This was originally published as an item in Issue 003 of the designspun email newsletter.

It is no secret that Twitter has enabled and emboldened Donald Trump by not restricting any of his tweets, even if they violated their terms of service. But earlier this week, they put misinformation warnings on two of his tweets about mail-in ballots. This angered the President but also got the ball rolling. Snapchat shortly followed by saying it will no longer promote Trump’s account. Against the backdrop of growing protests against the murder of George Floyd by police, some tech companies finally started to grow a conscience. But will Silicon Valley change? Mary-Hunter McDonnell, corporate activism researcher from the Wharton School of Business says, “Giving money to organizations that are out on the front lines is more helpful, but it’s also to some extent passing the buck. People are tired of that.”

As designers, we have some power over the projects we work on, and the products we create. Mike Monterio wrote in February, “At some point, you will have to explain to your children that you work, or once worked, at Facebook.”

While at Facebook, Lisa Sy designed ways to flag hate speech on the platform—using Trump’s account in the mockups. In 2016. Four years later, Facebook has not implemented such a system and continues to leave up dangerous posts from Trump, including the highly-charged “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” post.

Tobias van Schneider wrote in 2016,

The role as a designer, or even as an engineer has become more influential and powerful than ever. The work we do makes an impact and naturally brings up the discussion around ethics, responsibility and accountability.

Many of us will work on pieces that are seen by hundreds, maybe thousands. A few of us, having larger clients, or working at a tech company, might work on something used by millions, if not billions of people. We hold great responsibility.

We produce work for audiences, users. Humans who are on the other end of that screen, poster, or ad. Mike Monterio again:

You don’t work for the people who sign your checks. You work for the people who use the products of your labor. If I were to put my hope in one thing, it’s that you understand the importance of this. Your job is to look out for the people your work is affecting. That is a responsibility we cannot defer.

Sex

With coffee in hand, I flipped through Facebook yesterday morning. “Me too” read one post from a female friend I used to work with. Incredibly intelligent, hands-down one of the smartest women — no, people — I’d ever worked with just posted two words. I thought it was a mispost that was supposed to be a reply, a butt-post if you will. Then I saw another, and this time with an explanation. And throughout the day, my feed depressingly filled up with “Me too” posts, illustrating how common sexual harassment and assault of women are.

Of course this movement was spurred on by the bombshell investigative journalism by the New York Times and the New Yorker. Last week they broke open a story that’s eluded the media for so long: Harvey Weinstein and his serial sexual harassment and assault of women in Hollywood.

Why would a man who was successful, married, and the father of five children decide to regularly try to convince young starlets to sleep with him, give him a massage, or just flash their breasts? As I read and listened to women recounting what had happened to them, and how Weinstein actually acted, I realized just how small and backwards of a man he is. He negotiated with them. He sounded desperate. And he sounded guilty and scared immediately after committing any of those acts. Weinstein knew he wasn’t supposed to use his position of power and act like a predator. But he did anyway.

And he is not alone. Fox News Channel’s cofounder Roger Ailes, that channel’s biggest star Bill O’Reilly, Amazon Studios’ Roy Price, and disc jockey David Mueller, were all recently exposed or convicted. And it’s not limited to just the entertainment industry either; see SoFi’s CEO Mike Cagney, Binary Capital’s Justin Caldbeck, Uber’s Travis Kalanick, and many others. And of course, let’s not forget our president Donald Trump!

Men have sexually harassed or assaulted women close to me. Stories I’ve been told and my Facebook feed yesterday affirm that. There is a significant portion of men out there who, because they succumbed to their urges, have made women feel ashamed, dirty, and slimy. It’s pervasive, even in our first world country. Even in our liberal state. And even in a progressive city like San Francisco. Penis trumps brain.

Violence

I sat in my car in my driveway, listening to the remaining nine minutes of the podcast. The reporter, Jeffrey Gettleman, was recalling the horrific tale of a 20 year-old Rohingya woman named Rajuma who survived an attack on her village by the Myanmar military. She was one of the few survivors. The soldiers had shot, decapitated, and slit the throats of all the men in her village. They took her 18 month-old baby boy she was clutching to and unemotionally threw him into a fire. Then the men pushed Rajuma into a hut and proceeded to gang-rape her. Rajuma woke up to smoke and fire. Her mother dead. Her sisters and brother, all dead. Almost everyone in her village murdered. But she escaped. And eventually joined thousands of other refugees in Bangladesh.

