Mythically, the committee is the evil association of people sarcastically portrayed in the previous paragraph, faceless drones that eat away at good graphic design like termites at yummy wood. Realistically, they are the group of people you work with, to varying degrees of involvement, from the start of a project until the end. Whether they are note-takers, brand managers, vice presidents or CEOs, they are the people that you talk to and e-mail with, they are the ones that brief you on the project and sit through the presentations of your work, they are responsible for informing your process and ensuring that the work is beneficial to their organization… they are the ones you celebrate with once the project is completed. They are real and they make or break your days, weeks, months and years.

When, by default, we assign fault to our clients, the committee, for not allowing us to do our most “creative” work, we are insinuating that they don’t know any better, and we do — that we are, indeed, better but the shortsighted fools would never notice our greatness.

It is not always easy to discern digital and analog experiences. A lot of seemingly analog devices have digital technology built in without us realizing it (tape decks, ovens, cars), and, as you might have noticed, more and more digital devices try to look and feel like analog tools.

But once you enter the digital realm, analogies with our body break down. Instead, digital tools are analogies of analogies. Text editors are an analogy of type writers, type writers are an analogy of writing with pen and paper, writing with pen and paper is, initially, a substitute for our memory. In general the computer now works as an extension for our head controlling those tools.

Blind abstraction, a lack of real-world analogies, the feeling that the workings are a black box, and the experience of multiple fast-paced, fragmented processes — this is more or less what we mean when we use the words “digital” to describe a device.

Documents, images, videos, and audio tracks on the web are not more or less real than in any other medium. But they feel unreal and less credible on a computer, because digital media snippets reach us like fragments of a dream: unprepared, out of context, and lacking orientation, causality and continuity.

If you compare the overall information architecture of a website to a book, you will notice that the difficulty in reading a digital text is not just a matter of all the synchronous processes, or the typographic design of digital text. Think about the number of frames of reference that you need to enter, the number of levels that you need to climb down — and the mindset that this climbing requires — until you reach a digital text. How much more complexity do you need once you reach the ultimate text layer? Why is it that once we reach the text, we hardly stay there for more than a couple of minutes?

In books the transitions between the different levels or frames are clearly separated with empty pages. They act like airlocks. You know when you enter a new level, and when you leave it.

It is astonishing that, with all the high pitched projects around reading in the last few years, nobody has developed an alternative navigational model for reading digital text. The main interaction models for digital reading are still flipping or scrolling. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and both kind of suck on a tablet.

Whether we call something “digital” or “analog” depends more on the way we perceive, understand and use a device than the ghost in its shell.

Our tools, like most things, have natural limits to their utility. Up to a certain point, e-mail makes us more efficient. After that, the mounds of e-mail in our inbox take time away from our real work. Up to a certain point, time spent on social networks brings us closer to our friends. After that, it takes away from time we spend with them in person.

Our bacteria can offer us some wisdom here. If we want tools that respect their natural limits, we can design limitation into the tools themselves.

It is useful, therefore, to have missions to balance our metrics. Of course, each tool should have its own mission. But if I were to suggest one mission for all tools, it might be this: Every tool should nourish the things upon which it depends.

An ecosystem of cyclical tools would therefore nourish nature and empower people. A fully cyclical software application may, for example, use peer-to-peer data centers powered by its users, consisting of biodegradable, fertilizing microprocessors. It would be open-source and provide APIs to empower the creativity of builders, and a clean design and useful purpose that cultivates the concentration of its users.

The danger in user-centered design is that it releases the designer of the responsibility for having a vision for the world. Why have one when we can just ask users what they want? But this is a very limiting mindset. The user sees the world as it is. Our job as builders is to create the world as it could be.

There is another reason to avoid relying on your users to design your tool. The most elegantly crafted tools are those where the purpose of the tool aligns with the purpose of its builder. So the key to building great technologies is to first find your purpose. And you will not find it by polling your users.

To cut a long story short – what I want to say is, that there are many more important setscrews that have to be concerted and that determine good typography and optimal readability than just the stroke weight of a typeface. The text column has to look harmonious, with legible letterforms and good spacing, achieved by a rhythmical pattern of black strokes and the white space inbetween, with evenly rendered stems, well attuned word spaces and line spacing.

Possible minor differences in font weight from one device to another don’t matter much to me, as long as the thing in a whole can be read comfortably. But maybe us print designers, who had to deal with different papers, printing methods and dot gains all our lives, have just idly learned to come to terms with it. Colour and the contrast of the screen are much more crucial. All the finetuned optimization are at risk to get screwed up by a user who has his crisp retina display set to full brightness. And that cannot be responded to.

Most of the feedback comes from everyone in the company. I hope that doesn’t change. I feel like even when we were five people, we all knew when something was right or wrong because we use it so much. We still get feedback from the Support team. If Support’s getting thousands of emails about a design or functional piece, we can react to that.

The advantage of this system is we’re making all the decisions ourselves — we’re recognizing the problems and solving them ourselves — so when something doesn’t work, we know exactly why. When you’re A/B testing or solving problems for other people, and you ask for someone’s opinion, you’re not going to get an honest answer. You’ll get an answer because you asked a question. Also, you’re not going to recognize why you’re fixing something if you didn’t yourself recognize that it was wrong. You’re solving someone else’s problem.

For example, there is no longer a follower count displayed on the Dashboard. We moved that to the user’s blog page for two reasons. First, we wanted that column on the Dashboard to only relate to things you subscribe to — who you follow, who you like, tags you’ve subscribed to. Second, we wanted to take the focus off follower counts. It can be an intimidating number, and something to obsess over, and ultimately a huge distraction from why you’re on Tumblr. A high follower count is not a good reason to share something, and posting something purely as follower-bait is not ideal. You should post something that you like, to attract the audience that’s kindest and most similar to you.

But when we moved the follower count to another page, it bothered a lot of people. Data would show that the number of visits to the page dropped off dramatically. Both of those facts would indicate that we should move the page back up front, but we made a conscious decision: We just don’t want to show the number so prominently.

