Worldmapper features world maps re-sized according to different values, like wealth, carbon emissions, population, etc.

GDP Wealth

Carbon Emissions

Total Population

[tx Phil]

Even if you’re not a fan of Stephen King’s fiction, his book on writing is filled with insightful advice on the craft. (Btw, it was also the inspiration for the title of the “On Writing” posts we publish here.) Some excerpts below.

Get the first draft done quickly…

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

On rewriting…

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.

Second drafts can only help so much…

“A movie should be there in rough cut,” the film editor Paul Hirsch once told me. The same is true of books. I think it’s rare that incoherence or dull storytelling can be solved by something so minor as a second draft.

Formula for success: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%...

Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggest cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings)...I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: “Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.”

Excerpts from the Apartment Therapy book “The Eight Step Home Cure”.

Removing objects to gain breathing room…

Marre’s apartment, despite its severity, had a calmness and openness to it that my apartment lacked. Her apartment was smaller and yet it felt bigger. It was comfortable to sit in Marre’s kitchen, and people naturally gravitated to her apartment to talk. She was right. My apartment wasn’t carefully arranged, it was packed. There was no breathing room. It may have seemed functional, but it was crowded and required a lot of attention…I began to experiment with removing objects from my apartment. I got rid of a chair. I took out the drafting table. I threw out a pile of old, mismatched dishes and mugs. What began as a trickle turned into a torrent, and over the next few months I emptied half of my apartment.

Only a few elements should play a starring role…

A room stirs our emotions by leading our attention to a few strong elements, while the rest sit quietly in the background. Successful style is all about dramatic touches used sparingly. Most of the elements of a room should go practically unnoticed at first glance, while a few play a starring role, such as a vase of flowers, brightly colored lampshades or a commanding piece of art. If you have too many things jostling for attention, your home will be too busy and over stimulated, but if you don’t have any, your home will lack pizzazz.”

Balance is key…

Whichever type you identify with, the cure is balance. Whether warm or cool, you never want to change your basic temperament. It is who you are and it contains your strengths. Therefore, warm people achieve balance by “weeding,” since they have too much growing. Small things like cleaning out a closet, canceling a magazine subscription, or taking a load of clothes to the Salvation Army provide balance. Cool people achieve it by “watering and feeding,” since they don’t have enough growing. Their small tasks are buying flowers each week for the kitchen table, hanging curtains, and inviting a few friends over for a drink now and then. Both types should start slowly — a little bit goes a long way.”

Guinness

Josh Charles writes:

I visited the Guinness website this morning, and was pleased to see how they are using their country selection box. Some websites usually only move the U.S. or perhaps a few additional ones to the top. I wonder if there was some marketing data that went into this decision?

What the Font?

Mark Ott writes:

When matching fonts for an unknown font, “WhatTheFont?” has a nice liittle feature that makes your image stay put while you scroll so you can compare it easily with the results. Nicely done.

Facebook

Sebastian Hirsch writes:

I like part of the privacy settings on Facebook: Very effective on what it does and doesn’t do. There was bit of a row when the news feed was rolled out, but I think this screen is a great answer to users’ privacy concerns. Too bad that it just came as an afterthought.

True, Facebook had to do something to respond to its pissed off customers. But this kind of preference-mania is overkill. Too many indecipherable icons. Too many options. (From Getting Real: “For customers, preference screens with an endless amount of options are a headache, not a blessing.”) How about just an on/off switch and be done with it?

Got an interesting screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Send the image and/or URL to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

Auto-pilot often comes at a cost: It puts a layer between you and what you’re building.

In “Creating Short Films for the Web,” Hillman Curtis writes about shooting in manual:

Another goal I set for myself was to become comfortable enough with the camera to shoot in manual. This meant switching everything “auto” on the camera off: auto focus, auto zoom, auto iris and shutter speed, an auto white balance. This can be risky when you are new to using a camera: you might misfocus or forget to check your white balance as the light changes. But with manual you can dial in a much richer shot, and it forces you to stay connected with your camera throughout the shoot.

