The Tremendous 10 link roundup, #256

1. A new explanation video: What is information design? | “Learn the answer in the video series premiere of “Two minutes of Tremendousness”. Here’s a peek: the term ‘information design’ may sound academic, but it’s really egalitarian. And like air, it’s something everyone needs yet rarely thinks about until it’s nowhere to be found.”
2. Design Deliverables: How To Choose The Right Ones For Your Process | “It is important to generate low fidelity deliverables during the early stages of design, as spending too much time on visual quality is pointless. These deliverables need to be agile, to maintain the ability to quickly iterate and make changes, after all, the final solution for the problem we’re working on is still being refined.”
3. Email is 50 years old, and still where it’s @ | “50 years ago [last] month, Ray Tomlinson sent the very first email. He was a programmer working on ARPANET, the system that laid the groundwork for what would become the internet as we know it today. He tested the messaging system by sending emails to himself, and later said that the first note was probably something like ‘QWERTYUIOP.'”
4. Hot Streaks in Your Career Don’t Happen by Accident | “Aren’t there periods when you feel like you’re effortlessly flourishing at work, while other times you feel incompetent and uninspired? You might recognize these periods of concentrated success among your friends, peers, and competitors too. The Northwestern University economist Dashun Wang calls these special bursts of creativity “hot streaks”—a term usually reserved for sports.”
5. Stack Overflow’s copy / paste keyboard is no joke | “A Stack Overflow-branded keyboard with just three buttons (Ctrl, C, and V) is a great April Fools’ gag that has no business being as neat and useful as it is.”
6. ‘I can’t separate art from artists who’ve done bad things. How do I explain this without feeling silly?’ | “For many, bad men’s work is a kind of trigger, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. When something that’s fun for others is not for you, the best thing you can do is look out for yourself.”
7. Our Self-Imposed Scarcity of Nice Places | “Every advocate for making urban design more [pick one: walkable, bikeable, beautiful, lovable, inviting, human-scale] has at some point or another faced the charge of elitism. Virtually every feature of public space that makes it more pleasant to linger in, stroll through, or simply view, has at some point been associated by someone with gentrification, or simply culturally coded as upscale.”
8. Alison Turnbull | See her graph paper art in the Drawing Table sections. Neat.
9. A lighthearted, simple matrix explains whether someone is ‘intelligent’ or ‘stupid’ | “In 1976, Italian economist Carlo Cipolla wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay called ‘The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity’ that provides a great framework for judging someone’s real intelligence. Now, the term ‘stupid’ isn’t the most artful way of describing someone who lives unwisely, but in his essay Cipolla uses it in a lighthearted way.”
10. Wisdom From Merlin | “Or: ‘Everybody likes being given a glass of water.’ It’s only advice for you because it had to be advice for me. This odd collection began life as a challenge for a podcast I co-host called Do By Friday.”

Image: Art by Alison Turnbull, link #8.