On Writing posts show interesting copy from around the web.

Ambrosia Shaving Cream
Ambrosia Shaving Cream has some smooth copy:

This is the cream for sensitive faces, those that get so red and sore after shaving that it almost makes you want to grow a beard (well, almost!). Don’t expect it to lather; leaving out the soap is one way that we make it so mild. Don’t use it to shave by sight; it’s transparent. DO expect it to give you a smooth, close shave by softening the bristles with linseed and coca butter. Do expect it to leave your skin calm and smooth because of the honey, chamomile and marigold oil. This stuff makes mornings bearable; it changes lives.

Mosquito Trap Kit
The Mosquito Trap Kit provides a low-tech solution (a box fan plus a net) to a common problem (mosquitos).

Sid McCarty, the inventor of Skeeterbag, was a box fan virtuoso regulating the temperatures for every plant, animal, and dwelling the farm had to offer. Ventilating the puppy nursery one morning Sid suddenly noticed that all the mosquitoes had disappeared.  He figured out that the fans were sucking the mosquitoes out of the building.  Then he had an idea.  That night he fashioned a simple mosquito net bag to the blowing end of a box fan and set it on the porch by the dogs to see what would happen.   He and the kids counted out over 2,300 dead and dying mosquitoes in the bag the very next morning and rediscovered the porch for the first time since mosquito season started.   My name is Mark Valentine and I came to Florida to test, develop, and turn my cousin’s idea into Skeeterbag.  I couldn’t stand the thought of such a good idea not being shared with the world.

The site’s old description explained that “catching Mosquitoes is a lot easier than catching customers.”

I have learned that having a product that actually works 100% of the time is not believable. I have learned that the average customer would rather have a product that looks super cool, costs a ton of money, and doesn’t come close to doing what it says it will do more than a product that actually works and doesn’t look like much at all.

Coudal Partners
Coudal Partners is a design, advertising and interactive studio in Chicago. From corporate identity design to new business concepts to creative publishing, Coudal has pioneered the model of a modern design agency.

Michele Seiler shares how they use Basecamp to manage up to 100 client projects at a time.

Threadless
Threadless is an ongoing tee shirt design competition and retail site that sells 90,000 funky shirts every month. The site’s community is thriving with over 300,000 people signed up to score designs.

Jake Nickell, CEO, and Jeffrey Kalmikoff, Chief Creative Officer, explain how Basecamp has increased productivity at Threadless.

OrganizedWisdom
OrganizedWisdom is a health-focused, social-networking site that enables consumers, physicians, healthcare professionals, and health organizations to collaborate on thousands of health topics.

Steven Krein, CEO, and Unity Stoakes, President, explain how Basecamp helps them spend more time executing and less time managing.

See all the videos.

Crate and Barrel

Crate and Barrel offers typical product shots and also “room views” that show the product in a real context. Example: Calphalon Cookware.

Amazon

Nice touch at Amazon to disable the overnight button and explain why.

Ticketweb

Oh Ticketweb, you know my interests so well!

Here comes Cover Flow
As the world gets iPhonified and Leopardized, get ready for more Cover Flow (video), the scrolling interface with forward/backward arrows that mimics a CD collection or jukebox selection.

Jobs spent much of his talk showing how Leopard will help users more efficiently find files. Leopard’s new Finder will include Cover Flow, a new way to navigate through folders. Borrowed from iTunes, Cover Flow will let you flip through documents in the Finder, just like you can flip through songs in your iTunes library.

New Apple.com subnav
In a nod to this trend, Apple is using a scrolling horizontal subnav at the redesigned Apple.com:

Horizontal scrolling doesn’t often get this sort of prime time play since, as Jakob Nielsen puts it, users hate horizontal scrolling and “always” comment negatively when they encounter it.

TeamSnap is a smart new Rails-based product that lets people manage recreational or youth-league sports team online.

Anybody who’s coached or played on a recreational adult sports team or youth sports team knows how hard it can be to keep track of all the players, games, and team payments. TeamSnap takes the headache out of team sports by making it simple to manage your sports team online.

It’s well done too. Useful concept, great presentation, attention to detail, smart marketing site, nice buttons/icons, friendly, etc.

Some screenshots:

Nice buttons and icons.

Thoughtful blank slate.

“Andy” guides you through the team settings process.

A note on heart by Hillman Curtis:

I once gave a talk called “Putting Your Heart into Design” at a design school in Connecticut, and one of the students asked me what advice I had for people who, just starting out, will no doubt be doing the same things all the time, just churning out banner ads — or like me, when I started at Macromedia years ago, building executive presentations over and over. “How do you put your heart into that?” he asked.

