Part 1 and Part 2 are also available.

My 13″ MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar and 16gb of RAM arrived on November 16^th. I’ve had nearly a month to put it through its paces. To me, a month feels like an appropriate amount of time before putting together some real thoughts on the machine. It’s enough time to get used to using it every day and see if it makes your life easier. 

I’ve learned over the past month that all of the so-called deal-breakers are overblown. 

The New Form Factor

Let’s start with the obvious: these new laptops are shockingly thin and light. Half a pound (compared to the generation) is a ton of weight to lose. And it’s got a smaller footprint than my iPad Pro, which never ceases to amaze me. 

I ​“downgraded” from a 2012 15″ to the 13″ because I wanted the lightest professional MacBook I could get my hands on. This delivers. It feels solid in my hands, but in my bag, I don’t even know it’s there. I’m not joking: I always open my bag halfway to my destination to make sure I didn’t forget the laptop. I carry my laptop with me everywhere. This is a huge perk for me.

A lot of ink has been spilled about Apple has sacrificed performance and battery life for the sake of weight and size. I don’t think that’s a big deal, even if it’s true (more on that later). 

I’ve also heard people say that nobody wanted a thinner and lighter laptop. But I did. My father in law, a consultant who travels every day with his laptop, also told me he wanted a thinner and lighter laptop. (He ordered a new 15″ as soon as they were available.)

Normal people like thin and light laptops. Laptops are meant to go with you. They should be thin and light. 

The new Pros are the descendants of the MacBook Air. The 13″ Pro is thinner than an Air, weighs the same amount, and is much more powerful. For me, this is the perfect size for a portable computer. 

How many of us basically wanted a MacBook Air with a Retina display for years? This is basically that, but somehow even smaller. It’s fantastic.

The Keyboard

It’s still my favourite keyboard ever. Bar none. It makes my desktop keyboard feel like mushy junk. 

The Touch Bar

I like the Touch Bar. It’s a nifty little feature. Eventually, it’s going to be more useful than the function keys (I already use it more than I ever used the function keys). I find I’m already adapting to it, and tapping where the Touch Bar would be on my Bluetooth keyboard for certain things. 

So the Touch Bar, and Touch ID with it, are both great. I’m looking forward to having them on an external keyboard. 

All that being said, nobody needs either feature. We’ve lived without them for years, and could continue to. It’s the very definition of a nicety. 

Not unlike an Apple Watch, come to think of it.

I love it, but you don’t need it.

The Trackpad

I never knew I wanted a larger trackpad. Apparently, I did. The trackpad on this laptop makes me happy. It’s given me no issues. I love Force Click, or whatever they call it. I’m fascinated by its mechanics (it feels like a real click to me).

It looks too large, but in practice, it feels great. The trackpad on old MacBooks feels so constrictive now, by comparison, that they almost feel unusable. And they were the best trackpads on the market.

The new trackpads are better. I love them.

Performance

It’s more than fast enough. 

I wish I could stop there, but I can’t. I have never seen so many angry rants about how under-powered a laptop is. This laptop handles everything I throw at with gusto, including (but not limited to):

• Multiple virtual servers
• Multiple large PhotoShop files
• Multiple large Sketch files, with dozens of art boards each
• Any IDE I throw at it.
• Code processors
• Too many internet tabs
• And iTunes (but actually)
• And running all of the above at once is a non-issue.

In all honesty, computers have been fast enough for the overwhelming majority of us for years. I’d wager a bet that most of us would get by just fine on a 2013 13″ MacBook Air. 

Some of you are reading this and claiming heresy, insisting that you need at least 32gb of RAM and as many cores as you can buy. While that may be true, and I don’t doubt your understanding of your own needs, I suspect you’re never going to find a good laptop anyway. You need a professional desktop for power like that.

The thing is, laptops need to be portable. That means thin and light. Most laptops, including Apple’s professional lineup, don’t need to compete for the interests of über-demanding developers and filmmakers. For those people, there’s the Mac Pro. And I suspect Apple has a new version of that computer coming soon to satisfy their needs.

Every computer is a compromise towards portability or power. In this case, I think Apple made the right call.

The Dongles

They haven’t made a difference in my day-to-day life. I wrote about the dongles previously, but having given more thought to it, there is one thing that confuses me.

USB‑C is very nice. USB wasn’t really nice before. I never liked USB before. Now I do. What took them so long to get around to making a nice, small, reversible jack?

I’m not mad that the MacBook Pro is all in on this. I think Thunderbolt 3 and USB‑C are great (and I’m thrilled that I can power a 5K display with Thunderbolt 3). I just want to know why it took so long.

I also wonder: had USB always been this nice to use, would Apple have used it for their iPhones and iPads instead of Lightning? I’d prefer USB‑C at this point (although I’m sure it will never happen).

