I grew up watching the news every evening with my family. It was more than a ritual — the nightly news was an important institution. Other shows on television were a brain-rotting waste of time. But the news was special. For an hour a day, my head was filled with important worldly affairs. That’s a good thing, right?
I’ve thought quite a bit lately about how I spend my time. Life is short; I’ve got a lot left to experience. So populating my thoughts with ideas that I can’t act on would be a tragic waste of time. This concept led me to a simple maxim: Think Locally.
Thinking locally means focusing your attention exclusively towards things you can act on. It means not wasting brain cycles on economic crises, swine flu cases, terrorist plots, and Toyota recalls. Focus on what you can change. Otherwise you’ll be stuck living other people’s lives.
Photo by joiseyshowaa under Creative Commons
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Today I’m both re-designing my site and re-joining a community that I’ve been absent from for awhile. It’s nice to be back, internet.
The Facebook Design team just launched a public profile on Facebook. We’ll be sharing our design philosophy, processes, and content we find interesting.
Often the role of a product designer is best described as janitorial. I recently had the pleasure of cleaning up one of Facebook’s most important pages — our registration page. The requirements of the page changed over time, leading to a lot of inconsistency and duplication. Changes to the page were made piecemeal — support for Facebook platform one week, public profiles another week, invitations the next. The result was a complicated interface for something that should be simple.
Today, Shaun Inman humbly released the best RSS reader to date.
Liquid layouts are decidedly out-of-fashion. Fixed-width, centered layouts have become the dominant design pattern for the Web, and for good reason too. Fixed-width layouts allow designers to define strict proportions between columns, and keep line-lengths under control.
Apple’s new iPhone SDK will change the cell phone game. It’s hard not to draw parallels to the introduction of the Apple II and the Mac—we’re seeing the birth of a new mass-market platform, potentially even larger than the desktop software market.
One of the greatest career and life lessons I learned in college was one I picked up freshman year from my friend Dave. He’s a guy who projects confidence in any situation, in the face of any intimidating social environment. Awkward introduction? Not for Dave. Anxiety-ridden job interview? Dave wouldn’t even sweat.
The best bit of design and career advice I got this year didn’t come from a designer but from a brilliant developer at Newsvine. I resisted his advice at first, perhaps out of arrogance or an affinity for arguing, but looking back it was something I needed to hear. Although I’ve only come to realize it months later, learning this pearl of wisdom through words and actions made my internship at Newsvine invaluable many times over.
I often have trouble aligning text and graphics horizontally on the Web. To help horizontally-challenged designers like myself, Wilson Miner wrote a fantastic guide for building pages on a baseline grid. If you do the math right it works beautifully — but I often find myself tweaking and nudging to get every last element snapped in place. To aid that process, I wrote a simple bookmarklet script that overlays a baseline grid atop everything on the page you’re viewing.
Stop being a perfectionist—just throw it out there and see what happens. It’s simple advice, but something that I’ve been ignoring for too long. Not every blog post will be your opus, not every design will be your masterpiece. Stressing over every detail and clinging onto the project until it’s “perfect” only constructs a barrier in your creative process.