I told him about my first year at Macromedia, about the corporate presentations that consisted mainly of bullet points, pie graphs, and dull charts. I told him that I decided to focus on the exactitude of each design, and made each pixel as perfect as I could. I got deep into exploring the Swiss designer Josef Muller-Brockmann and grids. I focused on typography and consistency in design. And through all of the repetition I became aware of the power of restraint and simplicity. On the few occasions that I incorporated motion, I was always very conservative and moved elements in ways that reflected the theme of the presentation. They were not simply gratuitous.

I came to believe that even though a viewer might not be able to point to the screen and indicate exactly where an element had move two pixels from page to page in a presentation or Web site, he or she could sense it, and too many of those mistakes could leave the viewer with a feeling of imbalance. I explained all of this to the student. When I was finished he replied, “So, rather than just taking on jobs you can put your heart into, you should find a way to put your heart into everything you do.” Which was a wonderful way to put it.

From Curtis’ book Creating Short Films for the Web.

In Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine, Amit Singhal, master of Google’s ranking algorithm, and other engineers reveal more than they ever have before in the news media about how their search system works.

Here’s a story of how a new formula gets added and why Singhal ignores complaints at first…

In 2005, Bill Brougher, a Google product manager, complained that typing the phrase “teak patio Palo Alto” didn’t return a local store called the Teak Patio.

So Mr. Singhal fired up one of Google’s prized and closely guarded internal programs, called Debug, which shows how its computers evaluate each query and each Web page. He discovered that Theteakpatio.com did not show up because Google’s formulas were not giving enough importance to links from other sites about Palo Alto.

It was also a clue to a bigger problem. Finding local businesses is important to users, but Google often has to rely on only a handful of sites for clues about which businesses are best. Within two months of Mr. Brougher’s complaint, Mr. Singhal’s group had written a new mathematical formula to handle queries for hometown shops.

But Mr. Singhal often doesn’t rush to fix everything he hears about, because each change can affect the rankings of many sites. “You can’t just react on the first complaint,” he says. “You let things simmer.”

IDEO designer Jane Fulton Suri figures out unmet consumer needs by watching ordinary people doing ordinary things.

As the leader of the “human factors” group at IDEO, the international design consultancy, she and her colleagues will watch kids brushing their teeth, parents pushing strollers, or patients checking in at the emergency room, trying to find opportunities for design to improve the experience. Yet often that means looking for something less obvious: the ways in which the experience can improve the design.

Their observations have brought rubber grips to Oral-B’s toothbrushes, raised the height of Even-Flo’s strollers, and streamlined DePaul Health Center’s check-in processes. For Fulton Suri it’s as if the world is one big beta test, in which every feature is begging for improvement.

“Thoughtless Acts” is her book that shows random acts of design witnessed in everyday life. Some shots from the book below.

We can get greater quantities of every other resource we need, except time. [Peter] Drucker reports that executives spend their time much differently than they think they do and much differently than they would like to. His solution is to begin by measuring how you spend your time, and compare it with an ideal allocation. Than begin to systematically get rid of the unimportant in favor of the important. His suggestions include stopping some things, delegation, creating policy decisions to replace ad hoc decisions, staying out of things that others should do, and so forth…One of the best points is to give yourself large blocks of uninterrupted time to do more significant tasks…

Drucker argues that we should focus on what will make a difference rather than unimportant questions. Otherwise, we will fill our time with motion rather than proceeding towards results.

From A review of The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done by Drucker.

Wilco
Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy on the internet:

Internet is radio for a lot of people. It’s a place to get music and hear music, and no amount of clamping down will change that. And anybody who’d expend energy preventing people from hearing music seems not to understand the basic principal of making music in the first place. It’s so antithetical to being a musician.

On not trying to make everybody happy:

My question is: Could anybody imagine the Wilco record that would make everybody happy? I can’t imagine it. So you’re confronted with that reality—anything you do is going to be a disappointment to somebody. We just have to do what we do, and that’s make a record that we fuckin’ like. [Laughs.] We really don’t have any other options.

Lyrics from “What Light” by Wilco:

And if the whole world’s singing your songs
And all of your paintings have been hung
Just remember what was yours is everyone’s from now on
And that’s not wrong or right
But you can struggle with it all you like
You'll only get uptight

The White Stripes
The White Stripes are now on Warner Brothers and Jack White recently recorded a Coke commercial. White on indie cred:

Maybe we were stupid with this naive thing about if artistic freedom and business collide, something bad happens.

And here’s White on embracing limitations:

The idea of wearing just these colors, having just the two of us on stage—these are just boxes that we’ve cooked up to put ourselves in so that we can create better. If we had five people on the stage, all the opportunity of a 300-track studio, or a brand-new Les Paul, the creativity would be dead. Too much opportunity would make it too easy. We just don’t want to be complicated, it seems unnecessary.

Lyrics from “Little Room” by the White Stripes.

When you're in your little room
and you're working on something good
but if it is really good
You're gonna need a bigger room
and when you're in the bigger room
You might not know what to do
You might have to think of
How you got started sittin' in your little room