A Trout in the Milk

usabilitynews.com cited an article by Gerry McGovern entitled: "Why does the OK Button say OK?"

In it he says: "I belong to a group of people that really cares about words. I think they're precious and incredibly powerful things. I think that web behavior is driven by words. Get your words exactly right and you will be much more successful on the Web."

Further: "Stripping away all extra words and buttons is the path to simplicity. It requires a deep understanding of the fundamental nature of the customer's task."

Read the full article at usabilitynews.com to find out why.

Source: "Why does the OK Button say OK?" by Gerry McGovern. usabilitynews.com. 03 July 2008.

Signal vs. Noise reiterates that "designing is not a profession but an attitude" from László Moholy-Nagy's 1947 book "Vision in Motion:"

Designing is a complex and intricate task. It is integration of technological, social and economic requirements, biological necessities, and the psychophysical effects of materials, shape, color, volume, and space: thinking in relationships. The designer must see the periphery as well as the core, the immediate and the ultimate, at least in the biological sense. He must anchor his special job in the complex whole. The designer must be trained not only in the use of materials and various skills, but also in appreciation of organic functions and planning. He must know that design is indivisible, that the internal and external characteristics of a dish, a chair, a table, a machine, painting, sculpture are not to be separated. The idea of design and the profession of the designer has to be transformed from the notion of a specialist function into a generally valid attitude of resourcefulness and inventiveness which allows projects to be seen not in isolation but in relationship with the need of the individual and the community. One cannot simply lift out any subject matter from the complexity of life and try to handle it as an independent unit.

There is design in organization of emotional experiences, in family life, in labor relations, in city planning, in working together as civilized human beings. Ultimately all problems of design merge into one great problem: 'design for life'. In a healthy society this design for life will encourage every profession and vocation to play its part since the degree of relatedness in all their work gives to any civilization its quality. This implies that it is desirable that everyone should solve his special task with the wide scope of a true "designer" with the new urge to integrated relationships. It further implies that there is no hierarchy of the arts, painting photography, music, poetry, sculpture, architecture, nor of any other fields such as industrial design. They are equally valid departures toward the fusion of function and content in 'design.'

The late British designer Alan Fletcher would agree.

Jakob Nielsen's research uncovers that "on the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely."

You know you're a software developer when a client asks you what he thinks is a simple question and you have to control yourself from going into a conniption fit.  Because let's be honest, how simple can a question be if the answer is a 24-step process?

You receive the question via SMS at 10 o'clock at night: "HOW CAN I PUT A HMEPAGE LINK ON EVRY PAGE?"

First of all, you understand that he's trying to sound helpful because his message implies that if you tell him how to do it, he will do it.  You also know that he thinks putting a link on every page is easy regardless of whether it might or might not be because, after all, you've made it seem easy thus far.  But you know what he's really saying: "Hurry the fuck up.  This is taking you so damn long that I am willing to try programming myself." -- hence the conniption fit.

So after getting out of bed at 2:30 in the morning because you're tired of trying to fall asleep, you calmly think to yourself: Good fucking question. How can he?

Once you comes to grips with the risk of your client dabbling open source code--which would never happen--the response looks like this:

1. Clearly define what it is you're trying to do.  In this case, add a homepage link to every page (forget about the persistent link you already have attached to the logo)
   
2. Understand how the CMS works (CMS stands for content management system, but you already knew that). Hint: the pages are dynamically generated so you only have to write the code once.
3. Figure out where said code should live
4. Figure out which page to put it in
   
5. Log in
   
6. Go to "Design" >> "Templates" >> "Template Modules" >> "Page Design"
7. Read the code (good luck)
8. Realize your code doesn't belong there :)
   
   
9. Think again about which page to modify
10. (you should already be logged in)
11. Go to "Design" >> "Widget Sets" >> "3-Column Layout Primary Sidebar" >> "Edit" Page Listing
12. Read the code
    
13. Write the new code (revert to your n years of experience and write from memory): <li class="widget-list-item"><a href="./" title="Home">Home</a></li>
    
14. Copy and paste it into to the existing code
    
15. Save it
16. Publish it
17. Test it
18. No luck, the website was going haywire
    
19. Rethink your solution and reread the code
    
20. Move it one line up in the code
    
21. Resave it
    
22. Republish it
    
23. Test it
    
24. Presto! it works!  You have a link to the homepage on every page.
    

See, he was right, it wasn't so hard after all.

