onfocus

I really enjoyed this conversation between Jeff Veen and Mike Monteiro discussing Ruined by Design. There's nothing like hearing from two Internet Olds™ who watched the Web appear and had their idealism about it crushed in many ways. (And I say that affectionately as an Internet Old who has had crushed idealism.) They also discussed Chris Wetherell's remorse about automating retweets. There has been a lot of regret floating around lately. Tim Carmody called it The Builder's Remorse:

"This is the builder’s remorse. Not that you invented a thing, not that the consequences were unforeseen. It’s that you gave the thing to a power structure where things were overwhelmingly likely to end in ruin."

Web development as punk rock was a lot of fun for certain segments of the population. Now it's time to nurse our hangovers, clean up the garbage, and turn it into a profession. Mike Monteiro says it much better than that though which is why you should get his book if you haven't yet.

Field Notes really knocked this National Parks edition out of the, um, recreation enclosure. If you don't already have stacks of these nicely designed notebooks this edition would be a good place to start.

I really enjoyed this history lesson / manifesto / questioning. (lesfesquesto?) As the author says, "I find that both building and designing is a constant cycle of having a question and trying to find the answer." This offers some interesting questions including: what potentially important ideas have we forgotten and how can we use computers to iterate faster?

This is a fun font based on physical router templates that the national forest service uses to carve wooden signs. The great discussion at MetaFilter has some more context and also pointed to the similarly inspired Routed Gothic.

Wow, this is some awful antisocial behavior from a company (and marketing firm) that should know better. Can we have one or two ad-free spaces?

I’m impressed with these campaign brand guidelines which are fairly complex but conveyed clearly. The font is strong—I’m happy dems have moved away from serif fonts. Don’t miss the hand lettered state names.

I also enjoyed this review of the brand at Brand New: Water Under the Bridge.