I’m a sucker for “behind the scenes” articles on how other people made design decisions. They’re usually accompanied with neatly packaged lessons for everyone to walk away with.

Designing—especially during the early exploration phases—is anything but neat. There’s plenty of debates, countless iterations, and drive-by critiques.
I’m starting a new series here on Signal v. Noise called “Design Discussions.” Every so often, I’ll take a page out of our company Basecamp account and share the entire discussion behind a design project we’ve done. They’ll be raw and unedited. They might be full of insight, or they might be incredibly boring and expose the weirdness and silliness of each of our coworkers. That’s fine, too!
Either way, I won’t overly explain the reasoning behind what we were doing, nor will I share a top-ten list of things you should try in your own project. You’ll get an uncut backstage pass to the conversations that took our projects from A to B.
So, let’s start with something we had fun with. Around this time last year, we were Becoming Basecamp. With so many employees, it was high time for us to have a new identity, and that included business cards. (Chances for free lunches via fishbowl drawings, as I like to see it.)
If you happen to come across one of us happy Basecampers, be sure to ask for our card. They look like this.

Designing and illustrating the cards took a day. You can see how quickly other folks in the company chimed in to help me try new ideas throughout the day. The full-sized screen capture of the design discussion follows. Click-to-enlarge it to 100% if you’re on a desktop.

Continued…

I ordered something from overseas and checked the tracking number to see when I might receive the shipment. The results looked like this:

Since the page wasn’t in English, and Google knew I was an English speaker, Google offered to translate it for me:

So I did. Then it looked like this:

The special part… Check out the time column. They “translated” 24-hour time into 12-hour time. They knew I was in the US and that’s our preference for displaying time. So they didn’t only translate the words into English, they went the extra step and translated the time format to match expectations. They certainly didn’t have to do that, but I definitely noticed that they did.

Delightful attention to detail, and thorough definition of translation. Well done.

Good artists copy; great artists steal.
-Picasso

A famous quote about creativity often attributed to Picasso. But what can we actually learn about creativity from studying thieves? And did Picasso even say it?

Happy Halloween! I haven’t cared for ages. But, now I have someone in my house like this. My 5 month old ladybug :)
I find myself at the nearest drugstore constantly buying diapers, and I can’t help notice the holiday on sale. Candy, makeup, masks. Especially the classic: Frankenstein.
Most of us don’t realize our use of Frankenstein’s name is wrong. Frankenstein was the name of the scientist, Victor Frankenstein. The monster didn’t have a name.
In the book, he’s called monster, creature, fiend, even devil. If anything, the monster’s name is Adam.

I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed

-The “monster”

But the big thing most don’t realize is that the story of Frankenstein was written by François‐Félix Nogaret.
Wait that doesn’t sound right. Wasn’t Frankenstein written by Mary Shelley?
Julia V. Douthwaite, a professor at The University of Notre Dame, recently uncovered a story by French author François‐Félix Nogaret, written years before Mary Shelley was even born. The story is about an inventor named Frankenstein who creates an artificial man.
Mary Shelley stole the idea of Frankenstein.

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Cars were supposed to be the solution to lost or stolen horses.

When I leave my machine at the door of a patient’s house I am sure to find it there on my return. Not always so with the horse: he may have skipped off as the result of a flying paper or the uncouth yell of a street gamin, and the expense of broken harness, wagon, and probably worse has to be met.

