Interdisciplinary designer writer artist musician dancer inventor. former vp of design and dj. current executive consultant & mfa candidate in creative writing.
🌎🌍🌏🇺🇸🇨🇦🇳🇱🇮🇩🇨🇳🇨🇴
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- Following 1,213
- Followers 13,662
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ok, taking a leap and sharing what i wrote about mortality last night when i was supposed to be sleeping
it helped me
maybe it will help some of you, too
maylikhoe.com/writing/on-mor…
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I feel like every creative person needs to have some separate creative outlet that’s low stakes, in which they can do stuff and be unattached, let it go
anyone else feel like this? if so what is that thing for you right now? and has it been something else before?
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And some of the most peace-loving hippies I’ve met have been the most hypocritical fragile-egoed misogynist assholes… it happened enough that I sadly developed a prejudice that i have to check myself for now
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Accidentally said the word "designosaur" and I'm not sure what it means yet but I like it
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make your life a personal work of art filled with whatever random things energize you ✨
those little random 🌱 will bloom into things you never would have imagined if you give them the space outside a conventional career to grow
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Hey anyone who ever presents from a Mac!
In case you don’t yet know: you can option-click the notifications icon in your menu bar to turn off notifications
That way you can turn em off w/o exposing your whole notifications bar during a preso, if you forgot
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"We don't know how to measure what we care about, so we care about what we measure." — Richard Tapia, mathematician (via @FedericoArdila )
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"You can get a good idea on the corner for $4 with your latte. What matters is how well you execute."
– Steve Jobs, yelling at us after the MobileMe debacle
I wish more people would talk about this. Last I checked, this quote got lost, so I'm telling you now, since I was there.
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First there was “skeuomorphism”
Then came “flat design”
We took a little detour and put in glitter because it is fun
Introducing “glitterism”
in Scribble Together
with 💖 from @bridgermax and me itunes.apple.com/us/app/scri…
(P.S. I’ve wanted to do this for _years_)
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I was not able to do this
I think if we all admitted it we could all just feel a bit better
(Instead of presenting like we do and then mutually pressuring each other to do something that’s impossible to do without help)
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When Steve Jobs brought us into town hall the day before iPhone was announced he said people always ask him about 5-10 year plans and basically he thought they were bullshit. The world could completely change in 5-10 years and you’d be stuck stupidly sticking to some plan.
Not one person who went for a job interview in 2015 got the answer right to, "So where do you see yourself 5 years from now?"
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I thought that “in case of fire, use stairs” meant “you should use the stairs, just in case there’s a fire” not “use the stairs during a fire” for the longest time
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Well, in other news…
😭I’m leaving Khan Academy
🌍I’m going to be traveling the world for about 14 months!
My partner @FedericoArdila won a Simons Fellowship, which lets him take an extended sabbatical, and we decided we’ll go together
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i had to watch again to see the shower curtain 🤣
ALT a black curtain with oversized grommets that make it look like a shower curtain
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Haiiii… some news
I got excited about a technology thing despite myself, and I think you’ll be excited too, take a peek!
It’s an indy/non-profit project that helps people get together in digital space in entirely new fun flexible and sometimes silly ways ✨🎉
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😭 this is the best recruiting tweet i’ve seen maybe ever
We're hiring animators.
This is our swim animation right now. Please help us.
form.asana.com/?k=NQarmpAGk8…
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In case you didn't know this yet, there's a standard set of words you use to spell things over the phone:
Alfa
Bravo
Charlie
Delta
Echo
Foxtrot
Golf
Hotel
India
Juliett
Kilo
Lima
Mike
November
Oscar
Papa
Quebec
Romeo
Sierra
Tango
Uniform
Victor
Whiskey
X-ray
Yankee
Zulu
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OMG Apple is actually shipping OS level software to help us _not_ look at technology, shut it up, and know how we're spending our time with it. This is something that an ad-driven company could never do.
#WWDC18
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I worked on both Windows Vista and MobileMe. You want large scale software disaster stories I GOT EM
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Design-job-seekers: usually, annual planning at most companies happens in the fall and is done by now, which means executives have had a chance to advocate for headcount
What this means for you: any teams that received approval to hire more people are opening those spots up now
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As soon as I saw who the caller was, I knew.