I’m a big fan of old car dashboards, like Volkswagen’s Mark I Golf. I love seeing dashboards in old concept cars. Car dashboards are fascinating because they’re supposed to be usable instantly. And a lot of it needs to be usable without even looking at it. Turning on a blinker, using the radio. Checking speed, fuel, hitting the horn, even steering — all usable at a glance or less. You have hundred-year-old technology that makes sense to anyone as soon as they sit in a car. These dashboards deal with colors, they deal with touch, they deal with language, they deal with ergonomics. The result when it’s done really well — when someone can use it without being told how to use it — is really beautiful. And yet it doesn’t need to be beautiful because no one’s really looking at it.

It takes well over a year to design, execute, deliver, and ensure the proper implementation of the roughly 5,000 or so assets it takes to get a CS release out the door (we’re already thinking about CS7). Along the away, there are innumerable institutional, technological, and political hurdles to overcome. It can be daunting, but we do everything we can to get it made with as few design compromises as possible.

The jumping is where Journey breaks your heart. The jumping is why many players cried, even if they couldn’t pinpoint the cause. The jumping is the tiny, insignificant-looking wingnut holding Journey together, without which it would collapse into a heap of exquisitely airbrushed scrap metal. It’s not Thatgamecompany’s token nod to classic videogame interactions, settled on after staring blankly at an empty white board for two hours, unable to come up with anything more engaging to have players do. It’s not just a tool for poking around its stunning vistas and drinking in the sights.



Some critics have decried Journey’s design for being resolutely linear, claiming its parade of lavish set-pieces simply puts an art-house spin on the filmic template favoured by mainstream blockbusters such as Uncharted or Call Of Duty. Journey’s developers should’ve focused on leveraging interactivity in the way only games can, they argue, while neglecting to parse the game’s key interaction. Journey had to be a game. You have to press the X button for yourself and feel what it’s like for your robed avatar to leave the desert floor and drift back down like a fallen leaf surfing a breeze. To play Journey is to savour the most incredible inner lightness. Thatgamecompany aspires to move players not through moral choices or exploration, but through the art of locomotion itself.

Every aspect of Journey’s desert is designed to provide a tangible sense of water and buoyancy. The closest most humans have come to feeling weightless is the act of swimming. Journey references water and the ocean to evoke this sense memory while teasing us with the fantasy of experiencing the same sensation without the crutch of water. Like Dumbo - an elephant, one of the heaviest land mammals - realising he can fly without that silly feather clenched in his trunk.

We don’t want to KO gravity; we simply enjoy head-butting it in the nose repeatedly. No wonder the platforming genre has proven so durable over the years. Before Mario was called Mario, he was simply Jumpman, a name that spoke to his purity of purpose. The final mountain trudge in Journey stifles our ability to jump so that when we finally do quit struggling with gravity, the sensation feels even more dramatic. We’ve had just enough time to forget how remarkable it feels. Journey’s depiction of death and ascension is the closest games have come to communicating the physical sensation of one of religion’s most tantalising promises - rapture

This year, I have taken Typekit font releases in a new direction. Instead of simply making nice blog post images and listing fonts’ technical specs, I am using blog post announcements as a way to teach (and learn).

I found that with most of the games I was playing, while they were interesting and entertaining, I didn’t find that I had any contextual reference with the character – the character would do things I wouldn’t do, because of the story. It’s like when you watch a horror movie and yell at the characters “why are you doing that!?” I was having the same kind of response from gaming experiences. And I wanted to change that.

it’s an extraordinary experience for me to read around forums and blogs and find people getting into their characters and what happened to them. I read about people talking about shaking from the adrenaline of situations they’ve been in. It all cuts to something quite unique about humans, really, that ability and need to tell stories – that’s how people learn and it’s how people pass on information.

The experiment has to continue. Because that’s what big companies can’t do: to take risks and experiment like this. They can’t risk upsetting their userbase, they can’t risk messing with existing formulae. They can’t add radical or brutal features, and risk getting it wrong. But this project can. In that sense the experiment has only just started. If there’s one area I really want to see grow, it’s that the environment is also part of your consideration: the weather, the terrain, and so on. I think you should not just be challenged by your interactions with the zombies and with other players, but you should also be facing the world. That will add a contextual link to a map as wonderful as Chernarus. You will have to start worrying about shelter, thinking about the rain, and so on.

One of them was that I wanted to make systems that do not imply judgement: they should not tell you how to play. However, there also needed to be impact to your decisions. There will be decisions such as “do I pick up the ammo or do I pick up the food?” But you also face decisions like “do I shoot that person, or do I not?” If you shoot the person, there should be some effect from it. There shouldn’t be a direct negative consequence, of course, it shouldn’t tell you how to play, but there needed to be something.

Complicated systems have many parts, or take many steps, or have many rules; complex systems are complicated systems connected to and interdependent with other systems (likely also complex).

The associated complexity of a seemingly simple resolution generally shows up in unintended or unexpected consequences; complicated interconnections cannot be cut without repercussions.

The only way to reduce and resolve the complexity of a given situation is to reduce its level of interconnection with other systems; doing so, however, can undermine the value or power of the given system, and will alter the systems to which it was once connected.

In other words, the opposite of "complex" is not "simple," the opposite of "complex" is "isolated."

There's a solution in computer engineering known as loosely-coupled systems. Basically, the notion is that each subsystem should have the minimum number of connections to other systems. This probably somehow applies to the future somehow.

The studio’s new identity, created by New York studio Project Projects, is an interesting mix of two dimensional monogram and three dimensional axis, a smart reference to the bespoke and structural nature of the products and the combined design experience of its three founding partners.

This is a really smart visual identity that confidently resolves the fundamental and symbiotic relationship between RBW’s partners and modernistic design principles. Built around three converging strokes and a very simple geometric typographic solution the mark carefully balances a classic monogrammatic representation of personal quality and craft with a contemporary understanding of space, layout, design and construction. It also offers a smart duality in its top down plan-like visualisation of two dimensional space and an architectural, three dimensional axis representing length, width, and depth. For me this is a great distillation of a pragmatic approach.

