Howells.

I switched the date order on my inbox the other day, which made me realise I have kept every since piece of “proper” email (i.e. not newsletters, and so on) since July 2006.

That means I have, right now, 34,746 emails in my Apple Mail inbox (about 17 being worthy of keeping a day), which is an amalgamation of 2 main accounts - personal, and work.

I haven’t added any to folders, nor have tagged them in any way. Occasionally I use Smart Folders to simply group emails from certain individuals depending on what my current projects are (though I only have three smart folders active right now - it’s never more than this).

When I have to get back to an email or respond to it, I flag them. This effectively becomes my to-do list, and I can see all the flagged items at once using the Flagged shortcut in mail. (The flagging functionality introduced in iOS 4.something was the single greatest advance in the iPhone in my opinion.)

As soon they have been responded or actioned, I un-flag. I usually start from the oldest and work my up. If a flagged message is really old, and nothing untoward has happened or the message is now irrelevant, I un-flag it, and will never return to it again.

At any given time I have less than 50 flagged items. If there is more than that I just have to make a concerted effort to go through them, but it’s never a case of trying to achieve “Flag Zero” - there will always be flagged items there, and accepting that means I’m never overwhelmed or stressed by it.

If I need to find something, full text search across every single email has never let me down, and it’s always super fast (in Mail, or in Gmail).

Ultimately this works if you accept you’ll never achieve inbox zero, and aren’t interested in the administrative overhead that comes into filing messages, this works well.

Finally, because of this - I don’t understand why so many people and companies are trying to fix the “email problem”, since email is only really a problem for the <1% of people who receive hideous amounts of email.

Email works fine if you just accept what it is: mainly messages between a person to person. If you use email to handle support requests, blog submissions, and so on, there are much better workflows you can use to help. Email won’t help you here.

I’m often criticised for doing too many things and not focusing my time a great deal on a single project.

Because of that I used to worry that I should stop doing too many things and focus on the products I make which were the most likely to succeed.

But you’ll never know which ones actually will succeed. To do that, you need to do lots of things, and the best will bubble to surface.

It’s also useful to do lots of things at the same time, in parallel. The one that you look forward to working on the most is an easy test of whether it will succeed.

And while you should focus your time a bit more on the one you enjoy working on, don’t ditch the others: keep them simmering away to return to later.

NB: By “succeed” I don’t necessarily mean valuable in a monetary sense: a successful product is something that you and others enjoy or are engaged with. Money is a happy side-effect of that.

A few people have asked me where I enjoy going in New York City, so it seems like a good idea to write them all down publicly. I’m also building up a list of other places I should visit on my next trip (in May), so please add any suggestions in the comments please. There are many, many more that I haven’t included here so I could go on, but the longer the list of recommendations, the less useful it becomes.

The Burger Joint — http://www.parkermeridien.com/eat4.php Creep into the corporate Parker Meridien restaurant and make a bee-line for the neon burger sign. This place looks like it has been lifted from somewhere many miles from the mid-town location it’s in, graffiti and atmosphere included. Astonishing burgers.

Saturdays NYC — http://www.saturdaysnyc.com/ Gear for the discerning surfing gentleman. A wonderful shop on Crosby and Grand, even if you just want to grab a coffee and sit in their back yard on a sunny day.

Kiosk — http://kioskkiosk.com/ Don’t be put off by the entrance looking like the route to a crack den: this store is full of lovely unusual objects.

9th Street Espresso — http://www.ninthstreetespresso.com/ (for example, in Chelsea Market) I keep returning to this coffee shop again and again. It feels special, especially amongst the hustle and bustle of Chelsea Market.

The Standard Hotel and Bar — http://www.standardhotels.com/new-york-city/ I don’t stay at hotels much when I’m in New York, but when I have this is easily the best, with magnificent views of the High Line below. Make a trip to the Standard Bar: go early to avoid the ponces, and make sure you pay a visit to the toilets. You’ll understand why.

The Standard Grill is also pretty special.

