mediocre.

Think about that for a second! Three logos designed by someone and all three just average. It was not the first time I had seen something mediocre but it was the first time I had seen 3 mediocre logos on top of one building in the middle of nowehere.

I think, that is the worst that can happen to a design, a startup or one's life[1]. Just being average or mediocre. Mediocrity leads to apathy. Worst yet, mediocrity prevents you from being able to do amazing things.

If there is one thing you should avoid, it should be mediocrity. Not failure, but mediocrity.

[1] Some friends on Twitter suggested that being mediocre is the key to be happy in life. I might agree with that definition for life, for some types of people. But surely it should never apply to work. There is a difference between being mediocre in life and doing mediocre work in life.

Opinions in Design

Tuhin Kumar — Tue, 22 May 2012 22:28:00 -0000

Current state of my mind: I was half way to bed when I read this answer from Louie Mantia on the "working at Square" thread on Quora. I could simply not stop myself from writing this for the basic reason that this is important. Really important to me personally.

At Square, there's chances to influence products, though I would say that most of the work done is out of direction from others (like leadership). I became frustrated with Square when I realized that I was drawing things in an attempt to please management/leadership. I wasn't trying to fix things as I thought they should be done. Instead, I was starting to design and think in Square's mindset, not my own. And most times when I voiced my opinion, I was met with conflict. I was constantly prodded to "prove my work" by creating multiple versions of things (which I had done at Apple, but never to the extent I had to at Square).

I don't know how other people work, but while I work, I try to decide what's best and scrap other things. I don't often keep things I don't like.

And though I might have seemed stubborn, I believe that when you hire a creative person, you don't hire them just for their ability to use a certain piece of software, but also for their opinions, thoughts, and guidance.

I cannot over-emphasize the above snippet from the answer. Especially the one about "…as I thought they should be done…". Most people do not realise this, almost believe the contrary. But design is as much an art as it is a science. Every product has a soul and that comes from the vision and perspective of people behind it. No matter how hard you try it always creeps in. Trying to avoid it leads into a product that just sucks at everything or is simply "average". This is why design is opinionated. This is why design and thus products that carry them should evoke emotions, good or bad. You cannot build something that everyone likes. Period.

This is why opinions matter in design, this is why designers are so damn opinionated about things. Because you cannot design by a set of rules to maximize a number[1]. Yes that is one goal but behind all of this is the guiding philosophy, the opinion, the way one sees things. Some of the best work in the world comes from people who are highly opinionated. And for someone who has opinions, to be always told what needs to be done is almost suffocating.

The other part about what you do post hiring a creative person is important too, I think. Hire someone smart and let them do the way they do things. This is why you hired them in the first place.

Footnotes:

[1]I feel it almost shouts for another post where I go deeper into the why of last statement. Mostly has to do with local maxima of design (every perceived absolute maxima becomes annoyingly boring after a while), novelty and emotions in the dimension of time.

[2] People like to read between the lines and make assumptions. This has NOTHING to do with my current work but something I have seen too many times that it has become a pet peeve.

The sweet spot of personal search

Tuhin Kumar — Mon, 14 May 2012 21:00:00 -0000

Over time as more and more people start using web apps and services in the cloud, there needs to be a good way to search through all of that as and when needed and also make sense of it. Most of us refer to this domain as Personal Search, others as "the other half of web search".

Why has the adoption of this been so slow then? Why have the companies in this domain been so few and the products mostly just text based search with no in built contextual smartness or recommendation or any knowledge of what I want over time. Why do I still need to type keywords than type/speak natural phrases like "where does John live?"

The two big players (besides Google and Bing) are Greplin and CloudMagic. While Greplin has shown some really smart ideas on mobile, the overall feature set leaves a lot desired. Another smart approach is the one Ness has taken with tackling this indirectly via recommendations starting with restaurants.

I still think a lot needs to be done in this domain. Imagine Siri kind of intelligence with really contextual search and notifications. Here are a few use cases:

