The selective breeding of humans as "alphas", "betas", etc. may have been inspired by the eugenics movement[1], which had prominent supporters in the U.K. at the time (e.g., Winston Churchill).[2] Except that in the novel, instead of just getting rid of "inferior" people, they actively bred them into a servant caste. (After Hitler gave eugenics a bad name, it became much less respectable.)
A large aspect of design that separates great professional designers from amateurs is very hard to teach. It can be described as training your eye and developing your taste. This simply comes from repetition and practise. Ira Glass articulates this well describing the creative process — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbC4gqZGPSY
Another aspect of design is the mindset and mentality required when looking to solve a problem. Something I feel often gets overlooked in the software world, where culture is generally engineer focused. IDEO pitch this in as 'design thinking'. While I'm not so keen on the term they do a good job of communicating the importance of certain mental traits that designers possess that are key to the design process.
Sketch. Considering a user flow/feature or user story? Sketch out 50 ideas, explore and exhaust all possible scenarios, no matter how achievable, obvious or silly. Get it down on paper. I often think that getting the idea down on paper allows my mind to forget on it and move on to another potential solution. Try to not let your technical expertise constrain this exploration, that'll come later as you whittle your ideas down.
Personally, if I have the time I quite like to produce hi-fidelity sketches. It may seem frivolous when a quick sharpie sketch will do, but as I spend time sketching I find the thinking time valuable and often find myself with another piece of paper jotting down notes/ideas etc.
Learn to draw — I believe designers should sketch and draw. There are so many lessons to be learnt that translate to what we do when designing interfaces. It provides a foundation in understand proportion, lighting, white space, suspense etc. It's also an exercise in discipline and training your brain to accurately produce the image in your minds eye.
Like OP has demonstrated, this isn't how CSS works. To do so because this is how things are done in print is backwards. You could argue letters sitting on their baseline feels nicer to you, though I'd argue this was form over function.
This isn't a baseline - a typographic baseline aligns with the baseline of the letters because this is actually useful in design for example in order to line up pictures with the baseline. No-one said this 'feels nicer' it looks bad when pictures almost align but not quite with text, or when two columns of text don't align (check out CSS columns[1] for more examples of this lack of attention to typography in the spec messing up layout). If you call this a baseline, you'd probably steal sheep! [2]
CSS was created without much reference to traditional typography, and thus makes it hard to do good designs with grids, baselines etc. This is a failing in the CSS spec, not something to be celebrated as the new ideal. There are entire frameworks out there trying to address all the failings of CSS when doing proper design (Bootstrap, Foundation etc all feature grids, something CSS is lacking). It's a shame the creators of CSS didn't consider more deeply the centuries of thought people have put into placing type on a page (or vellum, or a stone wall, or a poster, or a screen, or a phone, many of these rules apply to any medium in varying degrees). If they had we'd have avoided a lot of the hoops people have to jump through just to produce pleasing designs.
I'm not clear why this grid is useful for web design, except perhaps as an illustration of another facet of CSS which is broken by design? Why would you want to align elements with the bottom of the line box as defined by CSS (which is usually invisible)?
> I'd like to learn more but the religious aspects are a turnoff.
This is a shame. Within the frivolous details we debate so much religion holds a wealth of wisdom and value that anyone can apply to their lives and benefit from.
I took a similar stance when getting into meditation. I was looking for a way to deal with stress and I was certainly not "religious". I quickly found that modern/western Buddhism is stripped free of a lot of the Asian cultural traditions that I perceived as religion.
"This is a shame. Within the frivolous details we debate so much religion holds a wealth of wisdom and value that anyone can apply to their lives and benefit from."
I have to agree. Many of the fruits of the Enlightenment[1] have been very positive, and the oppressive and totalitarian aspects of what passes for organized religion deserve to be rejected in the strongest possible terms.
However, the viciously anti-religious attitude that the Enlightenment has spawned and which has had a resurgence recently thanks to narrow-minded bigots like Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, the mainstream media's relentless focus on church scandals, some forms of religious extremism and supposedly religiously inspired terrorism (all of which I condemn in no uncertain terms) has led a lot of people to reject all of religion wholesale -- which is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
There are many profound, thought provoking, inspirational, and beautiful ideas, images, and messages in religion. And there's an incredibly wide and varied range of different types of religion -- to an extent that most people are simply not aware of.
Despite what we may see on the news or read in books by the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, or Harris, religion is not all about domination, pedophilia, or unquestioning obedience to some leader or dogma.
Unfortunately, many people do buy in to such myopic visions of religion, mostly through ignorance and propaganda. As a result, they're really missing out on the parts of religion which are positive, constructive, profound, and even liberating.
That said, I'm not a believer myself. I'm agnostic, but a student of the history, techniques, and beliefs of religion (among many other things). I want to learn about every aspect of religion -- good and bad, light and dark. Few fields as large as religion are as simple as they might first appear.
This is a shame. Within the frivolous details we debate
so much religion holds a wealth of wisdom and value
that anyone can apply to their lives and benefit from.
To be a little more specific, I enjoy learning about religions, but I choose not to practice any. So secular meditative practices are of interest.
I agree: there's a lot of wisdom to be learned from religions.
To be clear, I think the philosophical and some of the metaphysical ideas that come with meditation have a lot to offer as a way of thinking about the world. I'm talking more about the stuff like "aligning chakras" and "energies" and all that.
This generalisation of interface visual styles being either 'flat' or 'skeurmorphic/not-flat' concerns me.
I've experienced interfaces both good and bad that sit at either ends of the spectrum. It's hard to say which is better than the other because in reality most interfaces seem to land somewhere in the middle.
I find the whole debate rather shallow. As designers we should be educating others that a style is the result of a variety of factors such as branding, fashion, originality, time constraints, content, function, hardware, software etc etc.
I've already been asked by clients for "flat design" and it makes me cringe every time.
Forgive me for the shameless plug...but thought this might be useful for other HNers and related to OP.
I put together a little project that uses the browsers localstorage so you can jot notes down and come back to them, I find it useful as I'm always in the browser, hope you do too: http://a5.gg
I occasionally use a similar online tool, complementary to yours: http://notepad.cc. It stores each note online at its own URL, instead of per-computer at just the root URL. That lets you retrieve and edit notes across multiple computers. I mainly use notepad.cc if I’m using a someone else’s computer or a public computer and want to send some links or a note to myself.
FYI local storage is not reliable, so you may want to think about a fallback, or at least putting a disclaimer explaining that what you write will probably but nitndefinitely still be there when you come back.
Makes sense, and I like the simplicity of the design quite a bit. Maybe one way to augment it would be to add a button that throws the content into a gist/pastebin.something similar, so it could be more easily shared or preserved? Of course, it's a fine line between that and having social media buttons all over.
I noticed that you've added Google Analytics code to the page. Is this included because it is now a world-facing site, or do you use analytics on your internal projects for personal metrics?
Are things broken right now? No matter the browser, when I try to upload one of my small PowerDot created presentations (90k), it just pops a banner up that says "Thanks for signing up" and nothing happens.
Check up the compatibility.js file that comes with pdfjs. We edited some portions according to our need to have some PDFs render properly. Although we're not totally there yet too!
I've always assumed (perhaps wrongly) that culture was very different then and have been always been curious as to how he came to his prediction.