Death & Company — http://deathandcompany.com/ Possibly my favourite bar of the “faux prohibition” genre that seems to have spread like a weed. Solid drinks, nice atmosphere and friendly staff. No reservations: just turn up, get your name on the list and wander off to kill time in any of the other local bars.

Monofuku — http://www.momofuku.com/new-york-city/ Momofuku Ko and Momofuku Noodle Bar are very different, and I’ve only been to the latter, and dying to try the former. Pork buns in the Noodle Bar are astonishing.

The Clover Club — http://www.cloverclubny.com/ A dimly lit jazz bar on Smith Street in Brooklyn. Feels way more friendly and authentic than many bars of the same type in Manhattan.

DUMBO Plenty to see and do, and seems to be sprouting new places every time I visit.

Freemans — http://freemansrestaurant.com/ Everything on the menu is delicious (especially the artichoke dip appetizer), and the atmosphere is fun. It’s like dining in your eccentric grandfather’s hunting lodge. You should also check out Peels nearby, which is part of the Freemans group, and serves probably the best burger I have had in the city.

Please Don’t Tell — http://pdtnyc.com/ This was a fun place to visit, until last time I saw a giant queue lead out from it, meaning many hours of waiting. I don’t think waiting is worth it, but if you get a reservation it’s a fun place to check out.

Sleep No More — http://sleepnomorenyc.com/ The now infamous Punchdrunk production of Macbeth (kind of) will be on for much longer, and it’s well worth checking out if you can get tickets. Make sure you hang around afterwards to enjoy the jazz in the “hotel” bar. I wrote about the show in an earlier post.

Pastis — http://www.pastisny.com/ Ignore the mainly pretentious guests and enjoy the food at this faux French bistro. The mac and cheese is particularly brilliant.

Brooklyn Heights The promenade commands the best views of Manhattan, and the community feels cozy and interesting.

MoMA Design Shop in SoHo — http://momastore.org/ I’m recommending this rather than MoMA itself because a) everyone knows MoMA, and b) MoMA itself is horribly, horribly busy all of the time making a visit there stressful and detracts from the point of a visit. The store in SoHo is rarely busy, yet sell a superb range of design items and books.

The Metropolitan Museum — http://www.metmuseum.org/ Another obvious choice but ignore the crowds, and make sure you go on a highlights guided tour to discover parts of the ginormous collection you would have missed anyway. My favourite parts are the historic American interiors and the Japanese garden.

The Strand — http://www.strandbooks.com/ Miles of books, new and second hand.

High Line — http://www.thehighline.org/ Especially with the new phase two extension, this is the greatest attraction in Manhattan, in my opinion.

Eataly — http://eatalyny.com/ An incredible concept: a ginormous Italian grocery store, with different restaurants and bars peppered throughout. Lovely food and atmosphere.

Milk & Honey — http://www.mlkhny.com/newyork/ A little tricky to get in since you either have to be a member, or be referred by another barman, but worth a try.

Brooklyn Museum — http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/ You can probably tell I hate busy museums and galleries, but this is a wonderful escape from the rest of them. Interesting collections in a great building. It’s also worth checking out the Botanical Gardens next door.

MoMA PS1 — http://momaps1.org/ Over in Queens, a stunning contemporary art museum housed in a old public school.

La Colombe — http://lacolombe.com/pages/cafes I’ve been to all the cafes and they are amazing.

The Naguchi Museum and Sculpture Park — http://www.noguchi.org/ An out-of-the-way museum in Long Island City, but well worth the trip if you have the time to spend. A wonderful collection of Naguchi’s work, housed in a contemporary concrete building, with a small garden.

Katz — http://katzsdelicatessen.com/ This place should be a tourist hell-hole but thankfully isn’t. The most wonderful pastrami sandwiches I’ve ever had. I wouldn’t even bother trying to find anywhere better.