When on my way to a meeting, quickly enable to find info around the other participants or their phone numbers
Maybe if both parties have the app installed, allow sharing of location for a fixed time frame
If I saw something in my twitter feed but broadly remember the contents of the actual article, why is it so hard to get to it?
If I enter a restaurant and I have never been here, then recommend me what's good here (that I will like)
If I pinned something and near a shop that has it, suggest I buy it
When leaving for a meeting why can't I be reminded well in advance depending how long it would take, my preferred means of transport and existing conditions
My battery is about to die, why can my phone not remind me of a public charging place around
I tweeted something as a question, can my phone find the answer faster than my twitter network and tweet back at me or just give an in-app notification?
Analyze my communication and email to auto add events and reminders (better to not do it than do it wrong)
Somebody I have been lately chatting with on twitter a lot is around, why is it still so hard to notify people? (I seriously do not think there needs to be an app just for that)
What about all the information stored by my phone's sensors (how fast am I driving vs the allowed speed limit)
It is a friend’s birthday today, how about quickly finding about that gift she mentioned last year in Hawaii
If I am searching for ”cab” at 10:00 in night, why not just show me my cab companies’ number quickly? Maybe even show an in-app menu to call Über
Why is there still no platform to build apps using this personal data. What about a quick way to find text inside of documents and PDFs in Dropbox?
Speaking of platforms, can search itself be approached as a platform. As more and more of our data moves towards apps that Google cannot crawl, the more useful such a platform of search becomes. Instead of trying to search Yelp and Foursquare individually, what if these queries were distributed by a common origin point to these apps' backend and then answered returned and presented in a structured, normalized and unified way.

A lot of you would say that these are more features of a virtual personal assistant. I would say they have more to do with contextual search than an app that does what you ask of it. So instead of waiting for something like Siri to implement these, it could be a potential domain for personal search to explore.

Do you use any of the above apps? Why? Would you use something like this? What is the one feature that you would definitely need? Send in your thoughts on Twitter.

Inventing on Principle

Tuhin Kumar — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 13:59:00 -0000

One of the most powerful talks I have watched, ever. The part about living life by principle(s) is something that I have been doing sub-consciously for a while now. However, hearing this laid down so clearly is eye opening to say the least.

Letter Together

Tuhin Kumar — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 22:40:00 -0000

I had the opportunity to attend Letter Together, a lettering/type workshop organized by two amazing folks: one being Jessica (of the Hische fame) and the other being Erik (of Friends of Type). I knew this was going to be a good experience but it turned out to be way more awesome than I had imagined. Jessica is one of the most helpful person I know of in the industry. I know this first hand when I had gotten in touch with her over a personal lettering project. The fact that she answered all my stupid question without having known me or met me ever before was a gesture that I will always remember. And Erik is just the sweetest teacher you will ever meet. Together they took our group of 13 (2 letters each would make all alphabets) into a crash course on elementary type design.

We started off with amazing donuts and coffee that Jessica had brewed, quickly moving into sketching alphabets followed with a round of a really toned down critique. I say toned down but in no way was this ineffective. They kept dropping pearls of wisdom (I know a cliché but this was so true for them) as they talked about typography and lettering.

In the second half of the day we were all given 2 alphabets each that we had to draw on paper. We were later to draw them in Illustrator. Erik taught us a few tricks in Illustrator which really will make my life in Illustrator a hell lot easier. Both of them showed us their process and needless to say that was a revelation of the amount of hard work that they put into their work. By the end when we had got all our alphabets printed and critiqued we had well exceeded the original timings of the workshop. Despite that none of us really wanted to leave.

In hindsight this was one of the most amazing experience I have ever had learning from someone else. The act of really opening up your mind and your process, especially for something you are not great at, is very humbling. Add to that a pair of mentors who kept praising us to keep us motivated. The whole energy was so positive that it was refreshing. I really wish we have an advanced version and that I can attend it. For anyone who is interested in type design and lettering, if you get a chance please do attend it.

You can see more pictures from the day on Flickr.

My new Hello Cards!

Tuhin Kumar — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 21:52:00 -0000

In light of a ton of opportunity to meet amazing new people during the next two weeks, I decided it was high time I got new business cards printed for myself. However I wanted to do things a bit differently.

Inspiration

Long time ago in 2009, I had come across this business card from Inayaili de León. You can guess it's impact by the sheer fact that I remember it till this day, despite having seen a ton of really amazing business cards. It was the simplest business card I had ever seen and yet it made perfect sense to me. This time I did not want a business card that was cramped with all kind of information nobody ever cared about. This time I wanted a simple way for people to recall my name and if they needed a dead simple way to contact me.

Why Twitter?

It is probably the simplest place to know everything about me. My bio will give you a glimpse of who I am and link to my website. You can get in touch with me right on Twitter which is honestly my most preferred medium of quick communication.

Design and Printing

The typeface used is Chaparral Pro from Adobe. My ideal preference would have been Skolar but I don't happen to own the font, hence the fallback. The red used is Tangerine, Pantone 2012 color of the year. For printing purposes, the color actually used was this one. The paper used is Cranes Lettra, Pearl in 220# with red colored edge.

