Sunspots: kick in discovery edition - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)

Sunspots: kick in discovery edition 37signals 25 Apr 2006

11 comments Latest by Rugby Fan Steve

Richard P. Feynman didn’t give a shit about awards: After winning the Nobel Prize: "I don’t like honours…The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation of the people who use it. Those are the real things!"
Paul Graham: Startups worry too much about people copying them: It’s all about execution. "Startups should worry more about making something worth copying and less about whether someone will."
Web designer = arrogant, close-minded, fascist oppressor: Eric Meyer: "You have to make a judgment call, one that will appear wrong to some fraction of your users…you can never satisfy everyone with your choices of Web design techniques. It is simply not possible."
Lean Thinking applied to software development (PDF): Toyota Production System management style brought to software. Eliminating waste, empowering front line workers, responding immediately to customer requests, etc.
Book: Beyond Culture by Edward T. Hall: "The problem with bureaucracies is that they have to work hard and long to keep from substituting self-serving survival and growth for their original primary objective…Bureaucracies have no soul, no memory and no conscience."
Color tools: The Color Wizard lets you type in the value of your color and get an automatic return of that color’s complementary color, split complementary, analogous, etc. Spin the color wheel to generate color combinations.

The Monome 40h is a reconfigurable grid of sixty-four backlit buttons: Video shows groovy usage as a music controller. Buttons can be configured as toggles, radio groupings, sliders, or organized into more sophisticated systems to monitor and trigger sample playback positions, stream 1-bit video, interact with dynamic physical models, and play games.
Ajaxian on Pyro: "Pyro embeds WebKit on OS X (which is very easy to do, enabling these applications nicely) to offer a rich experience on top of 37signals Campfire chat application."
Apple plans new 50-acre campus ("our business has basically tripled in the last five or six years"): Jobs addressed the Cupertino City Council members on Tuesday, April 18: "We’re pretty thrilled. Since we’re your largest taxpayer, I thought you might be happy for us."
Thomas Jefferson was a badass: Quotes page including "A little revolution now and then is a good thing; the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
YOtel: Inspired by British Airways first class and Japanese capsule hotels. Includes revolutionary internal windows, whatever that means.
How C.R.A.P is Your Site Design?: Mike Rundle on Contrast + Repetition + Alignment + Proximity.
Analysis of recent redesigns by NY Times and Wall Street Journal: WSJ editor: "If you try to cram it all onto the home page, you’re just going to get killed. On the other hand if you don’t surface a lot of it intelligently, you’re not reflecting the full panoply of what’s there."
Prick (jokingly) judges children’s art work: "The premise: I can draw better, spell better, and run faster than your kids. So being that my skills are obviously superior to those of children, I’ve taken the liberty to judge art work done by other kids on the internet."

11 comments so far (Jump to latest)

Spike 25 Apr 06

Maddox is my hero. His opinions on Cameron Diaz are spot-on.

Bernie Aho 25 Apr 06

“How C.R.A.P is your site design?”

What a great article! You never hear ‘contrast’ during web design talk. But what a great word to explain those crappy designs as illustrated and why some designs look better. than than others.

It’s mentioned in the first link, but I strongly suggest everyone read The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Mr. Feynman. It is a wonderfully enjoyable read about the life and times of one of the most highly intelligent and influential physicists of our time.

I know that I can’t do him or the book justice in only a comment, but it brilliantly illustrates the fun, games, practical jokes, and general enjoyment of life he held and how he uniquely shared his insights and passion with the world.

It’s well worth a trip to your local library or the $2 charge in Amazon’s used book section. (ISBN: 0738203491)

Mike Rundle 25 Apr 06

Thanks for the link guys!!

Jeff Coleman 25 Apr 06

Dusoft, I was about to post the same link. Very useful, and a great color tool.

Danno 25 Apr 06

Maddox is way better than Che Guevera.

Gayle 25 Apr 06

I noticed that CRAP article over at thinkvitamin (which isn’t churning out articles fast enough, imho!)… I enjoyed it, because I’ve been teaching Robin Williams’ C.R.A.P. to my design students for YEARS.

Des 25 Apr 06

Maddox is has been consistently excellent since 1999 or whenever he started. He’s just released a book too.

I love his take on designer weblogs…

I’m keeping my web site shitty as a protest against all the slick-looking, contentless web sites out there. Nobody cares about your stupid rotating icons and fading links. Some webmasters have spent years tweaking their layout and designing their site, and very few get any traffic. This site, as shitty as it looks, gets over 1 million visits per month. I use large fonts also as a protest against all the stylish garbage you see out there. When I go to a web site, I WANT TO READ THE CONTENT. Trust me, that micro-font everyone uses isn’t nearly as original as they think.