Disclaimer: No clients were hurt while writing this article.

Accidental popularity is when something becomes fashionable because it is real or genuine.

On the web, accidentally popular websites are otherwise known as real or genuine interest websites. The kind that are often found on BoingBoing.net, where Cream Cheese & Caviar originally saw an entry about Ian Fieggen and a better way to tie your shoelaces.

Today Mr. Fieggen's shoelace website and his knots were written about in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ)--looks like it's starting to get popular. But was it by accident?

Mr. Fieggen's website is extensive in its content and you can tell he put a lot of time into it. Promoting "the fun, fashion & science of shoelaces," as his site professes, takes a lot of work. "When I was working full time," Mr. Fieggen says, "I would get up at six o'clock in the morning so I could spend an extra hour on it before I left."

And he goes on to say in the WSJ: "There are probably two types of Web sites, those that set out to become popular in some category and those that just end up that way by accident. Mine is one of the accidents."

Or is it? The site may be extensive, but don't let it's depth fool you. No matter how "accidental" it may seem, Mr. Fieggeri has done his best to capture even the most esoteric traffic. He once noticed, for instance, that many visitors discovered his site after plugging the term "shoelace tips" into a search engine. Eventually he realized that a good number of these passersby weren't looking for advice, but for the name of the hardened area at the end of a shoelace, officially known as "aglets." So he added an aglet page.

Further, in the last sentence of the WSJ article it became clear that we weren't reading about Mr. Fieggen by accident, in October of 2007 he will have his aptly named book, "Laces," published by Barnes & Noble.

So if Mr. Fieggen's gain in popularity is by accident, he'll have no problem selling copies of his book. However, if it isn't, he could always go on the road and help others gain popularity.

Mark Hurst wrote an intriguing piece at goodexperience.com about community-driven websites--showing information that customers care about--vs. organizationally-driven sites--showing successive layers of expensive redesigns with competing interests of design, marketing, and branding.

He says it "proves an (obvious) point about branding online: the brand is the customer experience, not the colors or logos. The [organizationally-driven] site has all the "right" colors and graphics...attempting to create an emotional experience for the user." Whereas the "[community-driven] site delivers its information in black text, on a white background, with blue text links."

Hurst goes on to say: "enough talk about colors creating an emotional experience. When people go online to answer a question, they don't care what color, typeface, associated graphics, or website domain is showing on the page. They just want a QUICK and EASY experience."

Can you guess the community-driven website (hint: their logo is the image above)? He even used it to inform his purchasing decision.

Think you do a lot of design projects? According to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation: Frank Lloyd Wright spent more than 70 years designing 1,141 works - including houses, offices, churches, schools, libraries, bridges, museums, furniture, fabrics, art glass, lamps, dinnerware, silver, linens, and graphic arts. Of that total, 532 resulted in completed works, 409 of which still stand. In addition, he was a prolific writer, an educator, and a philosopher.

Wright preached the beauty of native materials and insisted that buildings grow naturally from their surroundings. He freed Americans from the Victorian "boxes" of the 19th century and helped create the open plan with rooms that flowed and opened out to each other.

By changing architecture and changing the way America lived, Wright may have had an even more profound effect. As Wright said, "Whether people are fully conscious of this or not, they actually derive countenance and sustenance from the 'atmosphere' of the things they live in or with. They are rooted in them just as a plant is in the soil in which it is planted."

The soil that sprouted Frank Lloyd Wright was the rural Wisconsin countryside. Throughout his life Wright spoke of the influence of nature on his work and attributed his love of nature to those early years in the rural Wisconsin countryside. During summers spent on his uncle's farm he learned to look at the patterns and rhythms found in nature - the branch of a tree (a natural cantilever), outcroppings of limestone, and the ever-changing sandbars.

