Confessions of a Recovering Lifehacker


For all you fellow “lifehackers”… a reminder to focus on what really matters.

Life — the only one you get — consists of what you pay attention to. There is literally nothing else. The awesome thing… is that no one gets to decide what you pay attention to except you. It seems easy, banal even; it’s not. Learning how to do it — effectively, meaningfully, and relatively unselfishly — is pretty much the most profound thing you can attempt with the time you’ve got left. And there ain’t no app for that.

Pinterest is profiting off your ‘pinspired’ purchases without a disclosure

As a recent – but impressed – newcomer to Pinterest, this article has me a bit steamy.

Most of us move through life just fine without desiring or demanding to understand profit models at the places we shop – much less to require that they expose these as we step into the store or create an account. So I’m not sure how Pinterest’s appendage of affiliate information to URLs is so offensive in the seemingly sacrosanct social bookmarking industry. And I think it’s nothing but good news that a free, intiutive, useful service has found a way to be profitable from the outset without sacrificing the user experience.

Pinterest has identified a need that was previously indescribable, elevating social bookmarking from lists to mood boards in a way that empowers users to make fuzzy choices about their homes, weddings, and dinner menus much more manageable and, let’s face it, fun.

10 New Year’s resolutions for designers

There are some real gems here, including my 4 favorites:

Choose better problems to solve
Let’s find problems to solve that actually improve people’s lives.

Stop trying to save bad work
The minute you realise the comp isn’t working and you start trying to “save it”, you’re no longer working towards good design.

Blame yourself first
The sooner you take responsibility for something the sooner you can start fixing it.

Get comfortable arguing
You’re the line of defense for design. It’s your job to protect good design.

Designers vs Coding

I’ve also been hearing this question recently, and I’m still taking this to heart and learning more about code… although my interests lie more in project management these days. But it’s still easy to understand why we need savvy designers for the web: The underlying code should affect the way we design - in both a stylistic and structural sense - and this is affected by both restrictions and capabilities of the code which is available to us.

BTW, haven’t heard of Adobe’s Muse? Be afraid! 

via frank:

“Do I need to know how to code?” is a question that comes up with sure-fire consistency in design circles. I’ve seen it asked by so many, from uncertain design students in classrooms worried about their chances of landing a job, to seasoned professionals at conferences seeing their pool of print projects slowly evaporate. The question is being asked with even greater frequency as of late, because Adobe has launched their product Muse, which promises designers the ability to “create unique websites without writing code.” So, if a designer wants to work on the web, should they take the time to learn this dastardly “code” or instead rely on software like Muse?

Read More

(via viafrank-deactivated20120702)

The perfect web design app… and why it doesn’t exist

I’ve been thinking about this for a few years now, and even the upgrade to Fireworks CS5 hasn’t made me happier (in fact, it’s made me angrier in dealing with type). It’s good to know this is a trend – and hope some clever software developer might try to do something about it, or Adobe might start to turn the ship around.

The design has become an approximate visual. There’s an in-between step of prepping graphics to be web-ready. Rounded corners, drop shadows and gradients must be recreated in code and differ in appearance between the design tool and browser.

Top