This tasty morsel of mystery represents the end of our (slightly longer than a ) week-long Famous Destinations Travelogue. Thanks for coming along with me on the journey! You’re good company, all of you. Today we’re revisiting the Mystery Nebulae, home of the Cookie Sleuth.

Before you scroll down and vote in the poll to determine the new FInal Destination, can I ask you kindly to take a moment to check out the Goats Kickstarter? It’s doing pretty darn well from a funding perspective, but I would love to see broader-based support from the rest of the readers. I know there’s thousands of you reading this, and only 270 or so backers, so we have some work to do still. Can we get to 400 backers this week? That would be nice.

Anyways, enough rambling. Here’s your Final Destination poll!

You might think Trashbot has a crappy job, but he really likes it. He likes it a disturbing amount, actually.

As mobile devices have continued to evolve and spread, so has the process of designing and developing Web sites and services that work across a diverse range of devices. From responsive Web design to future friendly thinking, here's how I've seen things evolve over the past year and a half.

If you haven't been keeping up with all the detailed conversations about multi-device Web design, I hope this overview and set of resources can quickly bring you up to speed. I'm only covering the last 18 months because it has been a very exciting time with lots of new ideas and voices. Prior to these developments, most multi-device Web design problems were solved with device detection and many still are. But the introduction of Responsive Web Design really stirred things up.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive Web Design is a combination of fluid grids and images with media queries to change layout based on the size of a device viewport. It uses feature detection (mostly on the client) to determine available screen capabilities and adapt accordingly. RWD is most useful for layout but some have extended it to interactive elements as well (although this often requires Javascript).

Responsive Web Design allows you to use a single URL structure for a site, thereby removing the need for separate mobile, tablet, desktop, etc. sites.

For a short overview read Ethan Marcotte's original article. For the full story read Ethan Marcotte's book. For a deeper dive into the philosophy behind RWD, read over Jeremy Keith's supporting arguments. To see a lot of responsive layout examples, browse around the mediaqueri.es site.

Challenges

Responsive Web Design isn't a silver bullet for mobile Web experiences. Not only does client-side adaptation require a careful approach, but it can also be difficult to optimize source order, media, third-party widgets, URL structure, and application design within a RWD solution.

Jason Grigsby has written up many of the reasons RWD doesn't instantly provide a mobile solution especially for images. I've documented (with concrete) examples why we opted for separate mobile and desktop templates in my last startup -a technique that's also employed by many Web companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. In short, separation tends to give greater ability to optimize specifically for mobile.

Mobile First Responsive Design

Mobile First Responsive Design takes Responsive Web Design and flips the process around to address some of the media query challenges outlined above. Instead of starting with a desktop site, you start with the mobile site and then progressively enhance to devices with larger screens.

The Yiibu team was one of the first to apply this approach and wrote about how they did it. Jason Grigsby has put together an overview and analysis of where Mobile First Responsive Design is being applied. Brad Frost has a more high-level write-up of the approach. For a more in-depth technical discussion, check out the thread about mobile-first media queries on the HMTL5 boilerplate project.

Techniques

Many folks are working through the challenges of designing Web sites for multiple devices. This includes detailed overviews of how to set up Mobile First Responsive Design markup, style sheet, and Javascript solutions.

Ethan Marcotte has shared what it takes for teams of developers and designers to collaborate on a responsive workflow based on lessons learned on the Boston Globe redesign. Scott Jehl outlined what Javascript is doing (PDF) behind the scenes of the Globe redesign (hint: a lot!).

Stephanie Rieger assembled a detailed overview (PDF) of a real-world mobile first responsive design solution for hundreds of devices. Stephan Hay put together a pragmatic overview of designing with media queries.

Media adaptation remains a big challenge for cross-device design. In particular, images, videos, data tables, fonts, and many other "widgets" need special care. Jason Grigsby has written up the situation with images and compiled many approaches for making images responsive. A number of solutions have also emerged for handling things like videos and data tables.

Server Side Components

Combining Mobile First Responsive Design with server side component (not full page) optimization is a way to extend client-side only solutions. With this technique, a single set of page templates define an entire Web site for all devices but key components within that site have device-class specific implementations that are rendered server side. Done right, this technique can deliver the best of both worlds without the challenges that can hamper each.