Going for letterpress was an obvious choice. I chose to go with The Mandate Press, based on countless positive recommendations on Dribbble. Would definitely be going back to these guys again in future. Given my zero experience in printing, leave alone letterpress, they were very patient with me.

Saying Hello and making a personal connection

I had initially wanted the back side of the card to be a blind press with Eunoia and Pulse logo but decided against it. I felt it was the perfect opportunity to make the card more about the personal connection than sheer networking. So for every person I hand out the card to, I will be adding handwritten notes on the back side so that they may remember me. Also the hidden benefit of writing a note, besides the smile it leaves when the person reads it anytime in future, is the fact that in the process of writing the note, you also write their name thus making it hard to forget them. I am calling these "Hello Cards"!

Also check out a few other photos from the mini photoshoot of the cards on Flickr.

Dopey Ideas

Tuhin Kumar — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:40:00 -0000

Today I will talk about ideas. You know the ones we have while taking a shower that turn a 5 min shower into an hour long one or the ones that strike us in the dead of the night and leave us sleepless. The very same ideas that leave us thinking, the ones that others dismiss as daydreaming. Ideas so radical, you dare not tell them to anyone in fear of being a subject of public mockery. Ideas so powerful, they carry within them the force to change the course of world, yet so unformed when you encounter them at first. Here is the thing, no matter what, don't dismiss them.

Let them brew. Let them take a shape that our ignorant mind can relate more closely to; a form we understand better. All ideas begin as unformed thoughts. Some carry within them the seeds of the future while others not so much. But here is the funny part, most of the times you do not know which ones are the ones to nurture. So the only sensible thing you should do is wait and let them grow.

Our tech world is obsessed with making execution the single thing that makes all the difference between a great product vs a shitty one. Execution is important but not so much without a great idea. Think of the duo like a great car and a great driver. Without a driver who knows what to do with the car, the ride will just not be the same. But to say the ride in itself is worthless is far fetched. For without one the other is worthless or at least fairly diminished in value.

There is something else about ideas, I must tell you. Your gut will often try to fool you into thinking of an idea as not feasible. Don't let it do that. Instead when you come across one of those ideas, pause, take that Field Notes out and jot it down. Don't worry what you write, could be just words, barely making any sense, but that's ok. Just don't ignore them.

Keep thinking. Keep tinkering.

Svbtly Obtvse

Tuhin Kumar — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:08:00 -0000

Pretty sure you know the story by now. Dustin launched Svbtle as an invite only blogging network that uses it's design as insignia of "guaranteed to be great" content by being open only to "vetted" bloggers.

The initial release was sadly filled with a lot of snob and arrogance. The Hacker News community in particular did not like it and Nate Wienert created something similar in a lot less time without the nifty animations. He cheekily called it Obtvse. It was not an attempt to benefit by copying the idea but just a response to the arrogance, I think. Also the idea of a minimalist blogging platform is not unique at all. None of this is unique but as a whole it is unique.

Based on the discussions on HN, a sad feeling I get is people honestly believe that copying code is different from copying design. It is not. It is as bad and is still copying. Just like every programmer loves their implmentation/logic more than the actual code, every designer loves the idea/implementation and how it all fits together over the actual assets/images. So if you are defending how you did not copy a design, do not tell you did not copy the assets or CSS or code to justify your stand.

At the same time, once you release something on the web, you at least partially lose control. In this case Dustin lost contol of his idea and also the design's minimalism. People who admired it or wanted something but were not invited, sought to build something for themselves. Hopefully over time Nate's product will find a voice and design that is rightfully unique shaped by the open source sommunity it aims to cater to. Frank Chimero has something great to talk about it:

I think once you publish something, you lose control of it. At worst, you inspire mockery and parody. At best, you become material for future work, because what you’ve made is successful, interesting, or relevant. Usually, it is both.

All work produces spill-over repercussions that usually go against the will of the work’s creator. The creator wishes to retain authorship and control the work, while those in the culture wish to use, transform, and remix it. If the work is truly successful, it will defy authorship and turn into a shared experience for everyone. Those works are the hardest to control, because they diffuse, and spread wide by permeating into the air. The become a shorthand for those who make or enjoy similar work, becoming a shared vocabulary.

The situation requires things from both those who create the work, and those who wish to use it.

For the initial creator, they must resign most control upon publication, especially on the internet. Their work will be used to say and do things they don’t intend. Ideas, in truth, go further when others carry them, and this usually means they will go in directions the original author did not intend or imagine. For instance, I’ve had a quote of mine (“People ignore design that ignores people.”) taken out of context and used to justify two completely contradictory design methods. So it goes.

