Marci Ikeler

Weekly Reading

Sun, 19 May 2013 18:41:35 -0400

Here are my recommended long reads for this week:

How, When and Where Will The First Truly Great Digital Design Studio Emerge? - The digital agency landscape is changing rapidly, and small shops are ascendent. Good summary of the current landscape.
A Guide to Practical Compassion - I’m interested in all aspects of mindfulness and one area that I’ve found I really need help with is compassion - for myself and for others.
‘Invisible biometrics’ detect user identity by how they use the device - I’m fascinated by alternative, passive interfaces, and this a great example of a future use case.
Why Every Business Should Consider Innovation Teams - The skunkworks model of innovation continues to be popular, and this article displays why.
Is design a part of mainstream startup culture now? Absolutely. - Good article on the importance of design in startup culture.
Creative People Say No - I love this article. It explains why creative people have to be good at filtering distractions from their primary work - and that means saying “no”. Great read.

"Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 10:07:08 -0400

“Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work: the work of becoming expert through study and practice, the work of finding solutions to problems and problems with those solutions, the work of trial and error, the work of thinking and perfecting, the work of creating. Creating consumes.”

- Creative People Say No

"AirBnb baked design in from day one — taking the time to design the entire user experience from the..."

Sat, 18 May 2013 10:10:05 -0400

“AirBnb baked design in from day one — taking the time to design the entire user experience from the maps to the review forms. Warby Parker? Same thing. CEO and co-founder Dave Gilboa thoughtfully discussed that they spent a year and a half designing a beautiful site, thick card stock printed elements in their packaging, and a really polished product. And Medium? They’re competing for designers because, as Williams stated, “they’re no longer a nice-to-have.””

- On-the-nose article about the increasing role of design in start ups.

Weekly Reading

Sun, 12 May 2013 20:12:06 -0400

Here’s a lis of the long reads I’m enjoying this week:

The Money Shot - Very interesting and in-depth profile of Instagram’s meteoric rise.
“Second Screen” Industry In Prime-Time - I’ve been fascinated by the ways in which the so-called “second screen” is both replacing and augmenting the entertainment experience. This article has numbers to back it up.
The grand ambitions of Google Ventures - The interactions between VCs and startups are always interesting - and even more so when a big company like Google gets in the mix.
From Beethoven To Woody Allen—The Daily Rituals Of The World’s Most Creative People And What You Can Learn From Them - Inspiring (and humbling).
Haruki Murakami and the Art of Japanese Translations - A discussion of one of my favorite authors and translations both lingual and cultural. Great read.

Google Glass 101: How Glass Currently Works

Sun, 05 May 2013 11:16:00 -0400

Google Glass 101: How Glass Currently Works:

"Startups ask almost everything of you. They are entirely consuming. If you don’t deeply care..."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:02:42 -0400

“Startups ask almost everything of you. They are entirely consuming. If you don’t deeply care about and deeply believe in the thing that you’re trying to do, the things, the problem that you’re trying to solve, I don’t know how you can sustain the pain and the energy requirements.”

- Gentry Underwood and Scott Cannon, founders of Mailbox. Via Fast Company.

Silent Ambassador

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:51:58 -0400

Silent Ambassador:

via swissmiss

The Flattening of Design

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 19:02:23 -0400

The Flattening of Design:

It might sound audacious to think that Microsoft, the arbiter of uncool, was at the forefront of design a few years ago. But it was. (shared via Pocket)

Sonder (via Reddit)

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 12:29:10 -0500

Sonder (via Reddit)

My Digital Brain - 2012 Snapshot

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 20:19:00 -0500

Every year I become increasingly reliant on digital tools for my normal day-to-day productivity. My overall organization system evolves rapidly as new tools are launched. At the moment, this is my killer toolkit for ultimate efficacy. I’m looking forward to continue to refine this in 2013!

Todo - I can’t live without this todo list. It tells me what to do and when to do it, and helps me remember periodic tasks (watering the terrarium every 2 weeks, getting a haircut every 6 weeks, etc.). It’s telling me to write this blog post right now.
Pomodoro - This was a new discovery for me. I’ve started following the pomodoro method, which is 25 minutes of focused work followed by a 5 minute break. For Christmas my parents gave me an actual hourglass, which I like to use instead of the digital version. Frequently, I find myself so focused that I can work beyond the 25 minute interval.
Pocket - Another new discovery. During the week I don’t have time for long reads, so I add them to Pocket. Every Sunday I have a recurring Todo to read all my Pocket items. This ensures that I read all the long reads on a weekly basis, and I find it incredibly relaxing to sit on the couch on Sunday night and reading interesting content on my iPad.
Evernote - I’ve been using Evernote for years, but the way I use it has evolved. I now have scrapbooks for myself and business, as well as notebooks for all the projects I work on. I’m not a huge fan of the redesign, but overall it’s a fantastic app.
HealthMonth - I’ve done a lot of research on the best life tracking software/app. Most of them are severely limited - Lift, which has gotten tons of press due to its relationship to Twitter, only allows binary tracking - yes or no. HealthMonth is completely flexible, and incorporates really fun gameplay elements to make it easy to stick to. Hands down it’s the best app for building habits.
DayOne - One of my resolutions in HealthMonth is to keep a journal. DayOne has great security and is incredibly easy and flexible to use. It has a clean design and is easy to use.

It’s getting to the point where I have trouble imagining a world without these tools. They help me keep my head on straight in the face of incredible amounts of information. They are my external, searchable, organized, memorized brain - so much more useful than just my head and a pen and paper.