I've put together an overview of how a Responsive Design + Server Side Components structure can work with concrete examples. Bryan Rieger has outlined an extensive set of thoughts on server-side adaption techniques and Lyza Gardner has a complete overview of how all these techniques can work together. After analyzing many client-side solutions to dynamic images, Jason Grigsby outlined why using a server-side solution is probably the most future friendly.

Future Thinking

If all the considerations above seem like a lot to take in to create a Web site, they are. We are in a period of transition and still figuring things out. So expect to be learning and iterating a lot. That's both exciting and daunting.

It also prepares you for what's ahead. We've just begun to see the onset of cheap networked devices of every shape and size. The zombie apocalypse of devices is coming. And while we can't know exactly what the future will bring, we can strive to design and develop in a future-friendly way so we are better prepared for what's next.

Resources

I referenced lots of great multi-device Web design resources above. Here they are in one list. Read them in order and rock the future Web!

• Effective Design for Multiple Screen Sizesby Bryan Rieger
• Responsive Web Design (article) by Ethan Marcotte
• Responsive Web Design (book) by Ethan Marcotte
• There Is No Mobile Web by Jeremy Keith
• mediaqueri.es by various artisits
• CSS Media Query for Mobile is Fool’s Gold by Jason Grigsby
• Why Separate Mobile & Desktop Web Pages? by Luke Wroblewski
• About this site... by Yiibu
• Where are the Mobile First Responsive Web Designs? by Jason Grigsby
• Mobile-First Responsive Web Design by Brad Frost
• Mobile-first Media Queries by various artists
• The Responsive Designer’s Workflow by Ethan Marcotte
• Responsible & Responsive (PDF) by Scott Jehl
• Pragmatic Responsive Design (further details) by Stephanie Rieger
• A Closer Look at Media Queries by Stephen Hay
• Responsive IMGs — Part 1 by Jason Grigsby
• Responsive IMGs — Part 2 by Jason Grigsby
• Device detection as the future friendly img option by Jason Grigsby
• Responsive Video Embeds with FitVids by Dave Rupert
• Responsive Data Tables by Chris Coyier
• RESS: Responsive Design + Server Side Components by Luke Wroblewski
• Adaptation (PDF) by Bryan Rieger
• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Set my Mobile Web Sites Free by Lyza Danger Gardner
• The Coming Zombie Apocalypse by Scott Jenson
• Future Friendly by various artists

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Wonderful

/via @assaflavie

gabrielesque:

kjtgp1:

Peanut Butter and Jelly sushi success!

GET

IN MY MOUTH

My daughter’s favorite thing for me to pack in her lunch. 

Michael DeGusta has done an amazing job charting the fragmentation of Android by visualizing the history of operating system updates on Android smartphones for sale in the United States.

Compare this to iPhone updates (which DeGusta did), and it paints a telling picture.

Writes DeGusta:

I went back and found every Android phone shipped in the United States up through the middle of last year. I then tracked down every update that was released for each device – be it a major OS upgrade or a minor support patch – as well as prices and release & discontinuation dates. I compared these dates & versions to the currently shipping version of Android at the time. The resulting picture isn’t pretty – well, not for Android users.

Other than the original G1 and MyTouch, virtually all of the millions of phones represented by this chart are still under contract today.

If you thought that entitled you to some support, think again:

- 7 of the 18 Android phones never ran a current version of the OS.
- 12 of 18 only ran a current version of the OS for a matter of weeks or less.
- 10 of 18 were at least two major versions behind well within their two year contract period.
- 11 of 18 stopped getting any support updates less than a year after release.
- 13 of 18 stopped getting any support updates before they even stopped selling the device or very shortly thereafter.
- 15 of 18 don’t run Gingerbread, which shipped in December 2010.
- In a few weeks, when Ice Cream Sandwich comes out, every device on here will be another major version behind.
- At least 16 of 18 will almost certainly never get Ice Cream Sandwich.

I don’t want to steal the guy’s thunder by reblogging the whole thing, so go check out his chart and solid analysis of what’s going on DeGusta’s his Tumblr blog.

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Ha!

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#occupygooglereader #wearethe99percent #99percent #googlereader #google (Taken with Instagram at Google Inc)

The Product Revolution is Coming!

