Attempts to verify the utility of languages stifle innovation. Christopher Mims 03/06/2012 30 Comments Compared to the versions that are hacked together late at night under insane deadline pressure, the programming languages to come out of academia are failures. Well, not all of them. History can speak for itself. Via UC Irvine computer scientist Cristina Videira Lopes, who deserves credit for any insight you might get from this post, which is a gloss on her excellent, if long, Research in Programming Languages:Languages people use and love:PHP - Hacked toget...

Get the new year off to a positive start with these design resolutions Wake up. I hope you enjoyed your holiday because it’s a new year and it’s time to get back to work. We did pretty good last year. We started standing up for ourselves. We stopped working for free. We started getting our financial house in order. (Please don’t make me do the contract thing again this year.) We rediscovered typography (again). We learned to think about mobile first. We learned how to make responsive sites. And we stopped compin...

"Well, it's a start, but basically it stinks," said Steve Jobs, telling early Apple engineer Chris Espinosa exactly how he felt about the company's first calculator application. Iteration after iteration, Jobs continued to be dissatisfied with the calculator. Espinosa continued to code, slowly inching his way to perfection. But nothing was quite right. In a flash of both brilliance and perhaps frustration, Espinosa put together a visual builder that let Jobs design the calculator himself by changing the thickness of the lines, the size of the buttons, the shading, and the background, without ...

Most of the design books you read, including my own, are about how to be a good, competent designer. They are about how to make strong, reasoned design decisions and about design methods and tools. But what they won’t—can’t—teach you is how to become a great designer.The only way to be a great designer is to produce great products. Everything else is…well, everything else. I’m convinced that the people who are great designers, while assuredly they’re both talented and experienced, have taken extra measures to ensure that what they produce...

I just returned from Dave McClure’s excellent Warm Gun Conference, and I haven’t been this excited to be a designer in a while. The entire event was about design, metrics, and products, and even more importantly the people at the conference were many of the who’s who in Bay Area design. From what I saw and experienced there I daresay there are signs we’re entering a golden age of Design. The evidence: 1. The startups being invested in are designer-led. Take the new Designer Fund that funds startups with designer-founders and helps mentor them. Consider the companies...

Every now and then I get a really lovely email from an aspiring letterer that is about to publish a passion project of his or her own. They tell me my work was an inspiration and that they can’t wait to share their creation with the world. I feel all warm and fuzzy inside for a moment…until I click on their link and realize that much of what they intend to publish is nearly a direct tracing of my work.A lot of established illustrators and designers deal with the same thing—students or young professionals that rip them off without realizing it. Addressing these young d...