Skyler Vander Molen

I try to make things really good, and then I try to make something else. I don’t ever try to make anything perfect. In fact, I don’t believe in perfect. I believe in really good. I believe in a handmade object that retains evidence of its handmade-ness. And that, by nature, is never perfect. As designers, we don’t make “just one thing.” One project is not the end of the world, and it’s not the only thing to be made. A painting is just a painting, and there are more paintings. And you have to make many to begin to make good ones…

— Stephen Doyle, How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer

The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.

— Isak Dinesen

(Source: twitter.com)

Eddie Murphy: The Rolling Stone Interview

RS: Do you read reviews?
EM: I remember when Beverly Hills Cop came out, they gave it some horrible reviews... back then I would listen and trip. Now I don't listen to anything. I haven't read a newspaper in 20 years. I don't look at the computer or anything. You have to have a filter on what you let in.
RS: Isn't there a danger of feeling like you're in a vacuum?
EM: I don't feel like I'm in a vacuum. I be chilling, and the really, really important things, you hear about. It's the day-to-day bullshit I don't need. I don't watch any of it. I don't know how. The computer is a trip to me. Sit in a room, everybody is on their computer or phone. I don't do any of it.

For example, 93% and 86% of people say their personal and business circles have grown, respectively, and 76% say they’re more productive. More importantly, 88% said their isolation has decreased, which probably influences their productivity (and happiness). A good chunk of people even trusted these strangers enough to leave their stuff there unattended, because 96% of them thought community was an important value among coworkers.

— Coworking Is Better for You Than Previously Thought via rgreco

You break expectations by changing what someone’s already used to. You change expectations by giving them something new. Understanding the difference is key to product design.

— Jason Fried

(Source: 37signals.com)

Book jackets these days, for reasons I won’t unpack, seem to revel, overtly, in wit, conceptual deviousness, unusual clever or droll juxtapositions—we, as a professional community, seem to have elevated the visual bon mot above all other virtues. […] Not that wit in itself isn’t valuable, and doesn’t have an appropriate place in design—but wit is not the same thing as insightfulness, and often insightfulness is what is called for in a book jacket. Our fetishizing of cleverness has taken a toll I believe, in that (quite often) these clever solutions work at cross-purposes to the (more often than not sincere) narratives they represent. A book in which an author has gone out on a considerable limb in order to write in a genuine and unaffected fashion does not want a cover that winks at the reader. Wit, when it becomes compulsive (as anyone knows who has a friend who puns too often) quickly becomes its opposite—dullness or predictability. Are we, as a professional community, that punning guy? I hope not.

— Peter Mendelsund via viafrank

via jjjjound

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that some-one, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argu- ment, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle… I miss my old brain.

— Nicholas Carr in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs

My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him all good things—trout as well as eternal salvation—come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.

— Norman Maclean, via viafrank via Best Made Co.

Don’t stop imagining. The day that you do is the day that you die.

— Youth Lagoon - 17