Design is not dress-up:

A designer who wants to achieve good design must not regard himself as an artist who, according to taste and aesthetics, is merely dressing-up products with a lastminute garment.

and don’t mistake gloss for design:

To use design to impress, to polish things up, to make them chic, is no design at all. This is packaging.

Technical specifications in isolation are not good design:

The majority of products that we encounter in our day-to-day lives scream for attention or try to impress us with their magnificence or miniscule size. These objects try to dictate our relationships with them. Good design creates powerful long-lasting relationships with products as good design creates objects with balanced proportions

Sustainable design:

There is an increasing and irreversible shortage of natural resources: raw materials, energy, food, and land. This must compel us to rationalise, especially in design. The times of thoughtless design, which can only flourish in times of thoughtless production for thoughtless consumption, are over. We cannot afford any more thoughtlessness.

Source: Dieter Rams: Design by Vitsœ.

In a world of terrible apologies, I like the honesty of SmugMug’s to Valerie Schooling:

Sometimes you see the dumb things companies say and you wonder, “What were they thinking?”

I never imagined that happening to us, but we did something so dumb in a blog post, we’re now looking at each other blankly and asking, what were we thinking?

Worst of all, beyond any complaints you may have about alternate versions of sites – with responsive its’s a one way street. You can’t opt out of the media query that’s driving this thing. And that really sucks, so you better be pretty sure you can pull this thing off sonny Jim.

A Responsive Panacea – Alex Morris

python-intercom is a python interface to Intercom’s API. It is designed to (almost) mirror the behaviour of python-ruby.

Here is an example of it in action:

from intercom import Impression
impression = Impression.create(email='somebody@example.com')

from intercom import User
user = User.find(email='somebody@example.com')

For more details you can check out the project repository, and the pypi page.

Idea Magazine, a journal of ideas & technology in Ireland, is launching on Thursday, December 8th. Best of luck to Martha and Stu.