Wright later advised his apprentices to "study nature, love nature, stay close to nature."

Source: Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation

Image: Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr. Residence "Fallingwater"

Don't fall into the trap of conflating experience design with brand experience. People don't engage with “brands”, they engage with people at companies or organizations.

Peterme explains this well in an article at Adaptive Path:

The problem is that "brand" will always be about the impression companies want to make, and are by their nature an ‘inside-out’ proposition — a company figures out its brand and what it means, and does what it can to communicate or otherwise impart that message to people. Brand always starts with the company.

Experience, though, needs to be about the people. What do they want to accomplish, achieve, do? For experience to succeed, it must start with the person, and from there, impress upon the company. “Experience” is outside-in.

The Wall Street Journal unveiled a new, smaller newspaper design today aimed at bringing in younger readers with an easier-to-read presentation of news (access to wsj.com is free today, sponsored by Chuck and Chrysler).

The Journal listened to their readers and found they "could better tailor its efforts to how, when and where you access news," said Gordon Crovitz, the Journal's publisher.

Early reaction was positive. Melissa Pordy, media director for the advertising firm Cheil Communications America, called the new design ''very reader-friendly,'' noting that fewer stories ''jumped'' to other locations in the paper, making it easier to navigate.

In an interview, Crovitz said he had already received hundreds of e-mails Tuesday about the new design, which he described as ''overwhelmingly positive.''

''They say it is still the old Journal to them, and that it feels familiar,'' Crovitz said. ''They find it's easier to navigate, which is what we intended.''

Understanding that readers might need assistance with the change, the WSJ produced an 8-page "Readers Guide" (available here or here--PDF 5,303kb) to explain. They also highlighted eight key principles that guided the new look for the journal:

1. Make it easier for readers to navigate the Journal.
2. Create a hierarchy of stories, so readers know the relative importance of news.
3. Maintain the best visual traditions of the Journal.
4. Remember that Journal readers come to read, not to look.
5. Innovate graphically where improvements can be made.
6. Don't skimp on good journalism.
7. Balance long-form stories with secondary readings and quick story summaries.
8. Guide readers to the Online Journal--but don't overdo it.

Badly designed Web sites may have negative effects on a user's immune, cardiovascular, and nervous systems, a study says. "Mouse Rage Syndrome is recognizable by a quickening of the heart, profuse sweating, and furious clicking and bashing of the mouse. In extreme cases, the ailment can be identified by loud screaming at video screens."

The study combined data from a YouGov poll of 2,500 people with physiological tests on a separate sample of internet users, who were asked to find information from a number of different websites. It was commissioned by Rackspace Managed Hosting and published by the UK's Social Issues Research Centre.

It found that five technology flaws in Web sites may have deleterious effects and lead to Mouse Rage:

* Slow to load pages
* Confusing / difficult to navigate layouts
* Excessive pop-ups
* Unnecessary advertising
* Site unavailability

Jakob Nielsen wrote an interesting piece about user interfaces in film. He says they "are more exciting than they are realistic, and heroes have far too easy a time using foreign systems." Think James Bond or Jason Bourne. Here are his top 10 bloopers reprinted from his "Alertbox" entry for December 18, 2006 titled "Usability in the Movies -- Top 10 Bloopers":

1. The Hero Can Immediately Use Any UI
2. Time Travelers Can Use Current Designs
3. The 3D UI - it's very tiring to keep your arms in the air while using a computer
4. Integration is Easy, Data Interoperates - users have no trouble connecting to different computer systems
5. Access Denied / Access Granted
6. Big Fonts - most computer screens in the movies feature big, easily readable text
7. Star Trek's Talking Computer
8. Remote Manipulators (Waldo Controls) e.g. driving from your cell phone in the back seat of the car
9. You've Got Mail is Always Good News
10. "This is Unix, It's Easy"

Cream Cheese & Caviar's 2007 Travel Calendar (PDF 103kb) is a rendition of W. Bradford Paley's 2006 travel calendar (PDF 18kb) where the days in a year are arranged specifically for travel planning. The font is Traffic Type Sweden Standard and it was saved as a PDF with Adobe Illustrator editing capabilities enabled. If you want it in another format let bigperma[at]creamcheeseandcaviar.com know and it's yours.