-An excited new automobile owner from 1901, found in the book Stealing Cars

Instead, cars have been the object of thieves attention since they were first invented. Motor vehicle theft, also more popularly known as grand theft auto (amongst police and video game playing teens), is an enormous problem and a multi-billion dollar industry for thieves.
By many counts, a car is stolen in the US every 30 seconds. Of those stolen, only about 12% are ever recovered. And the problem is all over the world. 1 in 6 cars on the road in the Czech Republic are stolen vehicles or contain stolen parts.
But today, with the advent of Vehicle Identification Numbers (VINs), a stolen car isn’t that valuable sold on its own. If you had a stolen car and changed its plates, its VIN is still etched or stamped onto 20 or more pieces of your car. The dashboard is the obvious place you see it. But it’s on the engine. The doors. Some cars even have the VIN etched onto all the windows.
And so, a stolen car is easy to identify. As a whole.
Professional car thieves know that as soon as you steal a car, your next immediate task is to get it to a chop shop. A chop shop is an illegally operating garage that specializes in taking a car and almost literally chopping it into pieces. In less than an hour, a stolen car is chopped. Seats, windshield, airbags – every individual item is removed. Things with VINs are dumped, destroyed, or melted down.
Now, thieves have extremely valuable parts on their hands. Wheels, entertainment systems, air bags – all can go for hundreds to thousands of dollars on their own. Even melted down. A catalytic converter contains platinum going for $1500 an ounce.
And in their sale, they can’t be traced back to the original owner or the crime.
Professional thieves have figured out that there isn’t much use to stealing and reselling an entire car. The value is in deconstructing the car, and utilizing the individual pieces.

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Many people also don’t realize Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is subtitled “The Modern Prometheus”, as the subtitle doesn’t appear on modern editions of the book.
Prometheus is a tale from Greek mythology, probably 3000 years old. Some versions of the myth have Prometheus as the architect of mankind, fashioned out of mud and fire. Shelley’s monster was created with flesh and lightning.
Shelley didn’t just steal from Nogaret. She stole pieces of work from a countless number of places. Like Greek mythology. Like Milton’s Paradise Lost, an alternative genesis story about Adam, God, and Satan.

Like Adam, I was created apparently united by no link to any other being in existence many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition; for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.

-The “monster”

Like Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Mariner and Frankenstein both use a similar narrative technique of one character telling another character the story, and interrupting the narrative to make sure the reader is reminded of that fact.
She stole from Giovanni Aldini and Johann Konrad Dippel who were scientists in the late 1700s who were trying to sustain or create new life with electricity and chemicals.
Shelly even stole narrative and character ideas from her own mother’s novel, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
But you wouldn’t know these things unless you did a lot of research and could spot the elements. Nogaret and Shelley might have a main character with the same name creating an artificial man, but that’s largely where the similarities stop. The stories are completely different.
And that’s because Shelly did what these car thieves excel at: break things down, and find new value in the parts.

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Amateurs tend to be poor at imitation. When they see an idea, they clone the whole thing and offer it as their own work. The pro knows to chop these things into pieces and find new uses for them.
One of my favorite books to recommend to developers who feel like they can’t design is Jarrod Drysdale’s Bootstrapping Design. He outlines a way novice web designers can do what Mary Shelley did:

1. Find 3 sites that inspire you.
2. Steal the layout from one, color scheme from another, and typography from the third.
3. Combine those three, and you’ll realize you’ve created something original.

I’ve made something called Draft, software to help people write better. The homepage has served me well in getting traffic and getting people to sign up:

But it’s actually a combination of things I’ve stolen. The font I stole from Field Notes, these beautifuly designed notebooks from Aaron Draplin and Coudal Partners. They introduced me to Futura, and I fell in love.
The layout was stolen from Google. Simple, centered, almost nothing on the page, just click the button and get started.
There’s a little animation to the headline that drops in – stolen from DuckDuckGo’s previous design, a great search engine built by Gabriel Weinberg. Their logo had a similar animation when the page loaded.
Even the blue button came from some place I can’t remember now. But I was on a site, saw the blue they were using, and decided it would make a great link and button color.
On and on, I’ve deconstructed these other sites into pieces and mixed them together into something new. Something original.
Now, I’ve recently taken over as the CEO of Highrise, and as we look at things to improve and redesign, I see us doing the exact same thing.
I hired the very talented designer, Wren Lanier, and the first thing she asked me was: send me all the sites and designs that inspire you.
And as you’ll see, when we launch our new homepage soon, it will come off as original, because it is. But lots of elements on those pages are because Wren or I liked a button here, a color there, a font somewhere else.
Here’s an illustration that you might see soon on the new Highrise homepage, describing Highrise as a “Secret Weapon.”

A beautiful original “shaken” from a designer and artist I hired, Brad Colbow, but you can spot where inspiration came from.