In most cases, a designer would begin to work in Illustrator to create vector icons, but we chose Photoshop as our start place. From the outset we knew we wanted to design icons for specific sizes, so optimizing for those pre-defined pixels was paramount. With the recent release of Photoshop CS6, Photoshop has become a fairly powerful vector tool for pixel projects.

Design is in the details. With all our icons designed, it was time for us to create our font. We decided we needed two sizes of each icon. One size, 16px, would be optimized for its exact size. At 16px the details are limited so every pixel was important. Since the icons were designed for such a small space, they don't really scale well. To take care of that our second size, 32px, would be designed with more detail so that it could be scaled up for many purposes.

"It's not something people would explicitly ask for," Ahtisaari says. "But when given it, it's deeply beneficial. Glanceability has to do with eye contact and allowing people to be present for each other [in conversation]." The ability to interpret things at a glance, he says, is "hard-wired into us as organisms; it's just the way we are".

"Design talent is equivalent to operational excellence."

"Design is not about design. [economics, anthropology, etc, an encyclopedic knowledge of everything]"

"I'd rather talk about what makes something valuable than about value propositions."

"Money is never about money. Sex is never about sex."

"Ideas are easy. Strategy is much harder."

"You need to know why you do what you do."

"Relentless prepare."

I personally can't think of a way to redesign this game for a controller with buttons in such a way that makes it feel better.

y informal opinion was that Angry Birds is an incredible collision of game design concepts, and it works. It's got a pinballish sort of recklessness and a Super Mario level of depth. It's a game—like Peggle—in which you make quick decisions by way of a user-friendly one-touch tool rife with nuance. In manipulating Angry Birds' slingshot, the player will, in less than one second, choose just one option from a pool of literally hundreds: how hard are you going to shoot that bird, and at what so very precise angle upward or downward? Players will not hesitate to make these decisions. They'll stretch that slingshot and let it snap, again and again. I'm the guy who stares at a restaurant menu until my date calls her mom or a taxi; I'll sit and stare at my new Skyrim characters for literally an hour before I can dare to start the game. Decisions paralyze; Angry Birds doesn't. I fling those little birds all over.

I still had hundreds of game reviews on my website, including that list of my twenty-five favorite games of all-time, with Out of this World at the top of the list and Panzer Dragoon and Cave Story and Canabalt elsewhere on that list. On my list, I established a theme: that I like games that are minimalist in their presentations, tell a "story" with their atmospheres alone, and allow the player to joyfully exhaust the depth of the mechanics because simply playing feels wonderful. (Also, ideally, a game has you punching someone in the face within five seconds of the word "go".)

We could have talked about the presentation of death: the music should be of such urgency that cutting it off anywhere, with an instant snap to freeze-frame and breathless snap to red, would feel thematically consistent.

Katamari Damacy recalls the joy of rolling a ball; Noby Noby Boy recalls the joy of stretching something flexible. It took vision tantamount to artistic vision to identify love of those frictions and then turn them into games.

I see mobile phones as an opportunity to make Genuine Little Toys which happen to be games with rules and possibly even little worlds whose stories you feel at a glance. Their being electronic is a coincidence. I intend ZiGGURAT as a casual little snow globe of an electronic toy, and simultaneously as a gosh darn air-tight hard-core video game owing much of its soul to all things Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis.

It should be pointed out, however, that physics is not the only systemic toy upon which fun games can be built. Probability fields, such as those forged by the colours, numbers and suits in a deck of cards, and the stochastic patterns that emerge from mixing those cards up, are another well-known toy upon which many great games are built. In fact, there is a literal infinity of foundational systemic toys upon which meaningful games can be built, yet for the most part, the game industry focuses on building baseline game engines that simulate one single toy that is proven to only be marginally fun: physical reality.

Typecache.com is an online index for type foundries and font sellers, and showcases their collections of type. As typographic literacy grows, the site will hopefully be a useful resource for designers, art directors, and type enthusiasts. We will keep updating our list of foundries and posting typography-related information including new font releases on Facebook and Twitter. Please check them out as well.

We needed an art style that would emphasize simpler forms with very little surface detail, and we made a very early decision to pursue a papercraft / untextured color direction. Otherwise, the UV mapping required would be time-consuming and cost prohibitive and wouldn't really look good anyway because I'm not a great painter. There were also huge performance gains in using just one small palette texture for virtually every environment mesh in the game; that means Unity can batch all the polys efficiently and reduce overall draw calls.

People rarely notice what isn't there, even if it's horrible and glaring to you and a small handful of skilled artists. You, the game maker, set their expectations. They have no concept of edge loops or smoothing or lightmaps. To them, everything is intentional. That's the power of abstraction in art direction.

Designing in the browser was great for evolutionary, iterative improvements. For a project this small, with such a short turn around time, this approach worked well. I stuck to a tried-and-true two-column layout above 768px, and simply polished it as best I could while keeping with responsive design principles. I imagine in a bigger, more extensive project, I would want to experiment with more radical variations. I am not sure those variations would be as quick to do in the browser as it would be through a graphic program.

Art games have succeeded where the academics failed - spreading the ludology/narratology debate contagion into the laps of players. Traditional players worry that art games will dilute what the gaming experience is really about; those who support art games see themselves as fighting against the incumbent status quo that denigrates experimental approaches.

No one is talking the same language any more. What is a game? Do we want to narrowly define what we mean by a "game"? If we do that, do we need to kick The Cat and the Coup, Proteus, The Path and Dear Esther off Steam because they don't meet something like the ISO Videogame Standard? Good luck getting the toothpaste back into that particular tube.

Stretching theories to cover the entire universe of games leads to extreme statements that don't seem to have value. Koster, for example, makes the point that all games are essentially turn-based, which is technically true in an algorithmic sense, but is that actually helpful from a design perspective? Jack Post (2009) tries to rigorously define the narrative of Tetris to "bridge the narratology-ludology divide" but does anyone care? Narratology is not going to create the next great puzzle game.

