The Guardian’s series on great buildings
Scott Matthewman writes:

In the UK, the Guardian newspaper has been bundling a free poster each day highlighting one of the world’s great modern buildings. They started with some of the most obvious, the Empire State, Sydney Opera House, etc. and today have included the 1930s-built Arnos Grove station on the London Underground.

As well as including original design blueprints, the posters contain a wealth of information putting the design of each building into historical context, most of which is also online (there’s a Flash-based interactive presentation of some of the buildings in the series available from that address, too).

I particularly thought you might enjoy the five design principles that WS Graff-Baker stuck to when designing new train carriages for the Underground:

1. Will it work? 2. Is it as simple as possible? 3. Could it easily be maintained in service? 4. Can it be manufactured? 5. Does it look well?

Something tells me you guys would have got on well with him.

Saying more by saying less
Neal Shaffer writes:

Thought you might take an interest in this post I just put up, as it deals generally with some of the same issues you tackle now and then on SVN:

Saying more by saying less: “Since you usually can’t simply dispatch with the fool, either online or in person, what do you do? You let him have his say, and leave it at that.”

Bad support info
Jose Espinal writes:

I would definitely like you to check this (Amusing But Sad Video Shows Verizon Reps Misquoting Rates 93 Percent of the Time) out.

I used to work for a communications company in a call center and the same happened with my colleagues, what happens is just some people don’t take their time to get to know the system they’re working nor they don’t know how to use it to look-up this type of information.

Pantone's color of the year is Blue Iris

“Pantone selected PANTONE 18-3943 Blue Iris, a beautifully balanced blue-purple, as the color of the year for 2008. Combining the stable and calming aspects of blue with the mystical and spiritual qualities of purple, Blue Iris satisfies the need for reassurance in a complex world, while adding a hint of mystery and excitement.”

Clever thinking: reCAPTCHA uses captchas to digitize books

“reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.”

“People who design products are experts cursed by their knowledge”

The curse of knowledge = When we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. “It’s why engineers design products ultimately useful only to other engineers. It’s why managers have trouble convincing the rank and file to adopt new processes. And it’s why the advertising world struggles to convey commercial messages to consumers. ‘I HAVE a DVD remote control with 52 buttons on it, and every one of them is there because some engineer along the line knew how to use that button and believed I would want to use it, too,’ Chip Heath says. ‘People who design products are experts cursed by their knowledge, and they can’t imagine what it’s like to be as ignorant as the rest of us.’”

Why Starbucks actually helps mom and pop coffeehouses

“The key for independent coffeehouse owners who want to thrive with a Starbucks next-door is that they don’t try to imitate Starbucks. (As many failed coffee chains can attest, there’s no way to beat Starbucks at being Starbucks.) The locally owned cafes that offer their own unique spin on the coffeehouse experience — and, crucially, a quality brew — are the ones that give the Seattle behemoth fits.”

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Knickers, the lingerie weblog, uses 37signals products to manage its team
“The logistics of organising and keeping in touch between the three of us were a nightmare at first – two of us are in Scotland and our writer is in the States, and both Katie and Alison aren’t tech saavy and react with suspicion to any new technology I turn them onto. I needed a way to capture their work and keep it organised, so I slowly started introducing 37S tools to them – we started with Backpack for writing business plans and doing research, then moved into Highrise to keep a ‘collective inbox’ and mailing list, then finally to Campfire to generally stay in touch.”

Knickers’ Highrise Dashboard.

Highrise and 37signals “set the standard for web 2.0 apps”
Highrise is one of Lifehack.org’s 11 Top New Web Apps of 2007: “37signals sets the standard for web 2.0 apps, so you know it’s good: clean design, a highly functional interface, and interconnectivity with other 37signals apps.”

Use calendar colors in Backpack to “pencil” in events
In Backpack’s Calendar, the different calendar colors are a great way to differentiate events in this way. Use gray for maybe events and blue for definite events. Then you’ll be able to see, at a glance, which events are merely “penciled” in. Plus, you can change an event from maybe to definite by just changing the event’s calendar (located in the pulldown menu next to the event).

How marketing consultant Jon Moss and his clients rely on Highrise
“My first major contract is for a high end watch and diamond jewellery business called Ian Blowers Jewellers. Whilst they are a very successful, small, family business, one of the key areas they needed improvement was customer data and communication. This is where Highrise fitted in perfectly! As well as working with customer information, I am also looking after their rebranding, new websites and also general marketing, so Basecamp is the perfect tool for keeping people within the business up to date with what is going on, and what needs to be done.”