For those that use the things made by others, they should credit where possible, and have their work be transformative in some way. They can carry the ideas of others, but they must to take it further or a new direction. Then, they are obliged share alike. To not do both is to go against the goodwill initiated by the work’s creator.

And for both, we should recognize that all creative processes use materials from those who came before us, and respect the meaningful influence of others. We’re part of a long line of people who make things. It is a privilege to get to use the work of others in our own.

Regardless, I honestly saw this coming the moment I read the HN discussions. If only Dustin had toned down the opinionated release, the backlash would not have been this bad. Something we all should note especially when doing side projects.

Be good and treat others like you would like to be treated.

Disclaimer: I had asked Dustin back in end Jan if he were planning to make his blogging platform public. He said he was looking for beta testers and got back to me showing screenshots of what is now Svbtle. I was looking for a simpler blogging platform so I said I yes. He never responded back and I have since, found something that works pretty well for me. As and when I find time, I will make a fork of Pelican (it is what I use for my blog) that makes the act of writing posts and keeping them in cloud more cohesive than just Markdown files being synced and also make the Dropbox setup simpler and release. It might not be Open source, but will be open. Let me know if you more people are interested in this.

Interesting Read: Svbtle vs Obtvse (and on copying)

Influence & Best Design

Tuhin Kumar — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 02:28:00 -0000

As designers we draw inspiration and influence from a lot of sources around us. This helps us solve different problems with a unique approach and leaves its imprint on the products we build. I want to talk about influence today.

Influence is not inspiration; the same way it is not imitation. Inspiration and imitation (see Cameron Moll's Good vs Great Design), I think, are two extreme ends of a spectrum of stimuli for designers and influence sits somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. The other way to look at it is as the average response to inspiration and imitation. No matter what it means to you, I think it is safe to assume, for the sake of this discussion, that influence is an additive process especially when you look at its net effect in a product.

When we decided to create project management software, we knew Microsoft Project was the gorilla in the room. Instead of fearing the gorilla, we used it as a motivator. We decided Basecamp would be something completely different, the anti-Project. - 37Signals in Getting Real

When a product designer sets out to design a product there are a number of variables that they need to explore and find the values of before a problem, that the product aims to solve, is actually solved. To do so one of the many things we do is, look for what has been done before this. We call this prior work or "what do others do". Some might call it market research, some a SWOT analysis, while others may call it something else. It is essentially deciding where your product fits in the bigger affair of things in an industry. Somewhere during all this exploration, comes a choice to decide if the product you are building has to be innovative or it has to be simply incremental in design, still following the primary information architecture of "other apps" in that domain. It is a conscious choice in most cases. Another very important influencing factor in this equation is what the nearest competitor is doing (or the one competitor you really worry about). This is where things get a little debatable, interesting and tricky!

One school of thought believes that if there is a great way to do something, it must be done that way, irrespective of what competitors do. I fall in the other camp. I think there is no absolute best solution in design. Every feature's design is influenced by a central ethos that led to the ideation of the product - the reason for its existence. Thus the chances, that a solution/feature, that works for someone else's product, works in your case too, is not very likely, unless, the central ethos is exactly the same, in which case one of the two products is a ripoff. Foursquare and Gowalla were similar yet not same. Both had features and interaction, that was unique to one and only one. Word and Pages are similar yet so different. Readability and Instapaper seem similar but their approach to solving a common problem is different, as is clear in their respective product positioning so far.

Besides avoiding to fall into the grey area of being even vaguely misunderstood for copying a feature/design, there is another wonderful result of this self imposed restriction of avoiding solutions used by competitor apps. It makes you stretch your own boundaries of imagination. Let's take the example of a music streaming service like Spotify or Rdio. Obviously both in their recent incarnations are heavily inspired by iTunes. The similarity to iTunes probably helps new users understand the services better. However, do you honestly think that an interface that was designed 11 years ago for local MP3 files is the "best" or "only" interface or interaction model to follow for a music streaming app today? I don't. This is where such a self imposed bound really helps creativity. This is why I used to like the old Rdio so much because it showed the world that iTunes's interface was not the only "awesome" solution to managing music or listening to it.

I am really interested in listening how others go about this dilemma of influence and best design. Is it ignorant to make such a conscious effort? Is there a best solution in design? Do share opinions on Twitter.

