You only ever remember the highs & lows in life, never the middle ground. So rather than go to a lot of average restaurants, I’d rather go for broke and blow the budget on an incredible meal, then spend the rest of the time slumming it. You’ll learn more about almost everything in life by experiencing the very best and the very worst of something, than only experiencing the middle ground.
You can try to win a features arms race by offering everything under the sun. Or you can just focus on a couple of things and do ‘em really well and get people who really love those things to love your product. For little guys, that’s a smarter route.
When you choose that path, you get clarity. Everything is simpler. It’s simpler to explain your product. It’s simpler for people to understand. It’s simpler to change it. It’s simpler to maintain it. It’s simpler to start using it. The ingredients are simpler. The packaging is simpler. Supporting it is simpler. The manual is simpler. Figuring out your message is simpler. And most importantly, succeeding is simpler.
HTML is a language with roots in library science. It doesn’t know or care what content looks like… authoring good HTML and CSS is an art, just as authoring good poetry is an art. Expecting Photoshop to write the kind of markup and CSS you and I write at our best is like challenging TextMate to convert semantic HTML into a visually appropriate and aesthetically pleasing layout. Certain kinds of human creativity and expertise cannot be reproduced by machines.
Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
I often work at home – in a room that like the living room opens up onto the garden. Working does not mean so much designing in the conventional sense but rather thinking, reading, talking. Design is always first and foremost intellectual work.
In many ways, it’s the things that are not there that we are most proud of. For us, it is all about refining and refining until it seems like there’s nothing between the user and the content they are interacting with.
We can only make fantastic advances [in technology] through many failures.
Question everything generally thought to be obvious.
In most agencies, account executives outnumber the copywriters two to one. If you were a dairy farmer, would you employ twice as many milkers as you had cows?
