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Poor Charlie's Almanack
I don't care particularly about Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger: I don't think that I care about money enough. Does this make me naïve? At any rate I like what Stripe, who has published the latest edition of Poor Charlie's Almanack, has done with the website. They don't call it an ebook, and it doesn't come in a downloadable .epub file or anything—but it's an ebook.
John Gruber's right about the sorry state of ebooks. I don't mind reading books on my Kindle, but the certain quality to physical books that makes them really memorable, to me, is missing when I read digitally. I like reading on my Kindle, but it doesn't move me the way a real book does.
I wish that there was a platform, an opportunity, for books to be published like this: with attention to typography, with pictures and hyperlinks. I wish I cared about Charlie Munger and I wish I cared to read this silly book, because I want to spend more time with multimedia reading experiences like this. These feel like worthier alternatives to paper & glue than the spartan XML documents we got.
(Requisite complaint about how it spins my computer CPU up. I liked it better when Gruber was taking potshots at web developers.)
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Battery on Arc
Just finished downloading the latest version of Arc and it looks like the issue that caused a background 5% CPU load on my crusty old MacBook has been expunged. In fact, I'm writing this very blog post on Arc, with nary a spun-up fan to be heard.
Arc is nice—and I'm glad that they're trying to do something new with the browser—but I'm not sure whether their take is enough to pull me away from my precious defaults. It's thoughtfully-designed, for sure. But is it thoughtfully-designed enough to make it worth switching to? To make it worth learning how to use a new app look at the internet inside of a rectangle?
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Does web design matter
This past week, I finished making a small website for a family member’s business. I had an idea I liked for a subtle header animation. As I sat down to do it, I couldn’t justify how that animation would make the site any better at its job—attracting potential clients—than the static, non-animated version would.
It got me thinking: could I justify an animation for any website’s header?
There's this tense relationship between user-experience and design I've noticed a few times before: there's overlap between the two categories, but they're not the same thing:
- good link text is good user experience, but not always good design;
- animated headers might be good design but not good user experience;
- proper colour contrast is both.
Although: Dieter Rams's says that good design is aesthetic. Spinning headers are aesthetic but it's hard to make a business case for them because they're not functional. And Dieter Rams isn't like the final arbiter of these things anyway.
Then again it's often hard to make a business case for art. Are websites art?
As other forms of media rise in popularity, what I’ve observed is websites being relegated to one of two purposes:
- The website is the business, or a major part of it. Think e-commerce behemoths like Amazon and eBay, publishers like Dotdash Meredith and Buzzfeed, or social media companies like Facebook or Twitter.
- The website as a glorified business card. Someone people have square business cards, some spring for the gold foil and extra-thick card-stock, but they all do the same job in answering these two questions: are you legitimate and how can I contact you?
I like Jason Miller's application holotypes but this feels like such a cleaner way of conceiving of websites—and no less true. Much more easily grasped. Is your website itself a product, or is it an identifier?
Is this a dichotomy, or a spectrum? Where do blogs lie?
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Fujichia
Finally, a website that actually defies explanation! Finally some good fucking internet.
Fujichia is ostensibly the website for a "record label for CD-Rs and tapes"-slash-blog, but which in latter years has metamorphosed into a "castle full of enchantments, a warehouse of material related to previous projects, a blog, and occasionally a storefront."
These descriptions of website-as-place are not accidental: eschewing the traditional structure of scroll-down-to-view-more-words, Fujichia actually structures the website as a 2(.5?)-dimensional-ish space that you have to scroll and click around to explore. Links don't direct you to other pages, but to other parts of the castle; featured works are presented as installations in the grand ballroom. "Take the door below to the stairs, then go up a flight and it's the first door", the site reads. Direct hyperlinks are far between: you really do have to click through doorways and scroll around in space to find what you're looking for.
I don't know how to explain this to you. I'm just scrolling around in my browser, but the effect really is of being in a different place. The artwork is powerfully 2d, charming in its simplicity—all MS Paint-type work here, no ostentations WebGL to spin up my CPU and burn my lap. I've been clicking around for 20 minutes and I'm still finding new stuff. I feel like I'm at a National Trust house! Why have we been futzing around with dashboards and blogs and plaintext when the internet can be a real place you go and visit?
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Websites are fine
Robin Rendle and Chris Coyier going back and forth on embarassing, broken, janky websites.
Robin:
"The baseline for websites is not great. Okay, fine, most websites are pure unadulterated, straight-up bad."
Chris:
"Pick a theme on WordPress.com and spin up a simple blog. Do an eCommerce thing on SquareSpace and sell painted pencil erasers. Use an Astro template to build your next media endeavor. They will be very much fine out of the box. Better than fine. Pretty damn decent, really."
That websites are not fine is the position of content-, accessibility-, reader-focused web designers, though. The Internet, however, is on balance not for these people. There is a thriving IndieWeb(tm) scene rife with good websites. Robin and Chris both have good websites. Zach Leatherman just posted a website (itself: good) with 42 links to groundbreaking blog posts about the web, and all of those sites are also good. The Internet that caters to web designers is good, and has been good for a long time.
But as I say, the Internet is not for web designers. It's not for good websites. It's not even, really, for creating or consuming content. Those are just means to the Internet's real end: turning people's attention into money. You don't want a "sticky position ad for Geico right in the middle of it"? You don't want the "newsletter subscribe modal"? These are, unfortunately, profitable—or at any rate they make all the KPIs at the automobile insurance and newsletter subscription companies fly way up and to the right so fast that everyone in the boardroom's eyes spin around in their heads. These people get to make the decisions, and as far as they're concerned, the Internet is very much fine.
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