Two other quick thoughts: I don’t miss the SD card slot. It was nice to have before, and it would have been nice to have it over the past month, but plugging in a card reader (or just using USB) hasn’t been an issue.

However, I really miss MagSafe.

Battery Life

This is the only area where the new laptops are disappointing. I’m definitely not getting the ten hours of battery life that Apple is claiming. I’m somewhere around eight — respectable, for sure, but not as advertised.

Apple already issued a ​“fix” for the problem, which hides the ​“Time Remaining” estimate from the battery life bar. Apple claims it was inaccurate (although I haven’t seen any hard evidence to the point). Regardless, it doesn’t change real-world battery life.

This is one area that is truly unfortunate. You have to decide if you need a thin and light laptop, or if you need a laptop with great battery life. You very well might need both, which makes it hard to recommend these new MacBook Pros to you right now.

The 13″, in general, seems to last a little while longer than the 15″ laptops. I think that’s because it doesn’t have a discrete GPU. My old laptop was a 15″, and I’m getting roughly double the battery life with this new Pro than I was with the old one. So take that how you will.

For me, eight hours is an improvement over the four hours I used to get (massively so). I’m pretty happy with eight hours. But when you get actively working on photo development or anything too power-hungry (video editing), the battery starts to dive pretty quick. I went down 30% today with two hours of photo editing in Lightroom.

Even if you’re fine with six to eight hours of battery life (and I am, especially by comparison to my older machine), Apple’s estimates will make you feel lied to. I don’t mind a laptop with eight hours of battery life. Just tell me up front. 

Apple didn’t. And that’s gross.

Finally

I’ve lived with this machine for a month, and it’s quickly becoming my favourite laptop ever. It’s an improvement in every area for me (although it’s slightly less powerful than before), and I find it easier than ever to put my laptop in my bag and walk all over the city for a day of meetings.

To me, that makes a great laptop.

It’s a shame about the battery. For most people, it might not be a deal breaker. I can get through an entire day on battery without an issue, and I can use the laptop on and off throughout a weekend without having to charge it too. But frequent flyers have reason to be disconcerted.

But apart from that, to me, these laptops are a win. They’re a big indicator of the future of computing: small devices that can become massively powerful thanks to the capabilities of things like Thunderbolt 3.

My motto is simple: buy the smallest laptop your workflow will allow you to, and plug it into the largest and best display available when you’re at your desk. With the new MacBook Pros, I finally have a truly tiny laptop with a lot of oomph.

And it can power a 5K display to boot.

The Verge has a really amazing article filled with pictures of Sony products from their exhibit in the Sony Building in Ginza, Tokyo.

These products are gorgeous. Here are a few that I’ve borrowed from Verge (all credit goes to Sam Byford, who I’m guessing took all the photographs).

Man, does this all have me reminiscing.

The first PlayStation was an amazing product. My uncle had one (I think he still has). Visiting him and hanging out in his condo was the thing to do when I was a kid. He had a copy of NHL 95 (in all its glory), Crash Bandicoot 3, and one of the first NASCAR games for PlayStation.

It almost makes Apple’s proprietary stuff look like hobbies by comparison. Look at this wall of proprietary formats! Insane!

The Verge says Sony beat Amazon to the e‑reader market by a few years with this thing. It still looks so good.

Not that long ago, owning a Bravia meant your family had made it. The Bravia meant you had succeeded and could afford one of the grandest niceties of suburban culture. (My parents still have one of the original Bravia TVs in their living room.)

There will never be a more beautiful clock radio.

My home town doesn’t have an Apple Store in its mall, and the only place you could buy any of it in the early 2000s was driving over an hour to get to Toronto. So the closest thing we had to a ​“luxury technology store” was the Sony Store. There were three of them within a thirty minute drive of us.

I loved that store. No matter which mall we were in, I would head down to the Sony Store and see what stuff they were working on. I did this even after I started using Macs and iPhones, because Sony was always so cool. Even when they were losing their lustre, they continued to experiment with the weirdest, coolest, and most expensive ideas.

The VAIOs were stunning. I wanted one when I was younger. To date, they are the only Windows computers I ever saw that looked consistently elegant. I never owned one, but friends and family who had the pleasure of using them always told me how excellent they were compared to the rest of the market.

When I took a brief look at Windows laptops a couple months ago, I was sad the VAIO lineups weren’t what they were when I was a teenager. The ​“good old days”.

I don’t really know what happened to Sony. By all accounts, they did things right for a long time before veering off track. For a long time, even their weird stuff — like the MiniDisc Walkmen, one of which I owned — were really cool. They worked so well, and for their time, they oozed innovation and coolness.

For a couple years, walking around with a Sony Walkman was still the ​“cool thing” to do when I was in school. Until suddenly it wasn’t. The iPod became all the rage almost overnight.

The thing is, some of these Sony products wouldn’t look out of place in an Apple museum. These are beautiful machines.

I miss this version of Sony.

Part 1 is available here. It’s got the dongles you’re looking for.