Narrow definitions of games are perfectly valid within little contextual spaces. Ludology can have its rules-based framework. Narratology is free to pursue games through narrative. Art games can co-exist with the FPS, the RTS and the platformer. They don’t have to compete. Why can’t we have different theories for different situations, each one handling their own definition of game?

if there’s anything exciting about touch screen games, it’s that we can do this now: we can control the player’s physical proximity, we can change it in the middle of a game. centrifeud uses it in brief, frantic moments. in the late, lamented pongvaders, two players cooperate, usually autonomously, to destroy alien invaders. but at the end of every stage the players have to physically work together by tilting the ithing to direct the last ball at the last enemy. imagine a game that takes place on a sinking island – as the coasts grow smaller and smaller, the players’ hands are forced to operate closer and closer to each other.

“Absolute cleanliness is Godliness!” it starts. And if this maze of rhetoric about Spaceship Earth, the Moral ABCs, lessons, quotes, and creation myths reads like it was written by an escaped mental patient, it’s because it was.

Just as bewildering as the rhetoric on Dr. Bronner’s packaging is its typography. Due to the sheer volume of text involved (the 32 oz peppermint bottle carries over 2,500 words), many compromises are introduced. Line lengths of 250 characters or more are wrapped all the way around the bottle, forcing readers to turn it as they read each line, then return to search for the beginning of the next line.

That’s the beginning of the cool and the simplest part of the game. As you progress through the increasingly complex puzzles, Portal does something even cooler. It teaches you the game, it teaches you how to improvise solutions to the puzzles, and it eventually makes you a master of the Portal gun and its associated physics — without a single page of documentation. You learn about the Portal universe intimately, but you don’t notice the learning because you’re too busy playing.

The discovery of these rules is paired and reinforced with increasingly complex puzzles that continue to teach the player about the increasingly foreign physics inside of Portal. What happens when I enter a portal that’s on the floor, but exits on the ceiling? Which way is up? Success is not measured with points, timers, or headcrabs. Success is measured by the satisfaction you receive when you use the mechanics you’ve incrementally learned to solve the puzzle and exit the chamber in a not-dead state.

See, while you were busily having fun you had no idea that you were becoming an expert in the ways of the Portal universe. You now have experience using each of the individual tools and their behaviors to be able to combine them to handle the unexpected. The result: you are now able to effectively deal with novel and unknown situations.

It’s as if Australia’s terrain is designed to be seen from the air. From the ground, as Robert Hughes and others have pointed out, Australia’s landscape has a beauty of its own, but it is not one that can be easily drawn from the lens of western aesthetics. From the air, however, the vastness of its systems can be quickly appreciated. It’s beyond Burtynsky.

Similarly, flying into Singapore, we can sense the scale of the world’s economic systems, as with most of the eastern cities at this point. The water is full of tankers, container ships and smaller freighters, queuing to get into the port, patterns stretching towards the horizon. As the dark waters give way to land, suddenly everything is the pristine green of manicured golf courses, peppered with clubhouses.

But there is another, worrying implication that the Telegraph can disclose for the first time: that the errors committed by the pilot doing the flying were not corrected by his more experienced colleagues because they did not know he was behaving in a manner bound to induce a stall. And the reason for that fatal lack of awareness lies partly in the design of the control stick – the “side stick” – used in all Airbus cockpits.

Through the software they design and introduce to the world, these engineers transform the daily routines of hundreds of millions of people. Previously, this kind of mass transformation of human behavior was the sole domain of war, famine, disease, and religion, but now it happens more quietly, through the software we use every day, which affects how we spend our time, and what we do, think, and feel.

Through their inventions, they alter the behavior of millions of people, yet very few of them realize that this is what they are doing, and even fewer consider the ethical implications of that kind of power.

At Facebook, for example, they use a term called “Serotonin”, which refers to the bonding hormone released by the brain in moments of intimacy. In design reviews, Facebook designers are asked, “Where is the serotonin in this design?” meaning, “how will this new feature release bonding hormones in the brains of our users, to keep them coming back for more?”

This felt like a huge leap. Somehow, making rudimentary computer graphics in tools like Logo or Processing had never captured my imagination – perhaps because I felt I ought to be able to do that. Working in a medium I was very unfamiliar with as a developer (but saw every day in my life) and producing output felt strangely empowering.

There is value in just doing something, but there is also real value in finishing it. That doesn’t mean selling it, or productizing it, or anything as over-the-top like that. Just get it into a stage where somebody else might recognize it for a thing.

It is strange to say “remarkably, everything worked” so much, but hardware is so strange and fincikity I always expect it not to. Also: I was aware throughout how out of my depth I was, and yet I always bobbed back to the surface.

The project taught me the value of thingness: of completing something so that it’s an artefact other people can recognise and identify. The box-with-a-lid is a huge part of that. It stops it being a bunch of wires, something I explain as “an Arduino doing X”, and it becomes an Intervalometer. It becomes a thing.

Perhaps most importantly, though, it reminded me of the huge value of making something you saw in your head. It’s vastly rewarding to make an idea that you originated; to solve a problem that you yourself had. I’ve always found that I learn new things better when I have a reason to. Every programming language I’ve tried to learn without something I myself wanted to build with it – I got nowhere. The second I have an itch I need to scratch, I’ll bat through tutorials and understand them, not to mention start trying to implement that thing as soon as I can.

This, I think, is hugely important. It’s why I think an important part of learning to code – for kids, or for adults – is achieving something you wanted – or needed – to do. It’s vital to understand that making, in software, hardware, or materials, is something you do unprompted, to solve problems, and not always knowing where the journey will take you. You don’t just implement rote linked lists, or bubble sorts, or debounce circuits; learning from examples is important, and often all one can do to begin with, but it’s not what the work is about. To learn to make things, you have to Make your own Things. You have to travel a complete path. It doesn’t just make the end more rewarding: it makes the whole journey more rewarding.