Designing Time

Tuhin Kumar — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 18:10:00 -0000

As our interfaces evolve we continue to add new dimensions to them. The interfaces of today are, for most cases, more intricate than interfaces of yesterday. Over the last year or two, one of the most important of these dimensions to be considered while designing interfaces is time. By "time", for purpose of this post, I refer to any part of the interface that signifies the "age" of a certain element on the page. Be it a simple blog post or a status update or a tweet. Anything whose value changes, for the better or worse (within the realm of digital interfaces), with time, is part of the discussion of this post. As we move towards real time systems, this dimension of time in the interface becomes more important than ever.

This weekend I was reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". For some reason I had picked up the physical copy than the electronic version that I had. While flipping through the pages I could get an idea of how old my physical copy of the book was. At the minimum, I could tell, this is not a new book, nor a 2 year old copy. It was something older than that, and the color of the pages, the fold of the corners and the physical condition of the book in general were the clues that my mind was picking up to synthesize this information. That is when I began thinking about how we solve this in our interfaces currently. How do we make the user realize this dimension of time without literally writing it for them?

State of Interface Union

Unfortunately a majority of our interfaces do a not-so-amazing-job at it. Some simply show the timestamp in case of a user generated entry and a few others convert it into more human form saying "how long ago this happened". Popular examples being our Twitter stream and Facebook news feed. Can we be more innovative than this where even if we do not show the user a full information about time, at all times, they can still be aware of the "age" of an element?

inviting coworkers
— Jack Dorsey (@jack) March 21, 2006

Gradually getting there

The recent approach of using a timeline to visualize any collection of information where time plays an important aspect is a welcome change. The most recognizable ones being Facebook and Path. The way Facebook timeline shows lesser stories as we go back in time is synonymous to how we register past. Path on the other hand, avoids showing the timestamp as a primary part of the interface but shows them when you start to scroll or "travel around in time" within the interface. Snapjoy, is another interesting example of how an interface can give chronological information without being explicit about it.

However the above mentioned examples still attempt to solve the problem at a collective level and not at the individual element's level. What I mean by that is the age of individual stories, moments or status update is still shown as a mere text. What if we could also visualize this age somehow in the interface through colors, symbols or any other visual treatment.

Explorations

What if our interfaces had a way to show how old the information shown is? In turn also telling how reliable this information is? Surely a tweet that is a year old, is more than likely to be of lesser value and have incorrect information than a tweet from yesterday. The contents of a news article in an online site are a function of time. Why then, do we as interface designers fail to consider these when designing interfaces? Also, this scale of time to distinguish new and old, is relative too. When following news about a football match, the difference between old and new is a factor of hours. While when following the Presidential Election, it is a factor of days if not months. Our representation of time in interfaces needs to be calibrated for this.

An earlier version of the blog of Francisco Inchauste touched on this kind of visual design. I have not seen other examples of something like this being done on the web or apps.

Similarly another simple implmentation could be using color as an index of time. Just like the Clear app uses color variation to represent priority, we might use these color variations for representing time. An older element could literally be faded away snd thereby draw lesser attention from the unaware user. In cases where it does draw the attention or the user ends up coming to it from an outside link, then they are aware of this chronological data without even explicity looking for it in the interface.

What do you think about this? If you have more ideas, examples feel free to send them via Twitter.

A Vintage Studio

Tuhin Kumar — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 07:00:00 -0000

This weekend I had a chance to visit this cool little place in San Francisco called Photobooth. It's a tiny studio that does Tintype photgraphy and also is a great hangout place if you are into vintage photography or cameras. I ended up not only getting a portrait shot but also hanging there for around 2 hours talking about cameras, medium and photography tools and above all had an amazing time.

Check out more pics from this weekend including ones from SF MOMA on Flickr.

Contact Lust, Gatekeeper & Industry Practices

Tuhin Kumar — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:45:00 -0000

Update

Path has released an official apology for the mess. Really happy to see them do what is right for the user, because I love the app and use it everyday. I would say this is the best part and the most important one.

So, as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers. Your trust matters to us and we want you to feel completely in control of your information on Path. - Dave Morin (path)

I had made up my mind not to write a blog post about the Path fuck-up. Whatever criticism I had, I had already spoken on Twitter.

"Everybody else is in the industry is doing it" or "It is Apple's fault" is not such a great way to handle a compromising situation. #path
— Tuhin Kumar (@tuhin) February 7, 2012

However, I gave up resisting when I read the comments on Hacker News on the second article of the day talking about Hipster (yes, the Local deals- Local Q&A - Photo Postcard app company that had a funny jobs page). Apparently the hall of shame includes, Instagram (over https atleast), Facebook (no surprise), Kik, WhatsApp, Beluga (not sure) and many more. Path is just the kid that got caught with their pants down and hands busy.

