I saw Richard Wiseman’s book 59 Seconds mentioned on Boing Boing the other day and on a whim I started reading it. It reminded me of another book I’d enjoyed, Brain Rules. Both are what you might call “self-help” books based on legitimate, well-researched, scientific experiments. Real data. Plus, it has a great title! The…

No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it. Leon Battista Alberti (architect, painter and mathematician)

Morale is key in design. I’m surprised people don’t talk more about it. One of my first drawing teachers told me: if you’re bored when you’re drawing something, the drawing will look boring. For example, suppose you have to draw a building, and you decide to draw each brick individually. You can do this if…

Or maybe the past if you liked California-era Mr. Bungle. Regardless, it’s been a while since I’ve heard something so now. It’s ridiculous and it shouldn’t be any good at all. It’s Babymetal, I guess. Anyway, this whole thing makes me feel like I really am living in the future. (We are.) Enjoy.

Ain’t It Cool News interviewer Quint says it well, “To be a kid in my generation meant you grew up worshipping Snake Plissken, RJ MacReady and Jack Burton.” There’s a great, super-casual interview there with genre film legend Kurt Russell. Lots of interesting conversation on his career and his collaboration with director John Carpenter. Kurt…

Is beauty objectively true? Are there principles you can use to guide you to it in your work? Can designers from both the sciences and the arts look at each others work and find beauty? These are important questions for designers of all types. For those of us who design things … we need to…

Brevity is good. It looks like the Hemingway app can help you achieve it. It’s pretty cool. (Yes, I typed this post in the Hemingway app.)

I’m not quite sure what the StoryBots are but my almost four-year-old daughter loves them. Their Astronomy videos? I love them. My whole family loves them. Catchy hip hop songs with cute animation. If you have kids or have no shame about enjoying videos made for kids check them out. I’ve ordered them by relationship…

Brevity (the soul of wit) is my favourite principle for good writing. It may seem impossible to, say, arbitrarily cut any one text in half but the challenge of attempting it forces you to consider the importance of every phrase, word, and punctuation mark therein. Do it.

Languages, food, package tours, sitcoms, or (for my followers and myself) plugins and themes. Build things you want to use for yourself. In the original Java white paper, Gosling explicitly says Java was designed not to be too difficult for programmers used to C. It was designed to be another C++: C plus a few…