"Apparently Zaha Hadid is working on a new building in China and it’s being pirated … AS SHE’S..."

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 12:58:03 -0500

“Apparently Zaha Hadid is working on a new building in China and it’s being pirated … AS SHE’S BUILDING THE ORIGINAL. This sounds like a weird William Gibson future world:
“But the appeal of the Prtizker Prize winner’s experimental architecture, especially since the unveiling of her glowing, crystalline Guangzhou Opera House two years ago, has expanded so explosively that a contingent of pirate architects and construction teams in southern China is now building a carbon copy of one of Hadid’s Beijing projects.
What’s worse, Hadid said in an interview, she is now being forced to race these pirates to complete her original project first.””

- Pirated Architecture | Noah Brier dot Com

"The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories,” Andreessen says. “People..."

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 12:51:13 -0500

““The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories,” Andreessen says. “People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.””

- Jobs fight: Haves vs. the have-nots – USATODAY.com (via new-aesthetic)

"In the early part of this century, if you made a service that let users create or share content, the..."

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 21:17:19 -0500

“In the early part of this century, if you made a service that let users create or share content, the expectation was that they could easily download a full-fidelity copy of their data, or import that data into other competitive services, with no restrictions. Vendors spent years working on interoperability around data exchange purely for the benefit of their users, despite theoretically lowering the barrier to entry for competitors.”

- Anil Dash, The Web We Lost

Hurricane Update

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 23:38:12 -0400

Like many New Yorkers, Aaron and I were incredibly affected by the hurricane. We live in Alphabet City, which was completely flooded by East River water. In less than a half hour, seven feet of water filled our basement to the ceiling. This basement was not a normal building basement - it was fully finished, and was Aaron’s office as well as a guest bedroom. So essentially a third of our apartment is now unusable, smelly, and dangerous.

I feel a bit bad complaining, because the important thing is that we’re safe. However, this is going to have an enormous financial impact on us - we estimate that we lost between $10-15k of belongings.

Anyway, I feel compelled to document this insane experience.

Here’s what the basement looked like in its prime. The best photos I could find were from a holiday party, hence the silly party people dancing to the Kinect.

Aaron’s battle station. Thankfully we were able to move most of his most critical electronics before the flood.

When we heard about Sandy, we figured that we might get some flooding in the basement. We had about 4 inches of water during Irene. Since the warnings about Sandy were so serious, we prepared the basement to take up to two feet of water by elevating the furniture and removing the most important electronics.

Instead of two feet, we got seven. When we heard that Avenue C was flooding, we rushed to the basement to remove as many things as possible. However, the water pressure was so intense - the streets were flooded to the tops of the cars - that our storm door broke, and water rushed in. In 30 minutes the whole basement was filled.

This is the destruction on the following day, after the water had mostly receded.

We spent a day - with the help of some amazing friends - clearing out all the debris. This pile of trash is all our belongings - thousands of dollars of books, linens, electronics, all completely ruined.

Despite that fact that we pay $900 a year in renter’s insurance, they apparently won’t cover flooding in a basement. FEMA came by to check in and took an inventory, so we might get some funds from there. It feels weird to be taking government assistance, but this was a pretty major catastrophe for us.

We’re still slightly in shock. I feel like maybe we’re being babies about it, because after all it’s just STUFF, but it’s so disconcerting to see your belongings flung around and ruined in a short period of time. My heart goes out to those who fared worse, who lost entire homes in New Jersey, Staten Island and elsewhere.

Stay strong NYC.

"If you work in digital, part of your job is understanding how digital works – from zeros and ones on..."

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 12:43:00 -0400

“If you work in digital, part of your job is understanding how digital works – from zeros and ones on up. Compartmentalization may make the business of digital easier, but it is tremendously harmful to quality of digital.”

- Read more at Inventionists and the perils of compartmentalization | Little Arrows

The Flat Design Era

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 15:02:02 -0400

layervault:

When LayerVault 2 launched earlier this spring, we believed that we were taking a risk by pursuing an entirely flat interface.

Well-loved products on the web share a similar design aesthetic, with roughly the same kinds of bevels, inset shadows, and drop shadows. For designers, achieving this level of “lickable” interface is a point of pride. For us, and for a minority of UI designers out there, it feels wrong.

We certainly didn’t invent the flat style but arriving at it was a violent process. We tore through hundreds of revisions (we have the LayerVault timelines to prove it) to potential interfaces before arriving at the answer that now makes us say “of course.” The desk at LayerVault’s original headquarters (my Manhattan apartment) still has the battle scars from objects being slammed down in anger. At one point, while working on a mockup, a MacBook was slammed shut so hard it was nearly unhinged.

Read More

A Call to Arms for Decent Men

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 15:59:20 -0400

A Call to Arms for Decent Men:

Must, must read article on how and why men need to stop hating women.

Technology becomes the layer between perception and reality

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 14:20:15 -0400

Technology becomes the layer between perception and reality:

Over at Little Arrows, I wrote a post on how human beings have begun to use technology as a remedy for our inaccurate perceptions of reality, and question what that means for objectivity. Clickety click.

"Human attention is a finite resource, the same way that oil is and energy is."

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 10:30:41 -0400

““Human attention is a finite resource, the same way that oil is and energy is.””

- Jonathan Harris, via swissmiss

"At all times love and discipline have led to a beautiful environment and a good life."

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 15:53:27 -0400

““At all times love and discipline have led to a beautiful environment and a good life.””

- Charles Eames via swissmiss