Consumerist praises 37signals customer support
“37signals, the company behind the affordable online project management service Basecamp, has some of the fastest customer service we’ve ever seen: twice over the past year, they’ve responded in near-real-time to support questions with helpful, non-canned responses. We’re so used to big companies that sacrifice customer service in the name of profit, or small companies that aren’t prepared to handle queries, that it’s nice to come across a company that does it well.”

Subscribe to the Product Blog RSS feed.

Patagonian founder talks about breaking the rules

“In an exclusive excerpt from his new management guide, Let My People Go Surfing, Patagonia’s contrarian founder talks about breaking the rules—and creating the world’s most iconoclastic adventure-apparel company.”

Video: Trajan is the Movie Font

“Movie poster designers: It’s time to start seeing other fonts.”

Mario Batali on big words and the mass market

“He said the Food Network recently proposed a couple of new projects for him, including one where he would be host of a reality show, and that he would discuss them with the executives in January. ‘I’m not averse to working with them,’ he said. Still, Mr. Batali said, ‘They don’t need me. They have decided they are mass market and they are going after the Wal-Mart crowd,’ which he said was ‘a smart business decision. So they don’t need someone who uses polysyllabic words from other languages.’”

Book: “The Elements of Persuasion”

“All successful stories have five basic elements: the Passion with which the story is told, a Hero who leads us through the story and allows us to see it through his or her eyes, an Antagonist or obstacle that the hero must overcome, a moment of Awareness that allows the hero to prevail, and the Transformation in the hero and in the world that naturally results. In their book, The Elements of Persuasion, consultants and media professionals Robert Dickman and Richard Maxwell explore the underlying principles of storytelling and show how these principles work together to help people in the real world.”

Seen a great mobile web app interface? Link it up.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

CSV2vCard helps import contacts from Excel into Highrise
Highrise imports contacts from Outlook and ACT but not Excel. But there’s a way around this: You can save Excel spreadsheets as CSV files (or get a CSV file from another unsupported source) and use CSV2vCard to make vCards, which Highrise accepts.

Publish your Christmas Wishlist at Backpack
“All I have to say is: wow. SO MUCH EASIER. All I do is e-mail everyone a link to the public page and boom, I’m done. I can even take pictures on my phone and e-mail them (and list additions) to the page and have it updated for me. Fan-freakin’-tastic.”

Subscribe to Basecamp project feeds via email with Nourish
Want to get a summary of your Basecamp projects emailed to you? Then check out Nourish, a newsletter service which allows you to take any RSS feed from content you publish (like a blog) and convert it into an automated email newsletter readers can subscribe to.

Nourish’s Basecamp theme

New 37signals Twitter stream
We’re experimenting with a Twitter stream: Twitter.com/37status. We plan on posting status updates for 37signals products, occasional links to interesting posts, and, well, we’ll see.

Subscribe to the Product Blog RSS feed.

About “The Whale Hunt” interface (by Jonathan Harris)

“The Whale Hunt website was developed as an experimental interface for storytelling. Given an epic real world story, with lots of content and lots of metadata, how can the narrative be faithfully retold? The project presented a number of interesting design problems, including: how to present a large set of photographs (3,214) online while keeping download times relatively brief; how to express both the topography of the entire narrative and the ways in which any single moment fits into that narrative; how to extract and reveal the many substories occuring within the context of the larger story; how to convey the many feelings experienced on the hunt (boredom, fatigue, curiosity, excitement, exhaustion, sublime beauty); and more generally how to restage an epic real world experience on the Internet.”

Tracing business acumen to dyslexia

“It has long been known that dyslexics are drawn to running their own businesses, where they can get around their weaknesses in reading and writing and play on their strengths. But a new study of entrepreneurs in the United States suggests that dyslexia is much more common among small-business owners than even the experts had thought. The report found that more than a third of the entrepreneurs she had surveyed — 35 percent — identified themselves as dyslexic. The study also concluded that dyslexics were more likely than nondyslexics to delegate authority, to excel in oral communication and problem solving and were twice as likely to own two or more businesses.”

Building a blue collar web business

“Simple e-commerce sites in small niche markets that only have a market potential of a few million dollars is not the arena for the Dagny Taggarts of the world. Most big thinkers are sitting the whole day in coffee shops trying to napkin-scratch the next wave of social bookmarking or envisioning how blogs will work in Web 4.0 on the hopes that it gets bought up by Google even though it never brought in a dime of revenue. There’s something very traditional, almost blue collar, about building a commerce site and trying to make money the old fashioned way by selling goods for a little more than you paid for them.”

