Death metal band logos

Scary logos from Zyklon (Norway), Extreme Noise Terror (England), Vomitory (Sweden), Dead Infection (Poland), Regurgitate (Sweden), etc.

Netflix and fast iterations

“We make a lot of this stuff up as we go along. I’m serious. We don’t assume anything works and we don’t like to make predictions without real-world tests. Predictions color our thinking. So, we continually make this up as we go along, keeping what works and throwing away what doesn’t. We’ve found that about 90% of it doesn’t work.”

Kathy Sierra on how she makes her graphics

“People pay attention to graphics. They respond to graphics. They learn from graphics. If you want your readers/learners/audience to ‘get’ something as quickly and clearly as possible, use visuals. And you don’t have to be a graphic artist, designer, or information architect to put pictures in your presentation, post, or book. This post is my first attempt to categorize the kinds of graphics I do here, and offer tips for creating visuals that tell the story better and faster than words.” Related: The power of rough edges.

SmugMug saving big using S3

“Total amount NOT spent over the last 7 months: $423,686. Total amount spent on S3: $84,255.25. Total savings: $339,430.75. That works out to $48,490 / month, which is $581,881 per year…These are real, hard numbers after using S3 for 7 months, not our projections.”

LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy creates jogging-friendly track for Nike

“The DFA cofounder has just teamed up with Nike to release 45:33: Nike+ Original Run, a 45-plus-minute track designed to accompany joggers on their workouts. Displaying Murphy’s inimitable production style, the track has the dynamics and temporal ebb and flow of an eclectic DJ set, beginning with a long, warm-up segment, moving into a rousing Afrobeat crescendo, peaking with double-time disco, and finally coming back to earth on a parachute of cool, ambient synthesizers.”

In the final part of this chat, our guests discuss business models, companies they admire, influences, and businesses that don’t exist but should. (See part 1 or part 2.)

Choice quotes
Hedlund: “I just want to have a really clear and likely story for how money will show up. Step two can’t be "and then some magic happens"

Fletcher: “If you don’t have an audience, it doesn’t really matter what your biz model is.”

Hedlund: “I do think that the #1 thing that has helped me most is having and keeping friends who are talented.”

Hedlund: “Trust your gut more. When you read everyone in the newspaper saying one thing and your gut says something else, burn the newspaper.”

The waiting is the hardest part / Every day you see one more card / You take it on faith, you take it to the heart / The waiting is the hardest part (Tom Petty, The Waiting)

On a daily basis Comcast reminded me that the waiting is the hardest part.

I have a Comcast DVR. It recorded on time, the menus and interface were decent (I prefer TiVo’s UI, but Comcast’s is fine), and it was reliable.

But it was slow. Click fast forward and it felt like there was a 1-2 second delay. Hit stop and wait another 1-2 seconds. Sometimes more. The waiting killed the convenience. It was a frustration machine.

However, I just noticed that Comcast updated the software. Thankfully this happened behind the scenes so I didn’t have to do anything. Now menus selections are sharp, button clicking is crisp, and things happen when you ask them to happen. The experience is finally satisfying. The experience is what I’d expect.

Speed may have more to do with experience than anything else. Google knows this and thankfully Comcast finally gets it too. I applaud Comcast for spending time refining their existing product to make it faster instead of spending those resources on adding more functionality.

It’s rare that software gets faster with each release. Photoshop, Office, Quickbooks—these products seem to slow down with every new release. It’s nice to see Comcast bucking that trend.

So take a look at your own product or service. How can you make it faster? How can you reduce steps to the final outcome? How can you refine the experience to make it less frustrating? How can you make speed your newest feature?

This afternoon, the 1,000,000th person will be added to Basecamp. The account that registers this 1,000,000th person will be given a $500 credit towards their account. If that person isn’t part of a paying account, we’ll give the credit to the closest paying account over the 1,000,000 mark.

Last year Dion Hinchcliffe predicted that “37signals Will Cross The 1,000,000 User Mark” in 2006. We’re thrilled that Basecamp alone has passed this mark. Add in a few hundred thousand from Backpack, over 100,000 from Campfire, and a few hundred thousand from Ta-da List and we’ve got 2,000,000 in our sights next year.

A few notes about these numbers: 1) They represent all accounts, not just active accounts. We’re just counting raw numbers right now. 2) Some people may be counted twice. One person with logins in multiple Basecamp accounts is counted for each separate account. 3) These numbers group together paying and free accounts. We don’t share the number of paying customers we have. 4) These numbers have not been audited—we’re just running some simple DB queries to pull these numbers out.

All that being said, we’d like to thank everyone that made this possible! Special thanks goes out to our paying customers—thanks for trusting us to provide you with simple, focused tools that help you make your own business or team more profitable and efficient.

We’ve got some great stuff planned in 2007. We’re hard at work on it right now. Stay tuned, we think you’ll like it!

A clever yoga center straw.

This image for Penn & Teller is a nifty representation of the duo. The ampersand, usually a throw away character, becomes the star here with elements that match the performers’ personalities. The fat, curvy, loud part of it evokes Penn perfectly while the quiet little extender fits Teller to a tee.

(Aside: Where does the phrase “fit to a tee” come from? A couple of theories.)

If you dig this sort of witty design, check out the book A Smile in the Mind. It’s a neat resource for playful, creative design.

This book explores witty thinking — the most entertaining area of graphic design. Witty thinking is playfulness with ideas, words playing against images, unexpected connections prompting new insights. It is clever thinking, not funny drawing.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” describes flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas on flow stemmed from his attempt to discover a path to happiness. He wanted to figure out “how to live life as a work of art, rather than as a chaotic response to external events.”