Paley says: "I couldn’t find a simple enough calendar to draw on to manage possibly conflicting travel and conference dates, so I typeset one for myself.

It’s intentionally very plain looking to allow the scribbles, circlings, and annotations that will give it its functionality and visual life. Its layout was designed to keep few breaks (and only culturally meaningful ones) in the numbers—allowing circled date ranges to stay contiguous more often."

Update: Dan Bernstein caught a couple typos (July 1 is a weekend, and September has 30 days) so the original file has been updated. He also offers a simplified design and says:

"When you circle consecutive days for a trip they are always adjacent instead of resetting a month on the next line. I also added more white space around the whole thing for the notes. I played with the months and the year placement and settled on centering it all for the visual consistency in contrast to the days which start and end seemingly without reason."

Are advertisers magicians or vice versa? Watch this video by Derren Brown. Then decide if your environment persuades the way that you think, act, and work.

Derren Brown influences two advertising industry creatives.

Source: Design Verb

This little malaria comic by Dr. Seuss (starring Ann, an Anopheles mosquito) was published for U.S Army GIs in the tropics (overseas edition 1943) and is a perfect example of how to write for the web: concise, scannable, and objective.

Source: Boing Boing

With the demise of good architecture magazines there is the rise of ARCHITECT magazine celebrating the people—famous and otherwise—who get buildings built. The image on the cover of the premiere issue signals this intention; it doesn't show a building but a person, and not a big-name architect but a young design partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.¹ According to editor Ned Cramer, the aim is to "portray architecture from multiple perspectives, not just as a succession of high-profile projects, glowingly photographed and critiqued, but as a technical and creative process, and as a community."

If ARCHITECT magazine can record the technical and creative process by which buildings are produced then this may be another magazine worth subscribing to. In the premiere issue there is an interesting article on Bruce Mau's redesign of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Web site, illuminating how an internationally-oriented firm markets itself to potential clients, the media, and its own employees.

Oh, and their graphic designer is Abbott Miller of Pentagram.

²Slate Magazine: "The Glossies: The Decline of Architecture Magazines" by Witold Rybczynski

Four things we love in a sandwich shop are also four things we love about our work: authentic, genuine, passionate, and opinionated. In his post entitled: "We Close When the Bread Runs Out," Jason at 37Signals demonstrates how context over consistency is just as applicable in food as it is in the building of software.

It reminds me of the secret ingredient: caring about what you do with unbridled enthusiasm. Otherwise know as passion.

Getting Real from 37Signals is available online for free.

Michael Bierut at Design Observer wrote a nice tribute to the late British designer Alan Fletcher who said that design was not a profession or a craft, but a life. In an interview for his 1996 book Beware Wet Paint, he told Rick Poynor, "I'd sooner do the same on Monday or Wednesday as I do on a Saturday or Sunday. I don't divide my life between labour and pleasure." The title of another book from Pentagram could serve as a concise statement of his philosophy: Living by Design.¹

Alan Fletcher is one of the most influential figures in post-war British graphic design. The fusion of the cerebral European tradition with North America's emerging pop culture in the formulation of his distinct approach made him a pioneer of independent graphic design in Britain during the late 1950s and 1960s. As a founding partner of Pentagram in the 1970s, Fletcher helped to establish a model of combining commercial partnership with creative independence. He also developed some of the most memorable graphic schemes of the era, notably the identities of Reuters and the Victoria & Albert Museum, and made his mark on book design as creative director of Phaidon.²

¹Design Observer
²Design Museum
Photo: Alan Fletcher sitting on the terrace of his West London studio, 1995
Photography: Peter Wood

Chicago's VSA Partners Inc. created a new visual component for Chicago’s 2016 Olympic bid, as officials unveiled a torch composed of some of Chicago’s most iconic symbols.

