Letters Remain

Month: February 2009

  • Website Launch Checklist

    Here’s a great checklist for when you’re developing and launching a new website, as produced by Dan Zambonini of Box UK. Topics covered include: Pre-Launch Content and Style Standards and Validation Search Engine Visibility, SEO and Metrics Functional Testing Security/Risk Performance Finishing Touches Post-Launch Marketing Ongoing via @zambonini

  • Two Reasons to Travel (Rational and Emotional)

    These two stories have had a powerful effect on me: Why economist Alex Tabarrok (of Marginal Revolution) decided to travel to Machu Picchu spontaneously: At lunch with Bryan and Tyler last week the question arose as to what we would do differently if we were immortal.  […]  I answered that I would travel more. Later…

  • The Evolution of Art Appreciation

    The appreciation of art is not culturally learned, but is in fact an evolved trait, or at least that’s the view of Denis Dutton as elaborated in his latest book, The Art Instinct. In a generally positive review of the book, Newsweek points out the many limitations of Dutton’s conjecture as well as summarizing it’s main…

  • Using Neighbourhood Comparisons to Promote Conservation

    By comparing customers’ usage to that of others in the neighbourhood, utility companies are starting to reduce their energy consumption. This, from an experiment conducted by Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: In a 2004 experiment, he and a colleague left different messages on doorknobs in a middle-class neighborhood north of San Diego. One type urged…

  • Portfolios Instead of Diplomas

    Jeff Jarvis agrees with teacher Mark Pullen’s opinion that the education system should be modified to produce portfolios instead of, or in addition to, qualifications. Perhaps we need to separate youth from education. Education lasts forever. […] What if we told students that, like Google engineers, they should take one day a week or one…

  • Designing for the Poorest 90%

    The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%. —Dr. Paul Polak, International Development Enterprises Design For the Other 90% is a design exhibition aiming to…

  • Survey Art: The ‘Most Wanted’ Paintings

    After surveying thousands of people around the world and online, artists Komar and Melamid produced a series of paintings portraying the respondents’ results. The project was dubbed People’s Choice and consisted of the 30 most and least ‘wanted’ paintings for 14 countries and the web as a whole. Interestingly, the Dutch (and the Italians, to some extent)…

  • Working for Free as Promotion

    Could working for free be one of the best promotional tools available to an individual or SME? 37signals believes so, saying that their 37Better Project was “one of the best promotional things [they] ever did”. To illustrate their point they also take a look at R.BIRD’s excellent consumer packaging patterns, stating: If you’re looking to…

  • Timeline of a Car Crash

    In designing the Falcon XT, Ford engineers set out to discover the anatomy of a car crash and found that the accident is typically over before we’re even consciously aware of it happening. This is a reconstruction of a crash involving a stationary Ford Falcon XT sedan being struck in the driver’s door by another…

  • Conversations with Charlie Rose

    The archives of Charlie Rose are available on the official website and this past weekend I watched these excellent conversations: An excellent talk on technology and innovation with Marc Andreessen, a man with impressive Valley credentials: co-founder of Ning, co-author of Mosaic, founder of Netscape, investor in Digg and Twitter, and board member of Facebook…