"The proposed design calls for 1,203 "“stalks," each 180-feet high with concrete bases that are between about 33- and 66-feet wide. The carbon-fiber stalks, reinforced with resin, are about a foot wide at the base tapering to about 2 inches at the top. Each stalk will contain alternating layers of electrodes and ceramic discs made from piezoelectric material, which generates a current when put under pressure. In the case of the stalks, the discs will compress as they sway in the wind, creating a charge."

The IBM Glass Engine enables deep navigation of the music of Philip Glass. Personal interests, associations, and impulses guide the listener through an expanding selection of over sixty Glass works.

Nelson and Bush seem to get pretty hung up on technical (or even mechanical) hurdles rather than conceptual ones. There’s a lot of fussing about, in Bush’s case, how to shuffle microfilm around quickly, or in Nelson’s case, complicated server configurations. It reminds me of how characters in sci-fi movies park their hovercars to go use a payphone. These inventors are willing to imagine radically different worlds but can’t let go of the most banal limitations. And the things they lamented not having are no longer pipe dreams! Reading their texts in 2012, there appears to be no reason why a Memex or Xanadu can’t exist, other than that they just don’t.

You can do everything in the sketches above with a text-editor: collecting, typing, dragging and dropping to reorder, merging and splitting sentences. But a different interface would encourage a different mindset. Different relationships. Different ways of describing what you’re doing, like maybe: growing a text instead of writing it. They key actions being: arranging things on a 2D canvas for consideration, and combining related things.

It’s almost an architectural conceit: altering the way you can move through a certain space, and trusting that one’s environment has a huge impact on everything you do. It’s not a question of allowing you to do something magical that didn’t exist before, so much as knocking down a few walls and building a swimming pool, to make one’s environment feel more conducive to thinking.

Sunday I changed my avatar, which is silly but always feels like a big deal. I’ve stepped out of the shadows to reveal longer hair and different glasses. Less smiley, more judgey. Felt like I was living a lie.

I’d look up their titles in a magazine called Factsheet Five and choose the ones that most appealed to – or more likely, appalled – my polite Southern Baptist sensibilities. Then I’d send a handwritten letter and a couple of bucks to each fanzine’s author. Zines began arriving in the mail, and the whole thing was magical. My favorite was Artaud-Mania, an entire collated Xerox of hiss and spit, all stapled together, written by a college art student called Johanna Fateman.

These were no monetary transactions; they were social ones. The world, I soon discovered, is so small.

Anthropy’s real mission is only this: a more perfect world, one in which everyone can build a videogame. Maybe these games will be unedited and jejune and a little bit broken, as zines themselves often are, but that’s supposed to be the allure. The games will be authentic, these experiential snapshots, the works of diarists instead of artists and computer programmers.

Ought a videogame become the equivalent of a Livejournal entry? Can we really all be memoirists?

Anna Anthropy explains the game of Tetris:

These rules function in tandem to give the game a momentum and shape: the player makes errors that cause further errors, until eventually the player is overcome.

Also:

But the player places all the pieces herself. Every player will place the pieces differently, will play a different game, but experience a similar result. The same holds true for any system of rules, as simple as Tag or Tetris or as complicated as SimCity. Games have a lot of potential for examining the relationships between things – or, rather, for allowing the player to examine the relationships between things, because the player does not merely observe the interactions; she herself engages with the game’s systems.

This passage alone is beyond “high concept.” This is serious philosophy, wrapped up in comp lit and game theory and who knows what else. Add unto this the videogame’s near-boundless storytelling potential, and you might become as excited as Anthropy is.

But until Chapter Five, Anthropy hasn’t done any of the hard work for the reader. She hasn’t explained the ties connecting one thought to the next. It’s a constellation with no thoroughfares. Until now, the onus was on you, the “reader” or “player,” to take what meanings you could.

Chapter Six is the actual nitty-gritty of the book. But this is no textbook, no instruction manual. It isn’t advice. It’s a writing prompt. Anthropy is giving you some of her very best ideas, mostly for free.

You can singlehandedly change the world, probably.

Sometimes, when you are reading what she’s written, she sounds angry. No, I don’t mean to undermine her: she is angry. Certainly. There is a lot that ought to make Anna Anthropy angry. But she isn’t angry the way you think, maybe.

In this game you play as a blind monk who are tasked to protect a
valuable treasure and are traveling through varying landscapes in the
ancient world of east asia in order to protect your valuable
possession from the ninja warriors.

The game is a physical game without graphics that uses 3D soundscapes
that creates the feeling of being physically in the world of the game.
In addition to experiencing the world around you, the game makes it
possible to directly touch and interact with the game world and this
immersion creates an intensely intimate experience.

I’ll bet that the time-to-signup isn’t an important anxiety factor. When’s the last time you shopped for a software product under intense time pressure, where every second counts?

When I evaluate web products I often feel uncertain about what will happen after the quick signup. Sure it takes seconds to create an account, but then what?

Susy is different - a simple grid system that is fully customized to your markup, your grid, your designs, the way you want them. All gain, no pain.

The Yves Behar wave, hex, and dot relief textures carried over from the original Jawbone are even more stunning at this new size. The Big Jambox is now completely wrapped in a perforated steel mesh. The elastomer rubber used on the top and bottom of its smaller sibling now only covers the end-caps and should provides Big with a bit of protection against falls. Our white review unit looks absolutely fantastic, so striking that Jawbone should have exposed it with the same transparent retail packaging it uses for its Up fitness band. A real missed opportunity in my opinion — the opaque cardboard covering Big Jambox simply can't invoke the same passionate response as the real deal.

Then Amazon releases a simple and free GUI tool for styling reflowable epubs. Nothing fancy like iBooks Author or whatever Adobe is planning. It just gives them the ability to create really beautiful text-oriented ebooks. It imports ePub, doc, rtf, and HTML files. They can set the backgrounds, borders, and margins. Float some images here and there. Embed nice fonts. Add a movie or two. After that Amazon begins to add support for CSS font-feature-settings and updates the GUI tool to support it.

