I was perusing a 37 signals blog post from last week on some changes they made to backpack, and noticed in some of the screenshots, the designer Ryan Singer used my name in the mock-up of his new sharing information object. Hee!
Apparently, I’m sharing some documents with some folks.
I’ve tweaked my new design here and there, made some color use more consistent and added some extra flair. There are still some css layout changes that I need to make to fix a couple of pages, and I have a one-off template or two that need some work here and there.
I must say, I really enjoy looking at my own site now. Before I say that, though, I should probably look at it on the PC and in some different browsers to make sure it doesn’t look crap to anyone else. Heh. Looks fine everywhere I can test. I’ll look at in browsercam later.
Testing out my delicious tags autoposting for the first time.
On the design front, I’ve been restructuring my cascading style sheets for this site; separating layout markup into a separate style sheet than the one for design (color, font face, size etc.) and doing a bit of testing on that. That will help when I finally get my new design in order and start building. So I’ve done a bit of work, but behind the scenes.
Also, on the home purchasing front, Stephanie and I are going to see eight or so houses this afternoon to assure ourselves that the one we’ve already picked out is right for us both price-wise and size-wise. We just want to get a feel for what else is out there to confirm our decision about the house we like.
Also, if you’re on Flickr and you’re in my “friends and family” contact list, you can see pictures of the house we picked out. We have the privacy turned on for it, so the pictures aren’t public (we don’t want anyone else to steal it from under our noses).
The 37 Signals guys put pictures from the workshop we went to out on their Flickr Photostream. And here’s a picture of me taking notes.
37 Signals is a web application development company based in Chicago, consisting of 7 guys who produce some very successful products. The day-long workshop called “Getting Real” that we attended was all about how they do that — what methods they have that help them achieve that success with the products they build.
[link deprecated: Here are all my workshop notes], exported directly from OmniOutliner (which creates some seriously crappy html code, BTW.) If there’s anything there that doesn’t make sense — and my notes are really rough, so there will be — feel free to ask questions here.
So here’s the dirt on how they do that, boiled down: They start with a set of core philosophies that they all believe in, about the environment/culture they want to work in, and about what’s important about the products they want to produce. Then they set up some methods of working that reflect those philosophies.
Those methods involve how they interact with one another, how they make decisions, how they design, code, and test their products, how they launch them to the public, and how they handle customer support on their products.
By consistently following those methods, and constantly referring back to those core philosophies (to the point where they call these ideals “mantras”) during their decision-making processes, they are able to produce products that are consistent, functional and pleasing to their users.
When you’re looking at their applications, or listening to them talk about what they do, it becomes really apparent that they’ve identified and filtered out what goes wrong with most software development, especially development that happens at large corporations.
One the keys is that they don’t try to create large, complicated applications all at once. They boil their apps down to some core goals, get them functioning quickly (thus requiring little documentation, meetings, and endless wrangling in the process) and iterate additional features quickly, but only when those features benefit all users and make sense. All this occurs while they refer back to their core mantras for guidance in decision-making.
So are their methods scalable? Can they be applied inside a large corporation? They sugggested several times that skunkworks projects and small groups inside big corporations can achieve that, but I think it’s also possible with a larger team, as long as the person at the top has enough of a vision to set the core philosophies and get people to focus on them and work within them on a daily basis.
Pictures I took in Chicago — not many of the workshop, but lots of the city.
I’m logged into the wireless in the Gleacher Center for the conference, so of course, I have to test by blog.
I should have brought the prescription Ibuprofen. Other than that, the hotel rocks, and we had fun knocking around Chicago last night. We went to Navy Pier and ate dinner, then went to The Alley to shop.
I’m heading up to Chicago for the 37 Signals Getting Real Workshop with my co-worker Mike. We’re heading out this afternoon, because the workshop is all day tomorrow. Should be really interesting. I love the 37 Signals guys; their blog is one of my daily reads.
I’ve been re-working my new prototypes for this site quite a bit lately, and rethinking the design, as well. I realized the other day that my dissatisfacting with some of my new direction is due to the quirkiness of the content and how long it’s been around, and how I use the site differently now than I did 12 years ago when I created it. But then it dawned on me that I need to embrace the quirkiness of it the content instead of working against it, once I finally had that epiphany, new ideas for design instantly sprang into my head. So I’m restarting, but with fundamentally sounder idea than I had before.
I must say that it’s disheartening to stumble across original things I’ve written and my artwork on other people’s sites – presented as though they created it. People steal everything. That just sucks. Makes me not want to write or design anything cool anymore without charging money for it. That is one of the drawbacks of the ubiquity of blogging tools and sites like myspace — once it become easy for assholes and stupid people to put pages up on the web, they do just that. Meanwhile, my desktop wallpapers are no longer on my site. From now on, everything I design will have a tiny picture of me in it somewhere. That’ll show ’em.
On top of that I’m kicking around entirely new art ideas, because I’ve had some other creative sparks going on lately.
From keith, five several things that inspire me creatively: