design

A New Theme

This probably has no interest to anyone but me, but you may notice a change in the blog theme today. I’ve been dissatisfied with the typography of the blog for quite some time. Today I set out to try to find a theme that had better typography. Man, what a mess! There are a zillion WordPress themes out there. Some awful, but many quite good. However, finding a minimalist theme intended for writing and reading is surprisingly difficult.

Write the Manual First

Back when I was involved in designing medical devices, I had a saying to help guide the design: “Write the manual first.” This seemed to be an easier way for the teams to clearly describe what the device should do. Once everyone had a good feeling for how the system should operate, it was easier to move on to the more formal requirements management. Surprisingly, not everyone on the team was as fascinated with that as the Systems Integration team ;-)