The Chicago 2016 logo is styled in the shape of a torch and consists of three distinct visual components. The flame, in the shape of Chicago’s skyline, reflects the international significance of Chicago architecture and speaks to the vitality of a city that rose from the ashes in the wake of the Great Fire of 1871. The body of the torch merges a color palette that represents the blue of Lake Michigan with the vibrant green of the city’s park system -- further underscoring Chicago’s commitment to the environment and sustainability. Together, these visual elements evoke the spirit of the Olympic Games and its values. It also evokes Chicago’s Games concept, to host compact Games celebrated in the center of the city, along the Lake Front and in the city’s parks.¹

Mayor Richard M. Daley and Patrick Ryan, chairman of the 2016 committee, presented the logo at a news conference Thursday in Millennium Park.

Chicago is battling with Los Angeles and San Francisco to be the United States’ nominee to host the 2016 games. The U.S. Olympic Committee has not yet decided if it will nominate a host city.²

¹VSA Partners

²Crains Chicago Business

For additional information visit Chicago Public Radio at:
http://publicbroadcasting.net/chicago/news/content/980478.html

Design is changing the way innovative businesses operate. Successful companies like GE, Procter & Gamble, and Maytag have made significant investments and organizational changes to take advantage of design process and methodologies. Design as an innovative problem-solving methodology is fast becoming an imperative business strategy. Here is an interview with David Burney, Vice President of Brand Communications + Design at Red Hat discussing design thinking and innovation.

From Blue Flavor: It often seems in the design agency business that the status quo to pricing a project is the old car salesman approach, where no two cars sell for the exact same price and to negotiate the price you must pass scraps of paper back and forth until you reach an agreement.

Pricing is not a mystical art, rather pretty simple math, you just need to know the formula. If you are a vendor, know your market rates, know your costs, and know your hourly [rate]. If you are a client, do your research, know your internal weaknesses, and share your budget.

And for both sides, pricing is something that should be discussed up front by both sides without fear that anyone is going to reveal too much or too little. If both parties like and trust each other, there are always ways to work out an arrangement.

Honesty and transparency should always be at the heart of all projects.

A big secret for creative projects: buy the Graphic Artist Guild Handbook of Pricing and Ethical Guidelines. It can be found on Amazon and is on most designers or agencies bookshelves. The GAG Handbook is one of the best tools for knowing how much things should cost, as it will most likely be referred to in preparing a proposal.

Disclaimer: I used to love pixel fonts, "supermarket stickers," and I still love gradients, used appropriately. However, I'm ready for some of these trends to be buried, as you can see from the design of CC&C, especially links that don't look like links, low contrast design, and superfluous visual effects.

"Trends rule the web design world. More so than with other areas of design, the web is very transparent and in a matter of hours I can click my way through the work of maybe hundreds of individual web designers, without even realising it. This ease of access makes “trend osmosis” something of an unfortunate inevitability amongst web designers. However, trends come and go. Here is a small collection of web design trends that I predict we will all be completely sick of in about 6 months. The advent of social and accessible web design (to the uninformed, social and accessible web design means “big fonts ‘n’ gradient fills”) has brought with it a curious gang of design trends and gimmicks - lets take a look at who’s going to snuff it first."

Link via Coudal

I can remember the first time I read about firing cheap clients. And I can cleary remember firing them. It not only freed us up to focus on the big dogs, but it also helped us realize who really valued the work we were doing and as a result serve them better.

While perusing Happy Cog's new design for Advertising Age, I came across the "Ad Age Small Agency Diary" with an article called: "Say No To Cheap Clients."

We teach our creative people what it costs to produce work so they conceptualize within a corridor of possibility. But the micro-budget corridors are very narrow. It’s like the two-for-ten-bucks bin at the video store where you’re not going to find many things worthwhile. You can’t have people in your spots if you can’t afford people. You can’t have original music, or quality film or all the little things that add up to making your product look like it’s worth the price you’re asking for it.

A Trout In The Milk is a Chicago-based user experience design boutique. We specialize in undesign--minimal design for maximum use--& believe firmly in creating form through function in an environmentally responsible way.

