MAX FENTON'S SECOND HAND

The Bandcamp team is spread out all over the world, which means we don’t have lunch together, we don’t bump into each other in the hall, and we don’t have impromptu across-the-table conversations. In short, we don’t do many of the things that are often considered crucial to any startup’s success. To make up for this, we’ve developed a fairly disciplined system of communication that includes a daily company-wide video call, a comprehensive wiki where all of our projects are documented, lots of one-on-one Skyping, and a few in-person meetups each year.

Our most important mode of communication, however, is our group chat system (we use IRC). We all have it open all day long, running side-by-side with whatever else we’re doing, and we use it to ask each other questions, share links, coordinate feature rollouts… all of the stuff that elsewhere might happen in a hallway or over a desk. But what this system lacks in eye contact, it more than makes up for by being fully participatory (nobody is ever left out of a conversation), persistent (conversations happen 24 hours a day, 7 days a week), and most critically, archived and searchable (so regardless of when you’re offline or for how long, it’s easy to read the transcript and get caught back up).

The coolest part of our chat setup, though, is that it also doubles as the heartbeat of the business. In addition to the room/channel where the team communicates, we have another channel where a script announces every signup and every music sale, in real time. It looks like this:

We originally implemented this site activity ticker for the simple reason that we wanted to celebrate every signup and sale. It’s fun, helps focus everyone’s energies on our core metric (artist sales), and acts as one of our warning systems when things go wrong (the few times the feed has stopped, we could practically hear the flatline tone from the heart monitor). But it also has had an amazing, unintended side-effect, and that’s that it’s a brilliant tool for music discovery.

For years now, we’ve all glanced over at the feed a few times a day, been intrigued by an artist or album name, clicked it, and discovered new music that we loved. At some point someone suggested that we should add album art to the feed, at which point someone else said yeah-we-should-but-this-is-ridiculous-we-should-share-this-with-everybody.

So now we do. Take a look at “Selling right now” over on the new home page. It’s a bit of a firehose at times (particularly Tuesdays around noon PST), but it turns out that “someone just paid money for this” plus “this cover looks cool” is a great filter. It’s kind of like lurking at the checkout counter at Tower on a Saturday in 1997, and the line has three switchbacks and the clerks are ringing people up as quickly as they can, but in this case the Tower is at least three times bigger, you can listen to everything that’s being bought, and the customers are from every corner of the globe. Yes, you may end up questioning some of their taste, but just as often you’ll go “Whoah, what is this!? This is awesome!”

You break expectations by changing what someone’s already used to. You change expectations by giving them something new. Understanding the difference is key to product design.

It took me quite some time find any information about this image. I found it initially on Traditional Doom, but thank to Google Image Search I figured out that this Venus de Milo was photographed in Jean Paul Gaultier his studio. And now I’m at a dead end. Does anyone know if this is custom installation at Gaultiers studio or does anyone know the artist? Thanks for any hints. Thanks to commenters for pointing out that it’s an installation by Studio Makkink & Bey.
(BTW, seriously Tumblr, get your act together, you’re obfuscating the internet.)

You’ve probably already heard about the insane Photoshop deblurring function. But what about this insane Photosynth-like tool for videos?? And what about VIDEO MESHES??!

Seriously, watch that last one. It’s crazy. Reality is plastic.

Shared by Max
"The central planners on Wall Street, unable to restrain their impulse to gamble (as opposed to invest) with our collective wealth, have put the entire financial system on the edge of bankruptcy"

Last month the folks from PeepCode visited the 37signals office and asked to record my design process. Geoffrey told me not to prepare anything. He said he’d show up with a sample problem and simply record whatever I did with it. The result is two 75-minute videos (Part One, Part Two) that show my thought process step-by-step, starting with paper sketches and then moving on to HTML/CSS.

The hard thing about demonstrating design is the sample problem. The problem should be simple enough that the details don’t bog down the audience, but complicated enough that you run into real-life conflicts and constraints.

Fortunately Geoffrey picked a really good sample domain. He asked me to design a UI for picking the top five finishers out of 200 participants in a pro bicycling race. The task was rich and interesting enough that we spent the first 75 minutes purely sketching and analyzing the approach.

The first video, Part One, covers the sketching process. A lot of good material came out of this section, including:

• How to tackle a UI problem by dividing it into tasks that each have a beginning, middle and end
• How to use sketching as a response to uncertainty, and when to stop sketching and move on to HTML
• How to focus on the most natural solution so that people will intuitively grasp a design
• How to focus your design process on conflicts and friction points, attacking them one by one until the design works

This video also gave me a chance to explain the UI design process through an analogy to software testing. Kent Beck’s Test-Driven Development had a huge influence on me, and I’ve always had trouble explaining the connection. In both videos I continually refer to setting up “tests” — specific things in the design that aren’t working or aren’t resolved — and then design against those tests until they “pass” (that is, until the problem goes away). This loose analogy articulates that tricky and hard-to-pin-down process where a designer continually moves their focus among pieces of a problem and along the way settles conflicts step-by-step in a constructive sequence.

