Patagonian founder talks about breaking the rules
“In an exclusive excerpt from his new management guide, Let My People Go Surfing, Patagonia’s contrarian founder talks about breaking the rules—and creating the world’s most iconoclastic adventure-apparel company.”
Video: Trajan is the Movie Font
“Movie poster designers: It’s time to start seeing other fonts.”
Mario Batali on big words and the mass market
“He said the Food Network recently proposed a couple of new projects for him, including one where he would be host of a reality show, and that he would discuss them with the executives in January. ‘I’m not averse to working with them,’ he said. Still, Mr. Batali said, ‘They don’t need me. They have decided they are mass market and they are going after the Wal-Mart crowd,’ which he said was ‘a smart business decision. So they don’t need someone who uses polysyllabic words from other languages.’”
Book: “The Elements of Persuasion”
“All successful stories have five basic elements: the Passion with which the story is told, a Hero who leads us through the story and allows us to see it through his or her eyes, an Antagonist or obstacle that the hero must overcome, a moment of Awareness that allows the hero to prevail, and the Transformation in the hero and in the world that naturally results. In their book, The Elements of Persuasion, consultants and media professionals Robert Dickman and Richard Maxwell explore the underlying principles of storytelling and show how these principles work together to help people in the real world.”
An exception to the Google rule?
“Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it. (Compare the cost of paying and feeding someone to do a few weeks of P* hacking to the full cost of the meetings that went into a big company decision.) Don’t overplan something. Just do it half-assed to start with, then throw more people at it to fix it if it works. Worked for every successful Google project from AdWords to Google Maps.” [via JK]
Lighting of Ingo Maurer
“Since 1966, Maurer has created more than 150 different lights and lighting systems and designed lighting for diverse international venues, including fashion runways, public buildings and monuments, and private commissions. Maurer uses unexpected materials and found objects to create light, and he is a pioneer in the usage of new lighting technologies.”
Seth Godin is thinking about Google's Knol
“Apparently, the best thing that can happen to you if you pick Google as a platform is that they mimic you. This isn’t true in the restaurant business (it’s bad news for the farmers when a restaurant starts its own farm). This isn’t true for Hollywood (it’s bad news when the movie studios start their own film processing labs.) The nature of the Web, though, seems to be that because of the very openness of the system, imitation is the highest form of endorsement.”
Ruby on Rails 2.0 Users Give Thumbs Up
“The focus has been on security, performance, profiling. Also, making it even easier to create cleaner Rails applications…Overall, there are nice things that have been added and they will make our lives easier.”
Every beginning Rails developer should write their own blog software
“It’s a great learning experience and you can try things that aren’t possible with just an app running on localhost. It’s also a great environment for learning without the pressure of a mission-critical app. When you’re working for a client and deploying an important application, you’ll have made all the beginner mistakes on your own time (hopefully).”
The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog
“Shorpy is a blog about old photos and what life a hundred years ago was like: How people looked and what they did for a living, back when not having a job usually meant not eating.”