Most publishers of text-oriented books then face two choices: 1) A ubiquitous platform that supports exactly the features they want (floated images, full-bleed page backgrounds and borders, embedded fonts, opentype font-features). Cheap to develop for. Cheap to use. Has a most of their customers. Supported on all major devices and OSes. 2) A diverse set of heterogenous platforms that differ in a multitude of small ways (most of them non-technological, like B&N’s decision to override publisher stylesheets). A pain to test. Hell to develop for. Most of the tools will be either very expensive (Adobe’s) or proprietary to one platform (iBooks Author). The only way of getting the designs they want is to use a more complex spec that involves more work and isn’t supported by either web browsers or the Kindle. Together, these platforms have a minority of the market, but represent the majority of the publisher’s development costs.

Complex layouts, intricate flow, and extensive design capabilities aren’t a big concern for the makers of the kinds of ebooks that are easily over ninety per cent of the ebook market today. Text-oriented ebooks are the current ebook market and they are being abandoned by ebook vendors because they think they are commodities that neither need nor deserve any differentiation.

The problem is that ‘content’ – books – resists commodification. You can’t exchange Twilight, the Harry Potter series, or J.A. Konrath’s books for a generic slush-filler ebook during a sale and not expect an uproar.

If you think that Amazon is winning just because they were early to the ebook game then I can guarantee you that Amazon will eat your lunch.

“How do we see black now?” Shah interjects. “As a dynamic color?” There is excited chatter. Black has shed its cultural baggage as a negative color. The Italians “did a big statement” about black. The big Yohji Yamamoto retrospective down the road at the V&A. The noncolor that is all colors. Exciting new materials that help black transcend its blackness.

Armed with props that range from eggs to paper dolls to the latest images from the anonymous street “photograffeur” JR, participants pitch color concepts interwoven with theoretical narratives. The talk ranges from the specific (“people are always looking for replacement blue”) to the occasionally vaporous. “Not just a safety in numbers protection tactic,” says a British colorist, a textile specialist, from a prepared text, “it’s more about the buzz created from the joy of a shared activity.” The chromatic range accompanying this thought stream sounds similarly seductive: “Quiet tints of opalescent violet, aqua, and honey are jostled with shrill lemony chartreuse, cerise, and vibrant hot orange.” The Italian colorist, clad in light blue (“we Italians love blue”), with a professorial sweep of white hair, opens his presentation with a preamble on the difficulties of “unity” in the context of Italian politics. “Darling, if we wanted an Italian history lesson,” Shah says tartly, “we’d go to night classes.”

But another common refrain in the color community is that colors, in part because of the economy, are sticking around longer. “We’ve learned to kind of ebb and flow with colors,” says Eiseman, “to punch them up a little bit when people get a little more accustomed to them, bring them down a little bit, soften them, make them a little more sophisticated so that the color evolves.” As Mirabile says, “it’s a lot easier to be right about green when there’s no perfectly right green.” At the meeting, one of the British colorists argued things were returning to an older rhythm, in which “colors used to hang around seven to 10 years.” Sounding almost wistful, he pronounced “we always give up on things too soon. How many times did we say it’s the end of brown. It hasn’t ended yet!”

“Colors and trends on the runway are now seen simultaneously by consumers and the trade,” says Kevin Carrigan, global creative director at Calvin Klein. “As a result, they are adopted much faster on all levels.” Companies across the board have gotten more color-savvy. “Take J.C. Penney shirts,” says Mirabile—a category that once upon a time might have been manufactured in unsophisticated, outmoded colors. “They look beautiful. They’re doing what Izod’s doing. They’re not lagging behind anymore.”

In my mind, visual and interactive design should be treated as separate but interdependent problem domains.
What follows are two hierarchies of ebook design, outlines that climb from the trivial and decorative to the integral and necessary.
The visual design examples are books that I happen to have on my desk. The interactive design examples are, for the most part, major titles from interactive media history.

I’m very interested in how reading behaviours operate across the two platforms, but to call interactive thingumabobs ‘books’ makes the same mistake that mired us in Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation dead-end for fifteen years. In fact, that’s largely why I get a sense of disquiet about calling them books – that’s remediative, reductive thinking and it gets everyone nowhere. Take a look at what’s worked in recent months – Random House’s Story-cuts – short, lovely, well conceived incursions into a digital-led realm, that address the particular branding and design principles that are required to exploit the app store. It’s not remediation, it’s not transfer, it’s transposition, and that’s important.

Shadowbox is a web-based media viewer application that supports all of the web's most popular media publishing formats. Shadowbox is written entirely in JavaScript and CSS and is highly customizable. Using Shadowbox, website authors can showcase a wide assortment of media in all major browsers without navigating users away from the linking page.

http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch/

I actually put my interest in the alphabet down to that early history. I also think I was just fascinated by the visual forms. I’ve always loved the visual shape of the letters. When I taught at Harvard in the Art History department, and the students asked the faculty to talk about their favorite work of art, I said - the alphabet. They thought that was so amazing because they’d never thought about the alphabet as a visual form. So, my interest in the letters really comes from this experience of them as a visual form and as a set of, again, codes that seemed to me to be just inexhaustible. So how could it be so limited? That’s how I got into it.

There are really two parallel histories. What’s interesting to me is how in the twentieth century those two histories have separated. More and more we have specialists who look at the history of the alphabet within the origins of writing systems in the ancient Middle East and in that place between the Egyptian and ancient Sumerian cultures. Those are extremely specialized scholars and archeologists. But, more and more we’ve lost the other history, which is the history of ideas about the alphabet. We tend, in the late twentieth and early twenty first century, to bracket out the idea that letters have a magical power or a mystical power. I think that’s a mistake, because I think it’s exactly at the intersection of these two things that the alphabet functions most effectively.