I was heartbroken hearing that story. How could a human being do that to another human being? What could make them so savage that they could do those things to children? To babies? This vicious act was not the isolated act of a psychopathic serial killer. This was systemic, coordinated ethnic cleansing, carried out by groups of soldiers. Since August, the above scene has played out 288 times, with many thousands of Rohingya people killed.

Evolution

Schoolchildren are taught that male animals put on a show when they’re looking for a mate. Peacocks fan out their feathers. Pigeons dance around in a circle. But male mammals go further. Primates like chimpanzees will coerce females to mate with them by charging at them, ripping out their hair, or beating them.

Chimpanzees have also been observed killing other chimps who do not belong in their territory, or in an effort to expand. In fact, Jane Goodall watched one tribe of chimps, called the Kasakela, kill all six of the other tribe’s — the Kahama — adult males over four years.

As modern humans, we are many species away from our genetic ancestors. Proto-humans separated from chimpanzees seven to 10 million years ago. We developed a consciousness and a conscience. And yet our animalistic tendencies still persist. I’m not talking about core biological functions like hunger, or our fight or flight response, but acts that require thought and effort like arranging a “meeting” at the Peninsula Hotel or torching over 200 villages and killing all their inhabitants.

Values

“Hey! Stick to your side!” my daughter yelled from the back of the car. Her little brother is sticking his arm or leg past the mid-point of the row of seats. As he needles her, he’s smiling devilishly.

I’ve lost count the number of times that vignette has played out in my car over the years. Being possessive and territorial is instinctual. Children say “Mine!” all the time. But we teach them to share. We teach them that it’s good and nice to share with their friends. We also teach our children to be empathetic and help those who are less fortunate than us.

These are core human values: sharing and caring.

At least I’d like to think so.

Kayla Chadwick wrote a great piece last week, “I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People” that connected a few dots for me.

Chimpanzees may resort to sexual coercion and murdering rival tribes. But us, modern homo sapiens, should not do that. Yet we do sometimes. Our human society should be about cooperation and shared prosperity. But we don’t always adhere to that either. Instead, just like chimps, it’s each sub-group for itself.

Politics

My core human values are indeed sharing and caring. I am squarely middle-class and believe in sharing my tax dollars to help those who are less fortunate. I care for the plight of the homeless, the immigrants and refugees, Black lives, and the disenfranchised. This is the liberal platform. That all boats rise together.

But on the conservative side, the values are fundamentally different. It’s about the opportunity to prosper or fail by one’s own hand. In other words, it’s every man for himself. The fight over the Affordable Care Act illustrates this. Insurance is, by definition, pooling financial resources to share in the cost. Which, again by definition, means that healthier people’s premiums pay for sicker people’s costs. The Right’s constant drumbeat of repealing and replacing Obamacare is a demand for healthy people to pay less, and sick people to pay more. In other words, not sharing and not caring.

Healthcare costs for the sick can be extraordinary. A year’s course of treatment for a typical breast cancer patient is over $140,000. So if she were in a high-risk only insurance pool, her premiums would be incredibly high — upwards of $18,000 — compared to a healthier person her same age. Would a person making minimum wage or on disability ever be able to afford such insurance?

Republicans conveniently forget that Americans already share in a lot of costs that may not apply to us individually: mass transit on the other side of the country, the Library of Congress, the military, disaster relief from hurricanes. Adding healthcare — something that affects each of us — seems obvious to me.

We’re just not there yet

Perhaps we’ve been fooled by liberal idealism. We’ve been overly optimistic in our assessment of our own evolution as a species. Despite millions of years of continued brain growth and refining our societies, humans are still pulled by our primal instincts of sexual aggression, territorialism, and tribalism.

I want to believe that we can do better. I want to believe that someday, there will be peace and prosperity on Earth for 100% of us. That someday, men will no longer be pigs, and we won’t squabble and kill over a plot of land. The only way we can achieve that is by pulling the other way and moving forward. By believing and acting better, together.

P.S. This essay was not written from a point of moral superiority. The opposite is in fact true. I acknowledge that we are all imperfect, including myself. But that we can—and should—improve in our own lifetimes, and in the generations to come.