Contact Lust: All your contacts belong to us

The desire of any company, that relies on network effects for it's product to succeed, is to get as many contacts as possible and then create leads based on invites, recommendations, cold emails and all kinds of tricks of the trade. We all know it and I would be surprised to find any company in the social space that can proudly say they have never resorted to anything of that sort. The easiest way for mobile apps to get this is the Address Book. To be honest the signal to noise ratio of my address book is way higher than my contacts on any social network. So truly this is a gold mine. Where there is gold, there are the miners. However, with miners and diggers comes the need for regulations.

Apple: the gatekeeper that should have stood

In all of this, probably the biggest blame falls on Apple. From the way I see it, it makes truly no sense that something as private as Address book should be accessible without explicit permission or opt in from the user.

One can do way more harm knowing the contact info of people close to me than where I am at any point, which I share publically for the most part either ways.

Industry Practice

This is currently the industry best practice and the App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information. - Dave Morin (Path)

This is what makes me really annoyed at this drama. C'mon Dave, surely you are better than that. Also when did industry practice become a yardstick for company ethics?

Apple gives you access to the user's Contact list without ever asking the user for explicit opt-in/permision a la the Locations popup- Apple's bad.
You send this contact information from the user's device to the server in any form (secure or insecure is a different debate altogether) without asking/informing the user explicity- your bad

I am not talking about legal issues, data access, ownership of data or anything else. I am simply asking to keep users at the heart of the decision and their privacy at the helm of affairs. Just because Facebook has been getting away with it DOES NOT mean this is the "path" to follow.

Simply saying, every other app does it too, is NOT the attitude we as a community should have. Do you know who else blindly follows industry practices and copies what everyone else in the industry is doing? Hollywood!

Interesting Read

Congratulations, Nest!

Tuhin Kumar — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0000

Earlier in the day Honeywell, the company behind practically every thermostat in the country, filed a lawsuit that alleges Nest, a company that builds a learning thermostat, of patent infringement. So why on earth am I congratulating them for being sued?

Finding a great market

The very fact that Honeywell is suing them for patent infringement is sign that they have found a big market potential here. It is not just about "smart" thermostats that look beautiful too. It is about trying to change the status quo of the home appliances market. Anybody in their right minds and with a bit of math can figure out that someone like Tony Fadell will not be entering a small market like thermostats to make a whole lot of money. Thermostats are just an entry point. Have a look around your house, from the water heater to the Fridge and tell me if you feel they are in dire need of innovation. That is what Nest is in this for. The name Nest itself is pretty brilliant if you ask me and very well thought of. when you see it in light of extending to a whole range of high-end beautifully designed products for your "nest".

It is not about the silly patents or the idea

If this interview by Honeywell's President of some big-name-division is to be believed, they killed off this very idea 20 years ago.

We found that consumers prefer to control the thermostat, rather than being controlled by the thermostat.

So why bother suing someone over something you figured does not work anyways? Does it not make more sense as a strategy to let them continue working (or in your eyes waste time) on an idea that you had rejected eons ago? This is where the fun begins.

The damn distribution model

It's not that Honeywell does not have similar products (though incompetent) of it's own. However, try hard as you may, you will never find them in your local hardware store. Honeywell sells it through HVAC contractors. Also the products linked above are, from a strategy point of view, made for "enterprise" customer. So that leaves an entire distribution model of local hardware and retail outlets wide open for a company like Nest to come and eat the pie. This is, I believe, the primary reason Best Buy is also included in the lawsuit, since they sell Nest thermostats in their stores.

So Nest is not here to sell thermostats. It is here to change the way you think about appliances and home devices in general. It is here change the way a common person buys them and what they pay for them. And for that, they deserve huge congratulations. Think of them like being in the business of making iPods when everyone was trying to sell crappy MP3 players. Oh, wait.

Dropbox is the new Publish Button

Tuhin Kumar — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 18:48:00 -0000

I had written earlier about what my ideal blogging setup would look like. I am glad that I have been able to find something close enough that works for me. I looked around for a while hoping that surely someone must have created something close enough to what I need. My initial search of existing blogging platforms, big and small, ended up being fruitless. I had started working on something from scratch in Python. However, I knew being a noob programmer that I was, it would not only take months but that it would more than likely be full of gaping security holes. This is when I looked into Pelican for the second time, in light of using Dropbox as a way to publish my posts. I did not want to use FTP or push my posts via Github. Joe Hewitt has a brilliant post on using Dropbox as a method to push your posts to a server, in case you are interested.