Pathologic is a prototype of a “simulator of human behavior in the condition of pandemic”: it purports to test the user’s ability to make right decisions in times of crisis. It’s also agonizing to play, shoddily translated, and ugly as sin. Eurogamer’s John Walker called it “Oblivion with cancer ... a fascinating game. And a very broken one.” The game has cultivated a fiercely devoted fan base despite its poor reception in the West.

Pathologic shows the devolution of a society over the course of 12 days as plague overtakes a small, nameless Settlement. Events of the game closely mirror the real-world events of an epidemic. As the Sand Plague breaks, grows, and gradually consumes the settlement, characters research the cure and quarantine infected sections, until the military is summoned to suppress the growing chaos. By the end, it becomes nearly impossible to walk three steps without seeing a murder, as starvation drives people from their homes to be either infected or looted by raiders, and those raiders are in turn exterminated by soldiers.

When viewed specifically as a Russian work, Pathologic becomes an apologetic of remorse. Mistakes made in the Soviet era were often glossed over or denied: Ice-Pick Lodge seeds Pathologic with increasingly overt symbolism. The Settlement’s districts are named for parts of the body, and the player’s map constantly evolves, tracking infected zones and objectives, until symbolism is thrown out the window and the map is replaced with a cutaway of the internal workings of a bull. The most powerful moments in the game lie in discovering, bit by bit, the extent to which the Settlement has ravaged the ground on which it was built.

Figure is more complex than other gesturing apps like Clear. The use of buttons is necessary, yet it feels less button-y by using flat UI. But the really nice thing about Figure is the great use of animations. When you touch a flat knob button, the animations signal there is some gesturing involved to “turn” the knobs. The mix of levers, buttons and gestures that make this app really fun to play with. This is ‘The Happy Medium’ to me.

As shown in the first photo above, after I reduce the number of pieces from twenty-six down to two, and am all set to close up the bird for good, I inscribe a message to future goose-breakers (most likely me) inside the tail, along with the dates of breakage and repair. How often does one get a chance to write on a sealed object’s inside surface? To hide a quote-unquote Easter egg inside a bird? At the time this seems clever, but now I kind of wish I hadn’t done it — I feel like from now on whenever I see the goose around the house I’m always just going to think of the concealed message inside it. I can see this eventually bothering me. It’s possible I’ll have to re-break the bird so I can blacken the writing out.

Like anything taken to extreme, abundance ceases to be joyful once it crosses a certain line. Science doesn’t offer much insight as to where the line is; we just know it when we see it. Love in excess becomes infatuation. Self-confidence becomes narcissism. Neatness becomes compulsion. Too much of any good thing is no good at all. The overstuffed houses of hoarders and the ultra-minimal, bare bones interiors featured in design magazines are two ends of a spectrum of beliefs about homes and happiness. I could just as easily take on the hoarders as the zen-modernists, except for one thing — no one is advocating the hoarder lifestyle. Even the hoarders view their condition with shame. Minimalism, on the other hand, is often preached as a lifestyle nirvana — a blissful, transcendent state achieved by letting go of material things. For some people, this kind of muted emotional landscape is a relief, a break from a high-stress job, information overload, or a plethora of buzzing devices. But for most of us, I’d contend that this kind of environment runs against our emotional nature. We’re made to feel joy in an abundance of color, texture, and sensory stimulation; it’s what makes the neurons fire and the brain grow and develop. Rather than fight it, I’d love to see us use design to create a more sustainable kind of abundance, one that gives us delight without compromising the joy of generations to come.

This system — walling the player off until the game, or rather the designer, feels the player is ready, doling the game out in parcels measured both to prevent confusion and to manage enthusiasm and flow — has always bothered me. Mostly it feels transparent and mechanical. Its worst offenders, like Wind Waker with its inventory full of nearly identical items that each only is useful in one part of the game, raise too many questions. Why can’t I go down here? Because the game doesn’t want me to. Why can’t I open this? Because the game doesn’t want me to. Why can’t I just use the grapple instead of the hookshot? Because the game wasn’t designed that way.

A better way to limit progress is to put most of the onus on the player. Let the player decide when he’s ready to progress, and then be it on his own head. If he gets lost, or injured, or killed, or confused, that’s his decision. Let the player form his own rules: “Okay, the forest is too dangerous and is kind of scary; keep away for now.” And then later “Hey, I’m stronger and I have more resources; maybe I can risk the forest now.”

Either way, death and loss are handled unusually well. When you die, anything you’ve done stays done; you just warp back to your latest save point. Likewise, the game cuts down on a bunch of backtracking. If you know where you’re going, or if you just realize you’re out of your depth, you can warp back to any point. This warping, skipping around the map, becomes a major element of the game’s design, particularly toward the end.

This is one atmospheric game, full of the scratchy, grainy, crackly nervous energy that you get in Metroid II. Part of that comes from the minimalistic visuals, part of it from the ambient .XM musical score, part from the crunchy, squelchy sound effects.

The game uses just two colors — black and white — and not much in the way of dithering between the two. The character and most of the monsters are tiny. Most of the map is constructed of solid white blocks against a blank, dark background. The occasional bit of sand or water or mechanical design lends the environments a bit of spice and vibrancy.

Liz Ryerson recently did a great write-up of level 5-5 from Wolfenstein 3D (and makes a good case for the surrealism of 4-3) and it occurred to me that there's a pattern to this type of writing -- it's usually very specific, talks only about a single level (but contextualizes it within the whole game), and makes ample use of screenshots to help the reader understand the layout.

Writing about level design is incredibly important because we often run through levels so fast and understand "the language of games" so intuitively that it can be difficult to verbalize and explain. In playing levels, they exist more as tools to express our intentionality, not as objects to be studied and examined. The reality of it is that it would take a long time, or sometimes it's very difficult, to gain the type of fluency in platformers or Wolf3D that the best levels require.

Instead of asking for 10 changes and waiting a week, you can ask for 1 change and wait 15 minutes. Evaluate the change, praise it or identify weaknesses, and suggest the next change. By asking for small changes, you take the pressure off the designer because you aren’t asking for miracles. You also take the pressure off the review process because the set of constraints and motivating concerns is smaller. The design is easier to talk about because there are fewer factors involved.