Hey there, sexy.

As you probably know, I’ve got a launch on right now for the 4th round of my 30×500 Launch Class — aka, the coolest, most bullshit-free, most hilarious, most systematic way ever to start & launch your first product.

You also probably know that I’m not just into all this *waves hand at entrepreneurship stuff* for the money. I’m on a mission.

So, when I think about how I should market 30×500, I ask myself:

How can I market and reach my ideal audience, while also furthering my mission in general? How can I market in such a way that even just my marketing will help smart, creative people learn how to create products? How can I use my marketing alone to help folks break free from being used to create wealth for the people with money — bosses, clients — and use those crazy skills to create wealth for themselves?

The answer is obvious:

Give some of the awesomeness away. Give it to the world — for free.

Which, I’m gonna be honest with you, is fucking scary. On several levels.

But I didn’t go through everything I’ve gone through to create my business, and my life, just to shy away from doing something good just because it’s scary. If I lived every day just to maximize every penny, I would be a miserable, miserable girl. Luckily, in my experience, doing what I love (helping people!) with a mindset of “I can afford to give” makes everything better.

Now, there’s so much of 30×500 that I can’t give away. 30×500 is an intense project.

I spend a huge amount of time each class helping you, my student, personally with your product concepts — and the pitches you’ll use to sell ‘em. (And occasionally dispensing a corrective kick in the pants.)

That level of personal attention simply doesn’t scale beyond the folks actually in my class.

But what I can do is give away a few lessons. In the hopes that you’ll find them useful even without the structure of a regularly scheduled class, group chats, and lively mailing list.

So here they are! Free stuff abounds.

Your Tasting Menu: 5 lessons, 1 video

First, start with what the Austrians call “a greeting from the kitchen” — a little pre-appetizer appetizer. Then the appetizers. Followed by the first main course, second main course, and dessert.

Taste away:

• Setting the Stage: the first 3 lessons from 30×500 (a manifesto, if you will)
• Worldviews Rule, Niches Drool: why marketing is sooo much more than niches, and a workbook that’ll help you bake that understanding into every aspect of your future product (words, colors, design, features)
• Pain Killers: an intense workbook to help you identify rich opportunities to “mine the pain” — to figure out where your customer hurts, and how to help him
• Stacking the Bricks: can ruthless pragmatism rev you up? this video will prove it to you — the premise is that 8 years ago, 37signals had no products, & now they have millions in revenue (a month!). This video’s about the path they took, and how you can apply that to your path.

Yummm.

One Last Word: Before You Dive In…

Don’t just right-click this stuff and let it rot in your Downloads folder.

Oh yeah. I know you do that. I do that too. Get all excited for the smorgasbord of delicious content. So excited you gorge on it like a hyperactive hummingbird, jumping around from PDF to PDF without ever settling down long enough to absorb & use it.

That’s a huge part of why, when you take 30×500, the lessons are metered — they come out on a schedule, and there are deadlines for homework, and regular group discussions.

But seriously. Don’t waste this stuff.

Download it, and take the time to carefully read it. Ideally more than once. Print the workbooks out. Actually do them. Actually watch the video, in its entirety.

These lessons will help you kick total ass, if you’ll just give yourself the time.

Finally: The Goodies!

Download away, friend! I’ve broken the goodies up into the sections (appetizers, first main course, second main course, and dessert) I joked about above.

Enjoy.

Appetizers: Get Psyched, Get Your Head Screwed On Right

First, the first three lessons from 30×500. They’re all about the mistakes & missteps & suffering that we all suffer on the rocky path to profitable-product-owner-hood.

You know, that whole cycle: you wake up energized, eureka! You’ve found your great idea. It has such promise. You know that this time, it’ll work. You’ll make money. You’ll achieve your financial goals. You’ll be able to build the life you want.

But it never works out.

Why not?

Read these lessons — and you’ll slap yourself in the forehead and wonder why you didn’t think of it before:

• Lesson 1 – Why Things Are Broken
• Lesson 2 – What to Do About It: Crafting Your System, Step 1
• Lesson 3 – What to Do About It: Crafting Your System, Step 2

It’s kinda obvious in retrospect, isn’t it?

