For most of my life I wanted things to go faster. Last week, I realized that now I want things to slow down. That change seems meaningful. I don’t know what’s catalyzed it—getting older, probably. Feeling that I’m finally headed in the right direction. Mindfulness? Whatever it is, I’ve noticed that the present seems more bearable.

Back when I was feeling a imless and lost I used to read and reread something Cheryl Strayed wrote about writing: The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering abou... See more

“Your aesthetics get better as you make mistakes.”

A good product is:

1. Innovative; it must have creativity


2. Useful


3. Beautiful


4. Easy to use


5. Unobtrusive, modest


6. Honest


7. Timeless ; it won’t become outdated


8. Doesn’t skip over any small details


9. Environmentally friendly and doesn’t waste resources


10. Not overly designed, “less is more”

Understandability is a form of beauty, virtual does not mean immaterial and doing things with less is not a return to the past.

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it will be a butterfly — R. Buckminster Fuller

Cut a chrysalis open and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly… No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

— Pat Barker

The idea of having this giant graph where all your data is hyperlinked is cute, but in practice, it’s completely unnecessary. Things live in separate apps just fine. How often, truly, do you find yourself wanting to link a task in your todo list app to a file in Dropbox?

Where am I going with design? That's a hard question because none of us has the ability to understand our path until it's over.