Twitter’s Creative Director Talks Design, UX and Inspiration

“In a world where data bits flow abundantly, our minds have developed filters to sift through the overflow of useless and badly designed information. While design must appeal to our sense of aesthetic, it must not stand in the way of delivery, cause complications or introduce stumbling blocks.”

“Know very well the reasons why the product needs a redesign, or if it does at all,” Bowman told us. “Understand that users are creatures of habit, and change is often hard to move beyond. [– –] Some redesigns are often appreciated more for what they eliminate than what they add.”

The Future of Advertising

“Marketing actually needs to be useful — “use-vertising” instead of advertising — which means that you must think more like a product developer than an entertainer. While campaigns once promised glossy anthemic concepts, perfected before being shipped off to the waiting client, digital is incremental, experimental, continually optimized — “perpetual beta” — and never, ever finished”

The future of writing on tablets: A Q&A with Information Architects

“I don’t see design as a separate discipline. Good design has a technological, a tangible and an economical side. [– –] Designing better news is a design, strategy and economic issue. I don’t have a solution, but I feel that I’m on a hot trail. What motivates me is that with the liberation of information, we see a global transformation of societies toward more openness, more reason, less lethargy. “

“Sometimes I get scared that this revolution — just as all the big industrial revolutions before — might eat its kids. But I can’t see how. The dam has broken. There is no way back to information control.”

Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved

“”New” technologies – like multi-touch – do not grow out of a vacuum.  While marketing tends to like the “great invention” story, real innovation rarely works that way.  In short, the evolution of multi-touch is a text-book example of what I call “the long-nose of innovation”

How Microsoft Hit CTRL+ALT+DEL on Windows Phone

“A cleaner, consistent user interface wasn’t achieved just by tweaking mobile strategy. To guide the developers making Windows Phone 7, Microsoft’s design director Flora established “Metro,” a set of design standards. “The philosophy of Metro is trying to do a lot with a little,” Flora said. “Use typography in a creative way and eliminate a lot of decoration. Just have the form of it tell the story. That allows the content really to be the hero.”

“Henceforth, instead of a screen cluttered with icon buttons, Windows Phone 7 focuses heavily on typography to display different features and functions. [– –]”

Network Realism: William Gibson and new forms of Fiction

“Network Realism is writing that is of and about the network. It’s realism because it’s so close to our present reality. A realism that posits an increasingly 1:1 relationship between Fiction and the World. A realtime link. And it’s networked because it lives in a place that’s that’s enabled by, and only recently made possible by, our technological connectedness.”

John Sculley On Steve Jobs, The Full Interview Transcript

“An anecdotal story, a friend of mine was at meetings at Apple and Microsoft on the same day and this was in the last year, so this was recently. He went into the Apple meeting (he’s a vendor for Apple) and when he went into the meeting at Apple as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. [– –]”

“Later in the day he was at Microsoft. When he went into the Microsoft meeting, everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the design. That’s a recipe for disaster. [– –]”

“Design at other companies is not there. It is buried down in the bureaucracy somewhere… In bureaucracies many people have the authority to say no, not the authority to say yes. So you end up with products with compromises. This goes back to Steve’s philosophy that the most important decisions are the things you decide NOT to do, not what you decide to do. It’s the minimalist thinking again.”