Worldviews: Everybody’s Got One & You Need to Know Em

I hate niches. When you get into business, you can’t swing a cat without being told you have to find a niche.

What the hell’s up with that?

Obviously you know what a niche is: a group of people defined by slots and numbers, like middle-aged housewives, young men with disposable income and technical skills between the age of 18 and 35, white Republicans with an income of $70,000 to $100,000, new mothers, cat fanciers, Rails developers, web designers. Blah blah blah.

And there’s the problem. Those people may share a demographic, but they don’t think the same. They don’t value the same things. They don’t look at the world the same way. They don’t buy the same way.

Niches-ism doesn’t respect the way people actually buy.

On the other hand, Worldviews — and the 3 Laws of Customer Physics — do. Learn to spot Worldviews, and you’ll save yourself so much heartache, like when you try to sell to people whose worldview will prevent them from buying. (So sad!)

And your understanding of Worldviews will also answer that age old question: Does design matter? (The answer is: it depends on what worldviews your potential customers have.)

In short: this lesson is vital. Don’t miss it. Download it now:

• Lesson 21 & 22

(This taste test lesson also includes a lot of background on the other stuff you’ll learn in 30×500. As you’ll see, the lessons build on each other.)

Pain Killers: Everybody Hurts… So Make & Sell a Soother

You know that REM song, “Everybody Hurts”?

It’s not that different from that Buddhist saying, “Life is suffering.” Which is, if you ask me, is a sentiment with an unfairly bad rap.

To be human is to hurt. That’s just kinda the way it is.

And one of the best ways to make a profit while helping people is to kill their pain. Either take away the pain, or transform it into enjoyment and even joy.

But… other than just trying to spot a “problem” to solve, how the heck do you know which pains exist? Which pains to tackle? Which pains you can fix most awesomely? Which would be profitable?

That’s what this next lesson is about.

When you take 30×500, there are a bunch of lessons between the beginning 3 I already sent you, and this bad boy.

First off, you learn how to pick an Audience to investigate. Then how to find them, and learn from them. Figure out if they’re your ideal customers — or not. How hard it will be to sell. What they need.

You collect all kinds of crazy raw data.

Then you do THIS lesson, lesson 13. (And lesson 12, which is similar, but about money.)

This lesson guides you through, step-by-step, sifting thru that data and squeezing insight out of it. And what do you get at the end? Delicious juice?

No! An infinite number of potential product concepts. As many as you could ever want.

• Lesson 13: Pain Killers

This is part of the awesome process that is 30×500: pick, gather, apply rules, apply a system, apply effort, and BAM!! Results.

Dessert: From Lowly Peon to Rich & Famous

You know 37signals? Of course you do. You know how many products they had when they started out 8 years ago?

Zero.

You know how they got from zero, to millions of dollars of revenue a month? The same way you will get from zero to the income you want.

They did it by Stacking the Bricks. So did just about everybody else you see who’s successful. In this video, I dissect the product career paths of 37signals and 4 other smaller companies (including moi). And turn it into a lesson you can use.

• Watch Stacking the Bricks

Other Things You Learn in 30×500

I’m not joking when I call this set of lessons a tasting menu. They are only a taste. There is SO much more.

Take 30×500, and you’ll learn:

• how not to fail (based on my outline of 14 failure patterns!)
• how to start with an audience
• how to find your audience’s watering holes so you can:
• understand & analyze them
• market to them
• how to do guerilla market research — for free
• what to look for:
• how can you ensure you don’t fail before you even start?
• how do you pick an audience that you can easily sell to?
• who will be good customers?
• and how to mine that raw data for product concepts — as many as you like
• and then how to turn those product concepts into persuasive pitches you can use to market your product before you make it
• how to pick the best product concept for your needs (AND theirs)
• how to flesh out a tiny product concept with great detail
• how to break down that concept into a tiny, shippable atom
• how to plan to build that atom with the time & resources you ACTUALLY have (you know: on the side, after your day job!)
• how to combat & conquer featuritis
• how to speak your customer’s language
• how to price for value… and conquer pricing fear
• how to write your sales letter
• how to launch

This is meaty stuff. It’s theory and it’s practice. It’s actionable. It’s in-depth. It’s ways to think about biz that you can use forever, and in many different kinds of projects.

