If you can’t draw as well as someone, or use the software as well, or if you do not have as much money to buy supplies, or if you do not have access to the tools they have, beat them by being more thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is free and burns on time and empathy.

From a wonderful, thought provoking post by Frank Chimero. Read it, absorb it.

That little pencil…the tool aspect…is this little gateway to a million ideas. I think about that kind of stuff with each one I crack into. In a world where things are more and more compacted, complicated, sped up and digitized, a regular old wood pencil is always there for you. Never needing to be recharged, you know?

Aaron Draplin.

The time has arrived that three communities–the business, design, and technology communities–have independently discovered the same thing. That the best way to build new technology products, services, and the businesses that deliver them is to work in small, cross-functional, highly collaborative teams. To use lightweight, informal methods. To use rapid cycles of designing, making, and validating in order to test and learn and improve. To focus on the customer.

Josh Seiden in Agile UX? Lean UX? Customer Development? A multiple discovery moment.

A skeuomorph or skeuomorphism (Greek: skeuos—vessel or tool, morphe—shape) is a derivative object which retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original. Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar.

Skeuomorph on Wikipedia. Bookmarked because I’m always forgetting the word and have had need to refer to it twice in the past week.

Why the hell hadn’t anyone thought of this before? The keyhole, immeasurably improved. A genius piece of design, intuitive and elegant.

Hat tip: John Gruber.