Design puts form and content together. But content comes first. Good content enables meaningful design. Bad content enables malicious design. Designers with a moral compass must fight for good content to exist. You can’t design meaning from garbage.
“You can’t change how you feel. But you can change what you do.” —a friend --- Emotions can overwhelm in hard moments, no matter your experience. But actions are always a choice, even when feelings aren’t.
Success is hard to repeat because what got you there tends to go away once you achieve it.
Ego turns opportunities into actions, while egolessness helps you pick the right ones.
Visited the Japanese American Museum in Portland today, and got a vocabulary lesson thru the various historical artifacts and writings there about a v recent past here in the US.
The LLM can write better than you, by a standard which others are measured. But you write better than the LLM, by a standard which you measure yourself.
It is when you have nothing at stake or everything at stake when you are the most creative. It’s a different kind of creativity on either end.
How do we define the value of creative effort during a time when “effortless creative” is becoming the norm? I think we need to appreciate the slow marination of ideas that become subject to many random forces.
Having a place to think without subjecting oneself to extreme noise is a positive direction for me.
Daily life is mostly waiting for good news or bad news. With time, you realize no bad news is the good news you were desperate for.
Tools will keep changing, but our job is to shape the work with humanity and purpose. maeda.pm/2025/04/27/f...
From Reactive Graphics to the Agent Era: Reflections on the Evolution of Design and Code | John Maeda’s Blog
https://vimeo.com/198494483 Looking back at my path through design and technology, I’m often struck by how much the landscape keeps shifting—and how much there is to learn at every turn. In the early ...
maeda.pm
Artists comfortably work within and with the many enigmas in life—sharing their research as concrete evidence of a different path taken. johnmaeda.medium.com/why-art-stil...
Why Art Still Matters (Especially Now)
Artists comfortably work within and with the many enigmas in life — sharing their research as concrete evidence of a different path taken.
johnmaeda.medium.com
95% AI-ONLY: I wanted to find a way to compress the info in my ultra-long form video so I tried the new gpt-4o to see what it would create as infographics, and then went down a rabbit hole to create a short video. It definitely got the general "information shape" correct youtube.com/shorts/RfYVk...
2025 Design in Tech Report 95% AI Video 1
YouTube video by John Maeda: Design & AI
youtube.com
2025 #DesignInTech Report in super long form is up on Tuesday: Autodesigners on Autopilot youtu.be/mMcVKWCQmv8
2025 Design in Tech Report (Unedited): Autodesigners on Autopilot
YouTube video by John Maeda: Design & AI
youtu.be
Most new, interesting design trends are reruns. Some improve on the original, others just have better FX. Originality is a wonderful delusion—sometimes it leads to a timely twist, sometimes to a successful remix (see Lessig).
- Earning the badge of high craft comes from the deep respect one maker has for another maker's work. - Appreciating crafted experiences and objects is about empathy. It requires understanding the creator's journey, especially when your own making experiences resonate with or match their process.
I-assisted software dev can encourage laziness, but it can also push you to be more ambitious. Getting to a goal within the expected timeframe has become easier. At the same time, reaching for higher, riskier goals within the same timeframe has also become more achievable. The latter point is key.
Hikaru Utada’s Science Fiction Tour is available on Prime and one of the most beautiful shows I have ever seen on many dimensions — esp the ending. youtu.be/jiJTBW6kGC4?...
宇多田ヒカル「traveling」(HIKARU UTADA SCIENCE FICTION TOUR 2024)
YouTube video by Hikaru Utada
youtu.be
Courage is knowing danger and taking it on; audacity is ignoring the situation and jumping in. (From 2011 — when I was peak audacious :-)
Design is both “artistic” and “scientific” -- it’s a hybrid discipline with the accent on *hybrid*.
