The Superest
The Superest has a great yet simple design/style. Note the balance between the thick heavy lines, the heavy arrows, and the super thin grey lines that hold the page design together.

Design Museum in London
The website for Design Museum in London has nice variety from page to page.

A few George Patton quotes:

“A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”

“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”

“If you tell people where to go, but not how to get there, you’ll be amazed at the results.”

“Battle is an orgy of disorder.”

“Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.”

“I don’t measure a man’s success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom.”

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”

“Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.”

“Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.”

“Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.”

“The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine! When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead!”

“Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.”

Here’s George C. Scott playing him in the movie Patton:

In “Maverick: The Success Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace” (Amazon link), Ricardo Semler tells the story of how he converted a traditionally structured business into one without walls and rules. The way he challenges assumptions and rethinks how a business can be run is inspirational. (It’s probably the business book that’s been read by more members of 37signals than any other.) Below are some excerpts…

A modern company must accept change as its basic premise:

To survive in modern times, a company must have an organizational structure that accepts change as its basic premise, lets tribal customs thrive, and fosters a power that is derived from respect, not rules. In other words, the successful companies will be the ones that put quality of life first. Do this and the rest – quality of product, productivity of workers, profits for all – will follow. At Semco we did away with strictures that dictate the “hows” and created fertile soil for differences. We gave people an opportunity to test, question, and disagree. We let them determine their own futures. We let them come and go as they wanted, work at home if they wished, set their own salaries, choose their own bosses. We let them change their minds and ours, prove us wrong when we are wrong, make us humbler. Such a system relishes change, which is the only antidote to the corporate brainwashing that has consigned giant businesses with brilliant pasts to uncertain futures.

Growth is often just about greed:

A few years ago, I struggled with an opportunity to acquire a company with five plants and 2,000 employees. “Why do we want to grow more?” I asked myself. Are we going to be better for it?”...

It’s all about persistence, isn’t it? But where does persistence end and obsession begin? How high is too high? How big is too big? Of course, some growth is necessary for any business to keep up with competitors and provide new opportunities for its people. But so often it is power and greed and plain stubbornness that make bigger automatically seem better…

Semco has learned that to want to grow big just to be big is a catch…Much about growth is really about ego and greed, not business strategy.

We’ve recently added a few more “quick hit” demo videos to the Backpack tour. These tutorials show how easy it is add users to your Backpack account and share pages with them:

Video: Add others to your Backpack account
“Backpack excels when you use it with other people. Add co-workers, colleagues, friends, or family to your account and share pages, knowledge, files, calendars, reminders, and more.”

Video: How to share Backpack pages with colleagues and friends
“Backpack makes it easy to share a page of information that you’ve created. People you share with can also add new items and change content on the page. It’s perfect for quick collaboration or sharing knowledge.”

And this video answers a question we get a lot…

Video: How to get your Basecamp Milestones into your Backpack Calendar
The answer: By adding the Milestones iCal feed into your Backpack calendar. This video shows you how. More details here.

And in case you missed the first time around, there are also the videos we posted along with the original launch announcement:

Video: Make a Backpack Page
Video: Backpack Calendar
Video: Backpack Newsroom
Video: Backpack Messages
Video: Backpack Reminders

Also, the BackpackIt.com home page has a video that offers a big picture look at how Backpack works. It’s only two minutes and is a good place to start if you just want an overview.

Quick start at TripIt
TripIt.com has a neat way to get customers started: Just forward a confirmation email to [email protected].

Randy Peterman wrote:

Attached is a screen capture (plus photoshop blurring) of an email I received from TripIt.com.  I was impressed with their email’s removing the need for me to create an account to use their service: it was already created for me!  That’s a great way to reduce trepidation by simply staying ahead of the creating an account takes time excuse.  Users can easily evangelize their friends because the cost of entry is so small.

How it works: You forward flight and hotel confirmation emails and it automatically processes them. It then offers related maps, directions from airport to hotel, weather for your travel dates in both locations, etc.

Theocacao
Theocacao has a nice combination of lush ornament and minimalism.

All web apps are trying to suck. They are trying to be bloated. They are trying to be unstructured. They are trying to be confusing.

You are the stopgap. You are the one who stands between order and chaos. You are the sniper who must pick off every distraction, unneeded feature, and extra word that doesn’t absolutely have to be there.

You must be a killer. You must say no. You must anger those who disagree with you. That is the only way to make something great.

It’s not just software that’s this way. It’s true for anything you make. This American Life’s Ira Glass talks about it in this interview (below). He says that to succeed as a storyteller, or in any creative endeavor, you’ve got to enjoy killing (the part about killing starts around 1:30 in).

This idea that entropy is the enemy when you’re building something really makes sense: The universe is fighting against you. It’s trying to make whatever you’re creating chaotic and disordered. Everything will decline and degenerate unless you stop it from happening.

Greatness come from being a ruthless killer. Without vicious editing, your creation is destined to wind up the same as all the other crap that’s already out there.