It took me a week and a half to figure out how to log in to my MacBook without using Touch ID.

Let’s say you plug in your MacBook Pro to an external monitor and use it in Clamshell Mode. (I do this all the time to work on my external monitor.) Things are going well. You’re getting work done on your giant screen, feeling like a boss.

And then it happens.

You step away for lunch, and come back to discover the laptop is now asleep. 

“No problem,” you think, tapping on a key to wake up the screen.

At this point, you’re greeted with your avatar and user name. You don’t know it, because there aren’t any indicators on the screen, but your MacBook is encouraging you to use Touch ID on the new Touch Bar.

(Touch ID is wonderful on the new laptops, by the way.)

There’s one problem: you can’t use Touch ID with the laptop closed. So you open the laptop, put your finger on the sensor, and then close the laptop once you’re logged back in. Your windows re-arrange themselves again.

Another annoyance.

It turns out: you don’t have to do this! If you click on your name on the log in screen, you get the option to type in your password instead of using Touch ID.

There’s no indicator you can do this. I only know because I furiously clicked everywhere on the screen in desperation.

There’s no reason for this in 2016. Your laptop should know when it’s closed and driving an external display, and it should compensate accordingly. This is bad design.

The weird thing is, you and I both know there are probably dozens of people in Apple using their new MacBook Pros in Clamshell Mode with those fancy new 5k displays. The fact this isn’t fixed from the get-go is pure laziness.

It’s a first-world problem, but this is the only major pain point I’ve experienced with the new MacBook Pro since I got it. This is the only major workflow ruiner. It’s astonishing that this is a problem.

But here we are.

The first issue was my external monitor.

I have a Dell U2515H, a monitor Apple has doomed to irrelevancy because it lacks USB‑C and Thunderbolt 3. In its place, the Dell is rocking a bunch of standard USB ports, DisplayPort, and HDMI.

It’s a good monitor. (I know: they’re all good monitors, Brent.) I replaced my Thunderbolt Display with it. The Dell is more colour-accurate, and it has smaller bezels. It’s also much brighter thanks to an almost imperceptible anti-glare coating on its LCD screen. 

Getting rid of my Dell monitor because my laptop doesn’t play nicely with its port wasn’t happening.

So I set myself up with the first dongle, a USB‑C hub with HDMI out, three old-school USB ports, and an SD card reader. It was $85 when I bought it. Now it’s $65, one month later. Oops.

But that’s not all! Apple really hates HDMI, and doesn’t display RGB colours over HDMI without some serious hacking.

$85 and an hour of frustration and Terminal hacking later, my new MacBook Pro worked over this monitor.

With my old MacBook Pro, all I had to do was plug in the DisplayPort cable. And that was it.

The new MacBook Pro comes with some compromises.

Dem Dongles

The dongles are definitely an issue.

Despite that, I don’t carry any dongles with me. Maybe I’m an edge case, but I don’t remember the last time somebody passed me a USB stick that I needed to act on right away. Murphy’s Law has me reluctant to share this information with you, but I don’t suspect my needs will change any time soon.

But the Dongle Life is a problem. The SD card reader in the dongle I bought doesn’t work, so I need to attach my camera via USB and use Image Capture to bring images in off my DSLR. But the write speeds are so fast on the new laptop that I don’t notice a big difference in speed. It’s just an annoyance.

I tried a 12″ MacBook before the new Pros came out (some brief thoughts on that here), and the dongles were much more of a problem there. On the MacBook Pro, the dongles are an inconvenience, but not a serious problem — at least, not for most of us.

That Keyboard Though

Can we talk about the keyboard for a second? Because this is a fantastic keyboard.

This is one of those times where I undoubtedly and passionately believe the haters are wrong.

The keyboards on the old Retina MacBook Pros are wobbly in comparison. They’re too shallow to alleviate the issue, and not firm enough to be consistent. The spacing between keys is ridiculous. Typing on them feels completely inferior after an hour of typing on a new MacBook Pro.

My wife has a 2011 MacBook Pro, and those keys have even more travel than my Retina MacBook Pro did. The keys on that 2011 pro are lovely. They’re firm, and they don’t wobble from side to side.

The keys on the new MacBook Pro, similarly, offer firm and tactile feedback. They make a wonderful clicky sound that anybody who likes mechanical keyboards will enjoy. And if you don’t pound on your keys like an angry gorilla typing with a hammer, they can be pretty quiet.

Let me offer a new theory: the keyboards Apple put on laptops in between 2012 and 2015 were all missteps. They were the bad keyboards. Hindsight is 20/​20, though, and it’s hard to see the flaws in the one you love.

Two Weeks In

Exactly two weeks ago today, this new laptop arrived. Obviously, we haven’t had a ton of time to bond yet. And I’m still in the honeymoon phase.

But there’s a lot to process with this thing. And I do my best thinking when I’m writing. I still want to write about the keyboard, the Touch Bar, and the actual design of this thing.

