In Beautiful Evidence, Edward Tufte says, “If you’re running a business, figure out how to pack a huge amount of information onto a single 11×17” sheet of paper and print it out on a laserprinter, then give it to decision makers. With that one sheet of paper, they will have as much information as 15 computer screenfuls or 300 PowerPoint slides.”

So why don’t more web sites do this? Occasionally you’ll see a dedicated one-page takeaway sheet (Left: Regonline offers a “One-Page Brochure” PDF in the sidebar). But usually a crappy print job is the best a visitor can do. That just doesn’t pack the same punch.

There’s an underlying issue here: Site builders often assume the person visiting a site is the one who actually makes the call on purchasing decisions. In real world business settings, that’s not always the way it works. The person who signs the checks often isn’t the most web savvy person or is too busy/apathetic to really dig into nitty gritty site details.

One-sheeters like Regonline’s can be left on the boss’ desk. In a lot of places, that can be the difference between being ignored and getting in the game.

Inspiration is like picking up one of those blinky things in a video game that makes you invincible for awhile. You can do anything, go anywhere, and you don’t have to worry about it.

Those blinky things exist in real life too. It may be a picture, or some words, or a sound, or a idea, or a mistake, or a moment. Whatever it is, pick it up and run with it. Run with it like you stole it.

You can’t bottle up inspiration. You can’t put it in a ziplock, toss it in the freezer, and fish it out later. It’s instantly perishable if you don’t eat it while it’s fresh.

On Friday I was inspired by a few things. I swore off the weekend and dove into it. And I got about 2 weeks of work done in 24 hours. Inspiration is a time machine.

Inspiration is a magical thing, a productivity multiplier, a motivator. But it won’t wait for you. Inspiration is a now thing. If it grabs you, grab it right back and put it to work.

NewsDesigner reports that one of the newspaper industry’s responses to sagging ad sales is adscapes.

‘Adscapes’ are the latest look in newspaper advertising. No longer are newspaper ads relegated to squares and rectangles. Today, advertisers can attract attention with a variety of shapes and sizes.

More examples in this PDF.

The thread features some designers complaining about the trend but commenter Robert Kruger counters:

Why do you think ad reps find it hard to sell the space they already have? Because newspapers are BORING. These new ads are an attempt to change that, to bring a little STYLE into a space dominated by little people stuck in their little boxes. Newspaper subscriptions aren’t down simply because of the internet, bad writing, and bias, they’ve also gone down because of the rigid aesthetic thought, as shown by the designers kvetching here.

This week’s Time magazine features a brief shoutout to 37signals as one of “Five hot sites to watch” and calls our products “elegant” and “easy to use.” It’s in a sidebar to The Next YouTubes article but since the sidebar isn’t shown in the online version of the story, here’s a look.

Related: 30boxes, also mentioned in the story, wonders why Google is slow to respond to the piece: “One would imagine that Time would be quickly included in Google News and then echo out from there, but 48 hours later, searching Google news won’t lead you to the Time article.”

Does computer-related activity really cause carpal tunnel syndrome?

“Most likely the disorder is due to a congenital predisposition – the carpal tunnel is simply smaller in some people than in others…There is little clinical data to prove whether repetitive and forceful movements of the hand and wrist during work or leisure activities can cause carpal tunnel syndrome.”

Marc Hedlund on baking cookies and caring about details

“But what I really do is pay a lot of attention to all the little parts of making cookies. How melty is the butter when I add it? Did the eggs get beaten to that particular fluffiness? When I put the cookies in, did the oven just stop heating to temperature, or did it just turn on again? How does the kitchen smell when the cookies are ready? That’s all there is to it. I like cookies enough that I give all of my attention to making them come out right. I pay attention to every step and how it affects the results.”

Beating the market by buying art

“In 1997, the Christie’s sale of 20th century art works from the estate of Victor and Sally Ganz netted more than $207 million, a record sum for a single-owner sale of art at auction…Over the period 1948 to 1997 the Ganzes earned real rates of return ranging from 12 to over 21 percent for works sold at the three auctions. Overall, the Ganzes beat – often by a wide margin — the returns from diversified portfolios of common stocks…Their financial success did not result from a few lucky purchases. They earned consistently high returns, regularly beating the stock market on works by different artists acquired at different time periods.”

