Highlights

Clients value you in direct proportion to how much it costs them. If you have ever done volunteer work, you may have noticed that the people you were volunteering for had no trouble making increasing demands on your time. No one is going to value your work, or your time, if you don’t.

The biggest myth ever perpetuated in the design field is that good design sells itself. (The second is that Copperplate is a legitimate typeface.)

If you’re working at an agency that won’t let you present your own work, make the case for how it benefits everyone. It helps you, it helps the client, it helps the project get done correctly. If they still won’t let you present your own work, get the hell out.

Don’t waste a client’s time walking them through what they can already see. Your job is to explain how what they’re looking at is the best way to achieve their goals.

No matter how smart or articulate a person is, no one intuitively knows how to give useful design feedback. This skill is not part of anyone’s day job (except for art directors). How to give feedback must be taught.

Of course our dirty little secret is that while we’re telling our clients to be objective, and to keep personal preferences out of it, there’s nothing we want more than them to like it. The first step in getting objective feedback is to make sure we’re giving objective presentations and keeping our own feelings out of the mix.

Focus on: Overall tone (Does this site feel like your company?) Voice (Is it using language the right way? Is it friendly? Authoritative? Trustworthy?) Structure (Too dense? Not dense enough?) Ignore: Specific labels and body copy (Why is everything in Latin?) Missing elements (Where’s my newsletter signup?) Things we did not show you (I have comments about the company history page.)

Above all, never take on bad terms just to get a job. There are worse things than being poor. Namely, being poor and owing someone your time.

And if you remember nothing else, don’t walk away from money that’s owed you. Go get it. You worked for it, you put in honest labor, and it deserves fair compensation. Get over your awkwardness with money. It’s neither charming, nor “authentic.” You’re a professional designer, and professionals get paid.

The same goes for that horrid practice of posting your version of a redesign that has just gone live. By all means, critique it. Write about what works and doesn’t work, but keep in mind that another designer was working under constraints and internal politics that you may not be aware of. So write up your thoughts as a user, even as a user who’s also a designer. But taking the time to redo their work and posting it publicly is smug and petty.

Seasoned engineers tend not to go for trendy ideas, and have a lot of experience making pragmatic decisions. They are very good at what they do, as are you. And you’ll find that if you explain your rationale for your design decisions—as you need to be able to do with anyone you work with—they are an incredible resource. But as long as you’re both on separate sides of the gym thinking each other is weird, no one gets to dance.

Since we’re now far along in the book I believe I can give you some bad news. Almost no one is coming to the sites you work on because of your excellent design work, and those few that do are there to steal. People show up for the stuff. Design makes the stuff easy to find, and a pleasure to use; but it’s not the stuff. The web is made of content. Design is what holds all that content in place. Don’t feel bad; the Golden Gate Bridge is only there to help cars get across, but it’s the bridge that people photograph.

Thousands of people whose names are lost to history who signed the highways, the subways, our baseball cards, and our cities. And you. You are all designers. You are all as good or as weak as you choose to be. And you all have an opportunity to leave your mark of good work on the world. And I pray you use it well.

Like most Mac users at that time, she had no backup of her files. Even before the days of Time Machine, as a Genius, the natural tendency was to have a "tough luck" worldview when it came to data loss. It was easy to look at customers who lost data and not feel any pity, figuring that they had gotten themselves into that position by not having a backup of their data. I operated with that mindset a lot of the time. I think it's fair to say most Geniuses do.

Apple's secrecy helps keep the company ahead of its competition, but that secrecy sometimes hurts its retail employees, down on the front lines.

“Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.” E.E. CUMMINGS

The artist, when near, is concerned with production; when far, he enters a mode of criticism where he judges the degree of benefit (or detriment) the previous choice has had on the full arrangement.

Beauty is palpable, while intentions and objectives are largely invisible. This leads us to ask How more frequently, as if the tangibility of these characteristics were to somehow make them superior. But asking Why unlocks a new form of beauty by making choices observable so they can be discussed and considered.

