John Maeda
Designer and technologist; author of The Laws of Simplicity; former president of the Rhode Island School of Design; formerly at the MIT Media Lab.
John Maeda did not write this page. ppll compiled it from their own words, each linked to the source. Is this you? · Report a mistake
Latest x.com
What they believe
-
The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction: when in doubt, remove.
The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. When in doubt, just remove. But be careful of what you remove.
lawsofsimplicity.comSaid 11 Jun 2006This on korrents
-
Savings in time feel like simplicity: when forced to wait, life seems unnecessarily complex.
When forced to wait, life seems unnecessarily complex. Savings in time feel like simplicity. And we are thankfully loyal when it happens, which is rare.
lawsofsimplicity.comSaid 11 Jun 2006This on korrents
The bold line is korrents’ wording; the quote is theirs. These 2: what they wrote before what they said aloud, one per source, newest first.
Feed
As its own page →Hiding
21 October
4 October
22 September
8 September
6 September
31 August
26 August
25 August
11 June
4 May
15 February
30 January
28 December 2025
23 December 2025
30 August 2025
30 March 2025
Nothing matches.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 4 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction: when in doubt, remove.
The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. When in doubt, just remove. But be careful of what you remove.
The Laws of Simplicity, Law 1: Reduce Said 11 Jun 2006
Savings in time feel like simplicity: when forced to wait, life seems unnecessarily complex.
When forced to wait, life seems unnecessarily complex. Savings in time feel like simplicity. And we are thankfully loyal when it happens, which is rare.
The Laws of Simplicity, Law 3: Time Said 11 Jun 2006
More emotions are better than fewer: when emotion comes first, do not be afraid to add ornament or layers of meaning.
More emotions are better than less. When emotions are considered above everything else, don’t be afraid to add more ornament or layers of meaning.
The Laws of Simplicity, Law 7: Emotion Said 11 Jun 2006
Show 1 more
Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.
Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.
The Laws of Simplicity, Law 10: The One Said 11 Jun 2006
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Recommends rcmnd
rcmnd What they recommend 17 things — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
Recent
Recommends Finding Meaning
So if you're getting started in the resilience and safety universe, here are a few book recommendations I can suggest for you. They span many interests of mine ranging from design, business, leadership, inclusion, and the emergency sector.
maeda.pm 20 Oct 2020
affiliate link
Recommends Resilience for Dummies
So if you're getting started in the resilience and safety universe, here are a few book recommendations I can suggest for you. They span many interests of mine ranging from design, business, leadership, inclusion, and the emergency sector.
maeda.pm 20 Oct 2020
affiliate link
Recommends Self-Renewal
So if you're getting started in the resilience and safety universe, here are a few book recommendations I can suggest for you. They span many interests of mine ranging from design, business, leadership, inclusion, and the emergency sector.
maeda.pm 20 Oct 2020
affiliate link
Show 14 more
Recommends Design and Violence
So if you're getting started in the resilience and safety universe, here are a few book recommendations I can suggest for you. They span many interests of mine ranging from design, business, leadership, inclusion, and the emergency sector.
maeda.pm 20 Oct 2020
affiliate link
Recommends An Inconvenient Truth
So if you're getting started in the resilience and safety universe, here are a few book recommendations I can suggest for you. They span many interests of mine ranging from design, business, leadership, inclusion, and the emergency sector.
maeda.pm 20 Oct 2020
affiliate link
Recommends Building Resilience
So if you're getting started in the resilience and safety universe, here are a few book recommendations I can suggest for you. They span many interests of mine ranging from design, business, leadership, inclusion, and the emergency sector.
maeda.pm 20 Oct 2020
affiliate link
Recommends Black Wave
So if you're getting started in the resilience and safety universe, here are a few book recommendations I can suggest for you. They span many interests of mine ranging from design, business, leadership, inclusion, and the emergency sector.
maeda.pm 20 Oct 2020
affiliate link
Recommends Disasterology
So if you're getting started in the resilience and safety universe, here are a few book recommendations I can suggest for you. They span many interests of mine ranging from design, business, leadership, inclusion, and the emergency sector.