But in the meantime, I have to admit: it’d be sort of nice to have an SD card reader that worked.

I’ve been meaning to talk about the new brand identity of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra for a while. This is absolutely wicked stuff from Bond Agency, a top-notch graphic design studio.

A few years ago, I did the design work for a music magazine called The Modern Producer. (I should really put that case study back up on the website; it was great.) One of the things I had fun with was the idea of using a waveform in the logo. The branding for the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra takes that idea so much further. I absolutely adore it.

I also love the motion that they bring into this identity. It all comes together beautifully, with clean typography and a real sense of energy. I get the feeling convincing people that seeing an orchestra is energetic is a tough sell, and this branding absolute nails it. I love every bit of it.

The branding for the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra is one of the year’s bests, folks. Check it out in all its glorious detail over at Bond Agency’s website. And Bond, if you’re reading this, much respect to you for this incredibly inspiring work.

About six weeks ago, I put in an order for a customized 12” MacBook to replace my aging 2012 MacBook Pro. I wanted to see if I could get away with using the 12” laptop on a daily basis.

As a graphic and digital designer (and front-end web developer), my needs aren’t insane. But I do spend a bit of time in and out of some power-hungry apps every day.

I use Photoshop to edit images, Illustrator for logo mockups and vector work, and InDesign for print design. I’m also going back and forth between Adobe XD and Sketch for digital design.

I spend most of day hanging out with files around 250mb in Sketch. These files have a couple dozen artboards in them, a ton of pages, and quite a few images. To manipulate the images, I’m usually running Photoshop in the background and exporting updated images as I go.

Most of the time, I’m also running a couple browsers, streaming music, and working in a couple text editors. But none of that requires too much power.

And for most people, I’d guess that this laptop has more than enough power — especially for anybody running Office, working on documents in the cloud, or browsing the web.

In other words, for many people — millions of people — the 12” MacBook is powerful enough.

And for the record, if I was willing, I could make it work too.

But let’s say you want to keep everything running in the background all the time. I do this every day. Photoshop is almost always going in the background, and it almost always uses up a ton of CPU without me realizing it.

These little MacBooks don’t have fans. So at some point, the laptop needs to cool down — because Photoshop is warming it up. And to cool down, it simply throttles the speeds of the laptop. So the mouse gets laggy and Sketch gets a lot harder to use.

Now, I could quit Photoshop, but all of this is a bad omen for use as a daily driver.

Let me repeat that: this isn’t the MacBook for you if you plan on using it as a daily driver. It won’t end well.

However, this MacBook shines as a laptop.

This is where Apple got it right. This is a gorgeous, paper-thin, tiny, featherweight of a laptop. It weights practically nothing in my bag and feels like carrying around an iPad, but it’s so much more capable. And if my primary machine was a desktop, I’d absolutely want to carry around this 12” laptop. Because it’s very capable.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that you could probably do just about anything on it for a few hours at a time.

But after a few hours, it starts to get noticeably slower (in my use case). Maybe I had a bum machine, but I didn’t feel like swapping it out for a new one.

Instead, I just ordered a new laptop. One of those 13” MacBook Pros with a Touch Bar. It’s not that I need all that power, but I do think I need a fan.

If you’re a designer, or a developer, and you’re wondering if you should get the 12” laptops, I do have some advice for you. Get the 12” MacBook only if you plan on using it primarily as a laptop away from your powerful desk machine. This can’t do both, and it can’t be a primary laptop. Not yet. Maybe in a year or two (in fact, I’d be surprised if it took longer than that), but not yet.

If you’re not a creative professional, or a demanding computer user (a video editor, computer scientist, audio engineer, or the like), you should honestly pick up a 12” MacBook. It’s got all the computer you need in a tiny, lovable little body. It’s quiet, thin, and sleek as heck. I fell in love with mine. I was sad to return it.

About two weeks ago, I ordered a specced-out 12” MacBook. I had a good feeling that there’d be new MacBook Pros before the end of the month, and knew I could return the 12” within 14 days if I didn’t like it (or didn’t think it was powerful enough for my work).

This is going to be a little self-indulgent and very long, but buying an Apple laptop is a lot more complicated than it used to be.

To set this up a bit, I should explain a bit of what I do every day. I spend about 50% of the day plugged into a display, and 50% working with the laptop on my lap. Usually, I’m running iTunes, Mail, Codekit, Sketch, Coda, Safari, Chrome, TextWrangler, MAMP, iA Writer, and Transmit. At any given time, I might also be running a good chunk of Adobe’s apps: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, or Experience Design. OS X, or macOS as it is now called, is integral to my workflow.