Did you know that March 31 was World Backup Day? Yeah I didn’t either. But for shits and giggles, I decided to finish writing this post which I had started late last year. Hope you enjoy…

Anyone who works with any type of data files should have a comprehensive backup plan. Which pretty much means everyone who uses a computer. As a designer who’s been working professionally for over 20 years, having a good solution that works is incredibly important. Over the years I cobbled together something that works for me, but I wanted to codify it and share it, in case it might work for you.

The Crash

I’m a data packrat. Since my early days with my 512K Mac, I’ve tried to save everything that I’ve produced. Therefore there’s a big plastic bin filled with 400KB and 800KB floppies, DAT backup tapes, SyQuest cartridges, Zip disks, Jaz disks, CD-Rs, and SCSI hard drives, containing many years of work. Eventually, I’d like to extract all those files onto a modern medium, like say, the cloud, but that’ll have to wait until I have much more time on my hands.

Anyway, as a designer, I accumulate a lot of work files. At some point in the mid-aughts, I had a massive hard disk failure on my main work drive, which contained portfolio pieces from three or four jobs. Five-to-seven years of archived work disappeared with a screech. I sent the poor silver LaCie Big Disk (all 2GB worth!) to a data recovery company and crossed my fingers. A couple of weeks and $2,000 later, all they were able to recover was about 60% of the data, in loose, unorganized files, some even with generic names like “Photoshop Document 01.psd.” Because a lot of my work from that time were Adobe Illustrator or QuarkXPress files with placed assets, it was all pretty much useless. Sigh.

Since then I vowed to always back up my work onto a redundant medium. Enter RAID.

Redundancy

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It’s a technology that acknowledges that failure is inevitable and therefore builds in redundancy. There are a number of RAID levels which you can read about here. The gist is, for almost any RAID level except 0, if one of the hard disks fail, the data will still be protected. The first device I purchased was a 1TB Buffalo Terastation Networked Attached Storage (NAS) to which I manually copied all my music, photos, and whatever archived work I had left.

It worked fine for a couple of years until my storage needs started to grow exponentially (I just had a child and therefore wanted to take digital pictures of everything she did!). But I realized that upgrading the storage on the Terastation wasn’t exactly easy. While theoretically it was RAID 5 and pulling out a hard disk and replacing it with a bigger one should have been fine (then repeat for each of the four disks), I just wasn’t confident. The tools they had at the time made it look like a chore. So the next move was to a Drobo.

Drobo’s proprietary RAID system seems like a dream because I could expand it whenever I wanted to! It also involved me getting a Mac mini and connecting the Drobo to it, since they didn’t have a NAS option at the time. Also around this time I discovered CrashPlan. So now I could use CrashPlan to continuously back up to the cloud and to my Mac mini plus Drobo server. Additionally, I had CrashPlan running on the Mac mini and it backed up the entire Drobo to CrashPlan’s datacenter as well.

The Mac mini plus Drobo combo served me well enough for a few years. But I did have a couple of complaints. First of all, the Drobo model wasn’t exactly quiet. With the Mac mini in the living room and part of the entertainment system, the device was just a bit loud. Secondly, the Mac mini was mostly idle as I didn’t really use it much to view media on my TV. Yes, I could have solved the first issue by moving the Mac mini out of the living room since it wasn’t really necessary for it to be there. But I didn’t.

Because I’ve had to move around a bit in the last few years, the mini and Drobo went into storage. Recently I finally settled down and started to think about setting up the Mac mini + Drobo server again. But I also knew that it had been in storage for over four years. My hunch was that it would be dicey, so I decided to upgrade to a new NAS.

In the years since buying the Drobo, NAS technology really accelerated. Modern NAS servers seem to have come down to two brands: Synology and QNAP. After much research, I purchased the Synology DS916+, a four-bay NAS, and I outfitted it with four 3TB drives, formatted the unit as RAID 10, for a total of 5.5TB of storage. Synology’s DSM operating system software is pretty cool in that you can install numerous apps and use it as a mini server. Although it’s really not recommended that you use a NAS server for anything robust, as their processors are usually underpowered. I chose to format the volume as RAID 10 for both redundancy and speed. Although in hindsight, I would probably use Synology’s SHR format next time to eke out a little more space.

