I've been a fan of Jacob Bannon as long as I've been a fan of his band. Awesome short documentary of a really inspiring guy.

If you've ever seen Rodney skate, you know he operates on a separate plane of existence than most everyone else. It's incredible that he embraces what most everyone else avoids: loss of control (hello, primos?!). What I love about this talk is that Rodney's personality is nearly identical how he skates. Tangential and brilliant.

I'm pretty excited to hear what he does with Radiohead. Video from bloc.

RIP Hillman Curtis. You were such a immense source of inspiration to me when I was a young graphic designer, especially as I transitioned to the web. May your story and your work live on to inspire generations to come.

This is an absolute must watch from San Francisco CreativeMornings with Mike Monteiro, Design Director, and co-founder of Mule Design Studio. The event took place on March 25, 2011 and was sponsored by Happy Cog and Typekit.

We shape our tools and our tools shape us.” As more of the tools we live with every day become digital instead of physical, our opportunity – and responsibility – as designers is multiplying. We live in a world of screens, and we are the ones who decide what goes on them. We are in a unique position to have an impact – one that lasts longer than the next redesign or the latest technology. What happens when we stop thinking of ourselves not just as developers or experience designers, and take up the mantle as a new generation of product designers for a digital world?

Recorded at Build 2011

Superhuman Ross Capicchioni tells the unbelievable story of how he survived getting shot multiple times with a shot gun in Detroit's east side. (via Devour).  Part two can be found here

This is just so awesome.

Frank Gruber and I did this back in March which we were at SXSW 2011. I knew ahead of time that the interview would end up being about 3 minutes, but because we're friends we ended up talking for about 15 minutes. The result is a highly edited interview, but it turned out well. I should note that without context, the bit about being lucky to "work at companies that could have failures and not suffer from them" is a bit of a "say whaa?" but ultimately I'm happy with this interview. 

Hat tip to @gruber via @thefoxisblack for pointing out the video above – "How Stanley Kubrick used Escher-styled spacial awareness & set design anomolies to disorientate viewers of his horror classic The Shining. This is a must for serious Kubrick fans and psychology students. Written, narrated and edited by Rob Ager."

I absolutely love this video. It's an example of spectacular nitpicking. As someone with a deep passion for user experience, I always joke that my propensity for being an obsessive nitpicker due to some (arguably) minor OCD tendencies make me well positioned to have UX be one of the focuses in my career.

User experience is largely about nitpicking. It's all in the details of the details. I look at pages and screens like blueprints and imagine someone walking through them when I design. Where am I leading you? What's getting your attention? Is what's being presented to you intuitive? When you walk into someone's kitchen, you know it's a kitchen without needing a sign. If you click through to a page, do you know what its purpose is without reading the header? If I've done my job well, you do.

In my brief time in architecture school, I always dreamt of designing buildings that would require no directional signage. Such a building would require strong visual cues to guide someone exactly to where they needed to go, and only at the exact necessary moment would they encounter descriptive text (ie. a number or name on a door or gender assignation on a restroom entrance).

Web and mobile application user experience should be viewed similarly, only the user is moving through a design with their eyes and not their body. However, it's still realistic to think about not over-burdening a design with "signage". In order to successfully achieve this, you need to be one hell of a good nitpicker and constantly be thinking about where you can be misleading someone as much as you're thinking about where you're leading them.