I ran across this article earlier about the friendship between two skeleton racers in the Olympics, one from Ghana, the other, Jamaica. It’s a great read, but I especially love this bit:

Akwasi Frimpong, 32… remembers thinking on [his] first run [on the sled]: "Oh, man, I’m going to die. You want to brake, but there are no brakes. If there was a button to press stop, I would have."

But then he got to the bottom nearly a minute later, alive, and recovered his athletic instincts.

"The competitiveness in you says why not go back up and make less mistakes and go even faster," he said.

I wonder how many great inventions and accomplishments have happened after moments like that in human history? "Well, that was dangerous and terrifying… but I bet I can go faster if I try again."

Designer Tobias van Schneider posted a really interesting post-mortem reflection on his ".Mail" email client project.

I remember seeing his concepts for the app back in 2010 or so, and they were really brilliant. You can see a lot of ideas in there that have become standard in modern email clients: swiping for actions, simplified account sidebar, avatars/social integration, and lovely minimalist type treatments. His case study/pitch was the first place I’d seen them; I can’t say for sure he invented those UI patterns, but they certainly weren’t common before. As a product it may have failed to launch, but as a piece of UI design it was really influential.

This was also shortly before Sparrow got acquired by Google and then killed, and I remember desperately hoping .Mail would take off so the world ¹ would once more have a usable email client. I signed up for the email list and checked the case study occasionally, hoping to see an Available now! callout appear there.

But, sadly, email protocols and APIs are a horrible quagmire of sadness and despair and knashing of teeth, and it was not to be. But many of van Schneider’s ideas were picked up/stolen/borrowed by Dropbox, Spark, Polymail, etc., and we now have at least a few pretty damn good email clients, perhaps with .Mail to thank for it.

Also, Tobias van Schneider has perhaps the most amazing beard in the design industry.

This is a really lovely blog of painting and illustration.

I like to look at it every morning because it makes for a wonderful few minutes of peace and inspiration. And the notes on technique and history are really great - I’ve discovered lots of artists here I’d never heard of.

The work shown is usually quite traditional, broadly in the figurative, landscape, and still-life veins, but I really appreciate that no lines are drawn around canon figures; editorial and advertising illustration is happily showcased alongside museum-vaunted artists like Monet and Rembrandt. The author seems interested in great lines, brushwork, and color wherever they find it — and their mining has surfaced some amazing diamonds.

“FF Attribute” is a new sans family with both monospace and regular (kerned) versions — this is not unusual, per se, except that the two versions use (what looks like) almost identical character sets. One character set is versatile enough to do double duty as either text or code, with minimal modification.

Thom Björkland is one of the most amazing natural history illustrators I’ve ever seen. I especially love his portraits of prehistoric people - they’re so alive and full of personality.