uptonic: Great interview with Dieter Rams. “Good design is as little design as possible.” http://bit.ly/bUaq0Z
kiranmaxweber: “We generally air on the side of clarity vs. aesthetic. The simplicity that we try to achieve is an aesthetic in itself.” http://ow.ly/2dDXT
rjs: Design up front always disappoints. The best revisions come in later stages, but they don’t come unless you leave room for them.
After seven years sharing space, today was our last official workday in the Coudal Partners office. We’ve had an amazing time working with them, each of us huddled around computers, bringing ideas to life.
Jason’s latest Inc. magazine piece is up. Excerpt: “So sometimes, when we’re battling over a detail in one of our products, someone will eventually cede the decision to someone else: ‘OK, we’ll go with your idea this time. Next time, it’s mine.’ It’s not always that literal, but the intention is implied. It’s simply not worth battling every last decision until one side is too beaten up to battle anymore. Sometimes, a friendly ‘You get this one; I get the next one’ is all it takes to move on, egos intact.”
rjs: I hope my Gmail account learns that any email with the word “webinar” in it is spam.
sh: Chicago weatherpeople keep talking about our “tropical” weather. It’s funny how what they mean is wet & sweaty & hey your hair looks awful.
rjs: I’ve been on a Walter Murch kick lately. I highly recommend “The Conversations” as an intro to his impressive mind http://amzn.to/cNdRq9
mattlinderman: FYI iBookstore/Lulu: Apple gets 30% of revenue. Author gets 80% of remainding revenue. Lulu gets 20%. So $19.99 book = author gets $11.20.
asianmack: If you’re expecting immediate results, you will be disappointed… Most things worth doing take time before you see results. #10-minute-abs
dhh: Interesting. I’m in DK and can’t trigger the iPhone 4 reception issue by holding on the antenna band. In the US, I could every time.
@mattlinderman: Proportional leading with CSS3. The wider the measure (line length) becomes, the more open the leading (line-height). http://bit.ly/aqfFJm
Basecamp Basecamp translations now available
Basecamp is now available in Spanish, French, Italian, German, Finnish, Greek, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Japanese, Russian, and Hungarian.
New in Basecamp: Project templates
Now when you click the Templates tab, you’ll see a new option: Project templates. Project templates let you set up a standardized project with to-dos, milestones, and messages. You can then use this project template to create new projects. A new project created from a project template will be auto-populated with all the to-do lists, milestones, and messages from the template. A huge time saver that’s especially useful if you do lots of similar projects.
UTS Motorsports builds a race car with Basecamp
“Our most recent development is a ‘Panic Board’ (below) which uses the Basecamp APIs to constantly show upcoming deadlines and milestones on a monitor in our workshop. This allows team members to see upcoming dates at a glance and serves as a constant reminder of our time frame. Basecamp has facilitated effective communication and been instrumental in the development and management of the team.”
Jamie: It was interesting coming to 37signals because they have a distinct style, right? Everybody knows that’s like a 37signals look. But then when you actually get down to it, it’s really hard to distill that look into words. I was a designer at Crate and Barrel for about seven years. And it was easy there because, Crate and Barrel, it’s all about the product, it’s all about white space, it’s all about Helvetica. So the product is hero.
When you come to 37signals, it’s sort of like, what’s the hero? Well over the time of working with Jason and Ryan, I’ve realized that the hero is making it clear. Clear about what we’re trying to sell, clear about what does this app do. So it’s almost like the language is far more important than visual design. Where visual design is really supporting the idea, which is the words or the UI…
Ryan: When we start to get into the heat of discussing something that was just marked up and we’re really going through feedback, it’s like we’re very rarely talking about, “That border should be four pixels instead of three pixels.” It’s much more, we’re pasting different phrases and quotations saying, “How could we say that differently? How could we say that more clearly?” And how does that piece of copy scan differently if you put a certain keyword at the front of the sentence or at the back of the sentence, if you make it two sentences, or if you make it half as long or twice as long. Not only what is the meaning of the sentence, but, also, when you look at the screen, does the sentence catch your eye, so that you notice that it’s talking about the thing that you’re interested in.
Jason: Yeah. A big part of that is recognizing that people probably aren’t going to finish a whole paragraph, so what can you front load? So if they finish 10 or 20 percent of the paragraph, can you actually explain the whole thing in the first 10 or 20 percent? Obviously, it probably shouldn’t be that long if we can explain it in the first 10 or 20 percent. But sometimes there are other details that are nice to know, but you don’t have to know them. So figuring out how can we get the information out there right up front, as soon as we can.
markimbriaco: The 6 week cycle for Chrome releases with incrementing major version numbers has my bullshit detector going nuts.
asianmack: I wonder why newspapers are designed the way that they are. Big format, different sections, fold-over to read. Tradition? It’s unwieldy!
mattlinderman: I enjoy Netflix’ collection of Classic Albums documentaries. http://bit.ly/bijDyD
uptonic: Great interview with Dieter Rams. “Good design is as little design as possible.” http://bit.ly/bUaq0Z
kiranmaxweber: “We generally air on the side of clarity vs. aesthetic. The simplicity that we try to achieve is an aesthetic in itself.” http://ow.ly/2dDXT
rjs: Design up front always disappoints. The best revisions come in later stages, but they don’t come unless you leave room for them.
jasonfried: Dan Pink on speaking human at work: http://bit.ly/9FDt3G
