I'm Arun Venkatesan, and this is the arun.is newsletter, where I share my current obsessions, inspiration from around the web, behind-the-scenes content, and more. This week's issue covers a few things:

• What’s new
• Tyranny of numbers
• Recommendations

What’s new

Love Hultén Works

I’ve been following Love Hultén’s work for more than a decade and had the fortune of picking up both books he published. I had fun sharing his work and why it has resonated with me personally.

Yunnan IV · Lijiang

This is the penultimate installation of my five-part series about our winter vacation in Yunnan, China. Lijiang left me feeling like I need more time to truly understand the beauty of the region.

Why the Ferrari Luce looks like that

I, like many of you, had strong feelings after taking a look at the Jony Ive and Marc Newson-designed Ferrari Luce. Reading more, I felt that much of its design seemed predetermined based on structural constraints and choices made by Ferrari leadership. I wrote a piece to make sense of how the Luce came to look like that.

Daily Designer

Last week I launched a new side project called Daily Designer. Check it every day for a new inspiring quote from a designer I admire. I wrote a post about where the idea came from and the design process that led to the final result.

Since then the project has been well received — I've gotten tips on how to automate the mechanical steps along with words of encouragement from people who find it useful.

If you know any designers or specific talks you find yourself coming back to, please send them my way.

Tyranny of numbers

The first time in my life, I had the fortune of buying my dream car. No, it's not an exotic sports car or an vintage classic. It is the electric Volkswagen van, the ID. Buzz (full review coming in the future).

Sometimes when talking to acquaintances, I mention that I bought the ID. Buzz, and invariably someone retorts with, "doesn't it have low range?"

I usually tell them that range isn't the reason we bought it, in order to not get into a lengthy argument, but let's entertain that here today.

Range by itself is useless because you also need to know the car's battery size and charging speed to know how long it takes to recharge. You also need to know the locations and kinds of chargers you have nearby or where you're traveling to. And the whole thing gets really complicated because when Car and Driver tested popular cars, the practical charging times varied quite widely from each other and their advertised numbers.

Beyond that, the danger of evaluating something as complicated as a vehicle by one metric is that you forget to pay attention to the things that may actually really matter to you. It reminds me of the when Nintendo previewed the Wii (then called Revolution), and Satoru Iwata said:

"I suppose I could give you a list of our technical specs. I believe you'd like that, but I won't for a simple reason. They really don't matter."

He was telling us something that the best product designers and makers out there know: higher numbers don't necessarily translate into a benefit to the user.

A few years earlier, Steve Jobs had said something similar:

"A lot of our industry focuses just on 'more is better' — more megahertz and megabytes and, you know, 'speeds and feeds' we call it. But we think there's a whole other side to the coin, which is, what do you do with these things?"

That's the important question that Nintendo and Apple have continued asking for decades. Yet, people still don’t get it, criticizing their products for being underpowered.

The Wii was released two years after that Iwata interview and we could clearly see it was going to be a hit. Everyone bought one, including my parents and their friends (who aren’t gamers). For the first time, all ages sat together and played since the console was so accessible.

Six years after that Jobs interview, the first iPhone was released, and it immediately drew criticism for the features it lacked — basic things, like 3g and copy and paste — and soon it was being criticized for its lower processing speed and smaller screen size. But it prevailed in ways that people really cared about: usability, reliability, the retail experience

In the book The Tyranny of Metrics, writer Jerry Z. Muller talks about Hayek's critique of scientism: "By setting out in advance a limited and purportedly measurable set of goals, metric fixation truncates the range of actual goals of a business or organization." He continues: "The calculative is the enemy of the imaginative."

So how else should we evaluate things? Venkatesh Rao, in A Big Little Idea Called Legibility, wrote: "It is easier to comprehend the whole by walking among the trees, absorbing the gestalt, and becoming a holographic, fractal part of the forest than by hovering above it".

What those range-obsessed people should have done is just look at my orange van and look at me. Here's a married guy with kids and grandparents that visit often. This van is not just practical — people can get into the back with car seats in the middle, unlike most SUVs — it's also cute and fun, and it makes the occupants and the people on the road happy. We bought it because it's a tool that helps us day to day, and it's also a great place to be in.

The range thing is not actually a problem for us. On road trips, we found our children had a lower range than the car. And given its fast real-world charging speeds, we could charge back up in less time than it took to get lunch.

The funny thing at the end is that when you look at the metric businesses care about most — money — a lot of these products that seemingly didn't compete on paper ended up being massive successes.

The Wii sold more than a hundred million units, twenty percent more than either the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360. And in fact, Wii Sports, the most popular game for the Wii, sold nearly as many units as those consoles themselves. Five years after release, the iPhone, though making up only nine percent of units sold, brought in seventy-four percent of the industry's profits.

I can't predict whether the ID. Buzz is going to be a success, but I can tell you that it wins in the ways that actually matter to us.

Recommendations

XOXO Explore

I’ve written a post on the blog about the positive effect XOXO has had on my life and the special place it has in my heart. Since the last XOXO festival in 2024, the the organizers have published XOXO Explore, an archive of everything XOXO.

The Sounds of Nintendo 3DS Vinyl Rip

I stumbled upon the fact that Nintendo released the sounds and music from its game consoles in vinyl record form. This rip of the 3DS one makes the perfect background music in my studio.

Words of Type Encyclopedia

Did you know what the rounded sections of the letters a, B, P, R, etc. are called? Do you know what a diacritic is? You can learn the answers to these questions and more at the Words of Type Encyclopedia, a project initiated by typeface designer Lisa Huang.

That's it for this issue.

As always, this is my personal email, so feel free to respond directly.

Stay curious,
Arun Venkatesan