Some recent postings at the 37signals Job Board:

First Look is looking for an Amazing User Interface Designer / Engineer in New York, NY.

Red 5 Interactive, Inc. is looking for a Senior Interactive Designer in West Des Moines, Iowa.

Outside Line is looking for an Apache/MySql/PHP Developer in London, UK.

University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning is looking for a Programmer I in Lawrence, KS (Kansas City area).

Second Rotation is looking for a Senior Database Application Developer (Rails) in Waltham, MA.

Real Branding, LLC is looking for an Interactive Art Director in San Francisco, CA.

Curt Schultz Design is looking for a Web Designer in St. Charles, IL.

JB Scott Search is looking for a Diverse Interactive Creative Director in Minneapolis, MN.

WWF-Australia is looking for a Communications Manager – Online in Sydney, Australia.

[Fireside Chats are round table discussions conducted using Campfire.]

The latest chat is with three inventor/entrepreneurs:

Brian Crabtree of Monome (creators of the monome 40h).

David Rose, CEO of Ambient Devices (creators of the Ambient Orb and the Ambient Umbrella).

Nathan Seidle of Spark Fun Electronics.

Moderated by Matt (ML) and Jason (JF) from 37signals.

ML	for starters, explain to our audience what you guys do/make.
NS	SparkFun is a bit difficult to describe. We provide the widgets to the hardware world for creating prototypes. Before a new product is released to the consumer market, the company has to design the product. We product the parts to build the ‘mock up’. This spans hobbyists, research, and students. We see a lot of business from all markets.
NS	‘We sell the parts’ to build the mock up.
ML
NS	Ok :) That has nothing to do with a product prototype
NS	That was just for fun – to see if we could pull it off.
ML	ha, link up a better example.
NS	12 Channel Copernicus GPS Receiver
NS
ML	another fun one:
ML
ML	Picture Frame Tetris
NS	Actually, Tetris was really just an application of Brian’s work.
ML	what role do these “fun” ideas play in your company?
NS	We sell bits and pieces. Tetris was a demonstration of all these bits put together to do something interesting.
BC	monome is kelli cain and myself, we design adaptable hardware interfaces. our first device (called the 40h) is a grid of keypads with internal backlighting. the systems are decoupled, so it becomes a dynamic blank canvas. everything is open-source, community participation is highly encouraged, and we’re dedicated to domestic/sustainable production techniques.

Bemoaning feature creep

“The truth is, many consumers bemoan the incessant rush of innovation that pushes manufacturers to tamper with products the consumers feel are already perfect. Their grief is not just nostalgia. Drivers who miss the subcompact Japanese cars of yesteryear, and runners who yearn for the discontinued New Balance 855 running shoe with an anti-pronating roll bar, are victims of ‘feature creep,’ said Jon Linkov, a managing editor at Consumer Reports. This phenomenon, generated by market forces, media hype and twitchy retailers, creates a cycle in which products are constantly improved even if they don’t need to be…’[BMW] was a company that talked about ‘no cup holders. You’re supposed to be driving, not drinking in your car. Now they are power-everything, bigger, heavier in every way. They are these luxury tourers filled with leather and wood.’”

Michael Bierut radio interview

“In a world where a logo can induce epileptic seizures (as did the 2012 London Olympics logo), being a graphic designer involves a lot of responsibility. Graphic design expert and critic Michael Bierut joins us to answer your questions about logos, packaging, and fonts.”

“Dick in a Box” rush job

“The week of ‘Dick in a Box,’ the trio wasn’t even planning to do a short, but [Lorne] Michaels pushed them to do a musical parody because Justin Timberlake was hosting the show. (‘I gave them a direct order,’ Michaels says.) So they wrote, shot, and cut together the sketch between Thursday night and Saturday afternoon. A couple of months and over 10 million downloads later, [Andy] Samberg found himself singing a surprise duet with Timberlake in front of 18,000 screaming fans at Madison Square Garden.”

101 one-paragraph recipes that take 10 minutes or less

“The trouble is that when it’s too hot, even the most resourceful cook has a hard time remembering all the options. So here are 101 substantial main courses, all of which get you in and out of the kitchen in 10 minutes or less.”

Limiting emails to five sentences

“Every e-mail I send to anyone, regardless of subject or recipient, will be five sentences or less. Like a cinquain. Ideally, it would be a 160 character count like an SMS message, but since that would require an actual e-mail plug-in (viz. ‘work’), we’ll go with the much-easier-to-count concept of sentences instead.” [via DF]

The new Volvo S40
From: Régis Kuckaertz

Volvo has redesigned (sic) the S40 model, following a few — scandinavian — design principles:

1 Less is more
2 Treat everything like a piece of art
3 Form follows function
4 Redefine luxury
5 Never stop learning

Seems to be the perfect car for a designer!

Seagate packaging like Apple
From: Ross Hill

I just came across How Seagate learned to package like Apple. and thought you might be interested. A ‘corporate’ company jumping on the design bandwagon – with human copywriting.

“Crap” design regurgitated as “good” design
From: Yong Bakos

Check out the last half of this post from David Byrne, on design masters feigning crap design as style.

I guess at some point designers (and others) get bored with “good” design and the increasing ease of making tasteful design that looks more or less like everything else, which is exactly the point, and also not the point. At some point I guess people designing things want them to look tasteful so that they’ll appeal to a semi-sophisticated crowd. And now it’s pretty easy to do that. With computers, and under the influence of the wealth of slick packaging in the world, tasteful layouts are pretty easy to emulate. The general public is fairly sophisticated in their design sense these days — they “read” the language of design — but, it being a visual language, they are not able to articulate the “text”. But if as a designer you want to be really hip and to appeal to those who deem themselves above mere tasteful design, then you have to have to work a little harder. One way to achieve this ultra cool surprise is to look intentionally bad, but to drop little visual ironic winks into the mix so that the audience knows it’s not really buying a record by a crappy East German band.