Ace Hotel/Stumptown Coffee/No. 7 Sub/No. 8a/The Breslin — http://www.acehotel.com/newyork/ A visit to the Ace is like a one-stop-shop for sleeping, eating, shopping, and drinking, with the opening of a few new eateries and shops since I last visited. The hotel itself is superb, and the coffee from Stumptown even better. The sandwiches from No. 7 are incredible, and the things that 8a stock are interesting. The Breslin is a must for brunch: you should try their famous, very rare, lamb burger.

Bluebird — http://www.bluebirdcoffeeshop.com/ A tiny, very charming coffee shop serving delicious coffee and pastries.

Schiller’s — http://www.schillersny.com/ I’ve only been here once to eat and once for drinks. I don’t actually recall the food from the former visit (!) but everyone loves it so I assume it must be great. A very quintessential L.E.S. place, with decent wifi if you want to hang out there during the day.

Ground Support — http://www.groundsupportcafe.com/ There are surprisingly few premium coffee places in SoHo it seems, so if you get bored of Le Colombe, Ground Support is a good spot to check out.

Nom Wah Tea Parlor — http://nomwah.com/ It’s not a place you’d normally go into unprompted but the place services fabulous dim sum, at insanely low prices.

There are plenty of dive bars that I love too - the Botanica, Punch and Judy, Arrow Bar, Max Fish, Barramundi, etc. (all around SoHo/L.E.S.).

So that’s it for now. I’ll continually update this post as and when I find new places to check out.

I enjoyed Jon Hendren’s post, Your Company Sucks at Social Media which leaves some sage advice for those looking to hire a “social media expert”:

Who should you hire? Pretty much anybody but those people. Seriously, go walk around the office and look for someone who is cool but bored with their current position and who can hold a decent human-style conversation, and see if they want to take a swing at it. Simply running a corporate Facebook and Twitter account is not a full time job and does not require a dedicated employee. All it really takes is someone with a little humility, some people skills, a sense of humor about their role, a decent enough grasp of the Internet, and and a couple hours each day to interact with the void, tops. Ideally– and as long as your hiring practices hadn’t allowed doofuses into your company– this would mean most of your co-workers are able to do it.

☛

Before I start any sizeable project I create a data model. I do this way before I open up Illustrator, Sublime Text, or any other tool, and usually before I have made any notes or sketches.

Anecdotally speaking, this is at odds with the design process for most others but it’s a technique that works well for me. It helps structure, inform, and shape an idea into something very tangible, very quickly.

It helps piece objects together, mapping relationships in a very visual way. And this is an important point since my mind doesn’t seem to want to comprehend anything technical unless I can see it in the form of a diagram.

The image above is a small snippet (part of a much, much larger diagram) of the data model for Creative Journal which I am in the middle of re-developing alongside a much more complex project called Shorthand, which I’ll write about soon. I use SQLEditor to create these diagrams which is a tool I have used for many years. I’m sure there are hundreds of other similar/better applications available but this works well for me, and creates database/Rails schemas dynamically which is a huge convenience.

Doing this data-mapping exercise then informs the next stage: physically designing the application in Illustrator. Having some the thinking around how objects fit together helps enormously. You know which attributes need to appear where for a given object. As a very simple example, if you have an object called “User”, which has all sorts of attributes that form the application you have a laundry list of design elements that need to be pieced together on the page. And then if this User is associated to many Categories, for instance, it’s then then next piece of the puzzle is to consider how these related elements fit on the page. (Creating a data model helps with with solving far more complex problems than this, however.)

Ultimately the data model guides the visual design process, rather than the visual design process informing the data model. It means you and your team mates understand the fundamental structure of the project from the outset and help avoid discovering missing pieces during development.

Concept models championed by Dan Brown are another superbly useful tool if the idea isn’t clear or needs to be fleshed out before creating the data model. A concept model is a series of nouns connected by verbs (a user uploads a photo).

Frank wrote this insightful comment on my recent post about Svbtle and on copying, which I felt deserved to be brought from the comments section into its own post, as it touches on some important aspects of the copying argument:

I think once you publish something, you lose control of it. At worst, you inspire mockery and parody. At best, you become material for future work, because what you’ve made is successful, interesting, or relevant. Usually, it is both.