They told me the news: she’s gone. My godmother, hero, homie, passed away yesterday.
💔
Gonna be hazy with grief brain for a while. Hoping to share her stories with you one day. Wish me luck as I embark on this writing project.
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People talk a lot about Apple’s design
but what’s always under-appreciated is its operations. People constantly underestimate how hard operations are, *especially* when it comes to hardware manufacturing and fulfillment
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hey everyone working from home
if you need to whiteboard together we (@bridgermax and I) made a little tool for you✨ it’s super fast to get started up
it is best on iPad w Apple Pencil ✏️ but once you share out people can also draw with you via browser
apps.apple.com/us/app/scribb…
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my mom died 29 years ago today and it still messes me up
grief works in weird ways y’all, be gentle with yourselves
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must be nice to not have to think about injustices big or small
or to see simply them as some abstract political point of view to take intellectual interest in
and not a lived experience that hunted you down even though you fought to not let it affect you
must be nice
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when i started designing interfaces, i had no idea that twenty years later, three dots would carry so much weight.
they represent the mysterious door to buried treasures and powerful functionality, sitting innocently in the corners of our UI
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who else remembers these 👀
ALT blue, yellow and red tanks of water. they're transparent. they contain pink pins and a bunch of tiny hoops. there are two buttons at the bottom, red, blue, and yellow, respectively, that are meant for pushing so that water squirts around the moves the little hoops and you're supposed to get them on the pins
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i find this really beautiful actually. seeing newer tech rendered in visuals of old tech is an unexpected aesthetic
definitely interesting art directions to be had there
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Psssst.
@figma is BRINGING BACK DIGITAL WASHI TAPE PERMANENTLY. They told me my tweet inspired it 😭 So: you heard it here first and now you're hearing it here first. Enjoy! 🥳
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Bad system design:
1. label or punish people who bluntly bring up issues, particularly with organizations or leadership
2. act clueless when issues arise because “you hadn’t heard anything”
This is the status quo. It’s a system designed to prevent itself from receiving data.
As an industry, we need to get so much better at recognizing that criticism ≠ negativity
Criticism is optimism. It shows someone cares and believes things can change for the better.
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so this was in the sky the other day
what does it look like to you?
ALT floating circular cloud over grass and an old worn down wooden fence very northern california vibes
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Recruiters and hiring managers! The College Bribery scandal is a further reminder that you should NOT be hiring only from elite schools in your hiring process.
You should be doing the opposite, making sure to include and strengthen incoming applications from non-elite schools.
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being a manager is a level of responsibility that imo is not given the weight it should be. it’s a promo it’s not a promo we all lead etc
like no, you literally have the power to move life-changing amounts of capital toward some ppl and away from others can we talk about that ?!
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Periodic reminder: don’t forget to hang out with people who do wildly different work from you!
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Dear creative people & researchers,
Make friends with the part of you that tells you your work isn’t good enough. With each new thing you accomplish, you’ll always set your bar higher; it’s why you will keep getting better. So you might always have this feeling. It’s ok.
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Designers – if you’re not yet friends w the front-end engineer(s) building your UI, go make that happen! Designer-engineer synergy is magic✨
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hello here is a math you can play with. it is also a research
@andy_matuschak @farrarscott and I hope you like it
khanacademy.org/research/rep…
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My uncle said, "to succeed as a minority, you have to be a little better than the majority. But not too much, because they'll get jealous"
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Finally! I kicked off our Khan Academy Design blog with a post: Why design at Khan Academy? (I am terrified of writing on the internet but I love this team too much to not write about them!)
Check it out: medium.com/khan-academy-desi…
P.S. We are hiring! Help spread the word.
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Business idea: IHOT, International House of Tamales.
So many cultures from places with great leaves have 'em
Below: 🇲🇽🇬🇹🇨🇴🇨🇳
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hate to break it to you but “self-care” also means the voice inside your head speaks to you with care
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Designers who design any data ever
please look at this and then commit yourself to understanding and representing data accurately
this is an ethical commitment
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In an earlier design iteration of this design (pre-texture and all of that) I'd written "You have no friends." and then "You don't have any friends yet."
