week 5 of 2024

abi.toads has such delightful illustrations of chill toads and mushrooms

I don’t believe in guilty pleasures…if you like something, like it.

— Dave Grohl

Nearby Wiki presents Wikipedia on a map so that you can find articles based on relevant geography. I live in the middle of nowhere so there are only a few pages near where I live. I work in Lansing, Michigan and there are about 150 pages near where I work. It is a fun and interesting way to explore your neighborhood.

Daft Social is an anti-social network where you post by sending an email and only the email subject line is published. You can share short snippets of text, links, or images this way. The official Daft Social feed is pretty minimal and fun to read.

Full-Stack Personal Development by Anne-Laure Le Cunff at Ness Labs is a fun metaphor for understanding this funny thing called life. As a digital designer, the concept resonated with me. It looks at front-end public skills like Collaboration and Leadership coupled with back-end private skills like Metacognition and Self-Regulation. It is all about personal development couched in the language of building a web app. Reminds me of the article Life is a Video Game article by Mark Manson with cheat codes on how to play the game of life well.

A callback to what I posted last week about the combination of slow and fast design. I’m noticing a trend here that I should probably pay more attention to.

I believe speed is important. But I also believe that months of continuous pondering can produce an insight that lights the way for months to come. I understand the argument for shipping early and often. But I also believe that we should aspire to build lovable products, not viable products. And lovable products take time to build and polish.

— Sari Azout