Ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Stephen Goforth
Some professors argue that they don’t want to hear their students talk about a subject because they don’t know enough… But I always think of piano teachers; they would never keep their students away from the keyboard simply because those pupils couldn’t yet play Mozart. Sure they have to endure a lot of bad notes, but they would never push someone off the bench and refuse to let them play until they somehow became better.
Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do
What is to give light must endure burning. -Viktor Frankl
My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things, that I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great Saviour. -John Newton, author of “Amazing Grace” born August 4, 1725
Some of the tools available for graphic and UX design.
Adobe Indesign
Adobe product that is the industry standard for page layouts and design (posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers and books). For professionals and high end projects but for personal or smaller projects, there are other programs with a lower learning curve.
Adobe Pagemaker
While not on the level of Adobe InDesign, it is an effective page layout program for the non-professional. Includes predesigned templates that can be modified.
Adobe Kuler
Find complementary color palettes using a color wheel.
Axure
For UX design. A wireframing prototyping software tool. No coding needed. Aimed at web and desktop applications.
Balsamiq
Design software, a quick starter for wireframing tool.
Beautiful.ai
Quickly make beautful slides with these graphic tools. Slightly different workflow than PowerPoint so it takes a little time getting used to but more fun. Free.
Butterick's Practical Typography
Everything font-related including kerning, spacing, formatting, and more.
Color Me
Visualize hex colors.
Commarts
"Inspiration for graphic designers, art directors, design firms, corporate design departments, advertising agencies, interactive designers, illustrators and photographers—everyone involved in visual communication."
Design Thinking
Blog by Tim Brown about Design issues. Brown is author of Change by Design.
DesignEvo
Create logos. Easy to use but the free version allows only limited sizes and only paid accounts get trademark options. The paid accounts are somewhat expensive.
Florish*
A data visualization tool that makes it easy to create both standard charts and a mobile-friendly animated charts. Some customization available. Examples.
Font Feed (no longer available)
A "daily dispatch of recommended fonts, typography techniques, and inspirational examples of digital type at work in the real world."
Font dragr (no longer available)
Browser based tool that checks for web-friendly fonts. Just drag and drop.
FontJoy
This site will generates font pairings for your design project whether you are aiming to create balance, tension or set off content. Free.
FontPair
Helps you pick font combinations for your resume, website, poster, etc. so your creation stands out from the typical Times New Roman on other material.
Font Shop
This link takes you to the design section of the website where you can "improve your design skills with typography tips and tutorials. FontShop Education docs are formatted for easy downloading and printing, perfect for the classroom or studio." There's also a healthy glossary section, among other things.
How Design
This site seeks to meet the "business, creativity and technology needs of graphic designers."
Idea Mag
Japanese design magazine.
Indesign
See Adobe Indesign.
Kartograph
Simple to use data visualization tool if you know some Python or Javascript. Free.
Keynotopia
UI design templates.
QuarkXpress
Page layouts for Mac or PC.Alternative to Adobe InDesign.
Lucid Press
Page layouts for the non-professional to design flyers, newsletters, etc.
Markup Wand (no longer available)
Photoshop to HTML/CSS converter. Strip down Photoshop files (.psd) and convert them to embeddable HTML or CSS code.
MockPlus
Prototyping tool for Mobile app design. Drop and drag. No coding needed.
MyFonts
Large selection of professional fonts.
OmniGraffle
Design software. Industry standard.
PagePlus (no longer available)
Page layouts for Mac.
Page Stream
Page layouts for the non-professional to design flyers, newsletters, etc.
Principle
Popular UI prototyping tools for designing mobile apps. Especially useful for creating animation. No coding skill needed. $129.
Print Mag
Design tips, education, resources from Print Magazine, a bimonthly magazine about visual culture and design.
SassMe
Colum vizualize color functions by inserting Hex codes.
Society for News Design
Columns and tips on design, workshop schedule, membership database and more.
Society of Publication Designers
Scribus
Page layouts. Alternative to Adobe InDesign.
UXPin
Prototyping tool for Mobile app design. Simple setup with drop and drag.
What the Font
Figures out what font you are looking at.
More Tech Tools here.
"Although trust in science has important societal benefits, it is not a panacea that will protect people against misinformation. Spreaders of misinformation commonly reference science. Science communication cannot simply urge people to trust anything that references science, and instead should encourage people to learn about scientific methods and ways to critically engage with issues that involve scientific content." - study lead author Thomas O'Brien
From the abstract:
We identify two critical determinants of vulnerability to pseudoscience. First, participants who trust science are more likely to believe and disseminate false claims that contain scientific references than false claims that do not. Second, reminding participants of the value of critical evaluation reduces belief in false claims, whereas reminders of the value of trusting science do not. We conclude that trust in science, although desirable in many ways, makes people vulnerable to pseudoscience.
Read the study is here
The fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.
When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.
And who knows what might happen to you then?
