A list from designer Stefan Sagmeister’s diary:

Complaining is silly. Either act or forget.
Thinking life will be better in the future is stupid. I have to live now.
Being not truthful works against me.
Helping other people helps me.
Organizing a charity group is surprisingly easy.
Everything I do always comes back to me.
Drugs feel great in the beginning and become a drag later on.
Over time I get used to everything and start taking it for granted.
Money does not make me happy.
Traveling alone is helpful for a new perspective on life.
Assuming is stifling.
Keeping a diary supports my personal development.
Trying to look good limits my life.
Worrying solves nothing.
Material luxuries are best enjoyed in small doses.
Having guts always works out for me.

He discusses this list and how good design is the basis for many of the things that make him happy in his TEDTalk: “Yes, design can make you happy.”

Analyzing a list of things that have made him happy, graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister realized that almost half of the items were in some way related to design. In this intensely personal talk, he shares the details of some of those moments, and gives props to three artists whose work has had a positive impact on his world. Concluding with some examples of his own work, Sagmeister offers a real insight into his aesthetic and philosophy of work—and life.”

XBOX

Edward Cianci writes:

This amused me to no end – support for modern (X)HTML/CSS in Microsoft’s Outlook 2007 is so bad, they have to add a disclaimer for themselves. I saw this at the top of my Xbox Live newsletter.

Sharp

Dave Lehman writes:

Here is the results page from a printer driver search on Sharp’s website. The only download link on the page is the very small red arrow box in the lower right. Even the red “download” text beside the red box is not hyperlinked. Way to make it as difficult as possible to get the file you are looking for! What about a “Download Driver” link at the top of the results page in 24px bold font?

The other week we sent out our email newsletter and mentioned our appearance in a recent issue of Time Magazine.

To us, this seemed almost like old news. After all, we had mentioned it weeks earlier here at Signal vs. Noise.

But the email responses came flooding in. There were lots of congratulations on the coverage and warm wishes for continued success.

It was a reminder of how much power there is in email. We forget that the RSS-centric world we live in isn’t the one many (and probably most) of our customers live in. They don’t have the time or energy to keep up with the constant stream of info at our blogs. That’s why the old-fashioned occasional email update — which gives people the juiciest bits and leaves out the rest — still has so much power.

Speaking of our email list, sign up by entering your email below:

“On Writing” posts show interesting copy from around the web.

David Simon
David Simon, Baltimore-based author, journalist, and writer-producer of HBO’s The Wire, on the goal he has in mind when he writes:

Whoever the average reader was of my newspaper, I never wrote for him. I always wrote for the people living the event. And I wanted not to be embarassed in front of them as a writer.

So if I’m writing about somebody who is struggling with addiction, I want other people who have struggled with addiction to say “Yeah, you got it right.” Or people who are police doing a certain job, I wanted them to say “Yeah, you got it right.” Or a street level drug trafficker, I wanted them to say “that was real”.

Pamela Slim
Pamela Slim is a consultant who has worked with clients like Hewlett Packard, Cisco, Charles Schwab, and Sun. Her About page talks about her work with San Francisco gang members.

Despite lots of corporate experience, I learned some of my best coaching skills from gang members on the streets of San Francisco. For ten years, while working with corporations during the day, I was also the Executive Director of Omulu Capoeira Group, a non-profit martial arts organization. Through my work with Omulu, I developed innovative gang-prevention programs, and often walked the streets of some of the most gang-ridden parts of the City, talking with teenagers and encouraging them to join our program.

You can imagine the positive body language I got from them at first – crossed arms, glares and puffed out chests. But since I had worked with teens for so long, I knew that underneath they were vulnerable, bright kids who just needed some positive encouragement and structure.

One day when I walked into the conference room of a corporation to do some work with the executive team, I noticed similar body language from the executives, although it was a bit more subtle. So I told them so.

“Wow – you look just like the gang members that I work with. They look at me like that when they want to intimidate me. What’s up?”

