With the recent Basecamp UI refresh, we changed the comment line on the bottom of each message shown when viewing the “Messages” tab.

The old message view.

The new message view.

The new design reduces the difference between the “Posted by…” line and the actual message. It now has the same size, color, and spacing as the body of the message (the headline size and spacing falls in line now too).

The old way added unnecessary style and color changes, creating unwanted noise at the end of every message. The new way provides a solid rhythm so it’s easy to keep the visual beat while you scan.

To get the full effect, view a real-size before & after comparison.

Clickbank
Brian Armstrong: “Clever wording on the first field of this signup form from clickbank.com. I bet it substantially reduces people’s subconscious aversion to filling out forms.”

Commerce Bank
Daniel Drucker on Commerce Bank: “Most useless icons EVER.”

We recently went out and filmed some of our customers talking about why they love Basecamp and the positive impact it’s had on their businesses. It was really great to meet these fans in person and hear their eloquent descriptions of how Basecamp helps them get projects done.

The first group of video profiles:

• R.BIRD, a consulting firm with 25 years of experience in packaging design and branding.
• Atelier Weddings, planners of top-notch weddings in NYC.
• Elsewares, an online catalog of unique products from independent designers, artists, and entrepreneurs.
• TransactTools, the commercial technology arm of the New York Stock Exchange.

[On Writing posts offer up interesting copy from around the web.]

SORBS Dynamic User and Host List
SORBS is the “Spam and Open Relay Blocking System.” Boo to the site’s perplexing explanation of how to get deleted from the Dynamic User and Host List:

Anyone else may request delisting of addresses or netblocks provided that reverse DNS naming is set to indicate static assignment. SORBS will consider unique names that are not part of a generic naming scheme, or a generic naming scheme with an indication of staticness (we prefer the word “static” being included in the names, but will accept any existing ISP convention if the ISP just informs us of it) as proof of static assignment. Also, the Times to Live of the PTR records need to be 43200 seconds or more. This is an arbitrary limit chosen by SORBS. And of course, the reverse DNS names need to be valid; i.e. the names given in reverse DNS need to map forward to the IP addresses for which they were given.

Wondermill
User Experience Design Ninja job description:

When people have created an account with one of our products, they should shed a tear because the experience is over.  They should write ballads and march from town to town reading them to anyone who’ll listen.  They should hang signs from highway overpasses proclaiming our good name, hold 3-day block parties and call up radio stations to dedicate cheesy songs.

They should obsess.

Banzai De Bug
Banzai De Bug Pest Control shows that even unsavory industries can come up with an interesting story:

The pest control industry is changing. Most people picture a pest control operator as a guy walking around with a tank spraying chemicals. George started out with a sprayer but for the past 5 to 6 years has been using glue boards and baiting techniques.

George goes to work every day dressed in a blazer and gets to his clients on his motorcycle. He got into this business at the age of 43 and loves it. He feels this job is great for his personality and feels he needs to be his own boss.

George’s specialty is treating for rats and mice. He describes his job as that of a detective. “A big piece of this job is getting the details and facts, figuring out how it can happen and then solving the problem. The real satisfaction comes when I go back to the job to see that it worked.” His approach to catching the rodents is to give them a well balanced meal, served up on a glue board. He takes a piece of cardboard and spreads glue all over it. Then he takes bits of meat, sardines, and a Hershey Bar with almonds for dessert. The beverage of choice to serve with this feast is beer. George knows that the rats will drink until they can’t drink anymore and eventually they will become sick, choke and die. This is all done without pesticides.

George feels that if you are honest and good you get better at what you do and you will do well. He created his business; no one gave it to him.

A hundred dollar laptop must be a piece of shit, right? Actually, there’s some impressive technology in the One Laptop per Child machine being hawked by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte. He discussed it last night on 60 Minutes.

For one thing, it’s the first laptop with a screen you can use outdoors in full sunlight. It’s also built to withstand harsh weather (“You can pour water on the keyboard…You can dip the base into a bathtub. You can carry it the rain. It’s more robust than your normal laptop. It doesn’t even have holes in the side of it. If you look at it: dirt, sand, I mean, there’s no place for it to go into the machine.”)

Other features: A built-in camera that takes stills and video, a stylus area, ear-like radio antennas that give the computer 2-3 times better Wi-Fi range than a regular laptop, the battery lasts 10-12 hours with heavy use, and you can charge it up with a crank or a salad spinner (a minute or two of spinning gets you get 10-20 minutes of reading).

Our next Fireside Chat (on Tuesday) will bring together three innovative designer/artists who build engaging interactive experiences:

Jonathan Harris (Daylife, We Feel Fine, etc.)
Aaron Koblin (The Sheep Market, Flight Patterns, etc.)
Marcos Weskamp (Flickrgraph, Newsmap, etc.)

What question(s) would you like to see us ask them?

Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog describes how some small-scale recording artists are succeeding on the web. One interesting bit mentions the “pay what you can policy” used by Jane Siberry. The result: People wind up paying more than they would at iTunes.

The Canadian folk-pop singer Jane Siberry has a clever system: she has a “pay what you can” policy with her downloadable songs, so fans can download them free — but her site also shows the average price her customers have paid for each track. This subtly creates a community standard, a generalized awareness of how much people think each track is really worth. The result? The average price is as much as $1.30 a track, more than her fans would pay at iTunes.

Choose an option and you see stats on what other customers chose:

Her store provides an open letter that explains the policy:

Like many, I’m restless and impatient with living in a world where people are made to feel like shoplifters rather than intelligent peoples with a good sense of balance. I want to treat people the way I’d like to be treated. ‘Dumbing UP’ (as opposed to ‘dumbing down’)....You decide what feels right to your gut. If you download for free, perhaps you’ll buy an extra CD at an indie band’s concert. Or if you don’t go with your gut feeling, you might sleep poorly, wake up grumpy, put your shoes on backwards and fall over. Whatever. You’ll know what to do…This is not a guilt trip. Feel no pressure. The most important thing is that the music flow out to where it could bring enjoyment. And THAT is the best thing you could give me.

The current pricing statistics listed at the site:
18% Gift from Artist
18% Standard
05% Pay Now
58% Pay Later

Avg Price/Song $1.17
07% Paid Below Suggested
80% Paid At Suggested
14% Paid Above Suggested

The message of Mark Hurst’s new book, Bit Literacy: In an age of infinite bits, time and attention are the scarce resources. The solution is to constantly manage your bits with the goal of reaching an “empty” state.

When bits are infinite, the only way to thrive is to pick up the eraser. This is letting the bits go: always looking for reasons to delete, defer, or filter bits that come our way. Anything else allow the bits to pile up…Bit literacy is the constant attempt, in a world of bits, to achieve emptiness.

Emptiness is at the heart of bit literacy, and that may be an unsettling idea. Emptiness often has negative connotations…We prefer to have something. We live in a culture, after all, where more is better. The symbol of success is abundance…Things are different in the bit world, where size and quantity don’t mean much. Bits are abundantly available to anyone with Internet access…The challenge isn’t getting more; it’s making sense of it all, in spite of the glut. The scarce resource is not the bits but our time and attention to deal with them.

Hurst offers practical, opinionated advice on how to get to zero. Just like in his Uncle Mark’s shopping guides, he doesn’t shy away from taking a stand. It’s nice to read someone who says “do it this way” instead of being wishy-washy.

Get email to zero
For starters, empty your e-mail inbox – get it to a message count of zero – at least once a day. I’ve started doing this and it really is a breath of fresh air each time you get to this screen:

Use a bit lit to do list
Hurst advises using Gootodo for your bit-literate to do list but I can’t get enough of the conveyor belt time-sequencing of Highrise’s Tasks list. Either way, a to do list that gets “hibernated” tasks out of your way until you actually need to deal with them is a real game changer.

Prune sources ruthlessly
You have to prune your RSS feeds and other sources ruthlessly. (Hurst cites Richard Saul Wurman who wrote, “One of the most anxiety-inducing side effects of the information era is the feeling that you have to know it all. Realizing your own limitations becomes essential to surveying an information avalanche; you cannot or should not absorb or even pay attention to everything.”) So question everything.

Maintaining a healthy media diet requires vigilance about what you’re consuming. Thus it’s important to constantly ask the question, “Is this worth my time?” at every level: the source (“Is this source worth my time?”), a particular issue of the source, an article, even down to the paragraph or section of an article you’re in. If the answer is “no” to any of these, skip it. Move to the next article, or trash the entire issue; and if it happens too often with one source, consider removing it from the lineup altogether.

We’ve just launched the new 37signals product blog at productblog.37signals.com (subscribe to the RSS feed). Here you’ll find everything you want to know about our products:

• Tips and tricks
• Feature updates
• Extras, widgets, API integrations, etc.
• Case studies
• Press clips
• Coupons
• And more…

We created this new blog because we want customers to have one place to check for news and information regarding all 37signals products.

We’ll still post occasional product news here at Signal vs. Noise like we always have, but the new product blog is the place to get the in-depth scoop on Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Campfire, Ta-Da List, and Writeboard.

We’ll be tweaking some details and design elements over the next few weeks, but we wanted to get it out there now since 95% of the value exists already.

(Note: The launch of this universal 37signals product blog means the end of the line for Everything Basecamp and Everything Backpack. the individual blogs we had for those products.)

If there’s anything you’d like to see there, if you’ve got a tip that other customers might enjoy, or if you think you’d make for an interesting case study, let us know. We’re really looking to build up the site with good, customer-driven content so don’t be bashful.

Also, we’ll be adding a Getting Real section to the site shortly and we’re on the lookout for success stories. If you’ve found Getting Real helpful, tell us about it.