We’re often victims of design piracy. Roughly once a week someone emails us with an anonymous tip that someone has ripped off our “UI look and feel” and is using it for their own site or their own app. It’s amazing what people and businesses think they can get away with.

We send the violators an email letting them know they can’t take our work, our words, our code, or our design. 98% of the time the violators respond favorably and take the design down or alter it sufficiently that it’s no longer recognizable as our design. 1% of the time it takes a few emails before they acquiesce. And 1% of the time it requires legal intervention.

A blank canvas

They usually apologize by saying they didn’t know it was wrong or that their hired design firm did it. But then sometimes they say “Come on, how many different ways are there to design a web page or a web app?” That infuriates me. The web browser is a blank canvas. A big empty box that can hold almost anything. Fill it with something original, something you can call your own.

Inspiration in time

Whenever I run into designer’s block or just need visual design inspiration I turn to the world of wrist watches. I’ve posted on this topic before, but it comes up again often so I figured I’d hit it again.

A tiny canvas with endless possibilities

A wrist watch is a tiny canvas with something to keep that canvas tied to your wrist. It’s just a couple inches round or square or triangular. It has a fixed, common purpose: Tell time. The rules of time are understood. 24 hours in a day, usually displayed as 12. Your brain can tell if it’s AM or PM.

And yet somehow, with these physical and practical constraints, watch design flourishes. From analog to digital to a combination of the two, tens of thousands of designs are born. Different type, different proportions, different shapes, different perspectives, different indicators, different buttons, different bezels, etc. Fresh new designs hit the market all the time. Here are about a hundred different interpretations of the same question: “What time is it right now?”

If watch designers can do it, web designers can do it

So if someone can make a 2” circle look unique, you can make a million pixels look unique. Don’t sell yourself short. Don’t think there’s only a few ways to display content. Don’t think there’s only a couple ways to style a sidebar. Don’t think there’s only a couple different designs for a header with tabs. Don’t think a list always has to look the same or there’s only one way to distinguish time-sensitive information. Don’t think there’s only a couple ways to call something out as important or high priority.

As a web designer you have a lot more options and variables and possibilities than a watch designer. Build something that’s yours. Make something you can call your own. Make your own mark. Cut the excuses and be a designer.

Indesit MOON
From: Tom Martin

I know it’s hard to get excited about a washing machine but I just saw the Indesit MOON and was amazed it only had FOUR buttons.

It also has this little ring that works like a progress bar, so you can just glace and see how long the cycle has left.

You should spread the word that washing machines have become simple!

Simplicity In UX
From: Shawn Oster

Thought you’d enjoy this as Kynan Antos also subscribes to the less is more school of thought:

Simplicity In UX

4. Remove everything possible (this will be controversial, expect to work outside your comfort zone) (Things to remove – text, iconography, features, unnecessary configuration, or settings, etc…)

He’s also posting his early UI prototypes for the WHS project, nice to see the evolution.

Bad product design in everyday life
From: Jeff Patterson

Interesting thread on poor product design at Straight Dope.

There were many things there I had never thought to be irritated about, and now I am. Well done, SDMB.

New Highrise feature: Filter by multiple tags
Tonight we added one of the top feature requests to Highrise: Selecting multiple tags. Now you can filter your contacts and related notes by more than one filter. For example, selecting “Lead” and “2007” and “Design” will show you your contacts that match all three tags.

Hit End, Home, or Page Up/Down keys while dragging to save time
Mac OS X customers can use keyboard navigation while dragging items in Backpack in order to avoid scrolling. Hit the End, Home, or Page Up/Down keys while dragging and save yourself the hassle of having to scroll a lot.

Campfire helps Futuretrack5 collaborate across time zones
“What email is to mail, campfire is to teams. We connected on a whole new level. The simplicity of Campfire is ideal for group chat. Unlike IM which tends to be one-on-one, Campfire is like well…sitting around a campfire! Rather than roasting marshmallows, we burned through getting work done…We exchanged ideas, swapped stories & posted photos of ourselves (the way file sharing is implemented is incredible).”

Tag tab and streams in Highrise
Tags in Highrise are now accessible through the dedicated Tag tab and we’ve added streams that let you see all the notes from people tagged with a certain tag. This is a great way to get an overview of all the communication you’ve had with, say, “Leads” or people in “Marketing”. Tags now have their own permanent pages as well and will show up as tabs when you access them.

An ad for a dog walker tacked to a tree.

.Mac

Neat feature of .Mac web mail: Each line item in the inbox has a little reply icon. You can click that to send a quick reply. Just type text and hit Send. No need to bother with the to, from, subject fields…just type the reply and go.

Twitter

Twitter elicits better support queries with specific entry fields for “This is what I DID,” “This is what I EXPECTED to happen,” and “This is what ACTUALLY happened.”

Swerve Festival

This Swerve Festival screens has cool background images in the top, left, lower-left and lower-right corners. Along with the centered content, they give the page a neat, sorta old-fashioned picture-frame quality.

Netflix goes for phone over email support

“Netflix set up shop [for its call center in Oregon] a year ago, shunning other lower-cost places in the United States and overseas, because it thought that Oregonians would present a friendlier voice to its customers. Then in July, Netflix took an unusual step for a Web-based company: it eliminated e-mail-based customer service inquiries. Now all questions, complaints and suggestions go to the Hillsboro call center, which is open 24 hours a day. The company’s toll-free number, previously buried on the Web site, is now prominently displayed.”

