Allison Gibson:
>The nature of quality is that it’s hard to pin down. I can look into it forever and never find two matching definitions. Because, ultimately, it’s about intuition. I do know that sometimes quality is a thing so desirable it’ll lead you to chase the rising sun across a barren desert just to grab a heap of furniture that another person might call junk.
This is a fantastic essay, well worth a read a couple of times a year. It really made me think about what I mean when I use the word ‘quality’ and personally I think I have two definitions — both relevant to everything I ever post on this site:
1. That to say something is simply ‘quality’ with no further description is to say that this thing was ‘well-crafted’.
2. To use quality as a scale is to pit two definitions of quality at either end and find where the current thing lies between those ends. At the highest-end of quality you have a thing that I simply could not imagine having been crafted any other way. At the lowest-end of quality you have a thing that I simply cannot imagine why it was crafted the way that it was.
That is what quality means when I write here — as best as I can express.