Category: Contentions
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Your art doesn’t need more time, your time needs more art
I’ve occasionally written about the experience of writing within small amounts of time. In Big Ideas, Small Papers, I write: One of the most painful things about writing in small amounts of time is the lack of time for re-working. It feels like writing on a scrap of paper that’s way too small. I would…
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Same word, different meaning
A curious thing I learned today, via the marginalia (delightful, as always), in The Shared Language of Props: False cognates are words that look similar but have different meanings; heteronyms are words that are spelled the same but are pronounced differently. Even expanding beyond the technical environment, I couldn’t agree more; words are incredibly contextual,…
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A trustworthy expert’s tone
It’s in an expert’s interest to make the case that they can add value to you and your work. That usually means that you need to believe you’re not doing something right. The next time you experience doubt after hearing an expert’s claims, just remember that they’re incentivized to make you feel that way. It…
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The negative press brand litmus test
A couple of days ago, I wrote about how imagining a brand’s hotel lobby could make for a good litmus test. It reminded me of another heuristic a marketing executive once told me about; they measured the health of a brand by how much negative press it gets. When Jay-Z bragged about owning the Nets…
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The hotel lobby brand litmus test
If there’s anything that makes branding more tangible and easier to understand, I’m all ears. I came across this passage recently that fascinated me, from The elegance of nothing by Seth Godin (via Ben Gilbert and Liberty’s Highlights): If Nike announced that they were opening a hotel, you’d have a pretty good guess about what…
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Docs, branding, and opinions
There’s a reason writing amplifies the abilities of software companies, and it’s not (just) the marketing. I’ve previously put forward the idea that great writing is an extension of the product, in which I talk about documentation and brand voice. I neglected to mention a key factor: Most people don’t know what to do with…
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Fingerprints
In The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis writes of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s collaborative writing: By the time they were finished with the paper, in early 1970, they had lost any clear sense of their individual contributions. It was nearly impossible to say, of any given passage, whether more of some idea had come from…
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Contentions: Advocacy, ambassadorship, and relations
Amazon famously has an empty chair in each meeting, a quiet symbol that represents the customer. That’s not enough anymore. An empty chair won’t share a perspective or have a point of view. It won’t be able to tell you something you didn’t even know you didn’t know. That’s where people who work in advocacy,…
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World building
A decade ago, Donald Glover said, “You’ve got to build a bigger world. I’m not gonna make [just] an album; I’m gonna make an album, I’m gonna make the roll out dope, I’m gonna make the movie with it dope, I’m gonna make everything dope. I’m gonna make a world.” This approach is what led…
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Documenting Config
My colleague Jenny and I have been busy documenting Config here at the new Figma blog, Shortcut. Because you can already watch many of the sessions here, we decided to approach it with an emphasis on the atmosphere and the experience.