I need to replace my aging 2012 15” MacBook Pro. It was the first generation with Retina display, and at this point, it’s got a few issues of its own:

• My display was one of the ones that suffered with the burn-in problem. I’m using my laptop more and more as a laptop these days, instead of solely plugging it into an external monitor, so that’s becoming a huge annoyance.
• It’s really heavy and bulky at 4.5 pounds. This was great when I used it as a desktop that could become a portable if need be, but now that I use the machine as a portable that occasionally becomes a desktop (and I carry the laptop in my bag a lot), it’s way too heavy.
• The video card is dying on the laptop. It’s getting really quirky, especially when it runs Adobe apps. The screen will go black randomly. Sometimes, when I boot the machine up, the screen is black until I reboot it (again). It’s frustrating. As a result, I’m never buying a computer with an independent graphics card again (unless I can easily replace it).
• The battery is dead. If I’m writing, like I am right now, I can get about five or six hours out of it. If I’m doing any design work or coding, I get about two and a half — at most. I could pay Apple a few hundred bucks to fix this, but why bother? I can’t get them to easily swap out the video card, so it’d be more of a bandaid than a real problem.

Replacing the MacBook Pro meant it was time to look around. Last time I bought a computer, I knew immediately which one was rihgt for me. These days, I’m not so sure.

My first inclination was that 12” MacBook. It’s an amazing little machine. Unlike most people, I love the keyboard on it. (I’m thrilled the keyboard is making its way to the new MacBook Pros.) But even at its top-end spec (which was over $2,000 in Canada!), it only comes with a 1.3ghz CPU.

I don’t really understand what all these numbers mean, although like anybody else, I understand the gist that higher is better. I suspected, with my limited knowledge of these things, that the 12” MacBook would be fine for most tasks. And it is, actually. I’ve read a lot of reviews and reports saying the machine is under-powered, but those are largely overblown.

But when things get bad, they get really bad.

Let me give you the quick five-step method to slow down the frame rate on a 12” MacBook:

1. Run a code compiler in the background that automatically refreshes your development environment every time you make a change to the site’s code. (Codekit.)
2. Have a local server running on your MacBook with something like MAMP.
3. Open a 250mb Sketch file and get to work while you code.
4. Open Photoshop to do some lightweight image editing and create assets for your website design. Leave Photoshop running in the background.
5. Now use the computer as you normally would for a couple hours, leaving all this running. Things are fine. But suddenly, the computer slows down to about 12fps. This is called ​“thermal throttling,” and it’s an issue I encountered on day three of using the MacBook as a daily driver.

Thermal throttling occurs on the 12” model because it doesn’t have a fan. So while the laptop can do some tasks pretty quick for a brief period of time, it has no way to cool down when it starts to heat up. Which means that it has to slow down.

Anyway, the 12” MacBook was a no go for me. It’d be great if I had a desktop and only used it on the road, but it won’t work as a daily driver.

So back to square one.

On Thursday, Apple announced the new MacBook Pros. They’re more or less what I wanted: thinner, lighter, still packing more than enough power to do what I want every day.

But I’m a little confused by my options.

Here are your options if you want to get work done on an Apple laptop these days:

• The 12” Macbook. In Canada, it starts at $1,649. This price has gone up since I purchased it two weeks ago, actually, by $100. Ouch. Unless you’re an office worker or just need a laptop for use on the go when you’re away from your main machine, it’s sadly a little underpowered.
• The 13” MacBook Air. In Canada, it starts at $1,199. Expensive, somewhat powerful — good enough for just about everybody, I think. I could make do with it. But it has a low-resolution screen. I wish Apple would axe this and lower the cost of the 12” MacBook.
• The old MacBook Pros. Pass. Too heavy, too bulky, and definitely not the new hotness. If I wanted one of these, I would have bought one two weeks ago. Oh, and their price hasn’t gone down in the wake of the new laptops. They’re even more expensive than before. So why bother?
• The 13” MacBook Pro, without a Touch Bar. In Canada, it starts at a poop-your-pants price of $1,899. It’s supposed to be the Air replacement (it has a smaller footprint and weighs more or less the same). It’s less powerful than the MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar, and once you spec it up to comparable-ish levels, the prices are on par. So, this seems like an oddly-positioned tweener device. I thought about order this, but when I can pay the same amount for the MacBook Pro with the new Touch Bar and upgraded RAM, why wouldn’t I?
• The 13” and 15” MacBook Pro, with a Touch Bar. This is the new hotness. In Canada, the 13” starts at a ​“sell-your-kidney” $2,299. I got the ​“my-wallet-is-bleeding” mid-tier model with 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM (a necessity in design these days). The 13” version is, again, smaller than a MacBook Air — and they weigh the same amount.

Of course, I could always go Windows. I actually walked down to the Microsoft Store yesterday and tried out the Surface Book (the Surface Studio wasn’t available for demo yet). It’s a very nice laptop, but I don’t like the way the stylus feels in my hand. I also don’t like the space between the screen and the keyboard, even when the laptop is closed — that hinge is so weird! I’d spend most of my days cleaning dirt, dust, and hair out of the keyboard as a result. Plus, I still hate Windows. So I’m skipping this too.

