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.

Agencies, departments, and organizations don’t do things — people do things. People’s names should be on things to foster both accountability and pride.

Edward Tufte.

(via John Gruber)

And for me, 25 years on, what I love about this is being able to give this to somebody and say, “See, this is what I mean by comics.” It is not a genre. It is simply a medium. And it’s a medium that you can do anything with.

Neil Gaiman.

The secret among those who have poked around EPUB, the open specification for ebooks, is that an .epub file is really just a website, written in XHTML, with a few special characteristics, and wrapped up. It’s wrapped up so that it is self-contained (like a book! between covers!), so that it doesn’t appear to be a website, and so that it’s harder to do the things with an ebook that one expects to be able to do with a website. EPUB is really a way to build a website without letting readers or publishers know it.

But everything exists within the EPUB spec already to make the next obvious — but frightening — step: let books live properly within the Internet, along with websites, databases, blogs, Twitter, map systems, and applications.

Hugh McGuire on the future of books and publishers as API providers.

We generally try do the dumbest thing that will work first. And that’s usually as far as we get.

There’s an elegance to dumb solutions.