Notes on "26 things"

Dave Rupert’s boiled 101 tips from architecture school down to 26 tips. They’re all pretty good—but I reckon I can boil ‘em down even further. A lot of these tips come down to context > specificity. Good advice, put a whole lot of different ways.

“Beauty is due more to harmonious relationships among the elements of a composition rather than to the elements themselves.”

I wonder if this is why design systems are so hard.

Pre-built design systems (like WordPress themes) never really live up to their demos because the individual elements usually end up cobbled together with no concern for their overall relationships. Take sites built with Material UI: they’re usually gawkish, sparse, Brutalist-adjacent things.

Like this confusing UI used for creating complex key-mapping rules in Karabiner
Like this confusing UI used for creating complex key-mapping rules in Karabiner

On the other end of the spectrum, pre-built relationships between elements is the whole value proposition behind Tailwind UI. And look where that’s got us.

Here’s one that can’t be boiled down: “Three levels of knowing: Simplicity, complexity, informed simplicity.” Or, as the internet puts it:

The bell-curve meme where there's a troglodyte-looking Wojak on one end, a Jedi-looking one on the other, and a nerd-looking one in the middle, crying—indicating that the upper and lower bounds of the graph tend to use the same approaches
The bell-curve meme where there's a troglodyte-looking Wojak on one end, a Jedi-looking one on the other, and a nerd-looking one in the middle, crying—indicating that the upper and lower bounds of the graph tend to use the same approaches

26 Things from “101 Things I Learned in Architecture School”, Dave Rupert

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September 2022

The weather's finally turned, so I've got to choose my days out strategically or spend the next 5 months soaked through.