NY Times implements subtle layout difference to indicate whether a story is news or opinion

“The Times has instituted a sweeping but subtle redesign, to emphasize the difference between objective and subjective journalism. Straight news will remain, well, straight: laid out in justified columns, with even margins on the left and right. Stories that have been colored by analysis, commentary or authorial whimsy will all receive the layout previously reserved for columns: a straight left margin and a ragged right one.” [via Newsdesigner]

Stellarium Astronomy Software

“Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.”

A giant FAQ database about Google by Googlers

“Google encourages all its employees to send things they learnt or want to share with coworkers as a snippet of five lines – no less, no more. The employees have to be very precise and focused. It can be anything from executing a simple task or if they figured out a better way of doing something that is part of their daily work. Or just an aha moment. All they have to do is email it in. Google then indexes all these emails and makes them searchable.”

In part three, our designers discuss recommended books and who/what’s overrated (e.g. Jonathan Ive, Getting Real, 2advanced, blog celebrities) and underrated (Nazarin Hamid, Jared Christiansen, Eric Jordan, scrolling).

Digg

Alex Foley on Digg’s “While you’re waiting, add your profile”:

Excellent way to avoid having a longer signup form. I filled out the second part without even thinking.

The Nonist

The Nonist blog gets aquatic/literal with its anchor icon.

Others Online

Joel writes:

I was looking at the Others Online product tour and found these two screens. They say: “Registering is easy! It’s not like those other sites where you have to add a bunch of content. Yeah, you just have to enter a screen name, password, birthdate, gender, country, postal code, email address, a friend’s email address…And then upload an image, type in your interests, your tagline and your various web addresses. Sure, it is (unfortunately) fairly standard to ask for all that on registration pages, but what’s interesting is that they claim to be very simple and better than “those other sites”.

Got an interesting screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Send the image and/or URL to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

We’ve been very hard at work overhauling and improving the tools on your Backpack pages. In the next few weeks we’ll release these new features, but first we wanted to give you a little preview of one of the major changes.

Once we release this update you’ll be able to move any list, note, image, file, etc. around on the page. You can put a note at the top, then a list, then a file, then another note, then a list, then another list, then a photo gallery, etc. You’ll be able to organize a page any way you’d like.

Check out this quick demo.

Stay tuned. We think you’ll like the improvements we have in store. They’re coming soon.

Wallflower at the Web Party details the rise and fall of Friendster. Though there’s a lot of finger pointing in the story, there’s also a lot to learn from the site’s bust. Some excerpts:

Founder Jonathan Abrams vows to never again accept a dime in venture capital.

Mr. Abrams believed that he had developed a sound business plan for building Friendster into an Internet powerhouse — and that the plan foundered when his well-known investors shoved him aside and proceeded to mess everything up…’Jonathan had all these high-powered investors to please. He had all this money in the bank, so there was all this pressure to hire people and get things done. Open up new territories: China, Japan, Germany. Add all these new features. Meantime, he took his eye off the ball.’

The company spent too much time worrying about new features instead of the poor performance of its existing site:

As Friendster became more popular, its overwhelmed Web site became slower. Things would become so bad that a Friendster Web page took as long as 40 seconds to download…[Yet] technical difficulties proved too pedestrian for a board of this pedigree. The performance problems would come up, but the board devoted most of its time to talking about potential competitors and new features, such as the possibility of adding Internet phone services, or so-called voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, to the site.

And they made the mistake of trying to solve exciting potential problems instead of real mundane ones.

In retrospect, Mr. Lindstrom said, the company needed to devote all of its resources to fixing its technological problems. But such are the appetites of companies fixated on growing into multibillion-dollar behemoths. They seek to run even before they can walk. “Friendster was so focused on becoming the next Google,” Professor Piskorski said, “that they weren’t focused on fixing the more mundane problems standing in the way of them becoming the next Google.”

More mistake stories:
Evan Williams: How Odeo Screwed Up
Actual lessons from Kiko
The top five mistakes entrepreneurs make when they market
Paul Graham’s list of 18 mistakes

Long live creative advertising.

(via ifun.ru)