All work produces spill-over repercussions that usually go against the will of the work’s creator. The creator wishes to retain authorship and control the work, while those in the culture wish to use, transform, and remix it. If the work is truly successful, it will defy authorship and turn into a shared experience for everyone. Those works are the hardest to control, because they diffuse, and spread wide by permeating into the air. The become a shorthand for those who make or enjoy similar work, becoming a shared vocabulary.

The situation requires things from both those who create the work, and those who wish to use it.

For the initial creator, they must resign most control upon publication, especially on the internet. Their work will be used to say and do things they don’t intend. Ideas, in truth, go further when others carry them, and this usually means they will go in directions the original author did not intend or imagine. For instance, I’ve had a quote of mine (“People ignore design that ignores people.”) taken out of context and used to justify two completely contradictory design methods. So it goes.

For those that use the things made by others, they should credit where possible, and have their work be transformative in some way. They can carry the ideas of others, but they must to take it further or a new direction. Then, they are obliged share alike. To not do both is to go against the goodwill initiated by the work’s creator.

And for both, we should recognize that all creative processes use materials from those who came before us, and respect the meaningful influence of others. We’re part of a long line of people who make things. It is a privilege to get to use the work of others in our own.

☛

Twitter tells me that it’s time for the Webby’s again, and the judging is taking place right now.

And it’s this time when I feel disappointed that a vast canon of great digital and interactive work is going to be ignored and not celebrated (much of which I post on siteInspire).

The fact is, the Webby’s is a profit-making organisation who charge up to $495 per entry. Entrants therefore tend to be large agencies with even larger FMCG-budget work (and–if I’m going to be cynical–those agencies desperate to show off their digital chops to gain relevance in a fast-changing industry) massively skewing the quality of the work to be judged, I feel to the detriment of the industry.

Of course congratulations in advance to the winners (the Webby’s do sometimes highlight good work), but for the rest of us, see this as a remember of what’s involved behind the “…we are an award winning…” claims on most designers’ creds docs: just a lot of money and a fun awards after-party.

☛

These two Hacker News threads have been keeping me entertained today.

In a nutshell, “super hero” Dustin Curtis released an interesting new blogging engine called Svbtle, which he opened for only a select handful of “vetted” bloggers. This perceived arrogance obviously didn’t go down well with a number of Hacker News regulars; in particular Nate Wienert who cloned the platform, called it Obtvse, and open-sourced it on github for anybody to fork.

I’ve read a number of comments on either side of the argument for and against this move but I think some people have misinterpreted Nate’s move. He didn’t set out to create a copy of the app for commercial gain; he has simply made a point about the way in which the app was launched, its tone of voice, and the general attitude that surrounded its launch.

I enjoy Dustin’s blog and twitter, and he usually delivers some fascinating points-of-view and unearths some great content. Yet fundamentally, I have no idea who he is or what sort of work he has done, other than redesign an airport boarding card, and create lifepath.me (I can’t find references to either, but you probably know about them). Both are admirable design endeavours, but fundamentally neither attribute him with the monicker of “super hero” which he tells us he is at every opportunity. A super hero in my mind (and in our industry) is somebody who is genuinely awesome at what they do, but who are humble about their achievements: Jack Dorsey and Jeff Veen come to mind. I’d imagine neither would ever call themselves a super hero, with however much irony.

My second point is essentially a reflection on copying others’ work. I’m sat painfully on the fence here. For instance, on one hand I find Pinspire an embarrassing, cynical attempt to pull the rug from under Pinterest’s feet (and an equally embarrassing comment on the state of the European tech scene, but that’s for another post), and copying the idea along with the pixel-for-pixel design just to quickly be acquired is not cool. The same goes for hot-linking CSS styles and Javascript files which cropped up recently.

