The Music of 2017

2017 was a good year for music. I ended up listening to more tunes than I had since 2013, if I can trust the data at last.fm. Tons of great records. A few really great ones. Here are my lists.

Favorite records of 2017:

• Mangaliso — Bongeziwe Mabandla
• Humanz — Gorillaz
• Damn — Kendrick Lamar
• Drunk — Thundercat

Honorable Mentions:

• La Confusion — Amadou & Miriam
• I Tell a Fly — Benjamin Clemintine
• Capacity — Big Thief
• Hug of Thunder — Broken Social Scene
• Chronology — Chronixx
• Ash — Ibeyi
• 4:44 — Jay Z
• Harmony of Difference — Kamasi Washington
• Sleep Well Beast — The National
• Africa Express Presents The Orchestra of Syrian Musicians & Guests — The Orchestra of Syrian Musicians & Guests
• In Mind — Real Estate
• Ctrl — SZA
• Antisocialites — VVaves
• Big Fish Theory — Vince Staples

And here’s a public playlist of my favorite tracks of 2017 on Apple Music.

Favorite People

Imaginary Voices

Fascinating article about people who hear voices. It corroborates what I've long believed; these people are experiencing real things in their mind and body, but they're misattributing physical and chemical reactions to metaphysical causes. A psychic's talent isn't speaking with spirits. It's being highly sensitive to microemotions and moods and feeling their way through a conversation kind of like a psychosis sherpa.

I hear voices all the time, but it's not like someone talking to me. I hear dialogue, like a play happening in my mind. Imaginary conversations as a form of thinking. I suspect this is extremely common, especially among writers and heavy readers. I can easily imagine a person who takes this one step further, and hears these voices as breaking the fourth wall. A non-religious person would hear them for exactly what they were. A spiritual or unstable person might think it was ghosts or god.

Path of Atomic Design

Josh Clark clarifies a misconception about Atomic Design, which helps explain exactly why its so useful. He explains:

Right from the start, when Brad was first developing his tools and methodologies in our designs of TechCrunch and Entertainment Weekly, our process constantly zoomed back and forth between page level and atomic level. It’s never a linear path from small to large; it’s a constant roundtrip between the two scales.

Atomic Design prescribes a small-first process, but, like Josh says, it's a cycle. Sometimes, it's pretty chaotic, with design play often driving the car. But the structure of Atomic Design means you're always going back to defining and redefining the smallest elements (atoms), which are then used to construct larger ones (molecules, organisms, etc.). By the time you have your sights on the finish line, you'll have a highly structured design and front-end code architecture for building out nearly anything else in the future.

I've seen this play out a half-dozen times or more now on large projects. If you pay close attention to the detail (the atoms), and maintain control over the depth and breadth of your style guide, what you build will be highly efficient and easy to work with going forward.

Humanz Plus

Albarn revealed today that he has around 40 to 45 Gorillaz tracks in various states of completion, tracks which aren’t on Humanz. And also that he hopes to continue releasing these songs over the next 18 months or so. To this Albarn fan, the idea of a new Gorillaz track nearly every week is amazing. Please let this happen. Gorillaz, more than most any other project out there, is perfectly suitable for this kind of release cycle.

Married!

Cutesy Design

I’m in total agreement with this article deriding the nature of cuteness in so much of the software and products we use today.

“We’re in the middle of a decade of post-dignity design, whose dogma is cuteness. One explanation would be geopolitical: when the perception of instability is elevated, we seek the safety of naptime aesthetics.”

Ben Chestnut pushed this esthetic with Mailchimp, and wrote a book about it. I actually happen to be smitten with Freddie, the company’s mascot, and how he is used in the overall brand. The trend caught on like wildfire, however, and now so many apps feature illustrated animals hidden among the edges.

The popularity of Tumblr, gifs, and emojis has pushed them into the world of marketing. It really does infantilize the world we live in. There are plenty of sad reasons for why my generation feels a little less like the adults we figured we’d be by now. I’d prefer brands refrain from assuming it’s all a joke worth marketing upon.

Homes for This Gen

This article in Curbed is the first I’ve seen to correctly diagnose the home-buying difficulties my generation is facing.

Homebuilders also aren’t responding to the needs and updated preferences of millennials fast enough to meet the demands of a group entering prime homebuying years. While many expect the millennial preference for cities to remain unchanged, even those moving to the suburbs desire aspects of that urban layout and lifestyle.

“Millennials want walkability and convenience,” says Ducker. “They have a higher transit use propensity than those in the past, and they want to be within walking distance of shopping and dining. The problem with the existing suburban housing stock in America is that it just doesn’t provide that.”

There are plenty of places in the US to live, but developers need to start building homes and neighborhoods which match our minimum requirements. I really can’t see my peers moving into most neighborhoods built during the last 30 years. The over-sized houses, absolute lack of style, and intentional disconnect from any town center are all major deficiencies. I intend to own a home one day, but it seems the number of existing homes I’d consider acceptable is very very small.

CardStack.io

I built the new website for CardStack this week, and it went up yesterday: http://cardstack.io. What Cardstack is doing is amazing, and their roadmap is seriously impressive. Ken and Chris are fantastic people and I owe them a great deal of gratitude for the work they've given me in the last year. I'm incredibly excited to keep building things with them and the group of talented people they've surrounded themselves with. More great stuff is coming! Head to the website to read the technical details. Actual products and applications will be announced soonish.

Ask Brooklyn Museum Officially Released

Ask Brooklyn Museum was officially released this month, moving out of its year-long beta phase. The reviews have started to roll in and they're positive so far. I'll try to keep a running list here: The New York Times, The Verge. It was a winner of two 2016 MUSE Awards: a Gold award for mobile applications, and the Jim Blackaby Memorial Award. I've also written a case study, going into fuller detail about the design of the app.