A short break, spent thinking about the work.

recess noun

An alcove set back from the corridor, where you can stop for a while without being in anyone’s way.

recess noun

The break between lessons. Short, regular, and over before you are quite ready.

Both meanings are the point. The pieces are short enough to read in a break, and set back far enough from the day’s work to see it more clearly.

Anyone whose work shapes what other people can do: designers, researchers, product managers, engineers, analysts, and the people who commission and approve their work.

Many examples come from schools and learning products, because that is where the stakes of design are easiest to see: a teacher with ten minutes between lessons, a student on a shared laptop, a programme that either moves learning or doesn’t. You don’t need to work in education to use any of it.

Reading something and thinking “that makes sense” feels like learning, and mostly isn’t. So each piece asks a little of you along the way.

• Predict before you look. Most pieces stop and ask you to commit to an answer before the reveal. Being wrong cheaply, in private, is how judgement gets calibrated.
• Take it with you. Each piece ends with its takeaways and the one line worth carrying out of the room.
• Try it this week. An exercise you can do on real work in under half an hour.
• Mull it over. Three questions that don’t have a tidy answer.

• Headings are claims. Read only the headings of any piece and the argument should survive.
• Numbers over adjectives. Where there is a number, we give it, with its source. Where the evidence is thin or contested, we say so in the text rather than leaving it out.
• Invented examples are marked. Some cases are composites or made up to illustrate a point. They say so. The research is real, and every study is listed at the end of the piece.
• Our own side gets checked first. Several pieces take apart statistics the design profession likes to quote. We would rather lose a good-sounding number than keep a wrong one.
• Nothing to sell. Recess ends with exercises, never product pitches.

Zamde is an ensemble of intelligent tools for product and experience designers. Its apps take avoidable friction off a designer’s desk and leave the decisions where they belong. Recess is the family that makes reading rather than apps: unhurried where the apps are busy.

The history of Recess, from first draft to first issue, is on its own page.

• Good design
  • No. 01 The brief before the build.
  • No. 02 Look for the second click.
  • No. 03 What people say, what people do.
• Who decides
  • No. 04 Design is a decision, not a job title.
  • No. 05 Take the option away.
  • No. 06 The checklist was never the intervention.
• Built to be learned
  • No. 07 Ease of use is not ease of learning.
  • No. 08 Clean is a learning requirement.
  • No. 09 Confetti is not feedback.
  • No. 10 Write principles that can lose an argument.
• Zero is an average
  • No. 11 Zero is an average.
  • No. 12 Measure it after you take it away.
  • No. 13 Aim at the floor.
  • No. 14 Feed the pig.
• Finishing the work
  • No. 15 Good work does not speak for itself.
  • No. 16 Say how sure you are.
  • No. 17 Silence is not agreement.