I’ve always laughed at clients who insist on printing out websites for review. It’s like looking at a picture of a painting… The medium itself is what makes the thing what it is. Once you remove the media, the identity of the thing you’re reviewing is essentially lost.

But when I saw this slide in the excellent slide deck called Good vs. Great Design by Cameron Moll I sort of wanted to print a website. Now I have no idea what Cameron is saying during this slide in the real presentation. Maybe he’s making fun of people who print websites too. But what I see is a tactile way to review content and hierarchy.

There are lots of markup tools for online mockup reviews. But they all feel like using a butter knife to cut steak. You want to directly interact and scribble with your hands, not draw boxes and type text in Markerfelt. Why not print out a website big, stand 10 feet away and blur your eyes? We’ve been doing that stuff for print work for years. Maybe a change in perspective will help you focus more clearly on making the site read at a glance. Plus being able to doodle, sketch, and cross things out is always a liberating experience.

“What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable. I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. A small number of Black Swans explains almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

I still print things… Unfortunately when I proofread, I just can’t do it on my monitor. It’s a mental block I guess. But getting my eyes mere inches away from the content, and running my fingers over it helps me.

The iPad has the same intimate feeling for content as paper. I think it’s a great opportunity for a mac developer to build a plugin to the OSX print dialog for iPad output via bluetooth. Not only is it a great way to share documents with yourself right before heading out, it’s a placebo for paper in those few times we still need it most.

“Missing items in a complex visual search is not a new idea: in the medical field, it has been known since the 1960s that radiologists tend to miss a second abnormality on an X-ray if they’ve found one already. The concept — dubbed “satisfaction of search” — is that radiologists would find the first target, think they were finished, and move on to the next patient’s X-ray.” via

-Even when you think you’ve got it sorted, take a second and look around. I can’t tell you how many hours of future programming time you’ll save yourself by making a habit of taking a few seconds to review your last changes even after they “work.”

Even when I write, sketch, or draw in a notebook I never plan on letting someone else see, I have an imagined audience. I feel like someone is looking over my shoulder looking at all my crappy sketches, and stupid thoughts.

Things like this Flickr set make me feel pressure to have gorgeous creative notebooks. I feel like if I don’t, then I’ve somehow failed, or I’m not doing it right.

A while back though, I gave myself permission to use my notebooks for “junk.” Not for finished art. Not to frame. Not to brag about. But to really quickly get ideas out of my head, and thought through in a visual way.

My notebooks aren’t going to be in a museum 500 years from now like DaVinci, and that’s ok. My brain kicks out lots of ideas and 90% of them are bad. I use notebooks to record and sort those ideas, most of which aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.

Giving myself permission to treat a notebook like a tool, not something precious, has been a good thing in my life. Do you have self conscious thoughts like this that keep you from being more productive?

http://the99percent.com/videos/6201/scott-belsky-dont-let-your-genius-go-unnoticed

Imagine every blog article gets a unique hashtag. (kind of like how url shorteners work.) Twitter turns into a very simple way to comment on articles across the whole internet tracked via the hashtags.

You could build a cool site where you could see recently commented on articles. See what’s most popular, and see what users are commenting on what. Kind of like TweetMeme. Kind of like Digg.

Already been done? Other ideas?

Attorneys, doctors and accountants all are required to have continuing education throughout their careers. Web developers? Nope. In fact, our noble profession doesn’t even require a specific degree. You just say you are one, -and you are.

At Paste we all have degrees related to our assorted tasks. But we have been lacking in a formalized way to continue our education throughout our careers. Sure. Most of us are avid readers of blogs, and keep well up on current events in our industry, -but what about the hard stuff? The hard-won little bits that come from the deep reading of the history and tenets of our profession?

We’re starting a new program today. We’re a really small company so it’s not like “programs” are hard to roll out. But in order to formalize it a bit better for posterity, and because some of you might want to do the same. Here it is.

For all Paste employees:

• Purchase any design or programming related book.
• Read it cover to cover.
• Let everyone know about it.
• The cost of the book will be reimbursed.
• In addition you’ll get $50 for being a better employee.
• If you write a blog post review of the book, you’ll get another $50.

q. Will anyone do it?
a. I hope so. And I think so.

q. Will we go broke doing it?
a. I don’t think it’s possible to go broke making your employees better.

q. Will it improve our products and our workflow?
a. I don’t see how it couldn’t…

WIRED Magazine recently published an article in their print edition about daydreaming being a more productive activity than most people think. It got us thinking about what we daydream of, and we can’t help but agree that a little mind-wander here and there isn’t a bad thing. The problem is not having a way of tracking where your mind goes, prohibiting you from turning those thoughts into something useful.

“For years, brain scientists viewed a wandering mind as merely a lapse in cognition. But recent studies have found that we lose concentration shockingly often. Keep Reading

I’ve recently started using the Summarize Service built into OSX a lot. It’s been there for a long time, but it just never occurred to me how useful it could be.

With the new shortcuts preference pane in Snow Leopard, Summarize popped back onto my radar. I re-added it to my preferred services list by checking the box, then I additionally assigned it a keyboard shortcut. Keep Reading