Everyday people launch e-commerce sites only to realize they lack an essential element such as a pay-per-click campaign or Web analytics software. There's a good intermediate checklist at E-Commerce Guide to assemble almost everything you need prior to launch that will prevent numerous headaches. And it will better prepare you to compete with established businesses, operating with full toolboxes.

Below are the essentials you'll need to get your online store off the ground, assuming you already know what you'll be selling.

01. A Business Plan
02. A Reliable Source for Your Product
03. A Good Domain Name
04. A Reliable Web Host
05. A Web Designer
06. E-Commerce Software
07. A Credit Card Merchant Account
08. Knowledge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
09. An Accounting Package
10. A Web Analytics Package (and Knowledge of Conversion Rates)
11. Awareness of Competitive Sites
12. A Shipping Rate Structure
13. A Security System and Data Backup
14. A Marketing Plan
15. Perserverance

(Links: Part I & Part II)

We have our copy of Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design by Jenifer Tidwell, do you have yours? It's an intermediate-level book about interface and interaction design, structured as a pattern language. It features 90+ patterns and over 300 full-color illustrations from websites, desktop applications, web applications, and mobile devices. The book's companion site also contains a good pattern catalogue to help you solve design problems.

Ian Fieggan brings you the "fun, fashion & science of shoelaces" with "diagrams of knots [that] are all colour-coded to make it easier to follow where the lace runs. The left end is coloured blue whilst the right end is coloured yellow. The colours were chosen to make it relatively easy even for colour-blind visitors, as blue is darker than yellow."

"I tie my shoelaces with an 'Ian Knot', the World's Fastest Shoelace Knot: Make a loop with both ends and simultaneously pull them through each other to form an almost instant knot. It's a truly revolutionary way to tie your shoelaces!"

Update (February 07, 2007): Aaron Rutkoff wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal on the "Ian Knot" entitled: "Time Waster: How a Broken-Shoelace Incident Led to a Search for Efficient Tying."

Link (thanks Boing Boing)

user experience design • interaction design • user interface design • web design • usability • heuristic reviews • navigation flows • brand identity • information architecture • storyboards • rapid prototypes • wireframes • organic search engine optimization • presentations

Below are article excerpts from the February 13, 2006 issue of Business Week by Google's VP for search products and user experience, Marissa Ann Mayer.

When people think about creativity, they think about artistic work -- unbridled, unguided effort that leads to beautiful effect. But if you look deeper, you'll find that some of the most inspiring art forms, such as haikus, sonatas, and religious paintings, are fraught with constraints. They are beautiful because creativity triumphed over the "rules." Constraints shape and focus problems and provide clear challenges to overcome. Creativity thrives best when constrained.

But constraints must be balanced with a healthy disregard for the impossible. Too many curbs can lead to pessimism and despair. Disregarding the bounds of what we know or accept gives rise to ideas that are non-obvious, unconventional, or unexplored. The creativity realized in this balance between constraint and disregard for the impossible is fueled by passion and leads to revolutionary change.

A few years ago, I met Paul Beckett, a talented designer who makes sculptural clocks. When I asked him why not do just sculptures, Paul said he liked the challenge of making something artistically beautiful that also had to perform as a clock. Framing the task in that way freed his creative force. Paul reflected that he also found it easier to paint on a canvas that had a mark on it rather than starting with one that was entirely clean and white. This resonated with me. It is often easier to direct your energy when you start with constrained challenges (a sculpture that must be a clock) or constrained possibilities (a canvas that is marked).

Constraints can actually speed development. For instance, we often can get a sense of just how good a new concept is if we only prototype for a single day or week. Or we'll keep team size to three people or fewer. By limiting how long we work on something or how many people work on it, we limit our investment. In the case of the Toolbar beta, several key features (custom buttons, shared bookmarks) were tried out in under a week. In fact, during the brainstorming phase, we came up with about five times as many "key features." Most were discarded after a week of prototyping. Since only 1 in every 5 to 10 ideas works out, the strategy of limiting the time we have to prove that an idea works allows us to try out more ideas, increasing our odds of success.

