Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.” 

We are all designers. Designers solve problems. Designers love problems. Every new design begins with a problem.

“Recognizing that people’s reactions don’t belong to you is the only sane way to create. If people enjoy what you’ve created, terrific. If people ignore what you’ve created, too bad. If people misunderstand what you’ve created, don’t sweat it. And what if people absolutely hate what you’ve created? What if people attack you with savage vitriol, and insult your intelligence, and malign your motives, and drag your good name through the mud? Just smile sweetly and suggest – as politely as you possibly can – that they go make their own fucking art. Then stubbornly continue making yours.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

You Are Who You’ve Been Looking For by Adam Roa

This is sosoo good! “Your capacity to love others is limited only by your capacity to love yourself.” Treat yourself the way you would treat someone you love.

“Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.”

– Henri J.M. Nouwen

Confidence vs. Courage

Debbie Millman shares a conversation with writer Dani Sharpiro on confidence vs. courage via

An Eclectically Curious Home

Bait YSG is the home of interior designer Yasmine Saleh Ghoniem, and is an exploration of light, colour and texture. The apartment is located in the backstreets of Bondi, Sydney, and is nestled inside a red brick art deco building.

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How To Design For Everyone, In 3 Steps

First? Ignore the average user–they don’t exist.

Inclusive design is officially a buzzword, with companies like Airbnb releasing an inclusion toolkit and Microsoft attempting to use its principles to make better products. But the idea behind that buzzword–that designing for a wider variety of people makes more effective products for everyone–is still far from mainstream. At a panel at the Cooper Hewitt design museum in New York yesterday, four designers working on the front lines of the fight to make products, services, and spaces more accessible shared why inclusive design should be the primary way of thinking about design–regardless of who the end user is.
The World Health Organization defines disability in part as a mismatch between the features of a person and the features of the environment in which they live. While you can’t necessarily give a blind person sight or make an old person young again, you can adapt their environments so that that mismatch is less pronounced–or doesn’t exist at all. This is where inclusive design comes in.
The panelists, many of whom have physical and psychological disabilities themselves, advocated for a more universal way of thinking about design. Some of the design principles they shared were hidden in the most ordinary places, like in eyeglasses, or in airplane cockpits. Others could be found in the most mundane behaviors, like tying your shoes or brushing your teeth. Here’s what those simple, universal objects and experiences can teach us about inclusive design.

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10 New Principles Of Good Design

Dieter Rams’s design principles get a 21st-century update.

Designers thrive on questioning convention–on unearthing solutions to seemingly intractable problems. Today,  good design has never mattered more; it’s just the parameters of “good design” that have changed.
With a nod to Braun legend Dieter Rams–whose 10 principles for good design remain indispensable, though somewhat narrowly concerned with the particulars of industrial design - here are 10 new principles for good design.

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