Related
Eureka: We’re editors [SvN]
Storytelling and Business [Kevin Brooks]

Constraints force brevity
In No Resistance Is Futile, Paul Ford talks about how constraints (write without the letter “e”; use only one-syllable words; make every sentence exactly N words) can force you out of windbaggery.

Now when I face a new writing project, I open a spreadsheet. I want a grid to keep track of sources and dates, or to make certain that the timeline of a story makes sense. The grid imposes brevity. Relationships between sentences are exposed. Editing becomes a more explicit act of sorting, shuffling, balancing paragraphs. In this spirit, I’m rewriting some blog software to read directly from Excel. We’ll see how that goes.

Related: Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity In Words of Four Letters or Less

It’s not “I have a nightmare”
In Challenges to Both Left and Right on Global Warming, a pair of young environmental thinkers argue that gloom and doom environmental messages will fail if applied to global warming.

Instead they call for an aggressive effort to invest in energy research, while also building societies that can be resilient in the face of the warming that is already unavoidable.

In a recent interview, Mr. Shellenberger reprised a central point of the essay and book. “Martin Luther King didn’t give the ‘I have a nightmare’ speech, he gave an ‘I have a dream’ speech,” Mr. Shellenberger said. “We need a politics that is positive and that inspires people around an exciting and inspiring vision.”

Get hated
Polarize Me says, “If you want people to like you, first decide who needs to hate you.”

As a dater on Match.com, you have two key ways to communicate something quickly about yourself: a picture and a headline. The pic, of course, should embrace the social norm and be from 10 years and 20 pounds ago.

With the headline, you can start from scratch. Given the stakes, these headlines should really zing. They don’t. We examined more than 1,000 Match.com ads—from men and women, old and young. Our search yielded headlines like this one: “Hey.” Folks, if your opening line is “Hey,” you better be hot.

Another said “Looking for love.” Well, duh, you’re on Match.com. At least two-thirds of the headlines said nothing—and did it poorly.

Why do these headlines suck so much? Fear. Fear of saying too much. Fear of saying something clever that someone might think is stupid. Fear of saying something revealing that might turn someone off. The headlines try desperately not to exclude anyone. In doing so, they succeed at boring everyone.

Saul Bass is the master of film title design. Here’s his opening title sequence for “The Man With The Golden Arm.”

The backstory:

When the reels of film for Otto Preminger’s controversial new drugs movie, The Man with the Golden Arm, arrived at US movie theatres in 1955, a note was stuck on the cans – “Projectionists – pull curtain before titles”.

Until then, the lists of cast and crew members which passed for movie titles were so dull that projectionists only pulled back the curtains to reveal the screen once they’d finished. But Preminger wanted his audience to see The Man with the Golden Arm’s titles as an integral part of the film.

The movie’s theme was the struggle of its hero – a jazz musician played by Frank Sinatra – to overcome his heroin addiction. Designed by the graphic designer Saul Bass the titles featured an animated black paper-cut-out of a heroin addict’s arm. Knowing that the arm was a powerful image of addiction, Bass had chosen it – rather than Frank Sinatra’s famous face – as the symbol of both the movie’s titles and its promotional poster.

That cut-out arm caused a sensation and Saul Bass reinvented the movie title as an art form. By the end of his life, he had created over 50 title sequences for Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, John Frankenheimer and Martin Scorsese.

Saul Bass: A Film Title Pioneer offers Bass’ thought process behind his titles:

Saul Bass: “My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film’s story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it”

As Bass went forward, he proceeded in perfecting these thoughts, creating mini-narratives which would help bring the viewer into the film.

Writer Ken Coupland feels that in this respect, Bass is something of a magician: “I believe that a great title sequence almost literally hypnotizes you, especially the work of Saul Bass where there’s a very strong repetitive swirling motion and abstract things that happen that’s putting you into a dream-like state.”

More of Bass’ title sequences after the jump.

A while back, David posted about what Gordon Ramsay can teach software developers.

Since then, I’ve been soaking in the BBC America version of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and loving it. Even if there is some reality TV BS going on, the program does a great job of showing the power of determination, attitude, and attention to detail when it comes to running a small business.

If you’re looking for a place to start, I recommend “The Curry Lounge” episode…

This do-it-yourself curry house puts the customers in control – allowing them to create their own dishes, and making life hell for the head chef.

This “create your own curry” scheme is the brainchild of the restaurant’s owner, a former sales director. He figures the best way to please customers is by letting them call the shots. But it’s not working. The food is bad, the chefs are apathetic, and the business is failing.

Enter Gordon. He scales back the menu, gets rid of the DIY ordering, creates a low cost lunch option to lure in new customers, builds buzz via a marketing event, and puts regional Indian favorites that the chefs love on the menu in order to rekindle their passion for cooking.

That last item reveals one more reason to design for yourself first: It keeps your passion alive. There’s no substitute for that.

Here’s Part 1 of the episode:

Links to the rest: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

Farecast
Farecast, an airline ticket price predictor, shows this infobox that explains whether you should buy now or wait for a fare drop. The clear “Wait” message is backed up nicely by the low fare history.

Another nice touch: The site offers time sliders that let you dial in the exact time range that works for you. You can also choose by take-off or landing time.