These three areas — the domain, the eye/brain, and the implementation — intertwine with each other. A single element may have conflicts in one area or all three at the same time. Much of the work designing interfaces involves teasing apart these conflicts in order to solve the right problem. Is the action correct, but it’s too hard to find? That’s a conflict with the eye/brain. Is the screen clear and simple but it doesn’t show the right information? That’s a conflict with the domain. Does it take too long to get feedback from a common action? That might be an implementation problem.

From all of these examples we can see generally that jobs may have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is a useful segmentation. It gives the designer a way to think at the same time about what the user is trying to do and what the interface should look like at each phase of the job. Thus ’jobs’ as units of design extend in the dimension of the screen as pixels and also extend through the dimension of time as processes. They are more fundamental than both.

In order to manage this, we have to be able to break our ideas and efforts down into manageable projects. I try to find ways to define any effort in a < 2 week chunk. If there’s truly a lot to do, like a complicated new feature or a big change, I’ll try to break up the work into orthogonal or serial pieces that can be done in separate < 2 week chunks.

A core skill with defining units of work is being able to understand dependency in the design and code. What can we change without affecting other things? What can we change that creates the improvement we want while staying isolated within known boundaries?

Throughout the design -> program -> review cycle, it’s important to focus on flows not individual screens. No interface or piece of software is in a vacuum. People got to it from somewhere else, trying to do something. And after they do it, they go somewhere else. The more you can think of terms of sequences of action instead of static elements, the better. A flow is a better review target than an element or screen.

This happens over and over as we design. Patterns entrench themselves in our mental library through this process of encountering a situation, designing a solution, recognizing the same situation again, and recalling and applying the earlier solution.

The forces don’t have to be explicit. I never wrote them down before this post. But being aware of the forces makes it possible to critically analyze why you are making a specific design choice and how well that choice fits with the situation.

Taking patterns off the pedestal and noticing them in your everyday work is empowering. You don’t have to think about whether a pattern is a ”real” pattern or not. A pattern doesn’t need to be written in a collection or formalized to be part of your design toolbox. Then once you start to notice your own common patterns, you can begin to analyze the forces behind them. When you are aware of the forces that motivate your decisions, you can be conscious of whether you are designing by habit (“this is what I always do here…”) or whether you are actually applying the most fitting solution to the problem at hand.

It made me wonder what exactly I’m hoping to get out of my design reading. I realized in the shower today that I’m mostly looking at design writing across three spectra: consistency, fidelity, and determinacy.

The first is fairly straightforward: consistency of thought. Does a consistent thesis or set of theses emerge? This seems basic, but it’s amazing how often design writing fails this test. Very often, design writing will contradict itself just a few sentences later. I think some designers think of themselves more as artists than inventors, and shy away from any notions that box design in. (Related: I think this has led to a bloating of what comprises the domain of design. Not everything is a design problem. If it were, then design would cease to be a useful term.)

If you take all these levels of contingencies across all the areas of concerns you have a lot to account for in a product that doesn’t exist. And that doesn’t even touch on interconnections and dependencies between concerns.

So how do we manage all this? I like to imagine this mass of contingencies as an unmapped terrain. The terrain is everything needed to solve the customer’s problem, and my responsibility is to map and explore the whole thing. In order to know what has been explored and settled and what is still wilderness, I want to have some areas defined on the map.

These are just a few examples of how playing with paper can really contribute to the design process. Whenever I’m trying to communicate an idea or working through solving a problem, I find pushing away from my computer and sliding over to a stack of paper for “craft time” can bring a fresh perspective.

The publishing and ebook industry is completely in reaction mode. Publishers reacted to Amazon by colluding to set up the agency system. Kobo and B&N reacted to Amazon by mimicking its strategy. Even the IDPF’s EPUB3 and FXL standards are reactions to the runaway train that is HTML5 and Apple’s format extensions, respectively. Google’s publishing plans seem about as coordinated and planned as a piece of driftwood’s path through a hurricane.

I’m already on record as believing that ebook distribution and retail should be based on a modular ecosystem, open file formats and standardised services. I should be able to buy a book from any retailer, have it automatically download to any ereader (app or device), have that ereader use any bookmarking/note service I want, and have that service sync my notes on to Simplenote or Dropbox.

A writer should be able to open up a Scrivener or Word document – one that has been thrown back and forth between the writer and the editor until both are satisfied – click on something like “Export to EPUB” and have a ready-made EPUB file that works everywhere. Maybe have a bit of preferences and stuff to adjust but no fuss. No rendering errors. No worries about whether that blockquote is too long or whether the margins on that list will disappear for no reason. Maybe a quick conversion with kindlegen, but even that can be done automatically.

A tool that is unlimited by media, supports print design, iPad magazine app design, ebooks, ebooks with layout, etc., is a tool that will drive you to drink and suicide through frustration. These apps do deliver on the power and flexibility they promise but their complexity and expense will make that power a lot less useful than you think.
A tool that only works for one ereader app on one device type is amazing to use and fills you with joy, all of which is drained away once you realise that only people with iPads can read your work.

And what does design have to contribute to the seemingly invisible systems, services and flows that have begun to fail us because of their poor design? Because so few people have any education in design thinking, they often do not understand or know how to employ the design process — the iterative, critical examination of possible scenarios that has proven so effective in the physical world in anticipating likely failures or unintended consequences that need correction before a design becomes a reality. And because most designers rarely have the opportunity to apply this process to the invisible world of processes and procedures, we all suffer as a result.

These catastrophes also show how rarely designers get asked to participate in development processes outside of the narrow confines of what the design community itself has traditionally thought of as designed.

For design education, this means a much greater emphasis on the epistemology of design — on how designers think and on how the design process works — and a much greater acceptance among educators that applications of this knowledge will extend well beyond those currently emphasized in most design schools.