Design...Simple.

From pixels to pages and everything in between.

A Picture of me from my cruise, before I popped the question to Jan
“Part of being an expert in an industry is not only knowing it, but being able to communicate it.”
– Harry J. Gold
CEO, Overdrive Interactive
“…a good customer relationship is unique, and loyal customers are hard to steal.”
– Article on keeping customers happy via Smashing Magazine
Just another day at the office.

Just another day at the office.

“Success leads to success.”
– Stanford psychologist BJ Fogg on how you can take baby steps to success by building on small wins.

Conan O’Brien gave the commencement address at Dartmouth Sunday. He basically roasts the school for 20 minutes followed by some very inspirational advice based on lessons he’s learned in the last year.

The new Beastie Boys video is awesome. Tons of cameos by various popular actors set in the mid-80’s.

“It’s not the design experience that makes you the professional. It’s the client interaction.”
– Me

A great video on why software is really selling emotion.

Using the Old Spice guy as an example, with extended impersonation, made it pretty easy viewing.

Evolution of a Logo: Spinfree = 37signals

In the “you always learn something new” category: 37signals’ logo has nothing to do with what the company is named after.

Instead, it’s a slight modification of a logo from Jason Fried’s previous endeavor:

Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, asked me to design a logo for his business. At the time Jason’s business was called Spinfree and I proceeded to work on ideas loosely connected to the letters S & F. A fascination with metaballs led me to an idea I quite liked. Not only did it abstractly have the S & F, but could also be interpreted as J & F (Jason’s initials). Jason liked it as well. A couple months later Jason called me sad to say they had started a new company rendering the logo obsolete. After a description of the new company I looked at the logo and could see another aspect. Rotating the logo 90 degrees counter clockwise created an abstract figure with a hand in the air, almost as if to say “hello”. I affectionately called the logo “manlogo” and pitched it back to Jason.

Pretty cool. So the logo was originally the current 37signals logo rotated 90 degrees clockwise (seen below). 

You can see where the connections come from now. They make up the S and the dots add the portions of the F.

Rotate 90 degrees CCW, and you have what we know today:

I totally see the “man waving” now. I always thought it represented the distant planets or stars or something. Amazing how things really come to pass.

Awesome Screenshot is Awesome

I just installed this FireFox plugin. It takes a screenshot of the current page and lets you draw/write all over it and save locally or upload to their site to share.