A polished axe does not chop better, just as the refined design of a lamp does not necessarily light a room more fully. Beauty is a special form of craft that goes beyond making something work better.

One candle can light another, and the light may spread without its source being diminished. We must sing in our own way, but with the contributions and influence of others, we need not sing alone.

Ideas build on top of one another, and to do so well, one must be in the moment, actively poking at the current situation to use its opportunities as material for construction.

Limitations narrow a big process into a smaller, more understandable space to explore. It’s the difference between swimming in a pool and being dropped off in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight.

All design work seems to have three common traits: there is a message to the work, the tone of that message, and the format that the work takes. Successful design has all three elements working in co-dependence to achieve a whole greater than the sum of the individual parts.

Questioning convention can lead to new opportunities by making good on the potential of fresh configurations of the three levers

The faster horse is a recombination of the three levers in a predictable way: the customer’s answer is staunchly loyal to the horse, the already established format of transportation. They are inside of the adjacent possible, and ask a How question: How can horses be better?

Modern people, unlike the ancients, have a different relationship with the future, because we understand that it’s something to be made rather than a destiny imposed by the gods or the whims of fortune.

Design and persuasion are manipulative, and if we have the skills to seduce others toward green pastures, we can also lead them off a cliff.

It requires simply creating a new declaration and adding the :focus pseudo-class to the attribute selector for text inputs. (By the way, the preceding paragraph is a sure-fire pickup line, should you be in need of one. Thank me later.)

“I typed a few keys on the keyboard and I was shocked! The letters were displayed on the screen.” It was Sunday, June 29, 1975, a milestone for the personal computer.

“People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.”

“They were copier-heads who had no clue about what a computer could do,” he said of Xerox’s management. “They just grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry.”

ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.

“We were very relieved,” he recalled. “We knew they hadn’t done it right, and that we could—at a fraction of the price.” A few weeks later he called Bob Belleville, one of the hardware designers on the Xerox Star team. “Everything you’ve ever done in your life is shit,” Jobs said, “so why don’t you come work for me?” Belleville did, and so did Larry Tesler.

One of the engineers told Atkinson that there was no way to build such a mouse commercially. After Atkinson complained to Jobs over dinner, he arrived at the office the next day to discover that Jobs had fired the engineer. When his replacement met Atkinson, his first words were, “I can build the mouse.”

Jobs’s belief that you could distort reality if you had enough passion for your product.

different type of project manager, willing to make some trade-offs, might try to lock in dates after which no changes could be made. Not Jobs. He displayed another maxim: “It’s not done until it ships.”

On ne peut pas à la fois obéir au monde et le transformer. Un jour, on étudiera à l'école comment la démocratie s'est autodétruite.

Tandis qu'au bordel, l'homme se laisse aller, ne cherche plus à plaire, à se montrer meilleur qu'il est. C'est le seul endroit faux où il est enfin vrai, faible, beau et fragile. Il faudrait écrire un roman intitulé « L'amour coûte 500 euros ».

Comment on fait pour se réveiller, quand on ne dort pas ?

Le monde entier est prostitué. Payer ou être payé, telle est la question. Grosso merdo, jusqu'à la quarantaine on est payé; après, on paye les autres, c'est ainsi - le Tribunal de la Beauté Physique est dépourvu d'appel.

Dans une société bloquée ou tout le monde est coupable, le seul crime est de se faire prendre. Dans un univers de voleurs, le seul péché définitif est la stupidité.

Connaissez-vous la différence entre les riches et les pauvres? Les pauvres vendent de la drogue pour s'acheter des Nike alors que les riches vendent des Nike pour s'acheter de la drogue.

Le galop dans la morne plaine du temps
avant de découvrir
qu’il n’y a dans cette vie
ni nord ni sud
ni père ni fils
et que personne
ne sait vraiment où aller.