IRALOT #02 — I Read a Lot Of Things 👍
You can suddenly become a genius
Every week I will be compiling and curating: inspiration for design thinkers, pieces of articles, books and magazines, great stories, and awesome quotes (I ❤️ quotes — and emojis! 😎).
This is the second edition (wait? there was a first one already?? Yes!) with lots of the things I've been reading… 😉
To get things started, let’s add a soundtrack👌 🎧
The song is Yelling in Sleep from Rich Aucoin.
Liked the animation? It's from Joel Mackenzie.
1. Can we suddenly become geniuses?
If you are already a genius: Imagine yourself as an ordinary person…
If you are an ordinary person: just imagine…
You are in a Taxi, when suddenly the driver takes a nap (to make up for all those extra hours) and BAM! He hits another car making a turn, your taxi starts a beautiful flip (if there was an Olympics for cars, this taxi would be doing a half twist into a double front flip in a piked position). You are catapulted into the air and crack your head on the light pole.
You wake up nine days later at a hospital 150 miles (241 km) away. You don't know yet, but you are now a genius.
Possible? Impossible?
The story above (with ~a bit~ of contextualisation to the times we live) is what happened to Eadweard Muybridge in 1860.
The name means nothing to you? Well… he invented "the first movie":
👉 The full, very interesting, article is HERE.
By the way, there are other examples of people injuring the left side of the brain and becoming geniuses.
In general, the right side is home to creativity and the left is the centre of logic and language. The theory goes that as the patients’ left hemispheres became progressively more damaged, their right hemispheres were free to flourish.
2. Laws of UX
This is delightful from top to bottom. Little drops of knowledge smoothly striking your eyes with wisdom.
Jon Yablonski compiled from great Designers, Psychologists, Engineers and Psychiatrists, 10 maxims and principles for any Designer to consider when building interfaces.
👉 You can see the 10 (only 10?) Laws of UX HERE.
If I could, I would like to suggest one more for any UX Designer out there, the 3M's law: "Buy more post-its".
3. How to record the screen
I've seen many people asking "How can I record my screen?", by the way people use Google in interesting ways:
Yep… that's people googling things. 388 million results for "the" screen 😳
The other day I even saw a Chrome extension (never used it, so comments are welcome) called Loom.
However, dear Mac users, you all have a tool inside your beautiful machine called Quicktime that records the screen in some easy simple clicks.
Here is the easy step-by-step with Quicktime:
- Open Quicktime 🤯 (Really??)
- Then like magic you press "Command + Control +N"
- Boom, you will see this:
4. You press the red button to start recording and will see this:
5. If you read the alert above then you know that you either CLICK to record full screen, or DRAG to record a specific part of the screen.
4. Successful IPO from Brazil?
Yes! 🤑💰🤑
👉 Brazil’s PagSeguro raises $2.7 bln in IPO almost as much as Snapchat that raised $3.4 bln in March, 2017.
To explain in a very simplistic way, PagSeguro is for Brazil what Paypal is for for the world.
Brazilians speak portuguese, Paypal (and all the other international players) took a while to come up with good translations and low fees, given these points PagSeguro became by far the best option, in Brazil, to make safe payments online and in local shops (they have those card readers as well, like Vend, Square or Verifone).
It's the second Brazilian startup to reach a valuation of more than $1 bln. Earlier this year, 99 Taxis was acquired by Didi Chuxing, a major Chinese ride-sharing company.
💡Bear in mind that Brazil is massive with more than 208M brazilians 🇧🇷 (As much as Russia and The United Kingdom together!)
5. Chinese Scientists Just Cloned a Monkey
Whenever I read about cloning, for a moment, I think: animal enters a machine alone🐵 and leaves with a perfect copy walking along with it 🐵 🐵
But that’s not how it works. In fact, studying how to clone animal cells (or even human… why not?) could help us find answers to having a better health, for example.
Check out this quote:
Is this a stepping stone to cloning humans?
If monkeys are our closest animal relative and they’ve been successfully cloned, it’s only natural to wonder whether we’re next.The short answer is no. Human cloning is illegal in about 70 countries — interestingly, though, the US isn’t one of them.
(Please, please do not clone Trump…)
👉 The full article is HERE.
6. The Life of David Kelley, According to His Shelves
David Kelly, founder of IDEO and Stanford’s d.school, talks about things/stuff he worked on the past and still keeps in his office. For example an early prototype of the Apple Mouse.
The video is really nice. It shows, out of many things, how delightful and kind a true human-centered Designer behaves in his habitat.
Watching closely, with my UX investigative skills 🔍, I notice a big blue book, with bold white letters… 'Wait a minute… I know this book…"
The grandmaster designer David Kelley keep the same book as I keep on my bookshelf 😍 I would really like to know what he thinks about this book. It's by far one of the best books I've ever read about creativity and the creative process.
👉 The full article, written by Shoshana Berger and Devin Peek, where the video was originally posted is HERE.
7. How to Fly A Horse
Aha! 😉 Talking about the book…
I learned so much reading this book. The author Kevin Ashton is also the father of the famous Internet of Things (IoT).
Out of many little gems of wisdom, check these two great quotes:
Creation is a result — a place thinking may lead us. Before we can know how to create, we must know how to think.
And
Nothing begins good, but everything good begins. The courage of creation is making bad beginnings.
This book has 20 pages of bibliography! Kevin Ashton breaks down the creative process by using amazing real examples, such as:
1841 — The incredible story of Edmond, a 12 year old slave from the Réunion Island, who was the first in the world (competing, without knowing, against unscrupulous europeans) to pollinate a Vanilla plant! For hundreds of years europeans tried without success.
1983 — James Dyson and his more than 5 thousand failed experiments to invent the dual cyclone vacuum cleaner. The result of his resilience and creativity, I guess, you know… His net worth is £7.8 billion.
I'll end with this brilliant quote and life challenging proposal:
Creating something new may kill us; creating nothing new certainly will.
8. From the User Experience Design world
- The latest & most popular color palettes trending on Dribbble right now.
It's called: Colorbook.me - Bye bye Material Design — Considering Material Design for your next project? Please, think again.
Interesting and controversial 🧐 - Why you shouldn’t skip your wireframing.
I couldn't agree more. Designing without wireframing is like filming a movie without storyboarding. - The UX of AI — the core takeaways after three years of building Google Clips (Camera like GoPro from… Google!)
By the way, Google Clips is a small camera that uses artificial intelligence to take the right picture when it sees something interesting.
9. Wrap up!
Aaaaalright! This was my second IRALOT ✌️ Please let me know what you think by clapping 👏👏 . If you have any questions or want to share any link/article about design, leave a comment below.