Yet on the other hand I see hundreds of design rip-offs whilst searching for new interesting posts for siteInspire. The fact is, a copied site or idea is clearly a copy whose quality is almost always dreadful, and in my opinion is usually little more damaging than a fake Gucci handbag bought in a Hong Kong market. I have even had the entire siteInspire design ripped off with hilarious consequences. I was flattered, and just passed it off as someone’s attempt at learning by rote: a fairly ineffective but acceptable learning technique, but which is usually the motivation for these rip-offs. I mentioned it to them, but didn’t demand for it to be removed with such vehemence that a lot of “victims” do (they were sufficiently embarrassed to take the site down anyway).

If you find that your site or application has been copied, see it as feedback. In Dustin’s case, he can learn a huge amount from the episode. His reaction to the news wasn’t great and reflected on him poorly, such that he subsequently redacted and replaced it with an opinion on stealing designs. I think it still suggests he misunderstood the motivation for Obtvse and hasn’t learnt much from it.

In everyone else’s case, a general rule of thumb is to first be flattered. If it’s just a bad copy it won’t do you image any harm, and if it’s a much, much better copy… well there’s quite a lot to learn from that too, however frustrating it might be.

I suspect this is a controversial topic and I’d love to hear your thoughts: especially if your work has been copied; what you thought about it and what happened.

Update 1: Frank Chimero wrote a wonderful comment on copying.

Update 2: Chris Shiflett writes about an important observation on Hacker News. While for the majority of the people this is true, I would guess that as a self-styled super hero Dustin quite relishes the attention on Hacker News, having been a front-pager many times.

The mistake the Hacker News community routinely makes is to assume the author of whatever they read is making a big deal about something.

As I’ve made pretty clear before, I’m not too bothered about the latest craze for skeuomorphic design in UI. Obviously I dislike it, but think we can only go upwards from here.

But the other reason I’m not bothered about is because heavily skeuomorphic design has never failed me. It’s always obvious what button or other real world simulacra to push or drag to achieve a desired action.

That was until today, when I had to painstakingly merge two iCloud accounts. I had to import my contacts from an old account to a new one. Importing and exporting contacts from the various accounts wasn’t a problem, but figuring out had to manoeuvre the newly imported contacts to the new account was completely beyond me. There was no obvious option to choose from the menus, nor any buttons.

So it was to my surprise that thing I had to do was to click on the red, fabric tassel in order to filter and manipulate the groups and accounts.

Under no circumstances was it obvious that I should have even clicked on that thing. I thought it was a piece of decoration, not a fairly core and functional UI toggle.

So if you ever have this problem to deal with, now you know to click (not tug, drag, tease, or flip) the red fabric tassel.

I’d like a take a moment to introduce you to my blender:

It’s a Vitamix. It comes in black, red, or white. Or stainless steel for a few bucks more.

It has on it two big switches, and one knob. One switches the thing on with a satisfying clunk. One controls the speed from casual to brutal. The other switch doesn’t have a name, but seems to switch it into hyper-drive mode.

While I haven’t tried it yet, it would beat a Blendtec with no problems: it could definitely blend an iPhone with its 3.5 horse power motor.

It’s never not worked (apart from a time when we over-heated it whilst trying to make peanut butter and just needed to be reset with a simple flick of a switch). It’s annihilated anything we’ve tried to throw into it. Even if you wanted to break it, you’d have a hard time trying.

Essentially it’s the best physical, non-Apple product I own. It’s made me interested in cooking (even if now I’m mainly interested in soups and smoothies), and has opened up interesting cooking opportunities for Cecilia who is a far superior cook than I.

Yet it’s the ugliest thing in our kitchen, but still puts everything else to shame.

This is a convoluted way to say we have a lot learn from the brilliant but less than pretty things we use that haven’t got any sheen or gloss. I won’t name names since nobody likes their babies to be called ugly, but some of my most used apps–and ones that I actually pay for–are by far not the most shiny. They are beautifully engineered websites and applications at their core, but without any gloss so sometimes their technical guts spill out a little, adding to their charm.

Obviously I’m a massive proponent of design-led products and start-ups, but we should never forget the distinction between design and decoration, and always try to root for the ugly kid if it’s fast, functional, reliable, and ultimately superbly engineered.