The Jounce Cahier

Smart consumers balance risk in their financial investment portfolios, and smart designers should consider design and product investments the same way.

The best thing about product design is its inherent contradiction. The best products think of everything, but at the same time, they’re focused on exactly one thing. If you can wrangle that, you’re almost there.

The recent .webfont proposal and TypeKit service don’t seem to get us anywhere closer to terms that type foundries should embrace. So why are they embracing them?

The broader the web gets, the more specialized its practitioners are becoming. The role of the generalist is incredibly important, and we can’t keep neglecting it.

Though simplicity is the darling of the web, we’ve now long outgrown it. Life is complex, and tools to conquer life’s complexity need to instead embrace it, rather than ignore it.

Incremental improvement is the shoreline of safety: if you can see it, you’re sure to be okay, but you won’t be discovering any new oceans. Google and Apple are willing to move away from that shore and explore the risks and reward potential of innovation. Microsoft? Not so much.

Society should have learned from experience that trying to make academia do what industry wants it to do seldom works in the long-term. By concentrating our resources on providing and embracing a career path that doesn’t require moving mountains, we create a stronger work force and a stronger, more multi-talented industry.

There are two kinds of workers in many web shops: ask-enabled, and tell-enabled. They don’t realize the other exists, but they are both incredibly important and can work together swimmingly.

An open letter to aspiring Twitter speculators, setting the expectations appropriately: no, Twitter will probably not want to buy your product out, because you’re not really anything like Summize.

It’s easy to see why it’s become common practice: your organization (business, blog, whatever) builds a site, and your initial focus is on text content, since that’s what you’re used to producing. At some point, you start to expand into other media types like audio, video, slides, etc. So now you’ve got this text-centric site and this existing or potential load of content in some other format, and the question appears: where does all this stuff go? One hint: it’s not the “Multimedia,” “Audio,” “Video,” or “Podcast” sections.

Learning curves, advanced features, and powerful interfaces are things we on the web should be embracing, not fearing. Design for both the beginner and the expert.

Thoughts on cloud computing, inspired by Bruce Sterling’s rant at Webstock. Key takeaway: don’t feed a family on a webapp that completely depends on an external service that could vanish at any time.

Two weeks post-launch of my new design, I take a moment to look at how well Savoy, HTML5, and my new strategies have worked out. Some good stuff, some not-so-good stuff.

I’ve used two documents to replace the sitemap in the design process for my clients. I’ll cover some of the advantages (and disadvantages) of concept models and high-level user flows, two solid candidates that can replace sitemaps in modern web design processes.

If you’re spending your time designing for the homepage first, you may be sacrificing your time and your design’s quality in the process. I talk about “inside out” design and how it can help you as a designer and your client’s budget in the process.

Thoughts on copying, plagiarism, and related laws and ethics. Short form: don’t copy stuff without giving credit, and if you do, make right on it more than you actually have to.

Shrink your enormous deck of Keynote slides into a tiny little package only a fraction of the size! My girlfriend showed me how…

Thoughts and slides from my talk on Agile Design and UX at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC.

I had the great pleasure to talk with Paul Boag a few weeks ago about agile design and development, and how designers can fit into an agile process effectively.

If you’re getting your web design insight from the same people as you were a year ago, you might be getting caught in homogeneity. Get unstuck.

John Gruber doesn’t get it, but it’s simple: now that the iPhone 3G is subsidized, AT&T is treating it like every other phone they carry.

How the heck do you make a good email introduction? I didn’t know, so I’m asking. Can you answer?

Work/Life balance is about balancing more than just two things. Should I be running my life like a business, or is that completely lame?

PodCampDC may be about podcasting, but it doesn’t seem like a true BarCamp. Does it matter?

A modest proposal, but we’re not eating babies, we’re building better web stuff in DC.

DC Design Talks, which I didn’t tell you about yet, is almost full. That’s awesome, and it’s scary. See some of the decisions we made to keep it affordable while still awesome.

When was the last time you were really glad you deleted an email sent to your personal address?

I got an Ooma, don’t have a landline, don’t pay any phone bills, and I’m loving it.

Three days ago, we launched the first issue of The Humble Gourmand, which is a monthly (though it may become bi-weekly) online food magazine for the younger, urban demographic — complete with features, recipes, reviews, a wine column, and a blog.