Demonstrate from the top that high quality and attention to detail are prioritized and appreciated above everything else, including being the first to market, having the most features, or having the most aggressive prices. If you can get those as well, that’s great, but quality will not be sacrificed to do so. Instill these values [...] Continue →
Waterstreet GM is home to Terry Sutton.
DESIGN / DEVELOPMENT / WORDPRESS
Taking new projects. Get in touch.Lately
charity:water—year two
A friendly reminder that the September charity:water campaign is on. I donate through Cameron Moll’s campaign, as he tries to corale the design community to raise $35,000, almost double last year’s ambitious goal. Charity:water works to help the staggering 1 in 8 people in the world without access to clean water.
You can help.
We become what we behold
We become what we behold…we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.
—Marshall McLuhan, via Thinking for a living
Nicholas Felton on designing information graphics
My chief concern is that the finished graphic be highly scannable and easily digested. For me, this means the elimination of complicated keys and fiddly connections between labels and items. Relationships should be as direct and unadorned as possible and free of unnecessary design flourishes.
—Nicholas Felton on designing information graphics
Getting over the embarrassment of incomplete design
Well, you don’t want to show something that is weak, or poor, so you want to hold off until you get it right. And the trick is to actually stop that behavior. We show it every day, when it’s incomplete. If everybody does it, every day, then you get over the embarrassment. And when you get over the embarrassment, you’re more creative.
—Ed Catmull, Pixar President
Anniversary Number One
365 days of marriage under our belts. They’ve all been great.
Bill Gates tries to download Windows MovieMaker
So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.
—Bill Gates in an email to his team at Microsoft after a frustrating evening trying to download Windows MovieMaker from Microsoft.com. I think he’d be much happier with what he would find there today. [ahem]. Via the Brooks Review.
The summer before my brother moved away
Though it feels like it all happened last night, it’s been several months now since my brother moved away. He, his partner, his stepson and their friendly black Lab lived just a short walk up the hill and around the corner from our street.
On warm evenings last summer, my wife and I would walk over there for supper and a few drinks, and we’d often end the night with a campfire and a big yarn in the back yard. We’d sit around telling lies and stories long into the evening, watching the stars and flankers shine faintly above, and after a few hours my wife and I would walk back home, arm-in-arm, just around the corner and down over the hill.
To say that these evenings last summer were anything less than magic would be to lie. And now they’re gone.
Though my brother and I still talk and laugh and carry on everyday, it just isn’t the same. The words of Irene Peter often echo loudly in my ears, sadly and without consolation:
Just because everything is different doesn’t mean anything has changed
she once wrote. But yet it isn’t a vague ‘anything’ that troubles me these days— it feels like everything has changed.
Will we ever get those magic summer evenings back? I’m not sure. The optimist in me is ever reluctant to see the passage of time as a permanent thing, but there certainly is a nagging feeling of permanence about the passing of evenings like these. A feeling that although the evenings will carry on, they’ll do so with a certain emptiness about them. They’ll pass without the laughing and the stories in the backyard, and they’ll do so without the smell of smoke from the campfire. It feels like they’ll just pass without any specialness to them at all, and I’ve been feeling a bit sad and nostalgic about that for a few weeks now.
And sure, you could certainly say that there’s no real need for any of this sadness at all—he and his family have just moved to the other side of town, for God’s sake—but still, it does make me a little bit sad and wistful for the long evenings full of food and wine and stars and warm summer wind and that magic feeling that you can only feel as a family.
