Justin Jay Wang

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I loved reading The Creative Act: A Way of Being by music producer Rick Rubin. It’s organized into 78 short reflections — easy to pick up, put down, and come back to.

A few select quotes from Rubin:

  1. Good habits create good art.
  2. Ultimately, your desire to create must be greater than your fear of it.
  3. As soon as a convention is established, the most interesting work would be the one that doesn’t follow it.
  4. Communicate your singular perspective.
  5. The world isn’t wanting more of the same.
  6. Inspiration comes first. You come next. The audience comes last.
  7. The best work is the work you are excited about.
  8. Being an artist means to be continually asking, “How can it be better?” whatever it is. It may be your art, and it may be your life.

And a few more he cites in the book:

  1. It’s the little things that make the big things come about. (John Wooden)
  2. The personal is the universal. (Carl Rogers)
  3. The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable. (Robert Henri)
Filed under: Design Media

I came across, by way of Soleio, a Steve Jobs interview with Playboy magazine from Feburary 1985. The referenced interview transcript is no longer online, so I’ve reproduced it here on my site.

Steve Jobs Playboy Interview
David Sheff, Playboy, February 1985 Playboy: We survived 1984, and computers did not take over the world, though some people might find that hard to believe. If there’s any one individual who can be either blamed or praised for the proliferation of computers, you, the 29-year-old father of the
Justin Jay Wang
Photo credit: Norman Seeff

Well worth the read and packed with extraordinary ideas, including:

  1. On rigid thinking:
People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. It’s a rare person who etches grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a specific way of questioning things.
  1. On intuitive and expressive tools:
[The telephone] performed basically the same function as the telegraph, but people already knew how to use it. Also, the neatest thing about it was that besides allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing. […] That is what Macintosh is all about. It’s the first “telephone” of our industry. And, besides that, the neatest thing about it, to me, is that the Macintosh lets you sing the way the telephone did. You don’t simply communicate words, you have special print styles and the ability to draw and add pictures to express yourself.
  1. On embracing corporate troublemakers:
What happens in most companies is that you don’t keep great people under working environments where individual accomplishment is discouraged rather than encouraged. The great people leave and you end up with mediocrity. I know, because that’s how Apple was built. Apple is an Ellis Island company. Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers at other companies.
Filed under: Media Technology

More albums that, without exaggeration, changed my life:

  1. Ágætis byrjun (1999) by Sigur Rós
  2. Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (2008) by Sigur Rós
  3. Bryter Layter (1971) by Nick Drake
  4. Bloom (2012) by Beach House
  5. Atlas (2014) by Real Estate
  6. Carrie & Lowell (2015) by Sufjan Stevens
  7. Golden Hour (2018) by Kacey Musgraves
  8. Deeper Well (2024) by Kacey Musgraves
  9. Rumours (1977) by Fleetwood Mac

Music has that unique ability to transport you back in time and place, to that particular season of your life where you listened to it.

Albums that changed my life
Justin Jay WangJustin Jay Wang
Filed under: Lists Media

Over the break, I rewatched the Japanese television mini-series Going My Home. Written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda of Shoplifters fame and starring Hiroshi Abe and Tomoko Yamaguchi, it’s low-key, charming, and quite possibly the best show I’ve ever seen.

A few favorite quotes:

If you don’t look for them, you won’t know if they are there or not.
It’s those things you just glance at that can be what’s important.
This world isn’t made up with just what you can see with your eyes.
Filed under: Media
  • The Vignelli Canon
  • Design for People by Scott Stowell
  • baby granny smith apples
  • I missed playing music, so I bought a classical guitar and have been playing Cat Stevens’s The Wind, among other songs
  • MoMA
  • dinner and drinks with Oak
  • basketball with the gang at Brooklyn Bridge Park
  • dinner in Chinatown
  • weekend walks into Manhattan
  • Responsible Responsive Design
  • Jen and Brendan stopped by on their way to Iceland to visit me for a couple days; I showed them around all my favorite spots in Brooklyn and the Village
  • potato and chives, braised gluten, wood ear mushrooms
  • Brooklyn Museum
  • we moved offices from the Collins space in Union Square to a co-working space in Gowanus; I walk to work every day now and love it
  • navel oranges
  • sandwiches with avocado, cilantro, cucumber, and tomato
  • music: Pasteboard, Nirvana, the Kinks, Cat Stevens, Nico, and Photo Ops
  • watching early-season Friends episodes on Jen’s logged-in Netflix account
  • Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible
  • Tartine Book No. 3
Filed under: Lists Media