“Flow” & Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses what it feels like to be in flow:

• Completely involved, focused, concentrating – with this either due to innate curiosity or as the result of training.
• Sense of ecstasy – of being outside everyday reality.
• Great inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done and how well it is going.
• Knowing the activity is doable – that the skills are adequate, and neither anxious or bored.
• Sense of serenity – no worries about self, feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of ego – afterwards feeling of transcending ego in ways not thought possible.
• Timeliness – thoroughly focused on present, don’t notice time passing.
• Intrinsic motivation – whatever produces “flow” becomes its own reward.

So how do you get there? Wikipedia’s entry on the subject says the following conditions help:

• Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernable).
• A high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
• Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
• Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
• A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
• The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.

Group environment matters too. A couple of flow friendly space attributes:

• Creative spatial arrangements: Chairs, pin walls, charts, however no tables, therefore primarily work in standing and moving.
• Playground design: Charts for information inputs, flow graphs, project summary, craziness, safe place (people can say what is usually only thought), result wall, and open topics.

Enemies of flow include fearing what other people think…

A major constraint on people enjoying what they are doing is always being conscious of a fear of how they appear to others and what these others might think. Ecstasy includes rising above these constraining concerns of the ego.

...and mundane daily routines.

Stepping outside of normal daily routines is an essential element…This might be obtained through diverse routes or activities, such as reading a novel or becoming involved in a film.

It’s the content, not the icons, my rant on social bookmarking icons at blogs, generated some interesting responses.

Effective icon usage
A few commenters challenged my flimsy evidence that icons aren’t effective — a fair complaint since my research, a quick scan of popular listings at Digg and Technorati, wasn’t exactly Woodward/Bernstein caliber. Others offered some traffic success stories…

Pete Ottery: “Yes, multitudes of these icons on every site everywhere gets tired real quick – but for us at news.com.au we decided to trial a few select ones at the bottom of articles (example). Informal number checking suggests there’s about 10 times more stories from news.com.au being posted on digg now since those buttons were placed there. (maybe 5 a week pre buttons, 50 a week immediately after buttons being placed.)”

Gina Trapani: “Actually, Lifehacker’s traffic has gone through the roof since we started placing the digg button on select featured posts. We go in and out of the Technorati top 10 regularly (at number 11 right now.) Forgive me if this sounds like horn-tooting. I bring it up only because you asked for evidence. Here it is. That said, we add the button by hand on only one post a day, our featured original content article, the one we want to promote most heavily. I agree that all those icons on every post is pretty ugly and generally ineffective.”

Note that both of these methods use a more restrained approach then the scattershot technique I was discussing (i.e. blogs that feature a laundry list of icons at the bottom of multiple posts on a single page). Moderate use of icons is a lot different then a smack-you-in-the-face-over-and-over approach.

I want vs. they want
Some of the comments also reminded me of the timeless challenge facing web site owners: balancing what you want vs. what your visitors want.

People who defended the usage of icons seemed to fixate on what they want from their site.

3spots: “Personally I’ve added them for several reasons: -For myself. (well I’ve mixed them up with other tools.) -To show which SBs I like. + By curiosity, even if there aren’t much users, to see which ones are the most used, how, why…”

Ben Edwards: “Maybe having the icon there adds just 5% more to the people who would Digg an article. Don’t you think that 5% is worth it to people trying to get a greater readership?”

I wonder if these “I want” arguments are being adequately measured against what “they want” though. The view from the visitor’s side often takes on a different shade…

Ben Darlow: “Every time I see a site that has a digg counter or ‘digg this’ link on its articles, my immediate thought is ‘Whore.’”

Bill: “As a Reddit user, I have to say that when submitting a link to a blog post or news article I’ve stumbled across, the ONLY important thing is the quality of the content…I’ve never clicked on one of these buttons – I mean, how arrogant can you get.”

Part 2 of our chat with Mark Fletcher and Marc Hedlund (read Part 1 or Part 3).

Choice quotes
Fletcher: “People thought Bloglines had a lot of employees, when I was really the only full-time person up until 3 months before the acquisition (I don’t recommend that, btw. Too stressful)...Another reason to not go it alone, I think, is that in the case of an acquisition, the company is more valuable to the acquirer if there are at least a few employees (to avoid the hit by a bus syndrome, etc).”

Hedlund: “I think there’s hardly ever a bad time to start a good company that really helps people…In ‘bad times’ you have lower rents/salaries, and in ‘good times’ you can’t spend the easy money fast enough to get the stuff you really need.”

Fried: “The biggest mistake I see people making is raising their expectations too high too early by raising money. Obscurity is a very good thing when you are getting started.”

Fletcher: “Money is oxygen for startups, you never want to run out of it.”

Full transcript below.

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A collection of graphics shown at news sites at 11:20pm (EST) last night as election results were coming in…

The Washington Post tightly integrated the headline with the graphic (most of the other sites had the graphic sitting on its own with no text explanation). Also, the color blocks moving left or right to the line in the middle was an effective method to display the “prize” and how far away each side was from it.

USA Today also did a good job of providing text context with a headline. But it confusingly stacked color bars (one for this race on top of another for current seats) and used poorly placed labels to try to explain it.

The NY Times made visitors choose between House and Senate graphics. And the blank white area made it look like a few states in the northwest had disappeared (or been taken over by Canada).

CNN used different colors within blocks but didn’t explain what they meant.

The Chicago Tribune offered this plain jane graphic.

The LA Times version was also pretty plain but at least provided context by showing the net change in addition to the current numbers.

While we’re on the subject, let’s pause to remember the glory days of Tim Russert and his trusty whiteboard.