Billboard uses “audio spotlight” to talk to passersby

“The billboard uses technology manufactured by Holosonic that transmits an ‘audio spotlight’ from a rooftop speaker so that the sound is contained within your cranium. The technology, ideal for museums and libraries or environments that require a quiet atmosphere for isolated audio slideshows, has rarely been used on such a scale before.”

Some recent activity at the internal 37signals Campfire chat room.

New feature at Amazon

Jason F.	Neat new feature on Amazon…
Jason F.
Jason F.	"Most Helpful" good and bad review
Mark I.	I noticed that the other day. Amazon felt like it didn’t change much for a long time, but over the past several months they’ve made a bunch of nice tweaks.
Jason F.	I like their redesign.
Mark I.	Just renewed my Amazon Prime membership the other day.
Mark I.	It’s such a no-brainer.
Mark I.	I ordered four gifts for my kids the other day, one at a time and didn’t worry about bundling the purchases up to save shipping.
Mark I.	That’s the one feature I really want that they won’t give me: the ability to filter results by Prime status.
Jeremy K.	Mark – you can limit Seller to Amazon.com
Mark I.	I didn’t realize that.

Full Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in 37signals.

EVDO

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Great Campfire tips (and more) from New Leaders
“New Leaders is a team of designers and developers working all over the country focused on building high quality, Rails-based web applications for our customers. Talent knows no boundaries — we have team members that work from many different places and Campfire allows everyone to communicate on a regular basis. It acts as our virtual office and provides a centralized place for us to talk and make sure everything is on track.”

Basecamp permission system improved
We’ve made some significant, oft-requested improvements to the Basecamp permissions system. These changes should speed up your workflow and make giving/removing access to collaborators simpler, easier, and more consistent.

Use Basecamp as a sales tool
Basecamp customers often tell us the product is a great sales tool for them. Some pitch potential clients by showing them Basecamp and how they use it to collaborate effectively. Others go ahead and set up a client project before they’ve even won the account; Showing a live, functional project site helps build momentum and gives a leg up over slower-moving competitors. Basetwo Media goes a step further: The company’s new site promotes Basecamp as part of its marketing strategy.

Early products by James Dyson

“James Dyson’s first product, the Sea Truck, was launched in 1970 while he was studying at the Royal College of Art. A few years later came the award-winning Ballbarrow that can go where no wheelbarrow has ever been before. Then there was the Wheelboat and the Trolleyball. Even the integral hose, seen on most upright vacuum cleaners, is a Dyson invention.”

Building loyalty with the long wow

“True loyalty grows within people based on a series of notable interactions they have, over time, with a company’s products and services. No card-carrying programs are necessary: Apple doesn’t have a traditional loyalty program; neither does Nike or Harley-Davidson. These companies impress, please, and stand out in the minds of their customers through repeated, notably great experiences.”

Joel on installable software

“Making an elegantly-designed and easy-to-use application is just as gnarly, even though, like good ballet, it seems easy when done well. Jason and 37signals put effort into good design and get paid for that. Good design seems like the easiest thing to copy, but, watching Microsoft trying to copy the iPod, turns out to be not-so-easy. Great design is a gnarly problem, and can actually provide surprisingly sustainable competitive advantage.”

Turtles all the way down

“For Hawking, the turtle story is one of two accounts of the nature of the universe; he asserts that the turtle theory is patently ridiculous, but admits that his own theories may be just as ridiculous. ‘Only time will tell,’ he concludes.”

The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks

Pretty self-”explanatory.”

Nike’s Phil Knight at Stanford

“But it was around that time that Mr. Knight was surfacing anew in the classroom. Though not registered as a student, Mr. Knight has periodically taken classes with Stanford undergraduates over the past three years, swapping homework assignments and even going out with fellow students for a few beers at Palo Alto bars. He has told fellow students that he is writing a novel.”

About blogs on the Kindle

“If Amazon charged a monthly connection fee for the Kindle and made blogs free, instead, no one would complain (about the blog part). Because that’s the pricing model they’re used to.”

Global open-source car design summit

“Each team contributes a different set of parts or designs. I thought writing for my college newspaper was cool. These kids are building a hyper-efficient car, which, they hope, ‘will demonstrate a 95 percent reduction in embodied energy, materials and toxicity from cradle to cradle to grave’ and provide ‘200 m.p.g. energy equivalency or better.’ The Linux of cars! They’re not waiting for G.M. Their goal, they explain on their Web site — vds.mit.edu — is ‘to identify the key characteristics of events like the race to the moon and then transpose this energy, passion, focus and urgency’ on catalyzing a global team to build a clean car. I just love their tag line. It’s what gives me hope: ‘We are the people we have been waiting for.’”