Maira Kalman On The Power Of Lists, Maps And Organizing

Author and illustrator Maira Kalman on The Paul Holdengraber Show. 

Attention Must Be Paid

Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences. As Ortega y Gasset said: "Tell me to what you pay attention, and I will tell you who you are."  - W. H. Auden

From the introduction to Maria Konnikova's fantastic Mastermind: How To Think Like Sherlock Holmes. 

The end of history and the last website→

And so the rhythm of web work, the not-unpleasant repetition of edit-refresh, has changed. Now it’s edit-refresh-refresh-refresh. And with all those refreshes, you’re not just making sure your one single glorious layout looks right; no, that would still be tractable on a rainy day. Instead, you’re making sure the bizarro variant layouts you’ve cooked up for phones and tablets all look right, all unfurl themselves properly from within the same source somehow, the source that started out so simple, so elegant, but now it’s mutated, it’s full of special cases, because if the sidebar moves up to the top of the phone’s little screen, the buttons are going to have to line up in a row, but there isn’t room for all of them, and it’s not really even a sidebar anymore, is it…

Great observations about the web and web development by the fantastic Robin Sloan maker of Fish and writer of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore.

Craig Mod on Intertwingularity and the "User Experience" of Printed Publications→

It may seem strange to think about printed publications as having a "user experience." But they do, of course. Print is a technology as much as desktop computers and tablets are technology. One of the qualities most natural to the user experience of print is the sense of potential completion, defined by the physical edges. It is a quality that is wholly unnatural to digital formats.

The digital reading experience makes one want to connect and expand outward. Print calls for limit and containment.

Boundaries are good for creativity. The creation of printed materials brings with it the challenge of borders, limits. Creating digitally is such an open-ended process that I find a large part of my work is conveying to teams what the project is not rather than what it is, making borders, limits. ​

Designer Craig Mod continues to explore the edges of print and interactive work through fantastic essays, like this one for CNN.com, and beautiful work. ​

Tim Carmody on the Past, Present and Future of Reading

Tim Carmody at TOC 2012: Digital reading is firmly part of the mainstream. Whether it’s on the web, in an app, or packaged as an e-book, more readers all over the world are starting with a screen. But mainstream audience and still-quickly evolving standards are a recipe for anxiety for readers and publishers alike. This keynote examines how readers’ experiences and expectations are changing in response to the new digital reading landscape, and how and why editors and publishers can address those expectations and soothe those anxieties. 

(via Explore)​