Behind the Scenes

I write my posts in iA Writer. Each post begins it's life as a .txt file that I continue to iterate or write in multiple sittings. Once done, I simply change the file extension to the Markdown extension .md since it (and .rst) are the only file formats, Pelican handles by default. This avoids having to use a Status tag and setting it to Draft for every unpublished post because Pelican does not consider any .txt files for a potential new post.

All this while every version of the file is continously saved in a Dropbox shared folder. This shared folder is shared between my main Dropbox account and a sepearate account that is installed on my Ubuntu server. The Dropbox CLI for Linux is the key to get this done. Using a seperate account and a shared folder balances ease of use and safety of the rest of your files in your main Dropbox account. Just keep in mind Dropbox does not like being installed as root and throws all kinds of errors. Just create a new user and install Dropbox as this user while setting up. Also I am using Amazon S3 for all static resources within posts to which I can upload even using my iPhone.

How do these Markdown files get converted into static HTML pages for the blog? That is where the magic of Pelican comes in. It smoothly creates an output folder with all your posts and other blog pages as HTML every time you ask it explicitly. It also generates the tags, archives and RSS feeds of your static blog. This setup makes the site not only faster but also avoids any database complications or security issues that you might run into otherwise. Best of all, if anything unwanted ever happens, I can simply install Pelican and use my local Markdown files to create my blog all over again in less than 5 minutes.

Another missing piece of puzzle is how to watch the Dropbox folder on the server for any file changes that will then ask Pelican to generate new files for the new blog post. The answer is Incron, which watches Dropbox folder for any changes and executes a script that asks Pelican to do the needful. If you are looking for something more step by step, this post by Matt Ronge should be your go to guide.

The Design

The biggest reason for starting off with a new blog was to make blogging as frictionless for me as possible. If I want to write about something, the only step involved should be actually writing it. My original blog was designed for individually styled posts and more importantly as a protfolio. It was designed to sell myself and did it's job well. Fortunately I do not need that anymore, hence the need for a change. I could have chosen to redesign the old site but the thought of providing backward compatibility to older posts meant features I was not looking for in the new system. I am still not sure of what I will be doing of the previous site. Maybe I will make it a simple one page portfolio once I am done transferring all the blog posts in the new system and once I have found/written a good way to export my Tumblr.

With this blog, I am keeping things simple and minimal. The design has a flavor of my favorite colors of the season but is otherwise minimalist. I really like the idea of a cover/banner that I can change over time depending on my mood/season/occasion as seen in the Facebook timeline, Path and other new services. Other than that the site is as minimal as I could go for without being bland. The idea is to give written and visual content the room to shine. The typeface used is Skolar and is served via Typekit. All posts have a Tweet and a Read later button that enable you to appreciate the content if you liked it or save it for later reading if you are running short on time. Needless To say, but the site is responsive to the screen size you are viewing it on.

The nature of posts will be, as the name suggests highly opinionated and polar. It will cover design, startups and tech but everything will be as seen from my eyes. There will be long form articles interdigitated with shorter articles reflecting on important events/articles/news from the aforementioned spheres. I hope to write more frequently, so expect to see 3-4 posts every week in general.

For now, it is time to hit the save (publish) button.

Dear Steve

Tuhin Kumar — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 11:00:00 -0000

Dear Steve

I should have written this letter long time back, when I had a chance. When I had hope that there was this slight possibility that you would read this and maybe slighter possibility that you would reply to it. I never did.

I was too afraid to never hear back from the one person who I looked upon as an idol. A figure who through his years of actions had set a guidebook for me to reference when life threw a puzzle I had no answer for. Now I know, that fear of grief was nothing compared to the hollow sinking feeling when I know you will never read this. When I know that the guidebook’s last pages have been written and there are no more comebacks, lessons and magical things to come.

I have never met you or seen you in person. The closest we might have come tangentially would be when you spoke of Pulse, the company I was to later work at or when you and others at Apple had decided to give Pulse the Apple Design Award while I had just joined them. For every other moment of my life I have come only as close as using a Mac or the iPhone or the iPad and wondering if I could ever tell you how thankful I am for all these creations.

