- Pablo Picasso quotes
- “[Work] below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.” [tx Elia]
- Hippie capitalism
- “Entrepreneurs using capitalism to do good and help others. Here are some cases where capitalism isn’t totally evil and destroying innocent lives while creating vast wealth discrepancies.”
- “Church of the Customer” authors on the importance of democratized data
- On why YouTube beat Google: “YouTube won because of a vitally important theme: It democratized data. YouTube made user data transparent while Google Video did not. YouTube exposed data like numbers of views, comments, referrers, as well as most popular referrers, most popular videos, most popular channels, etc. That data helps YouTubers gauge their own popularity and allows the larger community to measure relative popularity, too. Google did none of that out the gate. It democratized data using a piecemeal approach, and it didn’t set any standards along the way. YouTube set all of the standards.”
- Pinsetter from Coudal
- “Spell with buttons. There’s not a whole lot more to explain after that…The 1-inch letter buttons are jet black and every order includes a red heart button too, so you can write I HEART YODA or something.”
- Look for more profit sharing deals at sites with user generated content in 2007
- “If consumers produce the content, if they are the content, and that content brings in money for aggregating brands, then revenue and profit-sharing is going to be one of 2007’s main themes in the online space. It’s not like brands will have a choice: talented consumers are going to be too sought after to remain satisfied with thank you notes. Get ready for an avalanche of revenue sharing deals, reward schemes and sumptuous gifts aimed at luring creative consumers.”
- Every feature is an opportunity to do something wrong
- “Apple likely does not pursue minimalist designs for their own sake. Every time a company adds a feature to a product, it adds the opportunity to do it wrong. Zune was an opportunity for Microsoft to look at the subscription model that has bedeviled its PlaysForSure partners and exercise restraint. Instead, it must now deal with the complexity of accounts that it has further complicated with an abstract points system.” [tx DD]
- The dawning of the age of iPod
- “When one of the designers said that obviously the device should have a power button to turn the unit on and off, [Steve Jobs] simply said no. And that was it. It was a harsh aesthetic edict on a parallel with his famous refusal to include cursor keys on the original Macintosh keyboard. From Jobs’ point of view, all that was needed was forward, back, and pause buttons, arranged around the circumference of the wheel. (After much effort, his team eventually convinced him of the necessity of a fourth button, called Menu, that would move you through the various lists of options.)” [tx Dan]
- Iranian typography
- “In comparison to Europe and North America calligraphy is a far more popular and practiced form of art in Iran and in most other countries around this area. You can spot at least one piece of calligraphy hung on the walls of most Iranian households. Perhaps these are all reasons why it is not so easy to draw the line where calligraphy ends and typography starts. Some of the masterpieces of Iranian design are often the results of a collaboration between a designer and a calligrapher.”
- Book: “Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology”
- “Gelernter suggests that the dichotomy between art/beauty and science/technology has led to inadequate academic training of computer-science students. He points out that the greatest minds in science and industry have always pursued beauty. ‘Machine beauty is the driving force behind technology and science,’ he says, and yet ‘beauty bothers us.’ Somehow it’s perceived to be softer and less rigorous to train computer scientists in art, music, architecture, and design. However, Gelernter sees these disciplines as closely aligned with the mathematics and science that are the foundation of technology. Because of this lack of aesthetic education, much user interface has been poorly designed.” [tx Andrew]
- Video: Charlie Rose interviews American Apparel founder Dov Charney
- The company is able to take a brainstorm for an item and have it in stores a week later.
- 10 Rules for Building Wealth
- “Start early: More than any one stock or mutual fund pick, the age you start investing will determine how much wealth you build…Go heavy on stocks: Subtract your age from 120: That’s the percentage you should have in stocks; the rest should be in bonds.”
- Why watches are set to 10:08 in ads
- “The form of the hands has a positive effect on the viewer: the short hand pointing at 10 o’clock and the long hand pointing at 8 minutes is reminiscent of a check mark, which commonly means ‘ok’ or ‘fine.’ Some observers further identify this appearance with a smiling face.”
Spike
on 19 Dec 06The coudal link needs fixing, it goes to the error page.
