The irony of creative change (via Forty Media):

The irony of creativity is this: people want to be creative without change. They want innovation with no risk. They want a new result with the same exact behavior. They can talk for hours about how passionate they are about creativity, but when it comes to actually changing anything, they’ll find a way to repeat the same thing again and again. That’s why books, seminars, courses and lectures on creativity rarely translate into much actual creation. No one can make change happen except the person who must accept the fears, and consequences, of change.

Why we don’t skip Photoshop:

3. No clients. This is a big one. 37signals is not a client services company. Rather, they build products. 37signals is a small team of people who all understand the web and web development very, very well. It’s easy for them to visualize things and move on — but it’s not so easy for many of our clients. A big reason we do visual comps at Blue Flavor is to facilitate communication and sign-off with our clients.

This is exactly what we thought when we first read the 37signals blog post. They can afford to skip comps because they don’t have clients, they have customers. It’s a subtle difference but an important one.

From Web God Jeffrey Zeldman: “Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.“

Via Team Forty:

“Good design is innovative. Good design makes a product useful. Good design is aesthetic. Good design helps us to understand a product. Good design is unobtrusive. Good design is honest. Good design is durable. Good design is consequent to the last detail. Good design is concerned with the environment. Good design is as little design as possible.” Dieter Rams

Design is not for the Faint of Heart (via CreativeBits.org).

Honestly, I found all but one, #23. I’ve been staring at it for several minutes and I just can’t find it. Of course, I’m just hunting around, not actually trying to figure it out from my graphic design knowledge. It’s more fun this way.