Speed also lets you fail faster. Have you ever wondered how a product so lame got to market, a movie so bad got released, or a government policy so misguided got passed? In cases like these, it's likely that the people working on the project invested so much time that it was too painful to walk away. They often know that the endeavor is misguided, yet they work till the painful, unsuccessful end. That's why it's important to discover failure fast and abandon it quickly. A limited investment makes it easier to move on to something else that has a better chance of success.

Yet constraints alone can stifle and kill creativity. While we need them to spur passion and insight, we also need a sense of hopefulness to keep us engaged and unwavering in our search for the right idea. Innovation is born from the interaction between constraint and vision.

Henry Ford once said: "If I'd listened to customers, I'd have given them a faster horse." True creativity makes the impossible possible. It can revolutionize a product, a business, the economy, and the world around us.

The cover story for the March 27th issue of BusinessWeek is titled Speed Demons: How smart companies are creating new products — and whole new businesses — almost overnight and features profiles on four companies: XM Radio, H&M, Best Buy, and Chicago's own web darling 37signals.

An excerpt: Back in the old days -- say, 2003 -- it typically took a couple of years for a software product to go from bright idea to market. Nowadays? Try months. 37signals LLC, a small Chicago company, has an ironclad rule: Never take more than 3 1/2 months to get a product out the door, not counting holidays or vacations. "This is a new model, not just for building a product but for running a company," says Chief Executive Jason Fried.

And rather than loading products with bells and whistles, they design them to do a few things well. "The way to get really good software is to make the simplest thing you can as fast as you can and get reaction, then see where it goes from there," says Paul Graham, a pioneer in Web-based software and now a guru for software entrepreneurs who operate like those at 37signals.

For IIT's Institute of Design's Strategy 06 Conference, Jim Wicks, the Vice President and Director of Motorola's Consumer Experience Design (CXD) organization explains how design has become tightly woven into the company's planning and strategy. Below are some excerpts.

Drive Home a Requirement, A Desire, and A Reward System
"... cultural changes are a result of the new leadership driving home a requirement, a desire, and a reward system for people to behave differently than in the past...these new behaviors and rewards encourage innovation and collaboration, driving the company to be first, not just to be in the game."

Leverage New Techologies
"The focus is now on leveraging new technologies instead of always inventing them, and partnering versus having to do it all ourselves...a big change in mobile devices has been to move from being technology-driven to being technology-enabled. This means things are driven by consumers' needs, wants, and desires."

The Product Is The Brand
"The product is the brand. You build brand...through the product and the experience."

You Can't Manage It if You Can't Measure It
"Rather than process changes, it's the achievement of tangible milestons that makes people realize that they can do this, and it gives people the confidence that they can win."

Quality vs. Quantity
"Focus on doing fewer things better, rather than trying to address everything in an average way. Process changes ensure greater quality in our products and enable a better kind of front-end planning process. Now we're giving ourselves more and more structure around how we plan innovation."

Keep it Simple
"People's real desire is to have something a little simpler. Things that support the core use cases that they care about, like community building, messaging, basic capturing and sharing of images, simple browsing, and..voice communications."

Meet Peoples' Style
"...create something that 'meets their style,' something that they see as an object of personal expression that they feel very good about, proud about, and comfortable with carrying around."

Design Synthesis
"Design is always about synthesis--synthesis of market needs, technology trends, and business needs."

Design Driven
"...integrate design seamlessly within the context of...portfolio planning, technology planning, and overall business strategy."

25 best license-free official fonts which would fit as a serious heading for a serious online-presentation found by Vitaly Friedman. (via Design Observer)

From IBM: "...incorporating ease of use into your products actually saves money. Reports have shown it is far more economical to consider user needs in the early stages of design, than it is to solve them later. For example, in Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach, author Robert Pressman shows that for every dollar spent to resolve a problem during product design, $10 would be spent on the same problem during development, and multiply to $100 or more if the problem had to be solved after the product's release. Simply stated, the lesson is clear: It is far less expensive to prevent a problem occurring in the first place than to fix it later. And one of the best ways to prevent problems from occurring, and to protect your development investment at the same time, is to keep your users/customers involved through the entire development cycle."