Am I happy with the options? Mostly. Oddly, it seems to me that laptop prices are climbing — particularly the prices for professional machines. If the prices hadn’t changed from one generation to the next, I think we’d have a great set of new laptops from Apple.

Consider this: you can buy a decent Chromebook for a couple hundred bucks, but top-of-the-line computers from both Apple and Microsoft are climbing towards $3,000 and above. I don’t get it.

I remember balking at the price for my 15” MacBook Pro in 2012. The price then, with the extra storage space I got in my model, was just over $3,000. The laptop I’m getting now is nearly the same price, and has arguably fewer features: I’m not getting a video card, there are fewer ports, and MagSafe isn’t a thing anymore.

I don’t think Apple has lost its direction. I think Microsoft is finding their mojo, and everybody’s competing to make a really great laptop for pro users, instead of a laptop that delivers exclusively on specs. For the old guard of PC users, this all seems confusing and gimmicky. To me, it’s just plain old expensive.

But I need a new laptop. So here I am.

One of the projects I’m working on is an identity project for a new Canadian charity. I’ve been trying to find a typeface that’s legible and distinctive, particularly in the regions of the world where they’ll be sending volunteers. I’ve found myself entranced by Cooper Hewitt’s typeface, which is open source and available for unrestricted public use.

In researching the typeface, I stumbled onto Pentagram’s new-ish case study about the project. It’s a very long read, but so incredibly insightful. In truth, I haven’t finished reading it yet. But the case study’s awesome, and I couldn’t wait to share it.

Check out Pentagram’s case study here.

Most of my clients start talking about the sort of design work they’re looking for and use the word ​“minimalism”. Almost every time, they mean simplicity. But they’ve heard a lot of designers talk about minimalism in the past few years and think it’s going to unlock some hidden green valley of successful business heretofore unwitnessed by mankind. 

Great designers talk about minimalism all the time. Dieter Rams, of Braun fame, spoke frequently about using minimalism to remove layers of abstraction from his industrial design. Jony Ive speaks eloquently about minimalism whenever he narrates a new iPhone video for Apple. Recent Microsoft hire Andrew Kim used the term in a (now missing) blog post on his website to discuss his affection for the Xbox One S’s new design language. 

I think minimalism has a bad end game, though. 

Minimalism leads us to the sort of ​“invisible” hardware and difficult software in films like Minority Report. I’ll be the first to say that Minority Report has some of the cooled computers ever. But every computer in the film looks completely unusable — like trying to open a coconut with a fingernail. 

Minimalism is all about the removal of features in an effort to achieve a zen-like product. It’s a philosophy more than a design mandate. And almost every hardware feature removed from a product gets added back into its software, which is why your phone feels increasingly complicated every year. 

I get it. I get that it’s the way things are going. But as designers, we should be aiming higher. 

Our goal should be to make usable products. If we want to delight people, we should be serving them with design. This applies to client services too. Clients come to us for our expertise, and our rationale — particularly the rationale of UX/​digital designers — should lean towards anti-minimalism. Human-centred design is decidedly anti-minimalist. 

Most of us aren’t minimalists. We like our creature comforts.

Minimalism is about clarity and simplicity. I believe in clear, purposeful design. But I don’t think minimalism is the only way, or even the most responsible way, to get there.

Last week, Apple announced they were removing the headphone jack for their new iPhone. It wasn’t the first time they removed an ​“essential” feature; most of us remember losing the floppy drive, disc drives, Ethernet ports, and even the traditional file system (on iPad and iPhone). 

News like this usually doesn’t pan out well, but this time it was particularly tone-deaf. When Marketing SVP Phil Schiller said they were removing the headphone jack because they had ​“courage,” I think the internet broke. I’ve never seen Twitter turn anything into a meme so quickly. 

But it wasn’t the first time Apple had used that line. 

Full credit to 9to5Mac for noticing this first, but Steve Jobs once said something similar. Here’s a link to the YouTube video that’s been making the rounds this weekend. If you can’t watch it, or don’t have the time for it, here’s a quick transcription (again, courtesy of 9to5Mac):

We’re trying to make great products for people, and we have at least the courage of our convictions to say we don’t think this is part of what makes a great product, we’re going to leave it out. Some people are going to not like that, they’re going to call us names […] but we’re going to take the heat [and] instead focus our energy on these technologies which we think are in their ascendancy and we think are going to be the right technologies for customers. And you know what? They’re paying us to make those choices […] If we succeed, they’ll buy them, and if we don’t, they won’t, and it’ll all work itself out.

Apple didn’t have to say anything different when they debuted the iPhone 7 last Wednesday. Steve already said it perfectly. 

I don’t think Apple is doomed, and I don’t think they’re any worse for wear without Jobs. These marketing blunders can happen to anyone. Apple is the world’s largest company, and they put good design at the core of everything they do — but sometimes, they can’t get their own story straight. Jobs was great at that. 

