This afternoon I was interviewing Cameron Moll as part of my upcoming audio book, Delight is in the Details.

During the pre-show conversation we were talking about his old weblog, Authentic Boredom, and Cameron mentioned that he’d been reading an article of his from 2004(!):

If there’s one thing I’ve repeated over the course of my career more than anything else, it’s this simple philosophy: If you have time and talent to care for the smaller details, it almost always means you’ve already cared for the bigger details.

Agreed. Moreover, I would also say details a great product maketh. All the little touches which often go unnoticed, add up to collectively turn something which is pretty good into something fantastic.

Nice profile of Ryan Sims, the head of design for Rdio:

Music is magical. Discovering and consuming it should be a joy. One thing we’ve tried to do with Rdio is bring the music to the foreground by pushing everything else to the back. If Rdio is the canvas, the music is the paint. And we are trying to compose spectacular landscapes. Being a company that values design at every level and having such a design-driven product, we can take some pretty big design risks where others might be more cautious and conservative. This is one hell of an opportunity and it’s something every one of our designers has a good grasp of and takes very seriously.

Hoefler & Frere-Jones rolled out Cloud.typography today and wowzers. These guys are home to some of the finest typefaces on the planet (I’m a huge fan of Tungsten, Idlewild, Gotham, to name a few).

If you’re a type nerd, at least do yourself the favor of taking a few minutes to peruse the webfont site, and for goodness sake, be sure you read all about the H&FJ Screensmart Fonts and how they designed and engineered them.

Tatsuo Horiuchi bought a computer to start creating digital artwork. He decided to use Excel because: “Graphics software is expensive but Excel comes pre-installed in most computer. And it has more functions and is easier to use than [Microsoft] Paint.”

Horiuhi’s work is absolutely stunning. You will never find a more perfect example that tools do not an artist make.

(Via Kottke.)

Fun story by Mark Simonson about the first time he used Visigothic in a project, the font that later became Proxima Sans and then, ultimately, Proxima Nova. (Via Sean McCabe.)

“Our giant 80-gauge current is the highest point of perfection yet attained in electric belt making.”

(Via Sebastiaan de With.)

Louie Mantia:

Skeuomorphism is a word that everyone disagrees on what it means (or suggests it means all of the above), but is often used to discriminate apps that use realistic textures for the sake of joy, beauty, and delight. When you’re talking about an app that uses realistic textures, call that “theming” or “skinning” because before last year, that’s what we called it, and that’s what it is.

Great essay by Sacha Greif regarding the “battle” and differences between flat design and skeuomorphism.

Austin Carr profiles Square’s internal design culture and their desire to design things like receipts, points of sale, and refund screens with a bit of fun and whimsicalness. And it’s true: just Tuesday I bought a cup of coffee at a local coffee shop which uses Square on an iPad as their point of sale. I used my finger to sign my name in the giant signature box and then thought to myself,“that was fun.” (Though not as fun as drinking the cup of coffee.)

Great discussion over on Branch about “unnecessary” but “delightful” elements in UI and UX design.

Most of the examples talked about in the Branch thread are of websites, but I couldn’t help but think about some iOS apps. Such as the oversized blue cursor in iA Writer, the hatching egg and flying Ollie animation on pull-to-refresh in Twitteriffic, the link to 1Password on the login screen of Riposte, and the iPhone’s bouncing Lock screen when you tap the camera icon. These are little things which aren’t necessarily needed for the app to serve its primary function. But I think the role of delight in design is vital because, when done well, it does the opposite of what friction does — delight “greases the skids,” so to say.

If it’s true that we use something more when we enjoy using it, then it’s also fair to say that a little bit of delight can go a long way in increasing usability.

Some links to wallpapers that’ll fit your new screen. Louie Mantia’s are, of course, fantastic. As are these designs from Marc Edwards.

This beautiful sans is Adobe’s first open source typeface. It’s influenced on some classy faces you’ve probably heard of before: News Gothic and Franklin Gothic.

You can grab the typeface and its source files here. And it’s available on Google Web Fonts, WebInk, and Typekit.

Gorgeous design.