Don't worry I never planned to propose shipping that copy, but it had to be typed at least once
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adding on:
- all managers are told very clearly by HR partners to treat this information with utmost confidentiality
- the ADA took *decades* of work to get into legislation and everyone who sets foot in the US benefits from it
Hope to see it enforced. Accountability for all
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why must i always be defined by a title and a company
i'm finding this to be an increasingly irritating norm
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my ex-boss told me he thought our team was diverse because each of the cis six straight white men were from different places, and because i’m quatricultural and a woman and non-white
i think he thought it was funny but it wasn’t fucking funny to me
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In case anyone needs another example of why considering the context of a design matters so much nitter.app/TaylorHerringUK/status… via @TaylorHerringUK
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one highlight of the year: setting new visual direction for the @sprout_place release. hadn't done that in a while, it was so fun!
i'd meant to share a bit of behind-the-scenes explorations and details ✏️🌱✨
ALT screencap of early sprout.place visual direction, the background looks like muji stationary and everything feels kind of like a japanese stationary sticker sitting in a layer overtop
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At the Town Hall beforehand. Steve Jobs had told us that people ask him for his 5, 10 year plans. He thought that was horseshit.
“The world could completely change by then, and you’d be stuck executing on some dumb plan you’d made before, having wasted all that time on it!”
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If you are a manager and you have a parental safety net
please make sure you’ve taken time to understand the effect that not having one can have on people in your team
especially for people early in their careers
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so many designers join the field, find some mainstream design they're disappointed with, and express disappointment with the design rather than the economics that led to it
makes me sad, because following the money often explains more than understanding the pixels
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Hello here is a dream adventure world of math play
khanacademy.org/research/rep…
@andy_matuschak @farrarscott @jasonbrennan & I hope u like it
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psssssst
I might or might not be working on a "game" with @andy_matuschak for this brand new handheld gaming system
it is many things that I like. small, yellow, cute, fun, and a little cranky. all things i would be okay being, too.
Introducing Playdate, a new handheld gaming system from Panic.
It fits in your pocket. It's got a black and white screen. It includes a season of brand-new games from amazing creators. Oh and… there's a crank???? play.date/
Yes. A thread…
ALT A photo of the Playdate system.
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brilliant.
brilliant use of the medium to teach a concept that’s so hard to grasp and also *so urgent to grasp*
best use of pixels, touch and scrolling i’ve seen in a long time
via @amelielamont via @shyamagolden
mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel…
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I also had a driver break down to me a few years back. We were trading stories and she’d just been let go from a job helping some rich tech mom with her 3 kids (she’d helped faithfully for many many years) for not hiding the amazon packages that were xmas presents fast enough
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Nice explanation of why the word “gamification” makes me feel pains and discomforts hideandseek.net/2010/10/06/c…
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In case you've seen me wince when somebody is going on about STEM – it may be because I think we need humanities more urgently than ever. And also:
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pretending to be apolitical is political
just like having no style is still a styyyyleee just not a deliberate one
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Anyone else have occasional nightmares from old jobs
Like you're back there again and the worst things are happening
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this is when we stop to wonder _why_ so much software is designed for beginners rather than experts
ask “why” enough times and you wind up poking at incentive systems
would the design of a traditional piano even get funding today?
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People also don’t understand that the innovation and ideas came from the amazing team at Apple, and what leadership did was a fantastic job of curation and storytelling and clarity-providing and ops.
Jony and Steve didn’t sit around coming up with all of the ideas themselves
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omg omg omg
bye bye boring meetings, hello minimum time to digital goofing off with good people
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haiiiii 👋🏽
there’s a teeny peek at a thing i’ve been working on in here with @andy_matuschak
ALT boogie loops game title text made of keyboards and records and donuts and other stuff and a panda cactus pizza bunny and second panda caught in mid dance. labeled as season one by may-li khoe and andy matuschak
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San Francisco today
ALT thousands of people at dolores park with signs and palestinian flags
ALT palestine will be free
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Let the students own the problem. (Ideally, let them discover it too) fawnnguyen.com/let-problem/ @FedericoArdila
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