How To Choose The Right Face For A Beautiful Body | Smashing Magazine.

These are the standard approaches underlying classic engineering and management, as taught in universities and practiced in business and government. But, they do not work so well when dealing with highly complex systems with fast changing, interacting components, where it is much less clear what is going on in the present, let alone how things will evolve into the future. We need different principles and processes to address this class of highly complex problems, many based on disruptive innovations which we have not encountered before. This is where we need to turn to holistic thinking to pull together everything we know about the problem, and to creativity to try to make sense of what is going on and come up with a working, satisfying solution. This is where we enter the world of design.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Design Principles for Complex, Unpredictable, People Oriented Systems.

Miranj: Typography for the Web.

Finally, good typography has come to the web. This slide deck gives several good examples of how important attention to detail is. via @espiekerman

My current favourites are:

• Back to Work with Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann
• Build and Analyze with Dan Benjamin and Marco Arment
• The Big Web Show with Dan Benjamin and Jeffrey Zeldman
• Q with Jian Ghomeshi Jian is so prolific that sometimes I get too far behind on this show and have to unsubscribe for awhile

What are some of your favourite podcasts?

I’ve read about people abandoning their laptops and desktops after getting an iPad but I never expected that would happen to me when I got an iPod Touch.

Here is my set-up so far:

• Mail, iCal and Safari are, of course, already installed on the iPod Touch.
• Dropbox to access, synchronize and backup files between my iPod and iMac
• PlainText for writing syncs with Dropbox
• Instapaper so that I can get reading done while I am doing other things like riding the bus
• Evernote to “Remember Everything”
• Twitter
• Facebook
• TaskPaper a simple to-do list that can do a ton of stuff
• Google Reader (added to home screen from Safari)
• same with weather
• Tiny Wings thanks to @brenasmith

Bonus app:

• Daily Tracker keeps track of things I do like walking, sleeping and tai chi and then exports that data to Google Docs.

A variety of articles on some sticky web subjects.

Last week I bought an iPod Touch 4G. It is the first iPod I’ve ever owned.

I was thrilled to open the smooth sleek packaging and start using it. Tenderly, I hooked it up to my iMac. iTunes dutifully opened and… error messages popped up describing how it was unable to backup or sync. My heart fell as I tried it again several times before going to Apple Support and having them call me.

Nathan at Apple was able to solve the problem quickly by having me reinstall iTunes. Now I use my new iPod touch all the time, even drafting blog posts like this one on it.

Typography fundamentals.