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This is the title of my article published today on Smashing Magazine.
In the the article I talk about some successful products and I try to see what makes them so. What can we derive from their success and how can we apply this knowledge to web design? In my opinion it all comes to three things:
This is a quite long and complicated but rewarding article. As the title says, it promises to show us the ultimate way to Web typography and I think it does. A great resource.
To become a leader sounds irresistibly sweet. Too many people dream of becoming leaders but too few can make it. Why? Because they hate solitude, no matter what they say.
Leadership and solitude seem to be two contradictory notions but they are not. No, really.
Do yourself a favor and spend the next 30 minutes of your life reading Solitude and Leadership.
The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself.
There’s a new kid on the block and I think it’s quite interesting. Its name is Instabuck and it aims to help you sell easily your digital product. “Easily” is the keyword.
Modern times imposed the use of modern products. Most of them are digital ones such as music, art, books, design themes, code and the list keeps on. Instabuck is a very simple website. However it engages a powerful mechanism which makes selling easy.
This is a project of the mighty Venture Geeks and it is developed around the Minimum Viable Product strategy. My involvement had to do with designing the main website and the available themes among others.
There are lots to be said about Instabuck, its philosophy and the design decisions, but I feel we need to give it some time to breath and evolve.
Until then I suggest you to take a look at Instabuck and become a member in case you want to sell a digital product. Registration takes seconds and the service remains free for the 7 first days. I hope you ‘ll like it.
When I saw the article I thought “What? I don’t consider my design to be minimalistic.” Then I slowed down and saw how ridiculous was my thought. Who cares what I believe? These good people on The Design Mag selected my design and put it among some exceptional ones, it’s an honour.
Many times I see my website being among “the X best ones”. When I was younger I took such mash-ups very seriously. Now I don’t. Also, never ignore them.
And then came one more thought: does it matter? What does this (tiny or important) recognition means for me? Nothing at all.
Which is of course wrong. Again. It means something, if not I wouldn’t bother sharing the news with the people I follow on the social networks. Such showcases add fuel to the machine. It may last long or it may not. But it is something.
Then I stopped thinking at all. And all I did was to accept the fact. It felt OK.
Kern Type is a beautifully designed, short, online game about kerning (If you have an iPad, you’ll enjoy the game even more). And what’s kerning?
According to Wikipedia:
Kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result.
We shouldn’t confuse kerning with tracking.
Kerning is the adjustment of the space between individual letter forms vs. tracking which is the uniform adjustment of spacing applied over a range of characters.
I enjoyed Kern Type so much that I decided to brag a bit. Here’s my score:
In the world of online advertising, I feel we’ve gone too far away from what everybody knows as “common sense”. I can’t undersrtand why we keep running a model that it is obviously sick.
I predict that in 2050, we’ll look back at the first 20 years of the web and shake our heads. The craptacular design! The hallucinogenic business models! The privacy nightmares! All because entrepreneurs convinced themselves that they couldn’t do what inventors have done for centuries: Charge people a fair price for things they want.
