Reading one book a week

The next time you eat a burrito, it might come wrapped up in a poem or a little philosophy from a Harvard professor. Starting today, Chipotle will be rolling out a new line of oddly literary packaging–bags and cups printed with new writing both from authors you might find in the New Yorker as well as comedians like Sarah Silverman. advertisement advertisement The project was the brainchild of author Jonathan Safran Foer, who happened to eat lunch in a Chipotle restaurant one day by himself, and started wishing he had something to read. He knew people at the company–who’d reached out after Foer wrote Eating Animals, a book about factory farming–and decided to suggest his idea: What if Chipotle’s packaging was more like a book or a magazine? “That’s how it started–it wasn’t actually our idea,” says Mark Crumpacker, the company’s chief marketing officer. “It was really because Jonathan was bored one day at … [Read more...] about Chipotle’s New Packaging Might Be The Most Interesting Thing You Read Today

I have a thing for deadlines. I don’t like to miss them. advertisement advertisement I once turned in a book manuscript 11 days after giving birth, which may sound extreme, but really isn’t. I had nine months of warning on both the baby and the book, so I planned ahead, finishing the manuscript a month ahead of time, and then using those last weeks to polish. So I was fascinated to read a recent Wall Street Journal article claiming that deadlines might not be good. Writer Andrew Blackman interviewed Richard Boyatzis, a professor at Case Western Reserve University who studies organizational behavior and cognitive science. He said that “The research shows us that the more stressful a deadline is, the less open you are to other ways of approaching the problem … The very moments when in organizations we want people to think outside the box, they can’t even see the box.” So are deadlines bad? In reality, if you want to manage well, the story is … [Read more...] about The Case For And Against Stressful Deadlines

A glossary of the 26 inventions that have most changed the world have been turned into a literal ABCs, thanks to a new typeface by New Delhi design student Khyati Trehan. The project is called the Beauty of Scientific Diagrams. Trehan’s intricate typeface represents 26 important technological advancements by diagramming a Roman alphabet of how they work. She illustrates, in letters, such inventions as Archimedes’ Water Screw, Thomas Edison’s Phonograph, Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin, and more. According to Trehan, who posted a free e-book online about how she designed the typeface, the project was originally inspired by a book she read about William Harvey, a 17th-century English physician who was the first to explain the circulatory system. Frustrated by how difficult it was to visualize the working of a human heart, Trehan experimented with visualizing the first initial of Harvey’s name, William, as a circulatory system in its own right. Her … [Read more...] about Scientific Typeface Illustrates 26 Great Inventions

Anyone who’s spent $100 to register as an iOS app developer has already had access to Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines. Now, the 245-page design tome is free for anyone to download in the iBooks store. advertisement advertisement The book offers a peek into Apple’s interaction design principles–how they approach user interface on iPhones and iPads–and it’s a pretty good read. Here are some of our favorite tips we gathered from our inaugural skim. Feel free to share yours in the comments below. Content Always Trumps Interface Don’t Say Hello With A Login “Delay a login requirement for as long as possible. It’s best when users can navigate through much of your app and use some of its functionality without logging in. For example, App Store doesn’t ask users to log in until they decide to buy something. Users often abandon apps that force them to log in before they can do anything useful.” … [Read more...] about 8 Tips From Apple’s Official Guide To App Design

Jonathan Safran Foer doesn’t have a smartphone, which is why the author found himself bored in line at Chipotle one day. In similar situations, most of us instantly whip out our smartphones to scroll through Twitter feeds and Instagram selfies. People don’t get bored anymore, they scroll. advertisement advertisement But for folks like Foer who don’t own a phone, downtime may still beget boredom, which may beget an idea. “I bet a shitload of people go into your restaurants every day, and I bet some of them have very similar experiences, and even if they didn;t have that negative experience, they could have a positive experience if they had access to some kind of interesting text,” Foer told Chipotle CEO Steve Ells. The text in question, Foer decided, should be his original stories printed on Chipotle cups and bags. Ells loved the idea, so starting today, prose from Foer, Toni Morrison, Malcolm Gladwell, Sarah Silverman, George Saunders, and others … [Read more...] about Literary Giants Seek New Readers Via Chipotle Cups