my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

Zen Design Principles

Following up on last week's post about Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind I came across an interesting article on Co.Design about 7 Design Principles, Inspired By Zen Wisdom. These principles build upon a concept called shibumi: To understand the Zen principles, a good starting point is shibumi. It is an overarching concept, an ideal. It has no precise definition in Japanese, but its meaning is reserved for objects and experiences that exhibit in paradox and all at once the very best of ...

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Recently, I heard designer Stephen Hay talk about the concept Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. The idea resonated with me. Now, I don't mean to delve into Buddhist teachings. I'm by no means an expert on that. What I'd like to broach is the more practical implications of this phrase - or at least one possible interpretation thereof. Maintaining a beginner's mind that's curious to learn, try and fail keeps you from getting into a rut. It means being open-minded, avoiding the well-trodden path. Such ...

Sunday August 31st, 2014 by Bjoern in Design

Atomic Design

Recently, I came across an interesting concept called Atomic Design. In a nutshell, Atomic Design favours systems of reusable components in lieu of monolithic pages. Now, don't get me wrong. This is nothing utterly new, of course. Style guides and brand guidelines always consisted of reusable and combinable components, fonts and colours. However, in traditional web design up to the mid-aughts designs used to be rather fixed, rigid and monolithic. It wasn't until relatively recently that due to the responsive design movement ...

Sunday August 10th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design

Bad Processes, Budgeting and Constraints

In a recent blog post Ben Horowitz talks about how one bad process can poison your company culture and break the company's back. The takeaway is this: Many startup founders - interestingly especially those with an engineering background - screw up the budgeting process by not applying any constraints to growth. According to Ben Horowitz a typical budgeting process goes like this: Set goals that will enable us to grow Break the goals down so that there is clear ownership and accountability for each goal by ...

Sunday July 27th, 2014 by Bjoern in Business, Design, Entrepreneurship, Software

Erik Spiekermann on Type as Visual Language

At this year's beyond tellerrand design conference Erik Spiekermann talked about type as visible language. Erik Spiekermann is a design and typography legend. Having started his career in the early 1970s he's been a both prolific and seminal designer. He's worked for BVG, Deutsche Bahn, Düsseldorf Airport, Audi, Volkswagen and Heidelberg Printing. So, chances are you've already come across some of his works and you've most certainly seen one of the typefaces designed by him. Besides imparting lots of knowledge on type, typefaces ...

Sunday July 20th, 2014 by Bjoern in Business, Design

Accessible Design: Empowering People

At the beyond tellerrand 2014 design conference, Robin Christopherson talked about inclusive and accessible design (Technology - The Power And The Promise) Robin is Head of Digital Inclusion at AbilityNet - a company that according to their mission statement 'exists to change the lives of disabled people by helping them to use digital technology at work, at home or in education'. Being blind himself Robin provided an insightful perspective on the difficulties people with disabilities face in everyday life and how inclusive design ...

Sunday July 13th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web Applications

SVG is Ready For Prime Time

At the very inspiring beyond tellerrand 2014 design conference that took place from 19 - 21 May this year in Düsseldorf (I'll write another bit or two about this conference in the next few weeks), Chris Coyier (of CSS-Tricks fame) held an interesting talk on Scalable Vector Graphics aptly titled 'SVG Is For Everybody'. In this talk Chris explained that although SVG tends to be sidelined it's quite ready for being used extensively today. To name but a few aspects: SVG allows you ...

Sunday July 6th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web Applications

Why Design Matters

OK, you're right. Countless articles and great books by brilliant designers have been written on this subject. So, who am I to tell you why design matters? As matter of fact I'm not going to tell you anything new. It just happened that I came across a particularly hideous example of bad industrial design that underlines pretty well that Design isn't merely an ancillary feature but quite to the contrary the most essential aspect of a product. Design by committee always fails. Less is more. Design ...

Sunday June 29th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design

ZenQuery 1.0 is available today!

A few weeks ago I wrote about a new product I'm currently developing: ZenQuery, an Enterprise Backend as a Service. I’m pleased to announce the first public version of ZenQuery today. Since the first public announcement regarding ZenQuery roughly 30 days ago we’ve been busy working on this release. Today, you’ll be able to try out ZenQuery 1.0 yourselves on your own server and environment. I really hope you like what we’ve got for you so far. For more information please have a ...

Wednesday May 21st, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Web Applications

ZenQuery: From Idea To Product In 2 Weeks

Earlier this week I've launched a new product called ZenQuery. In a nutshell, ZenQuery is an application that creates an instant REST API (with JSON, XML and CSV formats) for SQL queries. This allows you to easily access any kind of data from your database without having to deal with technical details such as database drivers, connections, ORM or caching. A typical use case is an enterprise company which for example wants to create a new mobile application. The data needed for such ...

Sunday April 27th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.