(Alumnus @adambrault recently told me he used 30×500 concepts to organize his first conference! And LOTS of alumni have used the 30×500 principles to improve their freelance or consulting businesses. Yeah! It’s good stuff.)

That’s what you’ll learn in 30×500. And you won’t be alone.

What Else You Get: A Recipe for Kicking Ass

Okay. Take all that stuff above. Think about it. Think about what you want. Do you want to create financial freedom for yourself? Do you want to be able to say “no” to a day job, or client work — possibly even forever? Do you believe that creating value, & selling directly with the folks who benefit from that value, is the way to do that?

Awesome. We’re totally on the same page.

Now ask yourself, What if I could have…

• Step-by-step help implementing this system?
• Personal advice from someone who’s been there, & done it, over and over? (hint: me! and I don’t pull punches!)
• The support of a lively community of nearly 300 people who’ve taken the class before me… and another 64 taking it with you?
• Access to all those goodies… fooooreeeeverrr?

Oh yeah. I haven’t really mentioned that last part, have I?

30×500: You can check in, but you can never leave! Just kidding.

You get access to the alumni group – forever. The lessons – forever. Free updates to those lessons (and new lessons!) – forever. The custom courseware – forever.

Plus, if you ask nicely, I’ll answer your biz questions even after class is over Just ask @edavis10 how often we’ve talked about his products since he took the first class nearly 3 years ago.

You really can’t beat this package for structure, sense, and support — certainly not at the price of half a class at a serious university.

APPLICATIONS OPEN: Friday the 13th, 3pm Eastern

That’s TODAY! So set your alarms now!

This time around, we’re doing things a lil differently. You have to apply. Here’s why:

In short: I’m selfish. I want more awesome success stories, and that means helping ensure everybody in 30×500 is ready to be there and make the most of it. Thus the application process.

Want to apply? Awesome! Here are the questions so you can prepare in advance. This isn’t a pop quiz, this is real life

Want to know more? This page has ALL the details — dates, prices, how it works, how 30×500 got built to start with.

Oh, and, how about some numbers from my business? I wrote a lil retrospective from 3 years of bootstrapping** — and include a huge list of 30×500 alumni kicking ass. Cuz it ain’t just about me.

Not Sure?

Remember: if you aren’t sure if the class is for you, drop me an email. I’ll do my best to help you decide. And yes, I tell people “No.”

That’s the reason I offer a 100% money-back guarantee: I want you to succeed.

And, thanks

Thanks for sticking with me for all these words. I hope you enjoy the sample lessons. Use them in good health!

I’ll see you in class.

Edward Tufte’s Philosophical Road Signs

Using the format of diamond signs that provide alerts and warnings about the road ahead, this series of works on canvas shows philosophical alerts, imperatives, and thoughts about the path past and future. This all started with real diamond signs made by a traffic sign company. I placed them along a curved road leading to my sculpture fields.

“Art is art and everything else is everything else” is Ad Reinhardt, and “Just show up” is supposedly something Woody Allen wears on a t-shirt.

Filed under: signs

Google Maps - The “map” or “satellite” button” shows the actual area behind it.

/via Hugo

Shared by Martin Polley
/via @dszuc

What if you were rewarded for biking to work each day? What if your city had a fleet of bikes and cars integrated with its public transportation system. Introducing mo, a new concept in urban mobility. The team at LUNAR Europe teamed up with the University of Wuppertal and Green City e.V. to concept a full urban mobility system for Munich, Germany that could be scaled for cities around the world.

The mo system, at it's heart, is a fully integrated share model which connects existing public transportation options with rental vehicles: bicycle and cargo bikes, electric bikes and cars. The fleet is spontaneously accessible allowing citizens to transport bulky goods or jet-set speed off for a quick breath of country air. A smart phone app allows users to book a vehicle, use location-based services to locate a hub, organize group meetings and access user information. And the best part of all? The more you bike, the more rewards you accumulate. mo rewards bicycling (even on your own bike) with a point system based on miles biked that can be put towards electric bike charging stations or even car rentals.

What if you were rewarded for biking to work each day? What if your city had a fleet of bikes and cars integrated with its public transportation system. Introducing mo, a new concept in urban mobility. The team at LUNAR Europe teamed up with the University of Wuppertal and Green City e.V. to concept a full urban mobility system for Munich, Germany that could be scaled for cities around the world.