Once set up, I dug the Drobo out of storage and plugged it in. It didn’t sound too great at all—after all those platters hadn’t spun in over four years. But it stayed alive long enough for me to retrieve all the data and copy it onto the Synology. Years of work, photos, and music data was safe again.

Comprehensive Backup Plan

Enough backstory, here’s the plan. The best backup plan is the kind that you don’t think about because it’s automatic and constant. To have to manually think to back up your files is an immediate fail. Because you won’t remember.

For me, the goals of my backup plan are:

• Access to 100% of my data from anywhere
• At least two redundant copies of 100% of my data
• Automatic and always running
• Security

To reach those goals, the solution really calls for a two-pronged approach: local and cloud. Local is handled by the Synology NAS plus CrashPlan. And cloud is handled by a combination of CrashPlan and Dropbox.

Local

For Macs, Apple has a built-in backup solution called Time Machine. You can switch it on and point it to an external hard drive, or to a network-mounted drive, like a NAS. But it’s for local backups only. And since I was already using CrashPlan to back up to the cloud, I can also use CrashPlan to back up to my Synology NAS. It’s automatic and always running in the background. If I need to restore anything—like I accidentally deleted a file—I can do so via the copy on my NAS, which would be a lot faster than from the cloud if it were a huge file.

With CrashPlan backing up to my NAS, I always have two local copies of every file.

Cloud

A key part of my workflow is Dropbox. All my project files are placed into Dropbox for realtime cloud backup and sync. And while I’m always really good at saving versions and iterations, there’s also the peace of mind that I can revert via Dropbox if I needed to. And best of all, I can always access work on my iPhone while on the go, in case a client needed a file and I was nowhere near my computer. Which I’ve used at least a few dozen times. I can’t recommend enough to use Dropbox in your daily workflow.

Now Dropbox is great, but there are limitations. Their upgraded individual plan is only 1TB, so it’s not great for my archival purposes. My music and photos alone take up over 600GB.

I’ve mentioned CrashPlan a couple of times already in this piece, but let me dive a little deeper. I install CrashPlan onto every computer I own—my MacBook Pro, my PC, and my wife’s MacBook. I have it back up my user folder which contains all my data files, including everything that’s synced with Dropbox. CrashPlan will also keep versions of files. And all my backup data is encrypted so no nefarious entity can go digging through my data.

Adding Dropbox and CrashPlan, I now have two copies of the same file in the cloud. This means for any given file, there are four copies: two local and two in the cloud.

Now the only piece of the solution that isn’t being backed up is the NAS. Back up the backup? Yes! Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy! I back up the Synology NAS to the cloud as well since it contains archives of project files, photos, and music. I do not back up the CrashPlan and Dropbox data that’s on the NAS. But for everything else, I use Synology’s built-in Cloud Sync app to sync with Amazon Cloud Drive. This awesome service from Amazon gives you unlimited storage for one flat yearly price. Well worth it.1

Security

With revelations from Edward Snowden about how the NSA and other spy agencies had developed tools to snoop on Americans, I—and the rest of the web—have been much more aware of security. That’s why for all of the cloud services I mentioned, I’ve enabled both encryption of my data as well as two-factor authentication where available.

Missing Link

I like my plan and it works well. But it is missing something. Namely all the pictures and videos I take with my iPhone are only getting backed up in one place—Apple’s iCloud. Yes, the media is also on my MacBook Pro which is backed up to the NAS, but it’s fleeting and gets deleted automatically when I’m running low on space and macOS decides to optimize my storage. I wish there were a direct way to sync all my photos to my Synology NAS as well. But in my research so far, it doesn’t seem possible. Will need to revisit this one in the future.

Conclusion

The origin of my backup fanaticism is tragic, but as certain as death and taxes are, so is data loss. Hard drives crash, laptops get stolen. It will happen. While my backup plan might seem overkill for your needs, feel free to tweak and modify as necessary. At the very least get a cloud backup solution like CrashPlan2 so that your data is protected at least once. Fit Dropbox3 into your workflow if you generate any amount of files. And then add a NAS when you can.

Having a comprehensive backup plan that’s automatic, that you actually use, will ensure that you can recover quickly and easily when one day you hear a big screech from your hard drive.

