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Every couple of days, I’ll drink a hojicha latte at a coffee shop I like. It’s delicious and gives me a perfect energy lift. I intentionally make sure it doesn’t happen every day, because I don’t want to rely on caffeine to get work done. I drink one beer very occasionally, perhaps once a season. […] The post Space easy rewards out appeared first on Herbert Lui.
When he was a young man, Andy Buckley wanted to be an actor. After graduating from Stanford, he moved to New York City to try to make it. He appeared in a couple of music videos, but didn’t experience much initial success otherwise. Andy pivoted, spending much of his early career working as a stockbroker […] The post Falling back in love, for the right reasons appeared first on Herbert Lui.
It’s much easier to be creative when you’re not constantly worried about tradeoffs. In order to relax, and actually create, you need to be able to experiment. And not every experiment will turn out successfully. Many will fail. You need to be able to make mistakes. Let’s call this creative abundance: you feel light-hearted, free […] The post Creative slack appeared first on Herbert Lui.
If you’re publishing content, one useful way to measure success is to read what people are writing about it online. Margarita Noriega, who’s the current managing editor of Morning Brew, calls this the Love Metric. When she sees someone saying something nice about her work online, she shares it with her team. I did something […] The post The Love Metric appeared first on Herbert Lui.
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My move from fractional work to full-time employment!
After a two-year absence from running a digital publication, namely Minimalissimo, I’m returning with a new project. Just when I thought I was out... Okay, no Pacino impressions. I definitely needed that break from curation and probably also from the constraints of minimalism for that matter. Over the past few years I’ve focused a lot on making digital tools and the odd experimental physical object. The latter still interests me hugely, and I’m casually working on a design for FFF, which I’ll cover in greater detail another time. Yet I became pretty disillusioned with the former: digital tooling in the age of AI. The sheer pace of development, replicas, slop, and hype just killed my enthusiasm for building. And I thought, “What do I actually enjoy doing?” The short and simple answer to that was “curation”. The longer and more complex answer is building a respectable publication that features journalistic deep dives, meaningful conversations, and tasteful curation. All presented and exhibited in a way that makes you appreciate the web experience over any social media feed or RSS reader. My new project is called MOUTHPRINT, which I’m building with my cofounder George Kroustallis, aka Minorstep. Together, our approach is to look closely at visual culture across art, fashion, and product design, tracing the people, processes, and choices behind the work. We’ll be publishing case files, which might sound a bit odd, but what the hell. These will examine individual projects through research and conversations with the people behind them. Ultimately, it’s about acknowledging and recording the many people who contributed to these projects and helped shape them. Alongside that, we’ll be publishing exhibitions that bring works together around a theme, making connections across disciplines and time. I’m under no illusions about how difficult it is to build a publication from the ground up. We’re totally up against it, but the web is a big place, we’re locked in, and we want to be heard. I’d now like to invite you to subscribe to our newsletter for the latest developments ahead of our official launch. We’d love to have you along for the ride. → mouthprint.com
Measuring output and time spent is easy, while measuring efficiency and effectiveness is hard. Here's why trusting your engineers beats tracking their productivity.
