Hello from the 20th edition of Diagonal! I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading concept through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups.
I’ve so enjoyed sharing five fragments a week with you for the past twenty weeks in a row—a hundred fragments in all. I’d love your help celebrating the milestone; could today be the day you forward to a friend?
As always, here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
The hard edges are easy to define. If you have a blank wall or just glass, maybe black glass or whatever, you can, as a human being, do nothing and there's no interest. The words “soft edge” mean a façade where a lot of things happen. It could be many doors, niches, or the vegetable seller putting out his tomatoes on the street. Soft edges could be the front yard where the kids are playing and grandma is sitting knitting just behind the hedge. We have found, of course, the ground floor is where the communication between building inside and outside occurs. That’s what you see. So if the ground floor is rich, the city is rich and it doesn’t matter what you do further up.
– Interview with Jan Gehl on the American Society of Landscape Architects website. No date on the post, but since it marked the publication of his book Cities for People in 2010, it must have been around then. Found while trying to find more information on “talkscapes” in urban design, but ended up liking this direction even more. Connects to last week’s fragment on “a transitional area round the edge”…
As the son of a goldsmith Durer possessed the knowledge of metalworking to shepherd his design through the shops of the world-class instrument makers of Nuremberg. Precision calibration and adjustable arms allowed its user to plot an endless number of curves by setting the length of each arm and determining the rate at which the arms turned. This, in effect, constituted a manual programming by setting the parameters of each curve plotted.
– Steve Luecking, “Durer, Drawing, and Digital Thinking,” 2013. Albrecht Durer made his own tools…in the 1500s! And there’s more: “Durer’s instrument could also draft a family of closely related curves known as the hypocycloids. These curves generate from a point on a circle rolled inside of a stationary circle. These are the curves created with the classic drawing toy, the Spirograph.” Encountered while learning about ray tracing.
As game after game rolled off the line during Atari’s early years, [Nolan] Bushnell kept ruminating on his restaurant plan. It occurred to him that his restaurant could also serve as an Atari-controlled outlet for its products, giving the company end-to-end control over its entertainment experience. “I basically hated the way my games were being presented to the public,” Bushnell told the New York Times in 1981.
– Benj Edwards, “Robots, Pizza, and Sensory Overload: The Chuck E. Cheese Origin Story,” May 31, 2017. This week I learned that not only did the founder of Atari also create Chuck E. Cheese, but that the restaurant idea came before Pong. Distribution, distribution, distribution. And talk about total authorship…
Fauvist artists broke away from traditional impressionist methods and innovatively experimented with exaggerated colors, composing their paintings based on wild color contrasts. The fauvists favored pairing complementary colors, like purple and yellow, magenta and green, or orange and blue. These colors are on opposite sides of the color wheel and were often picked for the main color palette of fauvist paintings as well as used at high saturations. However, fauvist artists did not choose colors based on scientific theory as the post-impressionists did, but on feeling, observation, and the nature of each chromatic experience.
– Adam Hencz, “Fauvism: The Art Style That Liberated Colors,” undated. Ended up on fauvism this week after a brief chat about Matisse with Kojo. The saturated colors of fauvism remind me of the train of thought I chased in 2022 around the aesthetics of generative models.
I have been given so much advice as a founder since I started building my own companies in 2013. And the thing that amazes me about advice is that you will often be told the same things—albeit in different ways or with different messengers or contexts. It is when you NEED to hear it, that you will actually absorb the advice. It’s never when you want to hear it. Or when you are most open to it. Or even when it is most relevant to your day. It will finally absorb into your bones for actual real when you in a moment when you MUST apply it.
– Liz Giorgi on Twitter/X, May 14, 2024. I admire Liz so much and I’ve been thinking about this a lot ever since she posted it.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com