For similar reasons, we often choose to pull out the machete and chop our own path in software development. Programmers write code in text editors, instead of integrated development environments, so they can better feel the pulse of the code. Designers code HTML/CSS by hand too. Also, we answer every support email ourselves because farming support out would put us that much further away from our customers.

Every time you outsource something, put something on automatic, or get software to do it for you, you put up another layer. After a while, these layers add up. They blur your vision. You lose touch with the core of what you’re doing. Like Hillman says, shooting in manual lets you dial in a much richer shot.

A development pow wow in the conference room. Note how Sam doesn’t need his computer. He programs in his brain.

Headphone time for Jason and Ryan.

The view from outside. (This photo by DjD.)

You can see the entire office in the Coudal film Copy Goes Here.

Good newspaper design is all about effectively presenting large quantities of text/information in a usable, straightforward way. That’s got a lot more in common with good web design than most of the sexy print pieces you find in design magazines/annuals. Some places to check out winning newspaper design:

Best Front Design picks out a noteworthy newspaper cover each day and analyzes why the design works.

Society for News Design has an annual Best of Newspaper Design Competition (archives).

And NewsDesigner is a smart blog about newspaper design.

Code Igniter

John Muhl writes:

[Re: last line] Code Igniter really, really speeds up your code.

800-Flowers

Bret Walker writes:

While it’s nice that 1800Flowers.com tries to be helpful with the recipient dropdown menu, the “myself” option seems a little out of place when “recipient” changes to “deceased.”

Dreamhost
Nick Grossman writes:

On the Dreamhost support request form, they ask you to categorize your state of mind regarding your support request. I’ve always liked the way they present these options in a very human way, and with a sense of humor.

Got an interesting screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Send the image and/or URL to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

For demo purposes, we’ve had to populate Highrise with a bunch of fake people. Here are some of the sites we used to save time and increase randomness while creating these make-believe contacts:

The Random Name Generator pulls first and last names from a couple of genealogy sites. Some fun ones that turned up: Garfield Morland, Juniper Pinney, Keaton Dimsdale, and Seymour Zeal.

A search for “John Smith” at whitepages.com provides addresses and phone numbers (we change the street and phone numbers by a couple of digits).

Plambeck.org has a company name generator that serves up choices like Sems Research, Cadridium, Nated Design, etc. 2robots.com also offers a Random Business Name Generator.

For job titles, The Economic Research institute has a huge list. And there’s also GigantaMegaCorp’s Job Title Generator which spits out random ones like Inter Purchasing Planner, Senior Engineering Associate, and Foreign Information Processor.

Apple: America’s best retailer is a great article about Apple and its stores.

The critics were way off…

“Sorry Steve, Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work,” BusinessWeek wrote with great certainty in 2001. “It’s desperation time in Cupertino, Calif.,” opined TheStreet.com. “I give [Apple] two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake,” predicted retail consultant David Goldstein…

Saks, whose flagship is down the street, generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy (Charts) stores turn $930 – tops for electronics retailers – while Tiffany & Co. (Charts) takes in $2,666. Audrey Hepburn liked Tiffany’s for breakfast. But at $4,032, Apple is eating everyone’s lunch.

The stores were prototyped like a product…

“One of the best pieces of advice Mickey ever gave us was to go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn’t work,” says Jobs. In other words, design it as you would a product. Apple Store Version 0.0 took shape in a warehouse near the Apple campus. “Ron and I had a store all designed,” says Jobs, when they were stopped by an insight: The computer was evolving from a simple productivity tool to a “hub” for video, photography, music, information, and so forth. The sale, then, was less about the machine than what you could do with it. But looking at their store, they winced. The hardware was laid out by product category – in other words, by how the company was organized internally, not by how a customer might actually want to buy things. “We were like, ‘Oh, God, we’re screwed!’” says Jobs.

But they weren’t screwed; they were in a mockup. “So we redesigned it,” he says. “And it cost us, I don’t know, six, nine months. But it was the right decision by a million miles.” When the first store finally opened, in Tysons Corner, Va., only a quarter of it was about product. The rest was arranged around interests: along the right wall, photos, videos, kids; on the left, problems. A third area – the Genius Bar in the back – was Johnson’s brainstorm.