Notes:

1 There is a way to install CrashPlan on the Synology NAS as well. I tried this for a couple of months, but ultimately gave up on it. It’s not an officially-supported platform for CrashPlan and took up a huge amount of resources from the low-powered processor in the NAS. Using Cloud Sync to back up to Amazon Cloud Drive was the best solution I could figure. However, it is only a copy of the current state of the NAS, and not a true backup with versions.

2 There are other great cloud backup solutions besides CrashPlan. For features and pricing, CrashPlan continues to be the best fit for my needs. Check out this excellent roundup of backup services from The Wirecutter for other options.

3 Dropbox was the first to the market with a cloud sync solution that just worked. I’ve tried Google Drive, Box, OnDrive, and others, but Dropbox works best for me. Feel free to explore the other sync solutions.

Yesterday Apple announced its third-generation iPad, simply named “iPad.” Buried in MG Siegler’s excellent take on the press event is this statement:

What’s more likely — 5 years from now, your primary home computing device is a PC? Or 5 years from now, your primary home computing device is a tablet? Just two years ago, this question would have been an absolute joke. Now it’s a joke to think it will take a full five years.

In the post-PC world, tablets are becoming the new normal more and more. In just the two years since the iPad was first introduced, we’ve seen it pervasive on airplanes to entertain children, many executives in Silicon Valley walking around with them instead of lugging laptops, and even the President of the United States receiving his Presidential Daily Briefing via iPad instead of a sheet of paper.

How We Really Use Tablets

Rosetta—the agency for which I work—released a study last month around how we consumers use tablets. Consumption and entertainment are still the primary uses of tablets today, but here are some interesting points to note:

• 33% of tablet users (who owned one 12+ months) prefer to read/check email on their tablets
• 38% of them prefer tablets to read e-books, magazines or newspapers
• 34% of them use their tablets at work
• 45% on the go

In other words we’re witnessing the trend of users either adding to their repertoire of connected devices or in some cases shifting away from traditional PCs to tablets. As MG Siegler said in the quote above, tablets are poised to become the primary computing device at home.

But I would argue that place is a misleading distinction. Yes, PCs will likely still be a primary computing device at the office, but maybe it’s the wrong way to put it.

Work/Life, Life/Work

PCs today are not stationary. Almost every workplace I’ve come across in recent years outfits its workforce with laptops. Those laptops are often taken home so that work can be done at home. And here’s the thing: as much as we’d like to draw a hard line between work and home, it’s too fuzzy. It’s too gray.

Workers check their personal emails and Facebook while at work, on their work machines. They IM their friends or watch funny cat videos on YouTube in the office. Conversely they check their work email on their personal smartphones and catch up with industry-related reading before bed.

The workforce of today achieves work/life balance by seamlessly blending the two to get things done. Wherever they are.

Responsive Web Design

Out of this notion of users being connected constantly and wanting access to information all the time, wherever they are, the responsive web design movement was born. Essentially it’s a set of techniques to enable a single codebase to deliver multiple layouts for different screen sizes. The redesign of BostonGlobe.com has become the poster child for this modern and forward-looking approach to designing for the web. It’s about letting users access content from whatever devices they have, wherever they are. And with this approach, content creators are also saving money on operating expenditures because they only have one site to maintain, not two or three. No longer should you need to write a different headline for mobile.

The Impending Future Is Here

With all this data staring at them in the face, it amazes me that when it comes to digital marketing, many corporations still have the traditional view of developing for mobile. They are still stuck on starting with the desktop experience and then dumbing it down for smartphones and tablets. The old way of thinking made sense at the time (three, four years ago?): users on the go have different needs, and the screen real estate is too small to do anything significant.

However, as we’ve become used to having the Internet in our pocket and as we’ve found a place for the tablet to live in our lives, that four year-old thinking is sadly out of touch with the impending future.

432 million users use Facebook on a mobile device every month. Facebook partially attributes the 76% increase from 2010 to the release of its iPad app. With Apple selling more iPads in Q4 2011 than PCs sold by any PC manufacturer, and with annual tablet sales projected to be at over 45 million by 2016, tablets are here to stay and will become more and more prevalent.

Additionally 472 million smartphones were sold in 2011, 46% of the U.S. adult population have smartphones, and 69% of smartphone owners use it for business. Last, but not least: 81% of smartphone users browse the Internet. The mobile web and the notion of content anywhere cannot be ignored.