Dennis Eusebio
on 19 Dec 06I always wondered about that about watches.
dave rau
on 19 Dec 06Coudal is on fire with awesome ideas for products lately, and who doesn’t love pins? We surely do! If anybody is looking to get pins made I recommend the excellent and affordable Cozmo Graphics: 1000 pins for $110 shipped; can’t beat that. We’ve ordered a ton of pins from them so far and they’re all top notch.
I will say that making 1” pins is about the most fun I’ve had in the last month. Maybe getting a Wii after the new year will break this cycle!
dave rau
on 19 Dec 06On watches: Does anybody have any links to some good watches? Something made by some indie artists or something? I’m so tired of the super big, metal bling watches. Where are the tasteful and quirky time pieces?
Jon
on 19 Dec 06“Here are some cases where capitalism isn’t totally evil and destroying innocent lives while creating vast wealth discrepancies.”
I can’t believe that after all these years this is still considered a reasonable position… I can understand pointing out cases where large entities have abused power, but to suggest that capitalism as a whole destroys innocent lives?
Find any place on the planet that switched from a state-run economy to a free market economy, and you will find a dramatic increase in quality of life from top to bottom.
bgates
on 19 Dec 06Hear, Hear, Jon. That quote might as well read, “Capitalism is usually evil, but when we’re doing it, it’s ok.”
Jake Walker
on 19 Dec 06FWIW, American Apparel just announced it would be acquired by a holding company already trading on the market (much like Jamba Juice did with SVI a few months ago):
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=EDA
I haven’t looked at the details/valuation/etc. yet, but it’s certainly interesting to have an opportunity to invest in a really well executed business.
Adam
on 19 Dec 06dave rau—
I remember Jason had a list of some pretty cool watches. I don’t remember the URL, but I imagine Jason will post it once he reads this thread.
ML
on 19 Dec 06Adam’s talking about Finding inspiration in time.
Austen Varian
on 19 Dec 06Easy for Picaso to say. Some peoples means are other peoples ease.
Karim
on 20 Dec 06Thanks for the post on Iranian calligraphy. The article is fascinating. When I was a kid, my grandfather always wanted me to learn how to do calligraphy, but I wasn’t interested in it then. I wish I had listened to him then.
Jon Maddox
on 20 Dec 06“Why watches are set to 10:08 in ads”
It also provides the fullest exposure of the watch face. It exposes the logos perfectly. This works well for ads and display cases.
If you’ve never noticed this before, be prepared to notice it EVERYWHERE now.
drew
on 20 Dec 06Youtube didn’t put up copyright barriers. Google did. The other features that Youtube implemented were merely icing on the cake.
Anonymous Coward
on 20 Dec 06Funny about the 10:08 thing, because the other day I came across a clock logo that had an inverse check with the hands – 2:50 or something – and I thought that was stupid and would have been more compelling if it was reversed into a check (which apparently everyone else thinks too). Wish I could remember where I saw it…
MH
on 20 Dec 06Re: Hippie capitalism,
To find out why “wealth discrepancies” are NOT a horrible and evil thing, read Paul Graham’s essay Mind the Gap>
http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html
dsvd
on 21 Dec 06v
Anonymous Coward
on 21 Dec 06Re: Graham’s Mind the Gap
I used to subscribe to that view for a long time. I still do for the most part, but there is one extremely troubling element of ‘wealth discrepancies’ which Graham and like-minded others gloss over: corruption.
When the rich can ‘buy power’ then the gap IS a horrible and evil thing because, as Paul’s article correctly points out, corruption is very damaging to the nation as a whole. Some rich get richer but everybody else DOES get poorer because it isn’t people getting richer by doing something productive, it really is a form of theft and very much a zero-sum game.
Of course the problem is with corruption and not the income gap itself, however, a big gap does exacerbate the problem a great deal.
I think if you look at “pork” bills, lobby groups, campaign funds and a bunch of other fun stuff within U.S. politics it’s pretty easy to come to the conclusion that corruption is , at the very least, a potential problem. If it is then income gaps become concerning.
This discussion is closed.