friday.FIVE.3
Five pieces to consider over the weekend…
Craft. Think about it. Foundational + yet so left behind throughout the world, especially in work. Time seems to be the more vital currency. Or maybe money… which is odd because craft can be used as a lever to save money if wielded correctly. It doesn’t have to be heavy. Take this well conceived email from Zwift. T+C update, illuminating right?!?!? No. And yet kudos to the copy writer or person who included the velvet glove touch. Do you see it? I’ll wait… (insert Jeopardy tune here)…
It’s like heading out to the nicest restaurant around. You’re willing to pay a little more for that level of craft. But you have expectations, if one aspect is well done, everything will be. So not incorporating craft at all levels is akin to hitting that super nice restaurant, loving the meal but then finding the bathroom a disgusting mess. Your experience is undoubtedly altered, lessened unnecessarily.So keep craft alive in all the ways you can. Even if it’s just a friendly little email from nicelawyers@swift.com.
Interesting parallels surfaced in What designers can learn from filmmakers from The Brief.
same.energy
“Visual style replicator - The coolest thing I’ve seen in many years is Same Energy.” Kevin Kelly, Recommendo. I’ll let KK do the talking but yeah, try it out.
”This is a beta-version of a visual search machine. You give it an image and it returns more images that feel exactly like the one you started with. Some images may be the same subject, some may be the same lighting and coloring, or some have the same visual style. It works uncannily well. I can start with a piece of furniture, or a fabric design, or an album cover, or an Instagram travel photo, and I’ll get an endless mosaic of images with the same energy. Like Pinterest, I can select one of the offerings and then get more images similar to that one, and so on. Unlike Pinterest, I can also create a collection of images and use that to train an AI to find images that share qualities of the whole set. I find I could spend hours watching the endless results recreationally, like staring into ocean waves or a campfire. It’s also a brilliant design research tool, a stunning creative prompt, and a total inspiration. “Happy New Year! Hope 2025 is wildly fantastic for you. And as eclectic as 2023 learnings were from the studious Tom Whitwell, a managing consultant at Magnetic. 52 Things I Learned in 2023.
Here are a few examples from his list:- The US Defense Department earns $100m/year operating slot machines used by soldiers on their bases.
- Psychedelic cryptography is a way of concealing messages (normally in videos) so that only people who’ve taken LSD can receive the messages.
- Scotland’s forest cover is nearly back to where it was 1,000 years ago, while England has risen to levels last seen in 1350.
For the visually inclined, not only is the redesigned Portland airport stunning but so to is this webfront showcasing it!