The thing is, Jobs knew it’s not always what you say. It’s how you say it. There’s a lesson to be learned here, and it’s pretty simple: choose your words carefully. 

Even Apple picks the wrong words sometimes.

Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of The Witcher 3, and have come away nothing less than inspired. Its art design is truly compelling. The world is immersive and the design work is second-to-none, making it one of the most satisfying video game worlds I’ve played in years.

I was looking for a great book on the game’s art when I stumbled on this blog post, which has some of the best concept images from the game I can find. It’s incredible the work that’s gone into this. What I was hoping for was a book in the Design Works series, which are known for their conceptual drawings, renderings, and detailed hand-written notes, but this might do in its stead. (That being said, this peek at what a book like that might have been filled with me makes me what it all the more.)

A number of things stand out to me with these images. Firstly, I love how detailed the art is — most of it is painted! It’s also fascinating to see how much, or how little, the game changed between these images and its final state. And of course, the monster designs are truly fabulous.

The other great thing about The Witcher 3 is that it was made in the era of the internet, so freelancers who worked on the project are sharing their in-progress material in their portfolios (often alongside images from the finished product). A quick Google search makes more material like this easy to find.

All of this has gotten me thinking: as UI and UX designers, I think we have a lot to learn from video games (and the people who make them). They’ve got a lot to tell us about experience design. It’s one of the reasons I admire UsTwo (the folks behind Monument Valley) as much as I do: they’re both digital designers and video game designers, and see the challenges and constraints in both as creative tools. Their work is fascinating, and they have a unique outlook on what games and design can do for us.

All that to say: a lot of ink has been spilled about how video games are destroying minds of generations, but I doubt that’s the case. If anything, video games have a lot to teach us yet — and they’re still in their creative infancy. Designers should watch this space closely.

Check out the original blog post about Witcher 3 here to see more images from this collection.

For five years, I ran three to seven times a week. When I started running, I was fifty pounds overweight. I ran for an hour a day, every day, for four months. By the end of that four month period, I was at a weight I hadn’t been since the seventh grade.

Since then, I’ve put back on about ten pounds (and am now at a pretty healthy weight), but I kept running three or four times a week for five years. To add perspective, within that same time period, I’ve started a business, graduated university, met my wife, and become a married man.

Some habits die hard — but maybe they shouldn’t.

About a month ago, I finally quit my regular running habit. I read an excellent article about the biology of belly fat and muffin tops. It’s a bit over my head, but here’s what I got out of it: did you know that belly fat is the most stubborn fat on the body? The article suggests that weight training is better for burning stubborn fat than cardio, because of long-term gains in calorie burning attributed to strength-based workouts.

In order for it to work, you have to:

• Stop running (almost), to prevent your body storing fat.¹
• Eat less and do only short workouts at the gym.
• Or alternatively, you can eat more and do longer workouts at the gym.

Your body will slowly use up its fat reserves naturally, meaning it will displace and shrink the fat cells in those stubborn areas. So long as you’re consistent.

In the past month, I’ve noticed a slight reduction of fat in that area. So has my wife. Like most positive changes in our bodies, the results are slow to come, but they’re meaningful. I say all this to say one thing: sometimes, in life and work, we have long-lasting habits. Maybe our lives and our work would be better off if we spent some time revising and changing them.

My father is always working on side projects. When I was growing up, he spent weekends building a new shed or deck, fixing the garage door for the thousandth time, or designing a new workshop for himself.

In hindsight, these projects were very specific: they were all large and time-consuming, they began on paper, they often involved learning new skills, and they always required building something with his hands.

It’s that last detail I’ve been having trouble rectifying over the past couple years. Like my father, I’ve spent a lot of time working on side projects. They’re long, time-consuming projects that I do during breaks or quiet periods between client work. They always involve learning new skills. But they rarely, if ever, involve building something with my hands.

Like my client work, all of my side projects are digital. My father doesn’t build things for a living, so his side projects are an escape. I don’t know if mine are the same thing. As an industry, we (particularly digital designers) tend to struggle with the echo chamber. Our ideas and creativity feed off each other, and become very self-perpetuating. Our work becomes homogenous.

And most people in our industry recommend side projects as a way to attract potential employers and clients, even though — in that regard — these side projects are actually unpaid spec work.

I’m guilty of digital side projects — I’m working on a huge one right now — but I can’t help but wonder if we’ve collectively missed something.

Would our industry be more rewarding, fulfilling, and creative if we all stepped away from the screen and made tactile side projects that required us to make something with our hands?

I’ve read a lot of articles about how homogenous web design has become, but few have compelled me like Morgane Santos’ on Medium. For the first time, I felt as a web designer that I wanted to join this conversation.