I think the process will be interesting to both designers and coders. Designers can compare the process to their own, while coders can use the analogies to software testing to see design as an extension of concepts they already know.

In the second video, Part Two, I take the sketches and ideas from the first session and build them out in HTML and CSS. Along the way I dip in and out of Photoshop, explaining the time and place for each tool.

Part Two especially focuses on getting quick results in the browser. I sketch out dom elements, give them classes to communicate their purpose, and gradually decorate them with inline styles until the design comes together in the browser.

I would prefer videos like this to be free. But Geoffrey came up with the idea and his PeepCode team did all the hard work. I just showed up one Friday morning for a couple hours of design practice. So if the material is useful to you I encourage you to support their effort and buy the videos at $12/each.

Here are the links:

1. PeepCode Play by Play: Ryan Singer Part One
2. PeepCode Play by Play: Ryan Singer Part Two

There’s also a 10 minute preview on the Part One page.

I hope this material is useful to you and welcome your comments here.

I’m afraid this event sold out within a few moments of BERG posting it on the twitters, but, just for the record, this is happening in London:

“The Near-Future of Pop” is a title that Jones came up with and basically forced upon me.  God only knows what I’m going to do with that.  After the event, I will probably post whatever I came up with here.

Before launching Pinboard I created the usual ritual series of spreadsheets to try to anticipate traffic, data storage requirements, and revenue given a variety of scenarios. And like everybody else I have found these spreadsheets to bear little relationship to reality.

The problem with trying to model this stuff is that we find ourselves in a domain where a small number of rare events can completely dominate the data. Here's an all-time graph of new Pinboard users per day, for example:

This chart shows user signups over time, but you'd see the same graph for every metric of interest - traffic, Twitter mentions, cups of coffee consumed by the developer. Just seven days account for half of all Pinboard revenue.

The mechanics of this are fmailiar. Someone writes an article about you, or you're featured on a Top 10 list, or a meteor hits your competitor and very briefly the full attention of bored people on the Internet is yours.

Somewhat counterintuitively, while the timing and size of the events is unpredictable, the overall pattern is regular. Here's what the same graph looks like if you rank all the days by number of new users and plot them on a log-log scale:

This kind of plot is the hallmark of the POWER CLAW. If your stats look like this, you can know with some confidence that your day-to-day experience will not prepare you for a few extraordinary days that will matter most for your project.

You can also expect to spend most of your time grinding away, waiting for those extraordinary days to arrive. Rare events are rare - it says so right there in the name!

Of course, many other people have noticed this phenomenon, and there's a terrific book devoted entirely to it. But there's something about human psychology that makes it very hard to internalize the idea. I'm still making the damned spreadsheets.

If you run a web thing, please consider sharing your own log-log plot with the world, obfuscating whatever you need to to feel comfortable. I'm very curious about how many young sites see a similar traffic pattern, and whether it diminishes as you grow.

---

* Back around 2003 the blog world became fascinated with power laws and exponential distributions due to a Clay Shirky essay. POWER CLAW has been my mental shorthand for this kind of beard-stroking ever since.

People have been asking for alphabetical sort order for two years, and I have stubbornly ignored them since it didn't seem particularly useful to me. Such are the hazards of having a site dictator! However, there has been such consistent demand for the feature that I've finally added it for the user+tag pages, and naturally I've immediately found myself wondering how I did without it.

I'll roll out alphabetical sort to other parts of the site shortly. Wherever you see a small arrow and 'date - title' selector near the navigation links you can click to change sort order. This is 'sticky' for that page type - once you've asked to sort by title on a user tag page, you'll keep seeing that sort order until you change it back.

I was up rather late last night, and thought I’d check Twitter on my iPad one last time before heading to bed. I did so just as the news of Steve Jobs passing away hit Twitter; somehow it felt fitting to be watching people express their sadness and thanks on one of the amazing devices he created. As President Obama said in his tribute:

there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented

I am an unabashed fan of Apple, and therefore Steve Jobs as they were for many of us inseperable, but I was surprised how I felt on hearing the news; the best way I can describe it is as a feeling of hollowness.

I didn’t know him, I never met him or even saw him present, but I feel I understand him. Every time I use a piece of Apple hardware or software I can see, and understand, his values and passion.

Two of my favourite Steve Jobs philosophies are that Apple products should be “insanely great” and “it just works”.

I’m reminded of these philosophies when I watch my six year old son creating music in Garage Band, export that music to iTunes and then sync it to his iPod. I like to think that Steve Jobs would be as proud and delighted as I am to see him beaming away as he listen to “his music”.

This is Steve Jobs legacy: insanely great products that are a joy to use and bring delight their users.

One of the regular topics in my /mentoring conversations is recommended reading. I got weary of pulling up links to the same posts over and over, so I decided to make a little page instead. I figured I’d share with you beautiful people.

These aren’t just for new designers, these are readings that I reference all the time, as well as some newer favorites. If you work with me, the chances are I’ve made you read one of these. It’s not a complete tutorial on how to be a designer (not even close) but do let me know if you think there’s something I should add.

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