The workforce of tomorrow will read their work emails on their smartphones and tablets. They will do research and consume work-related content on those devices. And they will go beyond consumption and produce work on those devices.

As designers and marketers, to ignore this is ignoring the inevitable.

This post was originally published on Bow & Arrow from PJA (my employer) on February 3, 2011.

The New York Times recently published an article about how apps and web services are enabling consumers to customize how they read their online content. From apps like Flipboard and Pulse to services like Readability and Instapaper, users are increasingly demanding to consume content whenever, wherever and however they want.

When Apple introduced the iPad a year ago, many print publishers saw it as a panacea for their dwindling readership. By creating digital editions, they hoped to recapture some of the eyeballs lost to aggregators and RSS feeds. One of the pioneering publication apps was the WIRED Magazine iPad app. Because of its novelty, its debut issue sold 73,000 digital copies in nine days, almost as much as on newsstands. There is a clear desire from users to read magazines on their tablets.

What that first generation of attempts miss though, is they are trying to replicate 20th century print experience on a 21st century device. The magazine apps feel very one way. But the iPad is an Internet-connected device and users on the Internet demand more interactive experiences. They want to copy and paste passages to put on their blogs. They want to share articles via Facebook and Twitter. Using Adobe’s Digital Magazine Solution, Condé Nast is starting to address some of these issues.

Meanwhile apps such as Flipboard are aggregating content and repackaging it for their users. Flipboard presents news items according to a user’s social graph, creating a personalized and highly relevant news stream. Additionally, the app presents this content in a unique way: as a paper magazine. The visual is striking, yet it still holds familiarity with users since it loosely mimics the experience of reading a real-world magazine, with the benefits of interactivity. And so far it has been a hit with users, even earning an [App of the Year](http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-calls-flipboard-ipad-app-of-the-year-2010-12 “Apple Calls Flipboard “iPad App Of The Year"") award from Apple.

Different kinds of content demand different kinds of packages. For example as a designer, I—along with most designers and art directors—flip through magazines such as Communication Arts and Print, and peruse blogs and websites like LovelyPackage.com and SmashingMagazine.com. Seeing something cool usually sparks an idea for whatever we’re currently working on.

To get through the hundreds of design-related sites out there, I use RSS feeds to aggregate this content for myself in Google Reader. Unfortunately, because I am so busy, I am not able to keep up with all my feeds. I may manage to check it only every few days. And I dread seeing that “1000+†number next to my unread items.

So last year, when the iPad was introduced, I decided to find a solution as an independent side project. I knew that an app on this large dedicated canvas could be created to serve this need of efficiently consuming visual inspiration. I teamed up with a developer friend and we started work on DesignScene.

We set out to create something that designers would enjoy using and become part of their daily ritual. We had two primary objectives:

• The UI must serve the content and the audience. It has to be beautiful and show off visuals well.
• The content must be relevant. There’s a glut of design-related websites and blogs on the Internet. Let’s help designers navigate through them.

The UI we designed is sparse—a simple grid that takes advantage of the screen real estate afforded by the tablet. Users flick through the various grid cells to see an assortment of images. They can enlarge the images to fill the screen or read the accompanying text from the original source via the built-in web browser. DesignScene surfaces up the latest inspirational images of not only design, but also architecture, photography, art and so on. The content is a curated list of sources and—as a whole—has an editorial point of view to enhance discovery.

It’s been two weeks since DesignScene launched. [This was originally posted three weeks ago on the PJA blog.] So far we’ve had great response from users and media. We built social sharing into the app and we can already see hundreds of discoveries being shared on Twitter. Our users are interacting with content in a way that was not possible just a year ago.

I’m really proud to announce that DesignScene for iPad has shipped today. From idea to release, it’s been about a year in the making. Here’s a little trailer I made in case you missed it:

I’ll be frank and say that this app was really made for me. Like many designers I spend a lot of my time going from website to website looking at stuff and reading up on trends. I eventually started using RSS feeds but even my feeds got unwieldy. I dreaded opening up Google Reader and seeing “1000+” unread items.

When Apple announced the iPad 12 months ago it struck me that this device was the perfect thing to visually browse through all of my design-related feeds. It didn’t take me too long to sketch and comp up something.