So, over the years, every genre of crap design — East German products, tacky back of magazine ads recycled by Warhol or Lichtenstein, sleazy RnB and Rock and Roll record covers, amateur porn and scientific textbooks — gets regurgitated as “good” design. Everything gets mulched and reused. So how does anything truly new ever get created?

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

A script that emails log files to your Highrise dropbox for easy backup checkup
Ross Belmont has rigged up a backup solution using the UNIX philosophy of employing many small tools, each perfectly suited for its job. One of the tools he uses is Highrise. He has the script e-mail the contents of the log file to his Highrise Dropbox so he can access it easily. “So far, this has worked without a hitch, and I feel much better having my files backed up everyday,” he says.

Create Backpack reminders via e-mail/SMS
Here’s how it works: Type “call aunt betty sat aft” into a new text message. Send the message to “[email protected].” This can be any e-mail account you have that supports POP3. The software Ross wrote picks up the message and sets a Backpack reminder for Saturday at 2pm with the text “call aunt betty.”

TrailGuide puts Basecamp on your mobile phone
TrailGuide provides mobile access to your Basecamp projects through an optimized mobile application and secure web server. With TrailGuide, the Basecamp experience has been adapted for efficiency on the phone, so you can see more of the most important things on screen quickly and easily.

Ta-da List named one of the “Top 10 best apps for the iPhone”
We recently announced the launch of Ta-da List for the iPhone. Today MacNN named Ta-da List one of the Top 10 best apps for the iPhone.

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Some recent activity at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room:

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Pastor uses Highrise to keep track of interactions with his congregation
Rev. Andrew Conard, Pastor of Congregational Care at The United Methodist Church, writes in: “I have found Highrise to be an excellent way to keep track of interactions that I have with members and visitors to the congregation both in the hospital, in appointments, at worship and around town. Highrise has become an integral part of my task of providing the best possible care for each person.”

StartupNation reviews Highrise
“Currently I have 1,556 e-mails in my company inbox. This doesn’t even count towards the average of a few hundred e-mails I have in each of my 30 current client inboxes. So when a client calls and I need to find the paper trail of our last conversation…well, you can imagine it takes me a while. Having a paper trail presented to me with an easy graphical interface and categorization for all of my contact communications streamlines this process greatly.”

1. Get friends to use Backpack 2. Receive free service
The Backpack Affiliate Program allows you to earn credits that are applied towards your Backpack account. These credits reduce your subscriptions fees and allow you to earn free service. It’s your reward for helping us spread the word about Backpack. And everyone who has a Backpack account is eligible.

What questions do you have for 37signals? Fire away and we’ll do our best to answer in the comments.

Note: We can’t guarantee we’ll answer everything (sometimes we just don’t know and there’s some info we can’t share). Also, we’re a private company and we do not disclose revenues, profits, or investment details. Sorry.

Hollywood lesson: Focus on niche groups over "the people"

“It turns out that not caring about ‘the people’ is liberating. It frees you to care about your people — the 2 or 5 or 10 million who are passionate about Friday Night Lights or Rescue Me or The Wire or Battlestar Galactica or The Office, who will stay with your show for as long as it’s good, whose enthusiasms and high standards and judgments may even help, indirectly, to make it better.”

Lessons from Steve Jobs' “greatest presentation”

“If you believe that your particular product or service will change the world, then say so. Have fun with the content. During the iPhone launch, Jobs uses many adjectives to describe the new product, including ‘remarkable,’ ‘revolutionary,’ and ‘cool.’ He jokes that the touch-screen features of the phone ‘work like magic…and boy have we patented it.’ I think speakers are so afraid of over-hyping a product that they go to the opposite extreme and make their presentations boring. If you’re passionate about a product, service, or company, let your listeners know.”

A look at three redesigned mainstream news sites

“I thought it might be interesting to compare three big media sites that have launched new versions of their web news properties in 2007: CNN (redesigned this weekend), USA Today (redesigned in March), and AOL News (redesigned last week). I’ll look at the different approaches each news outlet took, and what cues they took from web 2.0.”

Megan Jaegerman's news graphics

Tufte: “Megan Jaegerman produced some of the best news graphics ever done while working at The New York Times from 1990 to 1998.” [via JK]

Why Verizon turned down the iPhone

“No is the default answer. The spreadsheets and the marketing team and the CFO and the lawyers have no trouble at all defending the status quo, because, it’s their status quo. They created it and they like it that way. Bizdev deals like this almost always fail because the potential for upside seems too small compared to the mammoth disruption that organizations imagine will beset them.”

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Creating a Highrise case to deal with a car accident
A recent car accident was a bummer but at least Highrise helped sort it out.

Web firm Viget Labs picks Campfire over IRC
Their initial solution was to use an internal IRC server but they soon realized Campfire is a better solution for keeping communication flowing.

Tips on integrating Highrise with your iPhone (or any phone that syncs with Address Book)
Citizen Scholar’s Randy J. Hunt has planned ahead for Highrise/iPhone interaction without even knowing it. In the piece, he offers a handy template vCard and describes how to use it to set up your iPhone (or any phone that syncs with Address Book) so it plays nice with Highrise.

Photographer David Burke calls Highrise “a fantastic way to manage your relationships”
“Coming from one of the ‘little guys’ in the business world, I have to tell you that Highrise is a gift to me! Managing my relationships is crucial for my business…Here is how Highrise helps me…”

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