Had it not been for you, I would not be a lot of things I am today. It was my first MacBook that inspired me to become a designer. It was my first Apple blog that got me into blogging. It was my first iPhone that made me get into photography. It was your 2005 speech at Stanford that made me take the final plunge into the world of design and leave a conventional career behind. It is my first iPad with which I write this. However, you will never know and I will never have that elated feeling for which I wanted to do great work all my life so that one day Steve would take note. For someone who I never knew personally you have sure touched my life on so many levels. I do not think I have it in me to cry for losing a person in my life but the closest I could ever come to that I did when I heard about you. You had set out to create a dent in the universe you ended up changing it for all of us.

Steve, Thank You!

Instagram

Tuhin Kumar — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 11:00:00 -0000

The natural progression of things on the web is inevitable. One form of technology gives way to another and the fountain continues to flow. Assuming stagnation especially in the interwebs where things change by the day would be foolish to say the least.

Take into account the very need of Google OS based device since the announcement and keeping in view the growth of the Android platform since. When the announcement was first made, like everyone else I was very excited but today I would read about it in my RSS Reader and never care about it the next moment. That is the best and the worst things about the web. No matter who you are, things will change and even the best laid plans will falter.

In light of this knowledge, let us take a look into a small app that is gradually redefining the landscape of the way people share and click photographs. I am referring one of my most used apps on my iPhone, Instagram. Even if you have not used it yourself, I am sure you have seen it in bits and pieces via the links left by one of its 3,00,000 users (in less than 1 month of launch). If Twitter and Flickr were to have a love child, it would be Instagram.

What is it that has made Instagram such an overnight success. The number of photography apps in the App Store is endless, then what made it such a quick hit among masses? What is the secret sauce that founders Mike and Kevin seem to have figured out?

What problem does it solve?

For any app, the first and most important question to ask is “what problem does it solve”. The how comes later. Instagram solves the problem of sharing our moments effortlessly with the world and in a way that makes us look creative. I have talked about tapping the ego of the user and Instagram taps into our inherent urge to be creative (hipster if you may). In one click it allows me to explore the world of people who are not only far more creative but also share brilliant photographs despite the limitations of the device and the app (if you question this, have a look at Dan Rubin’s Instagram timeline).

Unlike Flickr where the focus is porting over friends and family from other network or seeing what they are uploading once in a blue moon, Instagram founders understand that there are only a billion other ways to do that. So they went ahead and solved the more complex problem of sharing stories through photography effortlessly and also seeing what others share, no matter whether they are friends or family or someone I have never heard of before.

Call it Instagraphy if you may!

Remember the time when all that blogging meant was writing long thoughtful pieces and along came a little blue bird that went by the name of Twitter. The landscape of blogosphere changed since then and today microblogging as a term is limited to only the social media fanatics. For the rest of the world, it is sharing opinion and views. Whether I do that in 140 words or write a novella about it should not really matter.

In a similar fashion, in a world of HD cameras and brilliant lenses, instagraphy brings photography to everybody and at all times. Every decent mobile phone is now equipped with a camera that can save a moment forever. Till now the moment was normally captured and forgotten. It was only when you ever took out the cable to sync your photographs or cared to email them to yourself that that moment was shared with others who would care about it. With Instagram, it all happens effortlessly. Sharing photographs over multiple networks is a magical potion that Instagram has brewed very craftily (second only to the now banned Campl.us), but more important in the long run will be the plethora of narratives being shared on Instagram itself.

The retro charm at no extra cost

Instagram has a set of filters that you can apply to your photographs and it all works like a charm. The process is streamlined and the filters beautiful. The end result is a photograph that not only can be shared easily across multiple social networks but is also worth sharing and gaining some street cred for being a creative hipster.

There are other apps like Hipstamatic that do this, but personally I believe it takes skeuomorphic design to another dimension where the charm of photographs comes at a heavy price of unnecessary an often annoying wait for animations like the changing of lens or the smaller viewport to click photographs. If I were ready for that investment, I would rather go buy a retro camera than use an app for it!

Community

The early adopters of Instagram were designers or photographers and all sorts of creatives. Add to that the easy access to Popular photographs which are regularly updated, Instagram has the perfect tools to grow a community. The app had 100,000 users in the first 6 days (a feat that took Foursquare 6 months to complete). The easy (though a bit confusing) way to import friends via Twitter makes it work like a charm. There is no extra effort that needs to be made to be involved in the community. The Like button comes to the rescue at times when we are too bored to comment on that awesome shot we just saw.

I do not know what lies next for Instagram. I do not know if they have given it a thought, but they seem to have tapped into a big market that is yet unoccupied or at least in its infancy. With carefully built extensions for desktop and other mobile devices, they might very well be on their way to be the next Flickr or Twitter or maybe something completely new and unheard of. After all evolution and progression are inevitable on the web.