My wife recently ordered Henry Bursill’s classic Hand Shadows and More Hand Shadows. It was first published in 1859 and 1860 (in two parts), but what’s best about it is that, aside from the name of each pattern, the book is simply a book of pictures. No text. No preface by a famous hand shadow practitioner. No page of text describing the history and variations of each pattern. Just pictures.

Each page is a single picture, drawn in mid-19th century style, demonstrating how to position your hands, and showing the resulting shadow. No text is needed; the book explains itself.

Obviously, this extremely minimalist style wouldn’t work for every book, but how many books could be improved by including less than they have? How much do you really have to say about a hand shadow, when a picture says it all?

We missed out on doing the promised 37signals Live event last week, so now we’re going to make it up by going double this week. Today, Jason will be speaking to the Milwaukee Area Technical College at 4:45PM CDT 5:30PM CDT. Tomorrow, we’ll both be doing a show from the office that’ll mix debates and the regular Q&A style at 11:00 AM CDT.

Both shows will as always be available live from http://live.37signals.com/. Hope to see you there!

Update on Milwaukee chat: Actual start time is 5:30PM CDT. Apologies for the confusion.

Even though we don’t see each other everyday, our team still manages to trade normal water cooler conversation. Part of that is recommending products we use each day and trading our reviews in Campfire. Here’s a few we’ve all been enjoying:

Jason and Sam love their Jiffy clothes steamer because it makes them feel like they work in a very small dry cleaner.

If we’re in the office, we can’t avoid a walk over to Sip for a coffee fix. The rest of the time Jason and I consume large quantities of Sprite Zero.

After David and Jason got their AppleTV’s, I was convinced. Then I convinced Jeff, and we’re all quite happy.

Jeremy loves his masticating juicer and says it works better than any centrifugal juicer. Jason loves his Omega juicer, too. Jamis and Mark are on the fence in their juicer quest.

A few of us are excited about the release of Fitbit in a few months!

Now that Jeremy is working while standing up just like Jamis, he picked up an anti-fatigue mat after I recommended one. Unfortunately, he hates it. (Whoops!)

We all have company cards, but most of us are also using American Express for our personal accounts.

Jamis. Loves. His. Bandsaw!

Jason bought this simple sound machine after I mentioned how obsessed with it I am.

Jason, Jeremy and I are big Calexico fans. Sam and I are loving an album by Beruit and the Darjeeling Limited soundtrack. (Though my favorite work music is the soundtrack to Little Miss Sunshine!)

Big up to our friends at West Loop Gym where a few Signals and Coudals are happy members.

We’re also customers of the awesome Irv & Shelly’s Fresh Picks. Highly recommended if you’re in the Chicagoland area.

In my past experience, I did not like designing and producing HTML email marketing campaigns. The emails that I created had their conceptual birth in another medium altogether: a Catalog, an Advertisement, or the Website. The concept and strategy was already finalized before it had gotten to me. At that point it was all about production.

How I see email working for 37signals
I want to take a different approach with 37signals email. Because we are not ready to start redesigning the marketing sites, I see an opportunity to use email as a means to experiment with concepts in anticipation of the redesign. That’s right. I am reversing that conceptual flow often practiced at many online retailers. Email isn’t going to follow what’s already been laid out. It’s going to lead the way. This is email as an inexpensive design and content testing platform.

Here’s the original design for the first Highrise email test:

I am hoping to address some marketing site issues with this email. There is no place currently on the Highrise site where customer stories or tips can be found. We have a great Product Blog with stories and tips, but you can’t sign up for Highrise there. It is also difficult to know that we have Basecamp and other products if you’ve come to the Highrise site directly. Maybe Basecamp will suit your needs better. This is how we did it with this particular email. A few emails down the line might take a different direction altogether.

