Mike’s Rules Of Design
This is a scratchpad for jotting down the various design rules I use, mostly as I run across violations.
1. No making people read hieroglyphics for core functionalitySomewhere along the way, a lot of people picked up on Steve Jobs's worst idea and ran with it: User interfaces should emphasize looking like something that would look "cool" in a movie, rather than focus on usability. Icons, which were originally meant as a visual cue to help you quickly distinguish functions without having to read text, became monochrome, uniform, abstract, unhelpfully difficult to distinguish from each other, and descriptive text went away so you couldn't know at a glance what they did, leading to millions of man-hours wasted mousing over 20 buttons in a row trying to figure out which one was the "import" button. As a design language, icons went from unique and identifiable to the visual equivalent of…
I have to be honest. I don't know about this one.
Back in 2009 my old ex-friend Rick Abruzzo, whom I'd met some years earlier during a mutual effort to resuscitate the soggy corpse of the San Francisco Cacophony Society, invited me to come down with my guitar and fill some airtime on 
This one is finished except for the final production and mastering... it needs some studio gloss on it.
Posted with great reluctance, my perpetually unfinished magnum opus, likely to someday stand as my failed masterpiece, a ponderous 65-minute arabesque of serialist post-rock instrumentals which, after 7 ongoing years of work and no end in sight, is at this point holding up the completion of 8 subsequent albums.
