There’s a lot of talk about how important details are. But what’s often left out of the discussion is timing. Details and timing are intimately related.

God, the devil, beauty, perfection, precision – these aren’t the only things you’ll find in the details. You’ll also find stagnation, disagreement, meetings, and delays. These things can kill morale and lower your chances of success.

How often have you found yourself stuck on a single design or code element for a whole day? How often have you realized that the progress you made today wasn’t real progress? This happens when you focus on details too early in the process. There’s plenty of time to be a perfectionist. Just do it later.

Don’t worry about the size of your headline font in week one. You don’t need to nail that perfect shade of green in week two. You don’t need to move that “submit” button three pixels to the right in week three. Just get the stuff on the page for now. Then use it. Make sure it works. Later on you can adjust and perfect it.

Details reveal themselves as you use what you’re building. You’ll see what needs more attention. You’ll feel what’s missing. You’ll know which potholes to pave over because you’ll keep hitting them. That’s when you need to pay attention, not sooner.
(Reprinted from Getting Real, The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application.)

Interface design is a two-person dance. By definition it connects two things—the customer experience and the hidden machinery. As a designer, you need a programmer to accomplish anything significant.

I’ve been thinking a lot about teaching UI lately. How do you teach interface design if you can’t get anything done without a programmer at your side? Pair beginner programmers with beginner designers? Sounds like a mess.

Then I remembered my own experience. When I started making interfaces in sixth grade, I didn’t need a programmer because I had Hypercard. Shortly after that it was Filemaker and Microsoft Access. These tools let me connect with data and display it in different ways without convincing a programmer to work with me. It was plenty to learn the fundamentals.

I haven’t seen a UI course that starts with a tool like Filemaker. And Hypercard doesn’t even exist anymore.

If I was designing an introductory interface design course, I think I would start with this kind of tool. Something that lets you gain the experience of putting affordances on the screen, accepting input and displaying output, moving around and enabling tasks.

That way students could get a feel for interfaces without getting into the complicated dance of communication, programmer languages and shared requirements. That all can come later.

About two years ago I was approached by Jason to make some art on the 37signals office walls. Around that time I was also beginning to delve into the notion of cityscapes. The first wall I did was an extension of an idea I doodled on a pizza box with a Sharpie marker.
In the time since I have been back to update the blackboards at the office several times and I have explored the cityscape idea further on my own. I have drawn and painted imaginary cities as cross-sections, from above, from every direction at the same time, quick and dirty, slow and precise, cloudy, vacant, abstracted, cartoonized, covered in streets that are like noodles, blanketed in billboards, brightly colored, monochromatic, big, small, and on and on. Each city is a new discovery to explore from whichever vantage I choose, and I’ve only just begun.
One of the things I love about being a “fine” artist is the freedom. When I’m starting a new painting or drawing, I am free to push the idea wherever it takes me. The onus is on me to take the ideas further, and venture out of my comfort zone. There have been so many times that I’ve gotten halfway done with a piece and thought to myself that this particular piece was a failure and amounted to nothing more than a bunch of wasted time and supplies, but then somehow, as if by magic, that work turns a corner and becomes my new all-time favorite. This transformation amazes me every time and it bolsters my often fragile confidence.
I have been an artist for a long time and I have gone through many phases. For years I exclusively did large abstract oil paintings, and there were times when I would draw nothing but cartoons. These past lives would seem to have very little to do with my current work, but the lessons learned from past experiences are not wasted. Instead, the skills and knowledge gained from being an abstract expressionist and in-class doodler will inform a new drawing. These are the tools I can use to build a brand new city, one that I never could have imagined before my hand began making the marks.

Last month we launched the redesign of our blog. During the process, we wanted to make it feel distinctly ours with a visual nod to its very name—signals and noise.

I wanted our blog to feel special, aesthetically unique, but not gaudy. I took a quick survey of our blog structure and found a great area for opportunity to explore style: our post categories. From design, programming, business, support, writing, to sysadmin, anyone from our team can categorize a post they write.

To give each post an identity, I riffed on these category themes. From there, the obvious presented itself: try illustrating waveforms to harken back to “signals and noise.” Although I had a focus on illustrating, I still started with words, and more specifically, questions to myself.

What does “writing” look like?

So, with Illustrator fired up, I started generating waveforms that would wear the identity of “design,” “programming” and so on. It quickly became an exercise in shape, color, and line densities. The process was fun, and the results were full of surprises.

Since the day The Starter League opened their doors, people from all over the world have traveled to Chicago to learn how to program web apps.

It didn’t take long before design-focused classes made their way into the curriculum. In Carolyn’s class, people learn how to research and shape great user experiences. Shay’s class takes those experiences and turns them into something tangible for the web. Now we’re thinking there’s room for even more. Today, we’re excited to announce the next addition to the growing list of design offerings at The Starter League.

If you’re in Chicago any time before Jan 20, 2013, spend a few hours walking through the Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec exhibition at the MCA.

This is one of the few times the MCA has opened up its exhibition space to furniture/object design. I hope the success of this show encourages them to continue the trend.

The Bouroullec brothers are really on to something. They somehow manage to combine high-tech with organic with comfort. A cool mix of simple and complex, sharp angles and slow curves, and an explosion of multiples. Wonderful colors and mastery of materials. Their work with textiles is something to behold.

They are inspiring.

Check it out if you have the chance. You won’t be disappointed.

We’ve been sharing our process and company values on Signal vs. Noise since 1999. It’s where we’ve planted the seeds for Getting Real and REWORK. And for many readers, it’s their first taste of 37signals. Yet, we haven’t given the look and feel any serious attention since 2005.

So I decided to tackle a much-needed redesign. In planning the overhaul, I wanted to focus on creating a beautiful, clear, focused reading experience.

Designing Outward

“Blog” has such a temporary, read-and-forget tone to it. On SvN, we take our time writing and editing every article. So rather than treating this like a “blog,” I shifted the mindset to that of a tenured publication. So, the entire redesign process started with typesetting the post, and designing outward.

Instead of poring over other blogs, I spent a week studying books, magazines, and of course, Bringhurst. Capturing the right feel for body text was step one—it sets the tone from here on out.

Perhaps it’s me, but there’s something about 13px sans-serif faces on the web that feels like “my Rails app just spit this out of a database.” I want you to read articles, not text rendered on a screen. Kepler, set at a comfortable size, wound up being a beautiful serif that added the touch of humanity I was looking for. Setting the headlines in Acta added to the look I was going for, and Freight Sans wound up being a great sans-serif pairing.