Have a tough time choosing the right title for what you do? Design pioneer Alvin Lustig (1915-1955) felt your pain:

The words ‘graphic designer,’ ‘architect,’ or ‘industrial designer’ stick in my throat giving me a sense of limitation, of specialization within the specialty, or a relationship to society that is unsatisfactory and incomplete. This inadequate set of terms to describe an active life reveals only partially the still undefined nature of a designer.

Who is Lustig? He doesn’t get as much attention as some other influential designers, but his book designs revolutionized the field:

The current preference among American book jacket designers for fragmented images, photo-illustration, minimal typography and rebus-like compositions can be traced directly to Lustig’s stark black-and-white cover for Lorca, a grid of five symbolic photographs linked in poetic disharmony…

When Lustig’s approach was introduced to American book publishing in the late 1940s, covers and jackets were mostly illustrative and also rather decorative. Hard-sell conventions were rigorously followed. Lustig’s jacket designs entered taboo marketing territory through his use of abstraction and small, discreetly typeset titles, influenced by the work of Jan Tschichold. Lustig did not believe it was necessary to “design down,” as he called it, to achieve better sales.

Lustig even managed to continue designing after he went blind:

One of Lustig’s great strengths, which made it possible for him to continue to work despite his blindness, was his honed ability to visualize the problem before him in both two and three dimensions. Even at the end of his life he was actively designing everything he could, including advertisements, by dictating what he saw in his mind’s eye to his assistants who transcribed his words into concrete form.

There’s more interesting text about him and lots of work examples at alvinlustig.org.

On Writing posts show interesting copy from around the web.

Ambrosia Shaving Cream
Ambrosia Shaving Cream has some smooth copy:

This is the cream for sensitive faces, those that get so red and sore after shaving that it almost makes you want to grow a beard (well, almost!). Don’t expect it to lather; leaving out the soap is one way that we make it so mild. Don’t use it to shave by sight; it’s transparent. DO expect it to give you a smooth, close shave by softening the bristles with linseed and coca butter. Do expect it to leave your skin calm and smooth because of the honey, chamomile and marigold oil. This stuff makes mornings bearable; it changes lives.

Mosquito Trap Kit
The Mosquito Trap Kit provides a low-tech solution (a box fan plus a net) to a common problem (mosquitos).

Sid McCarty, the inventor of Skeeterbag, was a box fan virtuoso regulating the temperatures for every plant, animal, and dwelling the farm had to offer. Ventilating the puppy nursery one morning Sid suddenly noticed that all the mosquitoes had disappeared.  He figured out that the fans were sucking the mosquitoes out of the building.  Then he had an idea.  That night he fashioned a simple mosquito net bag to the blowing end of a box fan and set it on the porch by the dogs to see what would happen.   He and the kids counted out over 2,300 dead and dying mosquitoes in the bag the very next morning and rediscovered the porch for the first time since mosquito season started.   My name is Mark Valentine and I came to Florida to test, develop, and turn my cousin’s idea into Skeeterbag.  I couldn’t stand the thought of such a good idea not being shared with the world.

The site’s old description explained that “catching Mosquitoes is a lot easier than catching customers.”

I have learned that having a product that actually works 100% of the time is not believable. I have learned that the average customer would rather have a product that looks super cool, costs a ton of money, and doesn’t come close to doing what it says it will do more than a product that actually works and doesn’t look like much at all.

Coudal Partners
Coudal Partners is a design, advertising and interactive studio in Chicago. From corporate identity design to new business concepts to creative publishing, Coudal has pioneered the model of a modern design agency.

Michele Seiler shares how they use Basecamp to manage up to 100 client projects at a time.

Threadless
Threadless is an ongoing tee shirt design competition and retail site that sells 90,000 funky shirts every month. The site’s community is thriving with over 300,000 people signed up to score designs.

Jake Nickell, CEO, and Jeffrey Kalmikoff, Chief Creative Officer, explain how Basecamp has increased productivity at Threadless.

OrganizedWisdom
OrganizedWisdom is a health-focused, social-networking site that enables consumers, physicians, healthcare professionals, and health organizations to collaborate on thousands of health topics.

Steven Krein, CEO, and Unity Stoakes, President, explain how Basecamp helps them spend more time executing and less time managing.

See all the videos.

Dean Kamen's commencement speech at Bates College

“You are moving for the first time into a world where ideas matter more than all the stuff there is. But those ideas have to come from educated people and they have to be used as a tool and not as a weapon. That’s the biggest change that’s happening…So I would beg every educated person in this world to remember, every day when you get up, that you are an incredibly small minority of all humanity. And with all the privileges I understand it gives us, I think it gives us an enormous responsibility to be leaders that do the right things for the right reasons. And remember that you can be doing good while you are doing well.”