Prototype JavaScript framework: Prototype 1.6.0 release candidate

“The first release candidate of Prototype 1.6.0 has arrived! The core team is continuing its tradition of bringing thoughtful incremental upgrades to the core APIs in addition to performance improvements and bug fixes. Keep reading for some of the highlights of this major release, or download it now for instant gratification.”

Why you should keep your landing pages simple

“In every case, landing page effectiveness and measured conversion increased significantly when choices and unnecessary distractions were eliminated — and the overall design and orientation of the page emphasized the call to action.”

Indian retailer succeeds with designed clutter

“So Mr. Biyani redesigned his stores to make them messier, noisier and more cramped. ‘The shouting, the untidiness, the chaos is part of the design,’ he says, as he surveys his Mumbai store where he just spent around $50,000 to replace long, wide aisles with narrow, crooked ones: ‘Making it chaotic is not easy.’ Even the dirty, black-spotted onions serve a function. For the average Indian, dusty and dirty produce means fresh from the farm, he says. Indian shoppers also love to bargain. Mr. Biyani doesn’t allow haggling, but having damaged as well as good quality produce in the same box gives customers a chance to choose and think they are getting a better deal. ‘They should get a sense of victory,’ he says.”

Tips on working from the most popular productivity bloggers

“Here are a handful of tips on working from the most popular productivity bloggers on the internet, along with bloggers on organization, the environment and more. Instead of blathering, we will summarize and then allow you to read more if indeed you think a point is up your alley.”

Before we launched the new Backpack a few weeks ago, we used to present new accounts with a Primer attached to the top of their Backpack home page.

The Primer was a cross between quick tips, a brief explanation of some of the stuff you can do with Backpack, and links to key features. Here’s what it looked like:

This worked well enough, but there were a few problems…

1. It took up a lot of space and pushed the key Backpack feature buttons (notes, lists, files, etc) on the home page down below the fold.
2. It could be hidden, but once it was hidden it was gone forever. The position of the primer encouraged people to hide it instead of keep it around for reference.
3. It made a weird first impression. The simple, clean, white page metaphor was marred by a big yellow box at the top. The name of the page (“Home page”) was no longer at the top of the page.

Welcome the Welcome Tab

We introduced the Welcome Tab when we launched Highrise earlier this year. It’s worked out really well so we decided to reuse the concept in Backpack.

The Welcome Tab in Backpack provides even more information than the old Primer, but it doesn’t get in your way. You can keep the tab around for reference as long as you’d like without it cluttering up your pages or pushing down your content. And when you’re ready you can hide the tab permanently if you’d like.

The tab is the first option in the nav bar. You can revisit it anytime if you need a quick refresher course in the basics of Backpack. It also serves as a crude site map of some of key administrative features, links to the help section, links to change your color scheme, change reminder settings, and more.

We think this is a great solution to a common scenario—getting people started but keeping the “getting started” info around for later.

John Gruber’s illuminating review of the C4 conference called out a great line by Wil Shipley:

“This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details.”

That’s the best descriptive I’ve heard of any product, project, person, or object. A collection of tiny details.

Details pile up. One influences another. One often makes another possible (or impossible).

If you stack up a bunch of great little details you have a great shot at a great product. If you stack up a bunch of poorly executed details you have a great shot at a mediocre or bad product.

Of course cohesion doesn’t happen for free. You can’t just pile up a bunch of details and expect a perfect whole any more than you can pile up a bunch of bricks and expect the Taj Mahal, but carefully considered details do set the tone for a great product.

Just be careful and don’t get bogged down on the details early on.

Detour is a look at Moleskine notebooks by an international collection of artists, designers, architects, illustrators, and writers. This video shows designer Paula Scher’s notebook, which is filled with funky fonts:

More of the notebooks online at these sites: London Detour and New York Detour.

Related: Picasso, Paula Scher, and the lifetime behind every second [SvN]

We’ve previously mentioned Ask The Wizard, the biz advice blog of FeedBurner founder Dick Costolo, but it’s worth another mention for its wise and winning posts. Aspiring entrepreneurs should listen up.

Too Many Companies? explains why Dick feels there’s a 90% chance the initial business model is wrong. The solution? You’ve just got to start peddling and see what happens.

On a psychological level, I think a lot of people confuse fear of failure with not having enough confidence in the ultimate success of their idea. They thus conclude that they aren’t confident enough in their idea or their strategy because it seems to have holes and flaws for which they don’t have answers. This is a tremendous mistake. While I won’t pretend to speak for the entrepreneurs I mentioned above, I bet if you asked them if they were confident on day 1 that they had a winner with each of their previous successes, they would look at you sideways and say “of course not”. Speaking for myself, I can say that my cofounders and I try to find a market opportunity that seems like it will need to be addressed and for which we think we have some angle and then we just pull out shovels and start digging and figure other things out as we go.

Personally, I know going into any new company that there is a 90% chance we have the business model wrong on day 1. I also know that I have a historically poor track record for understanding what will and won’t attract customers or defeat competition (I didn’t get Twitter when Obvious Corp first launched it without an “e” in the name, I thought eBay would be out of business in six months after Amazon launched auctions, and I was certain Netscape would crush Microsoft in the browser wars because Netscape was more nimble). But the opposite of ‘fear of failure’ isn’t confidence. The opposite of ‘fear of failure’ is just not bothering to think about failure (BIG difference between this and thinking about risk profile for your idea/company)...

The key is to just get on the bike, and the key to getting on the bike is not the confidence in knowing you will be successful if you do x,y,z. The key to getting on the bike is to stop thinking about “there are a bunch of reasons i might fall off” and just hop on and peddle the damned thing. You can pick up a map, a tire pump, and better footwear along the way.