One of the odder effects of the internet is that it’s possible to become semi-obsessed with someone else’s obsessions. I’ve been reading pieces by Marcin Wichary for a couple of years now. His day job, as far as I can tell, is as a software designer and is particularly concerned with user interfaces. It’s not a huge leap conceptually from there to his extraordinarily-detailed[1] interest in keyboards. It’s also not much of a leap from there to an interest in typography, which led him to write the best essay on the history of technology that I’ve read in a very long time, about a ubiquitous, little-known, and slowly-dying typeface.
In any case, I read his blog, usually a bunch of posts at one time in a clump. Yesterday I read his post discussing his “Goals and Principles” for the blog, and it struck a chord for me. Three of his goals, for example:
- Help expand what craft means: highlight relations between things, show connections between history and present, talk about things that are hard to describe and impossible to measure.
- Revel in being pragmatic. Share useful things, not just hollow inspiration.
- Be fun to read.
That seems familiar.
Three of his long list of high-level principles:
- Find a good balance between positive and negative examples.
- In general, offer variety…
- Be opinionated, but also humble and curious. You don’t know everything.
And two of his personal goals:
- Practice writing things that do count in less than thousands of words.
- Give back some of what I learned in my career over the years.
The entire list, at the link above, is worth reading even if you never intend to blog. How and why do we communicate professionally outside of what is necessary for work? How do we get better at it? How do we explain why we do what we do? I can’t answer any of these questions better than Wichary has.
- A two-volume, 1200 page treatise on the topic.↩︎
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