Jonathan Franzen
Honing your machine learning and pattern recognition skills with a simple regression problem
Once a useful number becomes a measure of success, it ceases to be a useful number
Around 90% of machine learning models never make it into production—here’s why
DARPA exploring benchmarking possibilities to help quantum computing development move forward
How to tell if you have trained your model with enough data
How a 70s teacher invented C, the hugely influential coding language
We’re Facing a Fake Science Crisis, and AI Is Making It Worse
Keep up to date with data science here
Obstacles are those frightful things we see when we take our eyes off our goal. -Henry Ford (Born: July 30, 1863)
People give their own memories and experiences more credence than they deserve, making it hard to accept new ideas and theories. Psychologists call this quirk the availability bias. It’s a useful built-in shortcut when you need to make quick decisions and don’t have time to critically analyze lots of data, but it messes with your fact-checking skills.
Marc Zimmer writing in The Conversation
What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals. -Zig Ziglar
When polls have faltered in predicting the outcome of elections, we hear calls for more and better data. But, if more data isn’t always the answer, maybe we need instead to reassess our relationship with predictions—to accept that there are inevitable limits on what numbers can offer, and to stop expecting mathematical models on their own to carry us through times of uncertainty.
To recognize the limitations of a data-driven view of reality is not to downplay its might. It’s possible for two things to be true: for numbers to come up short before the nuances of reality, while also being the most powerful instrument we have when it comes to understanding that reality.
Hannah Fry writing in The New Yorker
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering. -Carl Jung (born July 26, 1875)
What gods were to the ancients at war, ideas are to us. –Lionel Trilling
Imagine you are offered a deal with your bank, where your money doubles every three days. If you invest just $1 today, roughly how long will it take for you to become a millionaire? Would it be a year? Six months? 100 days? The precise answer is 60 days from your initial investment, when your balance would be exactly $1,048,576. Within a further 30 days, you’d have earnt more than a billion. And by the end of the year, you’d have more than $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 – an “undecillion” dollars.
If your estimates were way out, you are not alone. Many people consistently underestimate how fast the value increases – a mistake known as the “exponential growth bias.”
David Robson writing for the BBC
Never confuse motion with action. -Ernest Hemingway (born July 21, 1899)
Need to get an understanding of who is visiting your website and why they come? Here are some tools that will help.
Chartbeat
Tracks reader engagement and uses dashboards, reporting systems, headline testing, and other optimization tools to show what keeps them engaged. Used by many media sites. Three tier pricing plan.
Clicky
A simple interface for this tool that helps you keep up with activity on your website. Weeds out bots and spam. Free option with more info on the paid version.
Crazy Egg
A leading visualization software that gives website administrators popular heatmap reports showing how visitors are using pages. Designed to improve UX and ultimately increase ROI and conversion rates through A/B testing. Open to integration with other platforms. Thirty day free trial then plans starting at $24 a month.
Finteza
A cloud-based analytics solution that spots bots and potential scammers and hackers. Does not do data sampling, so the results are more accurate. Thirty-day free trial then paid plans.
Google Analytics*
Detailed statistics about website performance and traffic sources and measures conversions. The most robust and largest platform. Free though there is a paid plan (Google Analytics 360) for larger enterprises.
Hotjar
A relatively new web analytics tool using polls, surveys, heatmaps and visitor recordings to paint a picture of visitors to websites. Free plan or more functionality with a monthly subscription of $39 or $99.
Inspectlet
Records video sessions of website users’ behavior. Heatmaps show what users find interesting on your site.
Majestic SEO
Find out how all the websites on the internet link to each other. Information about how the fabric of the web is knitted together--and what is connected to yours.
Mixpanel
Measures user experience on websites and product interactions to help websites to identify trends and with customer retention. Free version and plans starting at $89 a month.
Open Web Analytics
Matomo (formerly Piwik)
An open-source web-analytics platform that gives you insights into you website's visitors. Doesn’t offer anything that Google Analytics cannot provide—except the user gets full control of the data and retains ownership of it. Free but also offers a pro account.
Positionly
Improves SEO by tracking your keywords and how well they are performing on the search engine result pages. 14 day free trial. Starting at $19 month.
SimiliarWeb
Understand website metrics for a site; like how many visitors a website gets, and where it get its traffic from. Free plan though the paid accounts get more options.
Spinnakr
Real-time web traffic response tool. Lets you post a targeted response on your website.
Woopra
A way to understanding website visitors from the moment they “set foot” on your site. People Profiles offer details on individual customers. There is a free plan but you have to pay to get tools like behavioral segmentation.Find more tools here.
When avoiding failure is a primary focus, the work isn’t just more stressful; it’s a lot harder to do. And over the long run, that mental strain takes a toll, resulting in less innovation and the experience of burnout. Ironically, allowing for mistakes to happen can elevate the quality of our performance. It’s true even within roles that don’t require creativity.
Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work
When we force our truths and stories into hiding, secrets can become their own trauma, their own prison. -Auschwitz survivor Edith Eva Eger
What people say about themselves does not matter; people will say anything. Look at what they have done; deeds do not lie. You must apply this logic to yourself. -Robert Greene
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