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That quote “Good artists copy; great artists steal,” is often attributed to Picasso. But that’s not what he actually said. According to The Quote Investigator, that’s Steve Jobs’ version as he was trying to quote Picasso.
Picasso has also been quoted as saying:
    Bad artists copy; great artists steal.
But a 1974 book, mentioned William Faulkner said:
    Immature artists copy, great artists steal.
But it was T.S. Elliot who in 1920 wrote:
    Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
And it was Alfred Tennyson in 1892 who wrote:
    That great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.

All these great artists, Jobs, Picasso, T.S. Elliot, stole parts, added their own, and inspired the next – just like professional car thieves, clever enough to deconstruct the originals, and use the pieces to create something much more valuable.

For the last ten months at Basecamp I have been the guy that draws stuff. After making occasional contributions at 37signals over the years, they tapped me to make hand drawn images for the Basecamp marketing site that first appeared in February. Since then my drawings have crept into the app itself, into email blasts, onto banners at Pitchfork, all up in The Distance, plastered on the walls of the office, and into several employee’s avatars. We came up with a creative contract that allows me time to work on my other career as an artist while still providing substantial input at Basecamp.

Continued…

Making something new takes patience. But it also takes faith. Faith that everything will work out in the end.

During the development of most any product, there are always times when things aren’t quite right. Times when you feel like you may be going backwards a bit. Times where it’s almost there, but you can’t yet figure out why it isn’t. Times when you hate the thing today that you loved yesterday. Times when what you had in your head isn’t quite what you’re seeing in front of you. Yet. That’s when you need to have faith.

There are designs that are close, but not there yet. There are obvious conflicts that will need to be resolved. There are lingering things that confound you, confuse you, or upset you, but you know that eventually they’ll work themselves out. Eventually you’ll find the right way to do something you’ve been struggling with.

It’s hard to live with something that isn’t quite right yet – especially when it’s your job to get it right. It’s important to know when to say “it’s fine for now, but it won’t be fine for later.” Because moving forward is critical to getting somewhere. And, eventually, you’ll figure it all out. It’ll all work out in the end.

This is what I’ve always believed, and have always tried to practice. A dedicated faith in the eventual resolution of a problem, the eventual execution of a concept, and the eventual realization of the right design. Even when something’s poking out you don’t like, or something isn’t aligning quite right, or the words aren’t as elegant as you’d hoped, or something just isn’t easy enough yet, you need to have confidence it’ll all come together eventually.

Remember that what you’re making is in a perpetual state of almost right up until the end.

In the meantime, you just press on and keep making things, trying things, and getting closer and closer to the time when you can tie the loose ends into a perfect bow and present it to the world. What fun it is!

When I switched to Android a few years ago, I promised myself this: I’d switch back the minute Apple added smart notifications, app data sharing, widgets, and a better keyboard to iOS.

Apple’s WWDC keynote yesterday was exciting. Craig Federighi is super awesome (I wanna hang out with him). iOS is finally getting the Android features I love. Yesterday I was ready to switch back, but now I’m not so sure.
Some iOS fans have pointed to Google’s Android as being a poor copy—thermonuclear theft. On the surface there are similarities, but conceptually Android started from a power user’s perspective. Where Android had power features it also lacked in the simplicity and obviousness of iOS. Simply because iOS did far less.
Yesterday Apple showed iOS doing a whole lot more. Apple is refining iOS by layering on functionality. They’re adding features to the simple iOS foundation. However, the more features there are, the more complicated it becomes—and the harder it is to use.

Meanwhile, Google has done something interesting with Android. It started out as a very power-user complex platform, but they’ve been refining it in a different way than Apple. Instead of adding features, they’ve pruned them. Historically Google hasn’t been afraid to nix apps or services in an effort to focus and simplify. You can see these efforts in Google Now. With Google Now you don’t interact with apps or widgets. Their “cloud” knows what you want to know and tells you. No interaction needed.

It’s always harder to take away features that are already there. But, I have no doubt Apple will try to continue making iOS easy-to-use while they layer on new power user features. At the same time, Google’s not afraid to take away features. Maybe Google will keep simplifying Android, pushing all you need to know from their sentient “cloud”.
I’m curious to see what happens next. But, I’m not switching back to iOS just yet.