The Tremendous 10 link roundup, #25

  1. How To Balance Client Work With Passion Projects | “Matt Owens, cofounder of design studio Athletics, reveals how he manages to take self-started work as seriously as paid client work.”
  2. Dear Design Student | “Advice on design from people who work for a living.”
  3. The User Is Drunk | “Your website should be so simple, a drunk person could use it. You can’t test that. I’ll do it for you. I’ll get very drunk, and then review your website. I’ll send you a document outlining where I thought the website needed help, and a screencast of me going over the website.”
  4. Nike’s “Just do it” slogan is based on a murderer’s last words, says Dan Wieden | “‘I was recalling a man in Portland,’ Wieden told Dezeen, remembering how in 1988 he was struggling to come up with a line that would tie together a number of different TV commercials the fledgling agency had created for the sportswear brand.”
  5. How to Write | “I teach a Popular Criticism class to MFA students. I don’t actually have an MFA, but I am a professional, full-time writer who has been in this business for almost two decades, and I’ve written for a wide range of impressive print and online publications, the names of which you will hear and think, “Oh fuck, she’s the real deal.” Because I am the real deal. I tell my students that a lot, like when they interrupt me or roll their eyes at something I say because they’re young and only listen when old hippies are digressing about Gilles Deleuze’s notions of high capitalism’s infantilizing commodifications or some such horse shit.”
  6. Space Invaders | “Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.”
  7. The Humanæ art project catalogs human skin tones | “After snapping a portrait of a volunteer subject, Brazilian artist Angélica Dass extracts a sample of 11×11 pixels of his or her face and matches it to the corresponding Pantone color.”
  8. Finland schools: Subjects scrapped and replaced with ‘topics’ as country reforms its education system | “…Finland is about to embark on one of the most radical education reform programmes ever undertaken by a nation state – scrapping traditional ‘teaching by subject’ in favour of ‘teaching by topic’.”
  9. The short guide to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up | “Last weekend, I trashed two garbage bags full of cards from my grandmas, mix CDs made by ex-boyfriends, and press badges from long-forgotten events. I filled even more with clothing and books to donate. That’s because I’m one of the legions of Americans who have latched onto The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, a book by Japanese organizational consultant Marie Kondo. And yes, I tidied up. But the jury’s still out on the magic. Likewise the changed life.”
  10. 10 THINGS I LEARNED WHILE WRITING MY LAST BOOK | By Austin Kleon: “My third book Show Your Work! came out a year ago. I kept a diary while writing the book, but it’s too painful and embarrassing to share in full. So here’s a list of lessons I learned while writing it, adapted from a series of tweets…”

Visual via Humanæ, link #7.