This part of the article grabbed my attention:

Perhaps the biggest issue with all this homogeneity is how lonely it can feel when you want to do something different. Two separate friends have told me how they don’t feel like they fit in with the design community. These two friends are guys who more or less fit the Designer Dave stereotype, too. If they feel isolated, how does everyone else feel?

I started to gather my thoughts, but explained to my wife later on that I didn’t feel qualified to share them — which is interesting to me because it proves Ms. Santos’ theory. I, too, am white and in my mid-twenties (although I do not have a beard). Some of my web design work falls prey to certain stereotypes (although I don’t necessarily feel all of it does). In many ways, I relate to Designer Dave. With that being said, I’ve tried to gather my thoughts coherently regardless.

What’s happening in design reminds me of what’s been happening in filmmaking over the past twenty years. Have you noticed that a lot of popular action movies have been bathed in orange and blue?

Once you see it, it’s hard to un-see it. Priceonomics has a really good rundown on what’s going on, and you should read the whole article, but this quote deserves special mention:

One way to figure out what will look good is to figure out what the common denominator is in the majority of your scenes. And it turns out that actors are in most scenes. And actors are usually human. And humans are orange, at least sort of! Most skin tones fall somewhere between pale peach and dark, dark brown, leaving them squarely in the orange segment of any color wheel. Blue and cyan are squarely on the opposite side of the wheel. You may remember from preschool that ​“opposite” color pairs like this are also known as ​“complementary” colors. That means that, side-by-side, they produce greater contrast than either would with any other color. And when we’re talking about color, contrast is generally a desirable thing.

I’d need to do more research, but I’d be willing to wager that a teal and orange colour scheme makes your average film studio more money on opening weekend too. Most big-budgets films are cast in this orange and blue look, while indies feel more free to roam around.

That’s not very different from web design: while market forces are unwilling to invest in unusual design, smaller organizations who need to stand out may be more interested. The same way some directors make one for the studio, and then one for them, it’s financially sensible to do the same thing as a designer. (I’m not saying to compromise your values; I’m telling you to make enough money to support yourself and your families.)

My second thought is this: there are ways to play with established conventions.

Priceonomics included an image from Mad Max: Fury Road in their article. It was my second-favourite movie last year, and a big part of that was because I adored the colours. The story is that director George Miller wanted to show the film in black and white, but Warner Bros. refused (market forces at work). In response, Miller gave them what they wanted: blue and orange, cranked up as high as he could make it go.

That sense of over-saturation practically outdoes Transformers, and in a backhand way, forces you to notice it and be aware. I don’t know a single person who saw it who didn’t mention the colours. It’s subversive. Miller wants the colours to be part of the film’s intensity, yes, but he also wants it to reflect the insanity of everything else going on. It’s absolutely intentional.

I think we can learn something from Miller: If you’re given constraints that you don’t like, be subversive with them. We design for audiences who are smart enough to notice, and while they might not realize you’re being playful, they’ll appreciate your work all the more. You’ll stand out within the confines of homogeneity.

All that being said, at the end of the day, I don’t know the answer to homogeneity in web design, nor do I feel qualified to share my thoughts on the topic. For me, sharing this takes courage.

I learned in school that our brains are wired to notice semiotic patterns. Blue and orange is one such pattern. Boring websites are another. And while neither are going away any time soon, I think there’s a lot we can do to subvert expectations and experiment with new things.

Most digital todo lists suck. I’m sure you’re aware of this. I’m certain you’ve probably spent hours combing through tips on LifeHacker about how to organize the chaos of your life with ​“this one simple app that will blow your mind.” Or maybe you’re like me and you’ve bent over backwards to fit your workflow into somebody else’s expensive dystopian view of getting things done.

I don’t need to tell you that task management apps suck. 

But I need to share this because nobody is saying it, and we’re all pretending like we’re organized, but the truth of the matter is that the people who make these apps must have nothing to do — because their apps don’t work for busy people. So this post is for them. 

I only need one thing from a todo list: to tell me what I should be working on right now. And when I’m done that, what’s the next thing I can do?

That’s it. No gimmicks. It’s that simple.

Yes, all your extra features, like sub-tasks of a sub-project inside a project within an area of responsibility in the context of ​‘Phone Calls’ are all well and good, but if you cannot give me a high-level look at what needs working on today, don’t bother.¹

This isn’t just about what’s due: it’s about what’s important, what’s in progress and what big-picture project I should be working on. If I need to finish a project by Friday and it will take three days, then it should show up in a special Today view as early as Wednesday and not leave the Today view until it’s done, even if it’s overdue by three months and a day. 

My task management app should be about managing what’s important, making changes to the unimportant on the fly, and getting crap done. 

For reference, this is where I’m storing all the crap I need to do now. 

Note: This post was originally called ​‘I Tried Every Todo List App So You Don’t Have To’. I changed it for the sake of brevity, not because it’s untrue. I think I did try almost every todo app on the market for iOS and the web.