It's important to know your history and where you've come from.

Irene Posch used historic gold embroidery materials and knowledge to craft a programmable 8 bit computer.

Solely built from a variety of metal threads, magnetic, glas and metal beads, and being inspired by traditional crafting routines and patterns, the piece questions the appearance of current digital and electronic technologies surrounding us, as well as our interaction with them.

Via Metafilter.

Suzanne LaBarre of Co.Design has come up with an update of Dieter Rams Ten Principles for Good Design list for 2018: 10 New Principles Of Good Design.

Good Design Is Honest

This is one of Rams’s tenets, but it bears repeating at a time when dark patterns abound and corporations treat UX like a weapon. Uber is the most flagrant example. The company built its business on a seamless front-end user experience (hail a ride, without ever pulling out your wallet!) while playing puppet master with both users and drivers. The company’s fall from grace–culminating in CEO Travis Kalanick’s ousting last year–underscores the shortsightedness of this approach.

Good design “does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is,” Rams writes. “It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.”

Lots to think about and absorb going into 2018.

(via kottke.org)

Too many people think graphic design is not a specialty, but something anyone can do, because the tools to make decent-looking Web pages, newsletters, books, and the like are readily available. But design isn't putting stuff on a page. It's about solving visual problems through an iterative process of decisionmaking, which may involve consultation, or may happen in private. If you can't master that process, you can't work in the field.

Glenn Fleishman on Yahoo's logo redesign.

It's been over a year since I joined WDCS, and to coincide with the 64th International Whaling Commission, you can now see a small piece of what I've been working on.

Say hello to dev.wdcs.org.

Over the next fortnight, our team will be busy posting news and blog posts from the IWC, offering us a great opportunity to ensure that the structure, work-flow, and multilingual nature of the new site all work as we hope. And in what I think is a brave move by everyone here, we're doing it in the public eye. If GDS can do it, well so can we (seriously, the GDS team has been, and continues to be, a massive inspiration).

It's a bit shabby round the edges: the theme is bland and temporary but hopefully very readable, there are some bugs in the internationalisation framework that I'm still fixing ("Ray, when someone asks you if you want to build a multilingual site, you say 'NO'!"), and you might find yourself in a bit of a navigation dead-end if you follow the wrong link.

As I said, it's a bit shabby, but it's our shabby.

If you're interested in the background of what led us to this point and where we're going in the future I gave a talk to the Oxford UX group a couple of months ago that fills in some of that.

Thanks to everyone at WDCS who's been helping on this project. As a web geek you couldn't ask for a more passionate and committed bunch to build for.

And now, some sleep.

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.