In his piece entitled iPhone 5, John Gruber made a statement that really stuck out to me: […] but there is no benchmark, no tech spec, to measure nice. But you can feel it. And that is what resonates with millions of people around the world. As soon as I read this, I was struck by how true this statement is for companies like Intel, Google and Amazon that claim to be “metrics-driven”. The unfortunate side-effect is that they focus so much on metrics that they end up being driven only by metrics — which ultimately results in consistently sub-par experiences.

A common misunderstanding that you often find in Engineering-centric organizations is that “design” is simply the way it looks. In truth, design is the way it works. Dieter Rams had the following to say: “A designer who wants to achieve good design must not regard himself as an artist who, according to taste and aesthetics, is merely dressing-up products with a last-minute garment. The designer must be the gestaltingenieur or creative engineer. They synthesise the completed product from the various elements that make up its design.

I’ve been doing tons of Ajax development at work lately. One of my projects (that I built on my own time, and therefore own complete rights to — just in case there was a question) was a very very simple content management system designed only to read/write news postings to the database (with support for Textile formatting), and generate an RSS feed, all with a slick Ajax-based interface. I pitched it to my boss as a replacement for the one we currently had in place, and then implemented it as a tool for our in-house intranet.

I found these a couple of weeks back, and I think they’re really good, so I wanted to share them. They’re 6 fonts that are supposed to be included in Windows Vista, but they seem to work for both Windows XP and Mac OS X. Also for you sIFR users out there, I created sIFR versions that you can apply to your sites. I found these floating around online, and presumably they’ll be free at some point, so I think it would be reasonable to assume that it’s okay to pass these around.

I just checked out Pirated Sites website, and saw my submission at the top of the front page. Granted, it says “Anonymous”, but it was me. Really it was. Destroy Drop was designed by Geir Landro (who is also the guy who wrote dTree). His site was copied in the form of Emoticate.net by a guy who calls himself “Krycek”. I recognized Krycek’s design, and submitted it. If I remember correctly, Krycek tried to play it off as though he was the one who came up with the design, but I knew he was caught.

I was just sitting at my desk at work, trying to kill some time before I leave for my vacation at 5pm. I went to CSS Zen Garden to check out some new CSS designs, and was blown away by one particular design. Outstanding! I wanna be like this guy when I grow up.