maeda.pm 20 Oct 2020
affiliate link
Recommends Safe
So if you're getting started in the resilience and safety universe, here are a few book recommendations I can suggest for you. They span many interests of mine ranging from design, business, leadership, inclusion, and the emergency sector.
maeda.pm 20 Oct 2020
affiliate link
Recommends Product Inclusion
So if you're getting started in the resilience and safety universe, here are a few book recommendations I can suggest for you. They span many interests of mine ranging from design, business, leadership, inclusion, and the emergency sector.
maeda.pm 20 Oct 2020
affiliate link
Recommends Learning from the Octopus
So if you're getting started in the resilience and safety universe, here are a few book recommendations I can suggest for you. They span many interests of mine ranging from design, business, leadership, inclusion, and the emergency sector.
maeda.pm 20 Oct 2020
affiliate link
Recommends So You Want To Talk About Race
So if you're getting started in the resilience and safety universe, here are a few book recommendations I can suggest for you. They span many interests of mine ranging from design, business, leadership, inclusion, and the emergency sector.
maeda.pm 20 Oct 2020
affiliate link
Recommends Antifragile
So if you're getting started in the resilience and safety universe, here are a few book recommendations I can suggest for you. They span many interests of mine ranging from design, business, leadership, inclusion, and the emergency sector.
maeda.pm 20 Oct 2020
affiliate link
Recommends Mismatch
So if you're getting started in the resilience and safety universe, here are a few book recommendations I can suggest for you. They span many interests of mine ranging from design, business, leadership, inclusion, and the emergency sector.
maeda.pm 20 Oct 2020
affiliate link
Recommends The Gray Rhino
So if you're getting started in the resilience and safety universe, here are a few book recommendations I can suggest for you. They span many interests of mine ranging from design, business, leadership, inclusion, and the emergency sector.
maeda.pm 20 Oct 2020
affiliate link
Recommends The New (AB)normal
So if you're getting started in the resilience and safety universe, here are a few book recommendations I can suggest for you. They span many interests of mine ranging from design, business, leadership, inclusion, and the emergency sector.
maeda.pm 20 Oct 2020
affiliate link
Recommends Resilient Enterprise
So if you're getting started in the resilience and safety universe, here are a few book recommendations I can suggest for you. They span many interests of mine ranging from design, business, leadership, inclusion, and the emergency sector.
maeda.pm 20 Oct 2020
affiliate link
Where they publish
Blog maeda.pm His blog on design, technology, business and leadership.
Recent
- Treat Yo’ Self: Gen Z’s Hidden Subsidy 25 Aug 2026 This rabbit hole started when I noticed this video on YT: So I went into Bank of America Institute’s new report, The Gen Z Reality Check, expecting to learn about Gen Z spending and whether the fellow was right or not.…
- What is AX? 11 Jun 2026 For most of my career I designed the cockpit. I made the menus and the tabs and the flows. I arranged the dashboards and the confirmation dialogs and the little blinking things that tell you something is happening. I wa…
- CMF 4 May 2026
Show 7 more
- 2025 / SimonW Summary 15 Feb 2026
- A JTBD-First Pattern for Agentic Tool Systems 30 Jan 2026 I started this thought in this post over here. Applied directly to NeonJS
- MacOS Run HF (HuggingFace) Model In Ollama, Part 1 (2025) 28 Dec 2025 1) Install prerequisites A) Homebrew B) llama.cpp via Homebrew Get llama.cpp via brew: Verify: C) ollama via Homebrew There’s an easy installer now instead of doing it the brew way. Verify: D) Hugging Face CLI (for down…
- Claude Status Line Mod 23 Dec 2025 I wanted to use this https://github.com/fatih/dotfiles/blob/main/claude/statusline-git.sh 2. In ~/.claude/statusline.sh drop the code from the repo into there 3. chmod +x ~/.claude/statusline.sh 4. echo ‘{“model”:{“disp…
- Out Of Distribution Thinking / AI Models 23 Dec 2025 Govind’s “Out Of Distribution Thinking” note and some new LLM learnings … Manifold Learning: Bing Wen Brunton Mechanistic Interpretability: Jenny Vega Visualizing LLMs | Layers of FunctionGemma Unsloth FunctionGemma Not…
- Vertical AI 23 Dec 2025
- Finding Purpose (2027) 30 Aug 2025 List of things I would have fun doing before I kick the bucket as a note to myself and for folks who are curious:
Link verified 6 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
x.com @johnmaeda Short posts on design and AI.
