February 2012
11 posts
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The Management Team →
Joel Spolsky has an excellent guest article on Fred Wilson’s blog about management structures, and flipping the classic org chart on its head. Excellent reading, though his comments on Steve Jobs are a bit subjective.
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New Pattern Tap (Beta) →
chrisbowler:
I love Pattern Tap as a resource. Like Dribbble, I use Pattern Tap when I need inspiration, usually for a particular UI element. The redesign of this app has been a good while coming, but I like what I see.
Feel like this has been years in the works, but it looks great and is an undeniable resource to any web designer.
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Dear developers
This is why I use Sass and Compass.
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Dear W3C/CSS WG
I’ll be the first to admit: I don’t really get how it all works. The standards process, the politics… I think I get the general idea, but that’s not really important. I know what vendor prefixes are for, and I’m tired of using them 4 times over with the same value. When 4 competitive companies/organizations use the same syntax for something, I’d call it a standard.
...
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Dear Microsoft/Mozilla/Opera
Please don’t implement Webkit prefixes. The very idea is absurd, goes against the entire reason for having CSS prefixes, and makes me a sad panda. What happens if/when Webkit decides to change the implementation of -webkit-text-size-adjust? They’re completely in their right to do so, as it’s their recommendation. That’s why it has a -webkit in front of it.
If you want...
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Our Favorite Typefaces of 2011 →
Excellent selection. Bookmarked. (via Typographica)
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Sencha Touch 2 Beta—Raising The Bar →
Sencha Touch 2 is another huge leap forward for rich mobile web apps. In addition to some of the huge performance improvements (40fps on Android?!), the new beta includes:
A huge documentation upgrade, including 20 new guides.
New Facebook integration demo
A new class system, which allows for bootstrapping (dynamically loading) applications.
An MVC application architecture, with history...
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January 2012
4 posts
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Beautiful Web Type →
A showcase of the best typefaces from the Google web fonts directory.
The project is also on Github.
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More on Less Commissions
Evan Gotlib, SVP Advertising Sales & Creative Services for blip.tv, posted a response to the article I posted yesterday which recommended removing sales commissions from your organization. You should read the whole response, but there are a few things I wanted to reply to directly:
The problem with this article is that it fails to account for the different way salespeople are measured and...
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“Taking vacation at Red Frog is encouraged (and even celebrated). And it’s...”
– Give Your Employees Unlimited Vacation Days
Some look at business management techniques like this and think they are pipe dreams or flat out silly. I disagree: I think it’s a shift in our culture and a necessary one. Just as sales commissions train salespeople to focus on the wrong results,...
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Why do we pay sales commissions? →
So we did it, and no catastrophes struck us. No earthquakes. No plagues, and no one quit. In the year since we dropped the commission system our sales have gone up. In fact, four of the last five months have been record months.
Fog Creek describes the pitfalls of paying salespeople commissions, but misses my favorite argument: Commissions give salespeople a skewed value system. Sales is an...
December 2011
13 posts
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Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design →
In particular, this passage does a fantastic job at articulating the hardest part of my job:
Removing dark patterns from any site involves a leap of faith. A company has to shift from a short-term quantitative measurement mindset to one that values relatively slow, steady growth of “warm fuzzy” qualitative things like brand image, credibility, and trust.
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The gdgt 2011 Holiday Guide →
If you’re considering any sort of gadget for a loved one this holiday season, here’s a good place to start.
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“I typically argue that it’s okay to diverge from conventions so long as the...”
– Geoff Teehan makes poignant comment about native vs. web interfaces in Going down the right Path.
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Easier Is Better Than Better →
While Paul makes a powerful commentary on the balance of choice and simplicity, and its role in your success, his evaluation of In ‘N Out vs. Wendy’s burgers is downright deplorable.
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“I was there because I just wanted to read something. Words. Black text on a...”
– The Pummeling Pages, Brent Simmons
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Video: Jonathan Hoefler at Pivot →
It’s a shame they decided to post this video with AIGA’s crummy video embed, so I can’t embed directly — but if you have any interest in typography today, click through and take 30 minutes out of your day to watch this. Informative, funny, and inspiring.
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November 2011
9 posts
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“In most scenarios, while a business may not need strong branding to get off the...”
– Emily Heyward, Brand Early, Not Often
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“It lets users create mixels in a few minutes, casually, almost without time to...”
– Khoi Vinh on Mixel, a new social collage app.
During my brief stint in design school, collage was definitely one of my favorite activities. I could see this app quickly becoming one of my favorites. While I love the simplicity of its tools, I would certainly appreciate some more precise cropping...
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“Not a design conference. Not a development conference. It was bigger than that....”
– Naz Hamid takes a stab at summing up why Brooklyn Beta is such an extraordinary event. It was great to meet him there, and see other fantastic first-timers like Jina, Matthew, Dan, Kyle, Rogie, and so many others.
I’ll extend what Naz says ahead and say that beyond a design or development...
October 2011
10 posts
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iPhone 4S Template →
marshallbock:
Pretty much every decent iPhone app ever made also has a website extolling the virtues of the app and its features. And pretty much every one of those sites has one thing in common: an image of an iPhone, its screen displaying a shot of the app.
Beautiful iPhone 4s Photoshop template from Marshall Bock.
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“Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love...”
– A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs
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September 2011
8 posts
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“Stop. Pull everything together into a single stack, take a breath, and enjoy the...”
– Unitasking, Trent Walton
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