At Nautilis, Simon Parkin examines the responsibilities and challenges of engineering luck into video games.
Design
Posted inEditor's Pick
How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games
“Humans have taken the reins from the gods, and luck has become a design tool capable of changing players’ experiences and expectations.” A look at how game developers strike a balance between luck and fairness.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
When a YouTube Video Almost Made the Modular Smartphone Happen
The story of Google’s groundbreaking, buzz-generating modular smartphone — aka Project Ara — from bang to whimper.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Dream of Ara: Inside the Rise and Fall of the World’s Most Revolutionary Phone
After generating incredible buzz among designers and gadget geeks, Project Ara — Google’s groundbreaking modular smartphone — was suspended in 2016, concluding a three-year, bang-to-whimper arc.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Slow Death of Restaurant Kitsch
When minimalism goes down-market, where do the tchotchkes go?
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The ‘Stunt’ That Helped Pass a Barrier-Breaking Law
In 1990, a group of activists and legislators fighting for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) gathered on the steps of the Capitol to make a statement. Writing for Curbed about the act’s 1990 passage and its impacts over the last quarter century, Patrick Sisson details how the group dramatized the difficulties faced […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Obama’s Typographic Legacy
The relative distinctiveness of campaign logos is a recent development: There was a time when they all looked basically the same, give or take a star, often featuring the same stylized, waving flag. The 1990s and early 2000s were a different time, with less media noise and fewer shiny objects vying for voters’ attention, so there […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
The Art and Business of Book Covers
Here are pieces I’ve enjoyed, new and old, about the art and business of book cover design.
Posted inNonfiction, Quote Posts, Reading List
The Art and Business of Book Covers
Here are pieces I’ve enjoyed, new and old, about the art and business of book cover design.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Would You Design a Memorial for World War III?
Architect Maya Lin was a senior at Yale when she designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In a 2000 essay for the New York Review of Books—which she began writing around the memorial’s completion in fall 1982 and then put aside for nearly two decades—she reflects on how she came to enter in the competition, and the […]