From uiGarden.net: The Google search page is so spare, clean, elegant, not crowded with other stuff..."because you can only do one thing from their home page: search. Anybody can make a simple-looking interface if the system only does one thing. If you want to do one of the many other things Google is able to do, oops, first you have to figure out how to find it, then you have to figure out which of the many offerings to use, then you have to figure out how to use it. And because all those other things are not on the home page but, instead, are hidden away in various mysterious places, extra clicks and operations are required for even simple tasks – if you can remember how to get to them." by Don Norman

Yahoo! released the Yahoo! User Interface Library comprised of a number of dynamic HTML utilities and controls for building rich web UIs and Ajax applications. In addition, Yahoo! released the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library for Web interaction intended to provide Web designers prescriptive guidance to help solve common design problems on the Web. Both are available under an open-source license.

From E-Commerce Times: "The German BMW site used a Web optimization tactic known as a 'doorway page' redirect. By using the word 'gebrauchtwagen,' which means 'used car,' more than 40 times, the Web page was able to fool the Google search bots into thinking the site would be highly relevant to users in search of pre-owned BMWs. However, users who clicked on the search link were automatically redirected to an entirely different page."

"A mockup makes visible what needs to be on a screen and where.

Caviar recently finished implementing a content management system for the crew at Project Roadtrip.

Caviar was commissioned by DS9 to implement a redesign of the popular blog, Lot 49, using CSS, PHP, and HTML. Caviar developed a solution that is cross-browser and printer friendly.

"'The site is the campaign.' That's how Crispin Porter + Bogusky's interactive creative director, Jeffrey Benjamin, describes the unique work his group did in..." by Zachary Rodgers.

37Signals
Boxes and Arrows
Design Observer
Frog Design
Boing Boing
Business Week
Emergic
Information Design
Average Idea
KFADvertising
MIT Advertising Lab
International Herald Tribune
New York Times
New York Magazine
JC Report
Wall Street Journal
Slashdot
Slate
Treehugger
Inhabitat
Edward Tufte
Paul Graham
Charlie Trotter
Warren Buffett

Walden
read online
Henry David Thoreau

Universal Principles of Design
companion website
William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler

The Art of Seduction
companion website
Robert Greene

Getting Real (free online)
37Signals

The Designer's Guide to Web Applications, Part I
Hagan Rivers

Incomplete Manifesto for Growth (free online)
Bruce Mau

How to be Fashionable or Consume Like Me (out of print)
free online or here
Andrew Coulter Enright

Grid Systems
Kimberly Elam

Beautiful Evidence (2006)
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2001)
Visual Explanations (1997)
Envisioning Information (1990)
Edward Tufte

Designing for Interaction
companion website
Dan Saffer

Designing Interfaces
companion website
Jenifer Tidwell

Designing Interactions
companion website
Bill Moggridge

Communicating Design
companion website
Dan Brown (no not that Dan Brown)

Designing the Obvious
companion website
Robert Hoekman Jr.

Thoughtful Interaction Design
sample chapters
Jonas Löwgren and Erik Stolterman

Analog In, Digital Out
Brendan Dawes

About Face 2.0
read excerpt
Alan Cooper and Robert M. Reimann

Pantone Fashion Color Report - Fall 2007

Pantone Fashion Color Report - Spring 2007 (PDF 2,000kb)

Fashion Trendsetter Color Trends - Spring/Summer 2008

bigperma[at]creamcheeseandcaviar.com

The benefits of working from home: A recently published study titled, "Fuel Smart Economy: It's No Gas," that examined the cost of the daily commute from April to September 2005, found that Americans spent US$250 million on commuting each business day during April.

The Easiest Commute Of All
The ranks of remote workers are swelling as companies see the sense in freeing them. (@ businessweek.com)

Using perl, html, and cascading style sheets, Cream Cheese and Caviar recently developed and implemented a redesign of Lot 49 for Diet Strychnine.

It’s that time again. Is your site ready? In the 37signals Holiday E-Commerce Ideas web-report you’ll find dozens of ideas for improving the holiday customer experience at your site. Each idea is accompanied by examples taken from top retail sites (they’ve visited hundreds of sites over the past few