/ Un microblog che raccoglie link, note, estratti e immagini
James Bridle che parla di AI, di sedie fatte dall’AI, mettendo in evidenza un limite: sanno come solo fatte, sanno come si fanno, non come ci si sente da seduti o ad averle attorno.
What we have here is, quite literally, a chair designed by someone who has read a lot about chairs but never actually sat in one.
Bráulio Amado, in un’intervista su It's Nice That, racconta come fa i poster per il Good Room e non solo.
Often, I can see what it’s going to be right away, but that makes it too easy and you’re just executing. The ones I have more fun with are where you don’t quite see it and have to explore and find something in it. It’s been very helpful for me even applying that mindset and logic to other works, because sometimes when you read a brief, you have ideas and it’s visual, but oftentimes it’s not. So it’s about dissecting it, and researching etc, and then you have everything in front of you and it’s like, alright what can I do with all this.
Kate Moran (Nielsen Norman Group) rilegge tredici anni di eyetracking: i layout cambiano, ma online le persone continuano a scansionare invece di leggere.
People still primarily scan, rather than read. Scanning all of the text on a page, or even a majority, is still extremely rare. Even when users do scan content in its entirety, they never scan it perfectly linearly. They still jump around pages, skipping some content, backtracking to scan what they skipped, and rescanning content they’ve already scanned.
As in 2006, content creators need to accept this fact: People are not likely to read your content completely or linearly. They just want to pick out the information that is most pertinent to their current needs.
Giorgia Lupi su come usano e non usano l’AI (nel suo team). Nel lungo articolo si parla anche delle deviazioni, che spesso aiutano più delle scorciatoie.
Where we won’t use A.I. is during the discovery, listening and thinking phase. Crucial information surfaces in early conversations. We learn what people are afraid of, what they’ve tried that didn’t work and what they believe versus what they have learned to perform. A.I. can scan annual reports and map the competitive landscape, but the strategic picture that actually matters doesn’t live in documents.
Celine Nguyen sul gusto, che si definisce e viene fuori anche perdendo tempo.
Not only do people make do with less data, but they also draw from seemingly irrelevant, unimportant inputs. When I began working as a product designer, I still found myself scrolling through images of ‘90s avant-garde Belgian fashion, instead of more obviously useful content, like screenshots of B2B SaaS software. If this was developing my taste, then what was being developed, and how?
It also seems very distinctively human — to train yourself in ways that seem like a waste of time.
Walking Men Worldwide è un progetto dell’artista e fotografa Maya Barkai. Barkai, con l’aiuto di altri fotografi (amatori e professionisti) ha raccolto le figure dei semafori pedonali da varie città di tutto il mondo. La raccolta è diventata una serie di installazioni pubbliche e un archivio visivo delle diverse identità urbane.
Strumenti, piattaforme e riferimenti spingono verso le stesse soluzioni. Succede da tempo. Il design tende sempre più all’omologazione e la proliferazione di strumenti accessibili a tutti potrebbe allargare ulteriormente lo spazio occupato dal “medio”. (Questa cosa allo stesso tempo potrebbe essere un bene e un male).
New design tools and platforms that promise speed and ease keep arriving, and honestly, they’re good. New agents, new ways to create, faster every time. Motion, coding, typographic systems, the whole apparatus of what we do keeps getting more democratised. That’s worth celebrating.
But something else is happening alongside this. Design is flattening. Not getting worse, exactly, getting narrower. Less weird. Less range. Less of the thing that only one person, or one challenging brief, or one long night can make.
The democratisation of creativity hasn’t made originality easier. It’s made it rarer. The more the range of outputs shrinks, the wider the middle grows to hold them all. And as the middle grows, the distance to something more distinct grows with it.
A un certo punto un prodotto (un qualsiasi prodotto) viene sepolto dall'aggiunta di una marea di funzioni. Sembra inevitabile. (Un articolo di Geoff Teehan nel blog del team di design di Lightspark).
The first version of a product does one thing and usually does it pretty well. Then people use it, which is unfortunately where the trouble starts.
People want things. Teams get bigger. Customers ask for features. Competitors ship things. There are quarterly goals. Someone discovers a new market segment. Someone else has a partnership. Eventually someone says AI.
Most of these requests make sense on their own, which is exactly the problem. Nobody wakes up and says, “Let’s make this product substantially worse over the next five years.” It happens one perfectly reasonable decision at a time.
Un pezzo di codice CSS di vent’anni con molta probabilità funziona ancora oggi, ed è una cosa notevole.
And the real crazy part is that my bad decades-old code still renders fine in today’s latest web browsers! I would be sad if it didn’t, but I also wouldn’t be surprised. How is this stuff still backwards compatible!?
How much of your software from 20 years ago runs on your devices today? I realize CSS is actually “software”, but it is a kind of user interface for making stuff. Most things in tech get worse as time goes on, filled with upsells and ads, or sparkle icons to try out some rad new agent surreptitiously shoved into an app. CSS gets better with age and as more features are added. That’s bananas!
La necessità dell’attrito e del disaccordo per una buona progettazione.
Not in the Figma file. Not in the pull request. In the friction between two people who care about different things and are forced to find a shared answer.
Il design system al tempo dell’AI. Il vincolo funziona se si trova e si capisce. Vale per gli agenti, vale per le persone.
Design systems fail when people don’t use them, don’t trust them, or can’t find what they need. AI adds another version of that problem. If an agent can’t discover the right component or doesn’t have enough context to use it correctly, it may generate something new.
Quando una mappa diventa uno schema. Da un libro sulle mappe ferroviarie britanniche.
Well-designed diagrams will have a sense of aesthetic balance between lines and typography. Their overriding imperative is to inform the passenger of the connections between destinations at a glance, rather than a slavish requirement to follow the topography.
Da un estratto di un libro della Taschen sulle moderne identità visive.
Olivetti’s unique corporate identity did not come about through following norms but through an expansive understanding of design.
Despite there being a number of breakthrough examples, most early corporate identities in the first half of the 20th century were based on the creative signature of an individual designer who produced, for example, posters, brochures and packaging in the same style. An important impetus in design history thus emerged with the approach of the Italian typewriter manufacturer Olivetti. In the early 1930s, Adriano Olivetti (1901-1960), the son of the company founder, established the principle of working with not just the best engineers but also the most innovative architects and product and graphic designers in Europe.
Documents and code are being generated faster than team members can review. You get the feeling that most people have stopped reading altogether.
We need to stop pretending that “the cloud” is a place. It’s not a place. It’s a promise—and promises are only as good as the entity making them. The web was supposed to be decentralized, resilient, a network of nodes that could route around damage. But in practice, we’ve spent the last decade centralizing our lives into a handful of walled gardens, each with its own exit strategy and its own definition of “forever.”