One caveat about using emails as a design and concept testing ground is that email clients are not perfect. The original design had to be adjusted slightly. You can see what we finally ended up with here: http://www.highrisehq.com/newsletters/090908/

Design compromises aside: Email becomes the perfect platform to perform this synthesis experiment. Elements and concepts from the design above may or may not make it into the final site design. That is still a ways away. We’ll cut our concepts for a site redesign over a span of several emails in the coming months. Would you like to see how it comes along? Sign up for our newsletters to see where these emails take us.

“Want to attract and retain Gen Y? Better rethink everything” [The Arizona Republic] explains how employers can attract younger workers and discusses 37signals (including some quotes from Jason).

In order to appeal to us, employers need to rethink their rules a bit. Forget rigid 40-hour workweeks. Forget traditional company hierarchy…

One company that has led the charge in shifting the work-life paradigm, especially when it comes to employee relations, is 37signals. Headquartered in Chicago, it’s a multi-million dollar organization deeply committed to maintaining a work-life balance for its employees.

President Jason Fried says today’s employers present the biggest roadblock. “Simply put, employees are treated like children. They are not allowed to think for themselves, and there are too many layers of approval, just too much insulation that prevents anyone from doing anything. The traditional workplace is broken, and until someone realizes that, there’s always going to be conflict.”

This suffocation by protocol is dead on and will never allow an employee to “go beyond” or achieve something extra for the company. This is a critical link that most organizations continually fail to acknowledge. They are too focused on ensuring employees do no wrong that they actually prevent them from achieving anything beyond status quo.

But there is hope, and a solution that is more common sense than radical procedural change.

To counter the “traditional workplace,” Fried had this to offer: “We challenge them. We give them different, interesting projects. We encourage them to do something outside of work and teach us what they’ve learned. It’s no help to our company to hire someone based on a skill or to get stuff done.”

It is a simple, no-brainer solution, but one that is too often lost.

A good portion of this industry is still trying to figure out how to make money for the first time (hint: charge people). But for those who’ve mastered that, I want to talk about the next step: making money twice (or three or four times).

Making money off original content isn’t hard as long as you aren’t afraid of making money. You can sell it, you can offer subscriptions to it, you can talk about it, etc. But what’s more interesting — and easier — is making money again of something that already made you money before.

Repackaging

Repackaging allows you to earn money multiple times on the same content. It’s a great way to grow your revenues without significant marginal cost.

Money One: A lot of our ideas originate on this blog. We post articles which generate traffic. We make money off the traffic by running Deck ads in the sidebar. We make a few thousand a month off The Deck ads.

Money Two: We bundled up the best blog posts about our software development philosophy and turned it into a PDF book called Getting Real. We sell the PDF for $19. We’ve made a few hundred thousand dollars from the PDF.

Money Three: We take the Getting Real PDF and turn it into a paperback at Lulu.com. We sell the paperback for $25 and we make a few thousand a month on royalties. The paperback is currently ranked the 4th best seller on Lulu.

Money Four: We took the content from Getting Real and produced a Getting Real conference series. We held a few conferences a year and made about $50K per conference. We’ve produced about 5 of these conferences.

It adds up

So if we add this all up, we made about $100K on The Deck ads (The Deck has been around about two years and we are a founding partner), $350K on the Getting Real PDF, about $65K on the Getting Real paperback, and about $250K on the Getting Real conferences (before that they were called Building of Basecamp).

That’s roughly $765,000 over a few years off roughly the same content. Insight and ideas about how we run our business. Blog entries, PDF, paperback, and conferences.

We probably could have done a few more things and pushed that total over a million. Regardless, making a little extra here and there over something you’ve already produced is a great way to grow revenues.

My first project here at 37signals was to evolve our email marketing and triggered messaging design. I want to share some thoughts about my first Getting Real experience and the design decisions we made to highlight “free Campfire accounts” for Basecamp Max plan customers.

I get it now!
Jason asked me to design our Welcome to Basecamp sign-up emails. The emails were being sent out as plain text only. Important messages like the “free Campfire account offer” were difficult to highlight in plain text. Max plan customers were confused as to how to get their free Campfire account. I started designing and producing the email last week while Jason was at the Web 2.0 Expo.

