{"id":106,"date":"2006-07-24T06:18:30","date_gmt":"2006-07-24T13:18:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/?p=106"},"modified":"2006-07-24T06:18:30","modified_gmt":"2006-07-24T13:18:30","slug":"to-be-egocentric-or-not-to-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2006\/07\/to-be-egocentric-or-not-to-be\/","title":{"rendered":"To be egocentric or not to be."},"content":{"rendered":"

Reading Atlas Shrugged<\/a> by Ayn Rand<\/a> these days, I was struck once again by her vision of society and what part the “people” as a concept play in it. She believes, and I am completely paraphrasing and interpreting here, so please don’t quote me on this that one should not follow what is socially acceptable, but one’s own voice. Her characters are very ego-centric (not to be taken as a bad thing) strong minded people who will go against popular beliefs, and public opinion to pursue their objectives. In reading a completely different article on the Global curse of Comic Sans<\/a> i couldn’t help but be reminded of Miss Rand.<\/p>\n

“None of this, however, stops the public from loving it. In Typophile’s online forums, a designer rightly observes that the vast majority of laymen love Comic Sans. “Why do you think it’s all over the place?” he asks. “No ‘decent’ corporation cares what a minority of specialists thinks.”<\/p>\n

And he’s right. Who cares if a small minority of deeply principled letterform diehards care about the wanton proliferation of a font that single-handedly throws typographic evolution back, say, a few thousand years or so?<\/p>\n

Clearly, there’s no accounting for taste.”<\/p>\n

So where does that put us as designers? Keeping in mind user-generated content and user-centered approaches are capturing the imagination of a number of business, when we listen to users, how carefully do we have to listen ? More importantly should we follow what they feel they need, or seek for the nuggets of untold stories and opportunities that lie in their tales of discontent, critique and apprehension?<\/p>\n

Sometimes there is power in being the first and only. As i look at the Web 2.0 revolution, I wonder if we would be building all this, if it weren’t for the active 1% <\/a> of the population? Should businesses concentrate on analyzing what the 86 % that just view content wants? Or look at their own products, cease the opportunity to do something radically different and let the 86% follow. It’s about radical innovation versus incremental innovation of course and we all know which one is the more dangerous.<\/p>\n

As Steve Jobs<\/a> says:
\n\u201cI understand the appeal of a slow burn […] but personally I\u2019m a big-bang guy.[…] The risk with a fast burn,\u201d he continued, \u201cis that it exposes you to your enemies. You\u2019re going to need a lot of money to fight thieves.\u201d<\/p>\n

I’m sure he’s read the Fountainhead<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand these days, I was struck once again by her vision of society and what part the “people” as a concept play in it. She believes, and I am completely paraphrasing and interpreting here, so please don’t quote me on this that one should not follow what is socially acceptable,… Continue reading To be egocentric or not to be.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p41XhY-1I","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}