Craig Newmark podcast interview

“Everything on the site is based on user feedback. Frankly, I have no vision whatsoever.” Other interesting Craigslist facts: Seven billion pageviews a month, the company has never had a tech quit in 12 years, they never hold meetings.

Edward Tufte takes his next book to Real-land

“No more staring at pixels on the screen. More staring at…what’s going into Real-land. Movies, books, DVDs—I don’t know. It’s called ‘walking, seeing, and constructing,’ and it’s now in Spaceland. No more representations. Instead of designing with Adobe Illustrator, I’m designing with a Komatsu excavator.”

YouTube Presidential debate

“We’re moving to a society that is video-based from one that is text-based, whether we like it or not. Candidates are starting to recognize that the only way to fight the potential of the tsunami of voter-generated video is to produce lots of video themselves. The Internet culture recognizes that Internet video is more authentic, more granular, less scripted than television, and it is an antidote to sound-bite politics.”

Having a mindset of constant criticism

“You have to reshape your mind until you’re finding fault with everything…And as you fix more and more of these little details, as you polish and shape and shine and craft the little corners of your product, something magical happens. The inches add up to feet, the feet add up to yards, and the yards add up to miles. And you ship a truly great product. The kind of product that feels great, that works intuitively, that blows people away.”

I’ve always preferred sketching UIs with an as-thick-as-I-can-find Sharpie over a thin ballpoint pen or finely sharpened pencil.

Ballpoints and fine tips just don’t fill the page like a Sharpie does. Fine tips invite you to draw while Sharpies invite you to just to get your concepts out into big bold shapes and lines. When you sketch with a thin tip you tend to draw at a higher resolution and worry a bit too much about making things look good. Sharpies encourage you to ignore details early on.

If you sketch, try a thick Sharpie next time. You may find you’re better able to focus on the concept and less on the drawing. That’s a good thing.

Crate and Barrel

Crate and Barrel offers typical product shots and also “room views” that show the product in a real context. Example: Calphalon Cookware.

Amazon

Nice touch at Amazon to disable the overnight button and explain why.

Ticketweb

Oh Ticketweb, you know my interests so well!

Here comes Cover Flow
As the world gets iPhonified and Leopardized, get ready for more Cover Flow (video), the scrolling interface with forward/backward arrows that mimics a CD collection or jukebox selection.

Jobs spent much of his talk showing how Leopard will help users more efficiently find files. Leopard’s new Finder will include Cover Flow, a new way to navigate through folders. Borrowed from iTunes, Cover Flow will let you flip through documents in the Finder, just like you can flip through songs in your iTunes library.

New Apple.com subnav
In a nod to this trend, Apple is using a scrolling horizontal subnav at the redesigned Apple.com:

Horizontal scrolling doesn’t often get this sort of prime time play since, as Jakob Nielsen puts it, users hate horizontal scrolling and “always” comment negatively when they encounter it.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp links Kidrobot’s NYC designers to manufacturers in China
In “The New Instant Companies,” Business 2.0 talks about how Kidrobot, a retailer of limited edition art toys and apparel, saves tens of thousands of dollars and tons of time by using Basecamp to collaborate with its engineers in China.

Highrise tags help you drill down to specific contacts
Tags are a great way to harness the power of Highrise and help you drill down to a specific group.

Improved date picker for Basecamp Milestones
We just pushed a Basecamp update that includes a long top-requested feature: A calendar date picker for milestones. Now when you add a new milestone, or edit an existing milestone, you pick the date from a calendar instead of a series of pulldown menus.

My son loves toy catalogs. He’ll turn the pages and just imagine. He drinks the koolaid, and loves every minute of it. I love to watch him.

I hope he never gets to the point where he thumbs through a catalog and scoffs. Where he reads the descriptions and cynically dares them to be true. I want him to always retain his sense of wonder, his desire to believe the best.

What has happened to our optimism? I’m sure all of us can recall many a childhood hour spent thumbing through dog-eared toy catalogs, dreaming. How many of us still do? Why are we now so quick to shout “hype” at every new development? Why are we so afraid to believe? “Meh, it’s just another X.” “So-and-so did that years ago.” “I’ll believe it when I see it.“

I’ve found myself slipping down that poisonous slope recently. I’ve started to reevaluate, and I think I’d rather follow my son. Perhaps it’s not too late to recapture some of that childhood optimism.

TeamSnap is a smart new Rails-based product that lets people manage recreational or youth-league sports team online.

Anybody who’s coached or played on a recreational adult sports team or youth sports team knows how hard it can be to keep track of all the players, games, and team payments. TeamSnap takes the headache out of team sports by making it simple to manage your sports team online.

It’s well done too. Useful concept, great presentation, attention to detail, smart marketing site, nice buttons/icons, friendly, etc.

Some screenshots:

Nice buttons and icons.

Thoughtful blank slate.

“Andy” guides you through the team settings process.