In reality, a particular shade of a color, say pink, can look darker when surrounded by some colors, lighter when surrounded by another, crisp in one context, and difficult to read in another. Picking one absolute value for it doesn’t actually deliver what it’s supposed to: consistency. The job of the good designer is to deliver a great design based on context. If the goal is consistency, then the designer should have the freedom to adjust that color to get that to happen, again working back from the context to the solution.

Insightful writing by Atrin Assa. 

photofights:

American Civil War veterans in 1925 vs. Vietnam war veterans in 2010


What I love about the picture of Civil war veterans is the disturbing feeling of modernity emanating from it. It’s hard to believe these old men in spectacle have fought in a mid-19th century war founded on the question of slavery. The victory of the Union was to engage a whole nation in its slow path towards equal rights and industrialization.

Almost a 100 years later the great-grandsons of those men fought in a far away land for a different ideology, an economic one. And this time the stage was global. However the outcome once again was a victory by the American-led capitalist ideology.

Those two pictures have in common that they show the winners of History, as in the ones writing it. Groups of men who did their part in making History take one course rather than the other.

The hats, you’ll have noticed, have changed dramatically.


1. April 21, 1923 – Conyngham Post, G. A. R., observes its fifty-sixth anniversary; about forty veterans of the Civil War, together with many friends, present.

2. Vietnam veterans at Washburn, North Dakota

A shorthand for designing UI flows, courtesy of Ryan Singer, designer and cofounder of Basecamp.

It’s very simple, you write above the line what hte user sees, and below what they do. Then draw an arrow and repeat for the next step.

I’ve been doing that for quite some time now, I didn’t know other people did. It’s great advice. 

The most expensive comic book ever sold, $3.2M.

Produced in 1938, the comic marked the first appearance of Superman and is considered the genesis of the superhero genre of comics (although there is some debate about that)

Why so expensive?

The reason it was in such impeccable condition was that the while the first owner bought it for 10 cents from the newsstand in 1938 like 200,000 other people did, unlike most everyone else he lived at fairly high altitude in the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia and when he finished reading it, he put the comic in a cedar chest where it remained virtually untouched for four decades. The cool, dark, dry environment of the cedar chest froze time for this comic.