Zach Braff paraphrases his character from Garden State:

I’m 26 years old, and I’ve spent my whole life waiting for something else to start. Now I realize that this is all there is, and I’m going to try to live my life like that.
Filed under: Reflection Media

I’ve been doing a lot of design reading lately. It started when I was in San Jose and would go to the library to browse books for inspiration. Now I can’t get enough.

A couple weeks ago, I read the comprehensive Meggs’ History of Graphic Design. I never got a formal design education, so I wanted to get a solid foundation and put things in perspective historically. It was interesting to see which designs have stood the test of time and which designs look dated, in a bad way.

I also checked out a couple of information design books from the public library, Envisioning Information and Beautiful Evidence by Edward R. Tufte. He’s a big proponent of content. If the numbers are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers. And clutter is a failure of design, not an attribute of information; but, visual problems shouldn’t be fixed by sacrificing the resolution of the content.

One chapter from Beautiful Evidence really got to me in particular. It talked about the inherent problems of PowerPoint presentations — good for the confidence of bad presenters, but horrible as a means of communicating something to an audience.

It’s just that people see, think, and read all the time at intensities greater than watching bulleted list items appear one by one on slide sequences. I only ever learned by (1) reading the textbook or (2) practicing or doing.

The issue is that PowerPoint presentations can be used as a substitute for real thought. Smatterings of somewhat related words and phrases are certainly easier than writing full sentences.

Time is rarely left for deep thought, which is required for meaningful communication.

Filed under: Design Media

Albums that changed my life:

  • OK Computer (1997) by Radiohead
  • If You’re Feeling Sinister (1996) by Belle & Sebastian
  • xx (2009) by the xx
  • The Year of Hibernation (2011) by Youth Lagoon
Filed under: Lists Media

Author Richard Koch of The 80/20 Principle spoke about “Happiness Islands” in an interview:

I encourage people to think about the small chunks of time—this week, this year, the years during their whole lives—that have given them far more happiness than most of the rest of their time. I call these periods “happiness islands”. Try it for yourself. Ask what the happiness islands have in common—why were you unusually happy then. You can do the same for your “achievement islands”—and for the opposites too, the times when you were least effective (“achievement desert islands”) or happy (“happiness desert islands”).

I’ve been thinking about my Happiness Islands lately. What do they all have in common? Friends and family—people who understand me. And a lot of times, food. Playing sports, or getting exercise, too.

Filed under: Reflection Media

I’ve been reading I Will Teach You To Be Rich during evenings, and I’ve been enjoying it very much. Earlier this week, I opened up an online savings account and a Roth IRA.

Other things learned this week:

  1. Don’t cook on too high of heat. I keep setting the fire alarm off when I’m using my cast iron pans.
  2. Improving a design in response to client feedback. I had to make something “pop” more. And I think I succeeded.
Filed under: Media

I finished reading Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, using iBooks, on my iPhone. Some thoughts and takeaways:

  1. Importance of intuition, often times over rational thought.
  2. Product, not profit. I remember being surprised at how profit-driven some of the business students were in my collaborative MBA/engineer class last year. Focus on making a great product, instead.
  3. Less is more. Giving the user fewer features and fewer options means a more focused, elegant product and experience. I agree often times users don’t know what they want.
  4. In some cases, Jobs took the approach of prioritizing design, and finding a way to engineer it later. Even better, make great engineering the essence of the design itself, so that a product’s aesthetic elegance is exactly its elegance in engineering or manufacture. It’s hard to decouple design and engineering, so arguably the best of both worlds would be an engineer who understands the importance of design.
  5. The people you work with and quality of work. It’s not hard to differentiate great work from not-so-great work; I’ve been fortunate to have worked with a handful of people who produce great work in my time at school.
  6. Take inspiration from nature. Make products that are harmonious, that take the path of least resistance.
  7. Look at how the tools and products that humans create fit into the big picture. Then make a dent in the universe.
Filed under: Reflection Design Media Technology
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