A quick capture of my recent book acquisitions from a trip to Northumbria…
From Barter Books in Alnwick:
From Bibelot Nook in Newcastle:
From the bookshop at Wallington:
From Bookcase in Carlisle:
Making good tools requires a lot of effort and many small, incremental improvements over a long period of time. The creators of Concepts (one of my favorite iPad apps) provide a good picture of this, in a post chronicling ten years of Concepts development:
If you’re invested in the digital creative space, it can seem like these developments that feel and act so magically are almost expected or taken for granted. We all put our hands up and say, “Of course, this should be obvious by now.” But the truth is they take deliberate engineering to bring the developments about. They wouldn’t exist if we didn’t put the ideas and time in. Watching our world’s technologies grow one decision at a time - whether it’s our own app or through another team’s resources and efforts - is humbling and worth celebrating.
From the same post, TopHatch Founder Ben Merrill:
The app in my head is about five years down the road, and the version I wish I had is relegated to Tony Stark. It just takes a long time to build good tools, but we’re making progress.
Business wisdom from 72-year-old Tom Persky, owner of floppydisk.com, in an interview with Niek Hilkmann & Thomas Walskaar:
On sticking to your principles…
One day somebody contacted me and asked if I wanted to buy the domain for $1,000. I felt it was an outrage. I told my wife I would not participate in this kind of cybercrime, but she took out a cheque-book and got the domain name instantly. This went totally against my principles, but thankfully my wife is much smarter than I am.
On getting out of a dying industry…
Everybody else in the world looked at the future and came to the conclusion that this was a dying industry. Because I’d already bought all my equipment and inventory, I thought I’d just keep this revenue stream. I stuck with it and didn’t try to expand. Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me.
On skating to where the puck is going…
In the beginning, I figured we would do floppy disks, but never CDs. Eventually, we got into CDs and I said we’d never do DVDs. A couple of years went by and I started duplicating DVDs. Now I’m also duplicating USB drives. You can see from this conversation that I’m not exactly a person with great vision.
On the future of the floppy disk:
There’s this joke in which a three-year-old little girl comes to her father holding a floppy disk in her hand. She says: “Daddy, Daddy, somebody 3D-printed the save icon.” The floppy disks will be an icon forever.
Now, as in 2017, past presidents demonstrate that moral leadership and standing against racism are not Left or Right.
…silence can be as deadly as violence. People of power, privilege, and moral conscience must stand up and say “no more” to a racially discriminatory police and justice system, immoral economic disparities between whites and blacks, and government actions that undermine our unified democracy.
It is time for us to listen. […]
We can only see the reality of America’s need by seeing it through the eyes of the threatened, oppressed, and disenfranchised.
…it falls on all of us … to work together to create a “new normal” in which the legacy of bigotry and unequal treatment no longer infects our institutions or our hearts.
Barack Obama, quoting Nelson Mandela:
No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion…
George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, in a joint statement:
America must always reject racial bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred in all forms … we are all created equal and endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights.
Rejecting and denouncing hatred is not political. It is not Left versus Right. It is the appropriate response in light of the worth and dignity endowed to us by our Creator.
We should expect and demand this most appropriate response unequivocally from our leaders. More importantly, we must expect and demand it from ourselves.
While my voice is small, by grace I will use it to respond appropriately: I reject and denounce white nationalism, white supremacy, Nazis, and all others who hate based on skin or religion. To those targeted by hate: you are my neighbors. I will stand with you and for you. This land was made for you and me.
On Massimo Vignelli’s funeral:
[…] it was a farewell that he personally designed down to the last detail, capping a long, storied life in design.
Ed Catmull, president of Pixar Animation, in his book Creativity, Inc.:
Despite being novice filmmakers at a fledgling studio in dire financial straights, we had put our faith in a simple idea: If we made something that we wanted to see, others would want to see it, too.
As a team, work together to make the product you all want to use.