Of course I am just a designer and had zero Objective-C skills whatsoever. I can do simple HTML, CSS and even PHP, but real programming languages elude me. I knew I had to find a development partner. Problem is that there are tons of people like me with an idea, while developers are in high demand. I asked my network of friends and contacts, posted on Craigslist and BuildItWithMe but didn’t really find anyone. I had a couple of meetings with friends of friends who were iPhone developers but they had their own objectives. Finally I got in touch with an old friend who was working on his first iPhone app.

I presented my idea to David and he liked it. We decided to go to iPad Dev Camp which took place a week after the iPad shipped and just a couple of weeks after David and I initially talked. We built the prototype for DesignScene at the camp (and received an Honorable Mention). We were off to a great start.

The reality of day jobs and personal lives slowed progress down as we got into the spring and summer of 2010. But in the fall as chatter of curated content emerged we kicked ourselves into high gear. David worked on functionality (there’s a lot of backend processing that actually happens so that the app is as fast as it can be) and I worked on reaching out to sources to get official permission.

Fast-forward to today, and DesignScene is now available for purchase on the App Store. We’ve worked incredibly hard on this, sweated all the details (there’s actually a maintenance upgrade that we released hours after 1.0.0 went on sale), and are really proud of what we’ve accomplished. Of course we could not have done this without the immense and loving support from our families. A million thanks to our wives and kids for putting up with our late night hackathons.

We are going to keep working on to improve DesignScene (we have some neat features we’ve been thinking about) but we’re also going to think about other apps. Stay tuned and wish us luck!

iTunes Link to DesignScene app for iPad

David’s side of the story

Whenever I look at anything with words on it, I look at the typography. Bring me to a local corner lunch cafe with a menu typed out and printed from Microsoft Word and I will have a field day. I would judge even more harshly at a more expensive restaurant. I can’t help it as I—like most designers, I’m sure—just look at everything with a critical eye.

My biggest typographical pet peeve is the rendering of apostrophes, single and double quotes.

It astounds me when I notice this on any piece, and all I can mutter to myself is “Where is the craftsmanship?!” This was not the case decades ago when copy was sent out to professional typesetters. The very thing that democratized graphic design was the the same thing that lowered the bar on what passes for “professional” graphic design. I’m talking about how the computer and software allowed more people access to the tools necessary to create great looking stuff. No longer did designers need to send out manuscripts to a typesetter who would in turn set the type into galleys for the designer to paste up in the mechanical. This spawned a whole new industry called desktop publishing, but killed the entire profession of typesetter, and along with it some higher standards.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no luddite. I put myself through college by working at a desktop publishing service bureau. But because I had some great teachers, and because of my sometimes unhealthy attention to detail, I had a lot of respect for typography, thus taking the time to learn all the rules and standards. But I digress.

What passes sometimes today for single and double quotation marks are actually foot and inch marks (or hour and minute marks). Why is that? My theory is that to be efficient in the manufacturing of some of the first practical typewriters, they straightened out the quotation marks so they could be dual purpose—open and close. In fact in Christopher Sholes’ patent for the QWERTY keyboard, only a single straight apostrophe key is shown, presumably the user would strike the key twice for a double quotation mark. And of course, most of this layout made its way into our modern computer keyboards and software.

Software companies like Microsoft and Adobe have been trying to mitigate this error by employing “smart quotes” technology. The software will analyze whether the quotation mark is at the beginning of the word (and then use the open state) or the end of the word (and use the close state). Most the time this actually works well. But what happens when you need to use an apostrophe in its close state as a contraction replacement in words like ’Til, Rock ’n’ Roll, and mac ’n’ cheese? The software isn’t smart enough to replace it with the proper close state and the designer or brand ends up looking amateurish.

How to not look like an amateur designer? (OK, maybe amateur could be considered a harsh term to you pros. Maybe bad craft is what I’m really talking about.) Go ahead and turn on the smart quotes feature of your favorite design app, but pay attention and override when necessary.

The New York Times published a story today about the Genius Bars in the Apple Stores, and how they are the “souls of the stores.” Mentioned within the article is the video loop that plays behind the Bar, which I had the pleasure and privilege of designing!

Invariably in their 20’s and 30’s, and predominantly male, Apple’s experts do keep lofty company. Behind each bar is a screen with a rotating display of quotations from half a dozen better-known intellectual luminaries, like Leonardo da Vinci (“The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding”) and Michelangelo (“If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem wonderful at all”).