Recent
- Design And Engineering Are The Same Thing 21 Oct 2026 youtu.be
- Truly beautiful interactive design from another century. 4 Oct 2026
- ▵ : Change is always imminent. Change is never immediate. I'm lucky to sit next to my speedy colleague @t2govind at work, who is consistently running a few steps ahead of me in this unusual era. Whenever I already know something Govind tells me, I let out a loud 😮💨 "phew." And once in a blue moon I'm ahead of Govind… and I get a fleeting 😎 fist-pump moment that I relish for a few microseconds. If there's one thing I've learned in life, it's that there are people who are fast at change, and then there's everybody else. When everyone's comfortable with the existing direction, people don't w… 4 Oct 2026
Show 6 more
- MOM’S BELIEF: Going through my mother's old motivational notes today, she numbered them 1 to 140, little Hallmark style lines she jotted down over the years. A few favorites from today's batch: > "You can't finish if you don't start." > "If you want to be the best you can do it!" > "When you let go of your past your future begins." Mom was relentlessly positive, and I think it was because she had a ritual of writing down whatever inspired her, or whatever challenged her. Belief, it turns out, isn't just a feeling. Sometimes it's a habit you build one note at a time. And maybe that's the real… 22 Sept 2026
- 🧚🏆 8 Sept 2026
- AUTODESIGNING PPTX: While trying to understand the new @github HydraFusion Project https://t.co/B03qBEWQQK I made my seventh attempt at a bespoke, and on-brand, PPTX deck tool for my brother @mariorod1 to cook with as a custom GitHub Copilot Canvas. It's getting an awfully lot easier to work within Swiss typographic grids in "creative" ways that make the literal roll of the dice satisfyingly fast without making so many LLM calls. Next, I'm looking forward to adding all the interesting GEPA and GRPO stuff that will enable compounding learning capabilities. —JM --- Cozy AI Recipe: - I pointed G… 8 Sept 2026 youtu.be
- DRAWING IS THINKING: The Bauhaus ▲⏹⏺ has always haunted me. A day of drawing (w/o the help of LLMs) helped me see that most everything to do with design can be encapsulated into those forms. The ▲ holds the essence of effective design; the ⏹ holds the shape of product simplicity; the ⏺ holds the winding cycle of the infinite journey. I'll elaborate on these figures in the 2027 https://t.co/0Y1PdIFenb —JM 6 Sept 2026
- PDE BLEND CALCULATOR: If you’ve been feeling an identity reset in the AI era, this app https://t.co/2dYeejnkpJ is designed to give you clearer language for that transition. It uses the three letters P, D, and E along with lowercase and null ( - ) variants to map the many role “smoothies” emerging across product, design, and engineering. The classic ideal has been a balanced P-D-E, but that balance is getting harder as the shape of E changes rapidly in the age of coding agents. The good news: you can always raise your vitamin P! —JM --- This app https://t.co/2dYeejnkpJ from the 2026 31 Aug 2026 designintech.report
- TIKTOK VS BOOK: A book says: … “Here is a world. Enter it.” A short-video feed says: …. “I’ll keep learning what makes you least likely to leave.” Both, when done well, take you into a state of flow. The WHY, however, differs greatly. https://t.co/ssRV2KB3BZ — HT @addyosmani 26 Aug 2026
Link verified 6 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
YouTube UsefulMBA by John Maeda Lessons on leadership, design and AI, plus his talks. Posts a few times a year.
Recent
Link verified 8 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter, especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked article and a belief on korrents.com are left in their original language.