The Tremendous 10 link roundup, #141

1. 28 Days of Black Designers | “The 28 Days of Black Designers project is a design project that focuses on the stories and work of African American / Black designers. The black community lack stories and accomplishments of black artists. To help facilitate this need this 28-day project will allow the awareness and celebration of black designers during Black History Month.”
2. Here Are The Best Design Ideas Of 2017 | “Fast Company celebrates the best in design, from products to spaces, with the annual Innovation by Design awards. Here are the winners of all 13 categories”
3. The most influential female designers of the last century | “On the centenary of women’s suffrage in the UK, we look at the female designers who have made an impact on everything from graphics to textiles over the past 100 years.”
4. Beyond Open Offices: The New Fog Creek Headquarters | “Putting employees first is always at the heart of how we create great places to work.”
5. A Wonderful Archive of Historic Transit Maps | “Expressive Art Meets Precise Graphic Design.”
6. Everything Easy is Hard Again | “It’s difficult to fathom how much has changed around the studio in the last 15 years. Back then, there were no social media as we know of them today—no Facebook, no Instagram, no snaps; most of the sites you visit today did not exist back then, and most of the sites we visited then do not exist now. There were no iPhones. You would go online to fetch directions and print out the map like a neanderthal. We were hitting rocks together trying to make graphic design. Everything is different now, but I am still at my desk.”
7. Why hiring the ‘best’ people produces the least creative results | “The multidimensional or layered character of complex problems also undermines the principle of meritocracy: The idea that the ‘best person’ should be hired. There is no best person. When putting together an oncological research team, a biotech company such as Gilead or Genentech would not construct a multiple-choice test and hire the top scorers, or hire people whose resumes score highest according to some performance criteria. Instead, they would seek diversity.”
8. The 9 Rules of Design Research | “Lately, I’ve noticed a lot more ambient enthusiasm for research among both early stage start-ups and established organizations. Businesses have embraced the idea that meaningful innovation requires understanding their customers as humans with complex lives. This is fantastic.”
9. Last blog standing, last guy dancing | “How Jason Kottke is thinking about kottke.org at 20.”
10. The astounding science and engineering of printer jams | “Anil Dash’s third law holds that “Three things never work: Voice chat, printers and projectors.” But Joshua Rothman’s long, fascinating, even poetic profile of the Xerox engineers who work on paper-path process improvements is such a bit of hard-science whimsy that it almost makes me forgive every hour I’ve spent swearing over jammed paper.”

Image: kottke.org, via link # 9.