Compelling piece by Matthew Butterick on the business and design of Medium.

On Medium’s use of minimalism:

As a fan of min­i­mal­ism, how­ever, I think that term is mis­ap­plied here. Min­i­mal­ism doesn’t fore­close ei­ther ex­pres­sive breadth or con­cep­tual depth. On the con­trary, the min­i­mal­ist pro­gram—as it ini­tially emerged in fine art of the 20th cen­tury—has been about di­vert­ing the viewer’s at­ten­tion from overt signs of au­thor­ship to the deeper pu­rity of the ingredients.

He continues:

Still, I wouldn’t say that Medium’s ho­mo­ge­neous de­sign is bad ex ante. Among web-pub­lish­ing tools, I see Medium as the equiv­a­lent of a frozen pizza: not as whole­some as a meal you could make your­self, but for those with­out the time or mo­ti­va­tion to cook, a po­ten­tially bet­ter op­tion than just eat­ing peanut but­ter straight from the jar.

The piece is less about typography and more about Medium’s business motivations, but the entire article is worth your time.

Dear Data is a year-long project between Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec who are creating weekly analog data visualizations and sending them to each other on postcards.

I like everything about this project.

The sad truth is, we can be absolutely awful at making decisions that affect our long-term happiness. Recent work by psychologists has charted a set of predictable cognitive errors that lead us to mistakes like eating too much junk food, or saving too little for retirement. These quirks lead us to make similarly predictable errors when deciding where to live, how to live, how to move, and even how to build our cities.

(By Charles Montgomery via National Post)

Those candidates got a study guide, free books, and an open invitation to proceed with the process whenever they were ready. The $80 in books we sent candidates had one of the best ROIs of any investment we made anywhere in the business. Some of our best hires couldn’t have happened without us bringing the candidate up to speed, first.

(By Thomas H. Ptacek via Quartz)

Of course it isn’t. Almost everything changes all the time. A statistic or data point is a tiny speck floating in a sea of ever changing context. People change, attitudes and behaviors change, tastes change, the economy changes, our minds, bodies, relationships and priorities change. The Observer Effect describes how something can change just by the process of measuring it.

(By Dan Zambonini via Medium)

• It’s attached to your wrist.
• Because it’s attached to you, it’s harder to drop and harder to lose.
• It’s touching your skin. All the time.
• Many watches are purely fashion.
• Interaction with a watch is measured in seconds and rarely minutes.
• Your longest interaction with your watch is during daylight savings time.
• After a couple days of wearing a watch, I forget that I’m wearing it.
• Some folks never take their watches off.
• Watch battery life is measured in years.
• We’re intrigued by watches that have complications, but mostly we use it for date and time.
• A good watch is passed on from generation to generation.
• Watches have never been about communication, but we’ve kind’a always wanted them to be, but I won’t be talking to my wrist. Maybe.

Oh yeah, rendered in real time.

“At bedtime there was some discussion of whether an army of predators could beat an army of aliens. The issue was never resolved.”

(By Matt Zoller Seitz via Coudal]

Michael Sippey on Medium:

“The fundamental unit of the blog is not the blog post. The fundamental unit of the blog is the stream.”

Also, Sippey is blogging on Stating the Obvious. His original blog with the same name was a major inspiration for Rands in Repose.

Via Quartz:

These and other findings led the researchers to identify the key patterns: children play to get oxygen, to understand hierarchy, to achieve mastery at a skill, and to socialize. The patterns were simplified into four categories: under the radar, hierarchy, mastery, and social play.