Links
A regularly updated collection of things I find worth reading, watching, or listening to. Subscribe via RSS.
-
Taste at speed
№ 55As I was finishing up writing a talk for Adyen’s Studio Day (on designing and writing with attention and intention, on quality and craft, on taste, and on AI tooling), an email arrived in my inbox. In it was the latest post by Carly Ayres, writer, and previous co-founder of HAWRAF, and it reinforced the line of thinking I’d been on.
She writes about taste, speed and AI and how, while AI may lower the bar to get to a decent first draft of whatever it is you’re creating, speed doesn’t always indicate progress. Progress may just be movement.
Tools produce polish, but not perspective.
I see many people writing about this at the moment. About how perspective and taste are what can set a good designer apart. About how creative constraints and thoughtful revision are key to an outcome that’s good, and not just finished.
-
Erin Kissane writes about online spaces and what makes them unbearable and joyful. The post is under her wreckage/salvage moniker, a “tiny studio and display case for small research projects and long-form explorations.”
-
An essay I wrote recently led me down a rabbit hole on stone skipping, culminating in this read on Kurt Steiner, a man who "has dedicated his entire adult life to stone skipping, sacrificing everything to produce world-record throws that defy the laws of physics."
-
Shelf Space
№ 52
For the 100th post on Frontier Magazine, Brian Sholis—self-proclaimed library devotee—indulges in sharing recently built libraries around the world.
Congratulations on 100 posts, Brian!
-
Richard Brody on the life and work of French filmmaker Agnès Varda. I’m looking forward to reading the upcoming biography, and I’ve quite a few of her films to catch up on.
-
I’ve been flip-flopping between Spotify and Apple Music myself, and can relate to this piece by Kyle Chayka. Changes to their apps in recent years have not favoured (album) listeners like myself. It’s fascinating and saddening to see one platform steer the way we consume music into a certain direction.
-
"This site explores the graphic design of Penguin book covers, with a focus on series editions. […] The covers presented on this site are all from my own collection of about 1.400 Penguins, which have been chosen for the beauty or interest of their cover designs. They span the history of the company all the way back to 1935 when Penguin Books was launched."
What a collection—beautiful.
-
In response to a recent post by Elle Griffin ("No one buys books"), Lincoln Michel decides a more positive take is needed.
-
I’ve not watched any other videos about the Vision Pro because I will not buy the goggles and I’ve been somewhat sceptical of this product direction, but Casey Neistat’s video does an excellent job of showing what it’s like to use this thing in real life, and gets across well the hints it provide at a future with spatial computing. It’s… kind of exciting?
-
I’ve been replaying James Blake’s latest album “Playing Robots Into Heaven” somewhat obsessively, and was reminded of this conversation he had with Brian Eno, for who he plays the music and who then provides him with his honest impression.