After a tense silence (when I was wondering if I had finally lost my mind), they burst out laughing and immediately changed their demeanor.

What I learned from the kids is that the worst thing you can do when confronted with hostility is to appear afraid. The best thing is just to act relaxed and confident and start talking. Ask questions. Gain trust. Pretty soon the walls come down and rapport develops.

Are we headed towards a world dominated by amateurish art, truthiness, photos of cute animals, and video clips of people being hit in the nuts? That’s the fear expressed in The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture (review), a new book by Andrew Keen. The book examines what Keen sees as the dark side of information democratization.

Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

The iPhone keyboard video shows how the spacebar is replaced by web-centric options when you’re entering a URL.

URLs can’t contain blank spaces so the iPhone gets rid of the useless key and replace it with ones that add value. Great example of context over consistency.

Photojojo

Jonathan Spooner writes:

was just over at Photojojo and noticed their cool solution for the forums and how to visually convey which threads are getting the most responses.

HP

Ricky Irvine writes:

I found this amusing OS selection menu on an HP product registration page. One Mac OS and sixteen Windows OSs.

Safeway

Jeff Miller writes:

I was shopping online the other day at Safeway.com and never finished my order. They just emailed a reminder to me letting me know that my cart still has some items remaining in it and that it has been set aside.

Have an interesting link, story, or screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Contact svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

We recently decided to stop diving in too deep on tasks right away. Instead, we’re going for four hour chunks upfront. We start work on a task and then, after the first four hours, come up for air.

Why? When you’ve done nothing, you don’t have a realistic view of what it’s going to take. But when you’ve spent days or weeks on something, you can get too invested. It becomes hard to change, admit you’re wrong, or that what you’ve been doing isn’t actually worth more effort.

Four hours lets you get your toes wet. Then you ask questions. Is this worth continuing? Are you on the right track? Is there a way to judo this? Should you bring in another set of eyes?

If it’s all good, then keep on going. But a lot of times this forced break can reveal hidden solutions and/or lead you in a different direction.

It’s easy to get excited about solving the problem at hand, even if the solution is complex. But then you can wind up spending way too long on a problem that’s just not worth it. Sometimes you’re better off restating the problem or even tabling it and moving on to something more important. The four-hour upfront technique prevents you from going too far in the wrong direction.

Chris Ware’s cover for “Candide” by Francois Voltaire (larger version).

Have a tough time choosing the right title for what you do? Design pioneer Alvin Lustig (1915-1955) felt your pain:

The words ‘graphic designer,’ ‘architect,’ or ‘industrial designer’ stick in my throat giving me a sense of limitation, of specialization within the specialty, or a relationship to society that is unsatisfactory and incomplete. This inadequate set of terms to describe an active life reveals only partially the still undefined nature of a designer.

Who is Lustig? He doesn’t get as much attention as some other influential designers, but his book designs revolutionized the field:

The current preference among American book jacket designers for fragmented images, photo-illustration, minimal typography and rebus-like compositions can be traced directly to Lustig’s stark black-and-white cover for Lorca, a grid of five symbolic photographs linked in poetic disharmony…

When Lustig’s approach was introduced to American book publishing in the late 1940s, covers and jackets were mostly illustrative and also rather decorative. Hard-sell conventions were rigorously followed. Lustig’s jacket designs entered taboo marketing territory through his use of abstraction and small, discreetly typeset titles, influenced by the work of Jan Tschichold. Lustig did not believe it was necessary to “design down,” as he called it, to achieve better sales.

Lustig even managed to continue designing after he went blind:

One of Lustig’s great strengths, which made it possible for him to continue to work despite his blindness, was his honed ability to visualize the problem before him in both two and three dimensions. Even at the end of his life he was actively designing everything he could, including advertisements, by dictating what he saw in his mind’s eye to his assistants who transcribed his words into concrete form.

There’s more interesting text about him and lots of work examples at alvinlustig.org.