We use Campfire here at 37signals nonstop to communicate with each other. I knew Jason was out, but he checks the Campfire transcripts regularly to keep updated with the day-to-day. I made sure to upload the design showing the “free Campfire” conditional block so that he could give me some feedback.

Sam started integrating the HTML template while I was waiting for feedback from Jason. After all, what would he have a problem with? It was looking great and we were hoping to deploy it before the week was over. Sam was nearly finished with integration when I finally received feedback from Jason: We should break out that free Campfire message into a separate email.

Fuck really? OK I agree. But really? I mean I was hoping to get this out soon. Like today! I checked with Sam.

“I have to rework that email.”

Sam says, “That’s OK. I’ll deploy this. Just get me the free Campfire email next week.”

A recent Screens Around Town post prompted a healthy debate about crowdSPRING and designers working on spec. We invited crowdSPRING’s Ross Kimbarovsky to write more about the issue. Below is his response.

For those who haven’t heard about us: crowdSPRING is the creative marketplace, where buyers post creative projects (logos, websites, print design, illustrations, marketing materials, etc.) and instead of receiving bids and proposals, designers from around the world submit actual designs. Buyers choose the design they like. Since our launch in May 2008, 700 buyers from 30 countries have posted creative projects. Today over 6,100 designers from 130+ countries work on crowdSPRING. We’re in Chicago, a few blocks from 37signals. We make products we like (we used our own marketplace to design our site – the designer was a 20 year old student from the Netherlands) and we believe others will like them too.

Our business model differs from offline and online design shops and from other marketplaces. Because buyers on crowdSPRING select from actual designs, designers on crowdSPRING submit work on spec. “Spec” is a short name for doing any work on a speculative basis, without a prior agreement that you’ll be paid for your work.

Some in the design community object to work on spec. AIGA, the U.S. professional association for design discourages designers from doing work on spec. A few years ago, the NO!SPEC campaign was founded to organize people who object to work on spec.

When we started working on crowdSPRING in 2006, we noticed that some companies (iStockphoto, Threadless) were succeeding with business models that allowed professionals and non-professionals to fairly compete against each. Today, we believe even more strongly than we did in 2006 that there is an underground, underdog community of creatives that is shaping the Internet. They are the future. They’re writers and inventors, photographers and designers, musicians and coders. They post videos to YouTube, photos to iStockphoto, t-shirt designs to Threadless. They write great code.

The establishment has long held that these ‘amateurs’ – students and stay-at-home moms, freelancers and fed-up corporate refugees – are nothing more than a novelty and are not capable of competing with the ‘professionals.’ The establishment is wrong. The Internet has blurred the boundaries between professionals and non-professionals. The underdogs are challenging tradition in industry after industry. They are risk takers. They are true entrepreneurs. The underdogs compete on their ideas and their work, not education, training, and fancy offices. They make things they like and they hope that other people will like them too.

I’ve been randomly Twittering from our 37signals Twitter account for a few months now, but it’s time for me to go out on my own.

You can follow my personal thoughts on design, innovation, business, and other general daily observations at my jasonfried Twitter account.

Follow me!

Apparently there’s something worse than being despised and that is to be utterly irrelevant. Gruber hits it spot on in his commentary on Microsoft’s panic response to the mixed reception of the Seinfeld ads. A company that stands for nothing can not market themselves out of that position.

I actually liked Microsoft better when they stood for something. Even when that something was being a ruthless corporation hell-bent on world domination. Batman needs the Joker too.

It’s hard to imagine that the once mighty 800-pound gorilla in the room has been reduced to a mere monkey. A monkey with a $230B market cap, but a monkey no less.

I pity the marketers working the Microsoft account. There’s no way to win. If they go vague, they get people_ready. If they go edgy, they get panic and push back. Talk about a set of golden handcuffs.