The mo system, at it's heart, is a fully integrated share model which connects existing public transportation options with rental vehicles: bicycle and cargo bikes, electric bikes and cars. The fleet is spontaneously accessible allowing citizens to transport bulky goods or jet-set speed off for a quick breath of country air. A smart phone app allows users to book a vehicle, use location-based services to locate a hub, organize group meetings and access user information. And the best part of all? The more you bike, the more rewards you accumulate. mo rewards bicycling (even on your own bike) with a point system based on miles biked that can be put towards electric bike charging stations or even car rentals.

Love mobile culture LOLs & FAILs? Dial into Autocowrecks!

I'm experiencing one of those little clusters of noticing. Your attention snags on one thing, then lots of similar things seem to crop up all at once.

I realised that, all my life, I'd been wondering about those hand signals people use in action movies. Holding up their fist to say Stop etc. And I finally wondered about it while in front of a computer and ready to do a little googling.

Here, for instance, is a guide from the First City Rifles, a military explorer programme for 14-18 year olds.

I can imagine this being useful on a conference call:

This, hopefully, would crop up less often:

And, then I saw this piece in the NY Times which illustrates the signs the staff at a New York restaurant use to talk to each other and references the same practise at the 'legendary Stork Club'. Photos of which you can see here. Guess what this means:

It just occured to me that these are all North American examples. I wonder why that is, the influence of baseball maybe? Did military signals preceed sporting ones?

Ah - I've just thought of a non-US version - cricket umpires. And, of course, Give Us A Clue.

There's no particular point to this except to wonder whether these vocabularies will be mined by the gesture scientists. I can imagine furiously signalling I DO NOT UNDERSTAND at a computer vision device somewhere - trying to do the signal equivalent of shouting or enunciating more clearly.

(I always wanted to make a Kinect Hack which would read Give Us A Clue signals, connect to the IMDB database and guess the movie. That'd be a proper demo of machine learning.)

Anyway.

Last week saw the latest release of Instapaper, a service for saving web pages for reading later. It seems like a simple thing, but Instapaper has embedded itself into my life surprisingly deeply, and is a must-have for folks who find themselves with dozens of tabs in their browser of articles they want to read, but don't quite have the time for right now. Instapaper also proves quite instructive of how to deliver great experiences.

Given my love of the service, what I find most inspiring is that it is essentially the creation of one person, Marco Arment. Originally begun as a side project while he was the CTO of Tumblr, about a year ago he decided to focus on it full-time. I'm guessing Instapaper began as one of those, "I want to use something that does this, there's nothing out there, so I will just make it," projects. 

As an Instapaper user, I feel Marco's love and care throughout my use of the service, and I think it suggests an opportunity to approach interaction and service design as a craft. This is exemplified in the use of helpful prompts that guide your use of the tool, providing functionality before you even knew you wanted it. My favorite example of this on iPhone and iPad is when I "copy link" from Safari or my RSS reader, and then open the Instapaper app. Most apps would have you paste the link into a field in order to save it for later. Instapaper, though, pops up a dialog the moment you open the app, with a one-click choice to save that URL to read later.

It sees that you're bringing a URL over, and reasonably believes you want to act on it. It's a small thing, but so helpful, and indicative of the care in the app's design. Other such prompts include an offer to "Return to Position" if you (perhaps accidentally) tap the top bar (which causes the page to scroll to the top), or an offer to turn on pagination if, on the iPad, you use a swipe gesture (as opposed to vertical scroll).

Instapaper shows the power of approaching experience design as a craft, as opposed to some kind of massive organizational process. It demonstrates the power of the small team. Or, as Marco shows, even a team of one. And, as Marco hones his craft, he is able to evolve the experience over time. Too often companies launch something and then move on to whatever's next. Instapaper shows what happens when you go deeper and deeper and deeper into something. Unlike Microsoft or Adobe, who simply tack on features with every new release, Marco, instead, refines the design, honing it, polishing it, like his app is some jewel. I'd love to see companies approach service design the way Marco has. It would require a fundamental shift in how they work, but the results could be quite beautiful.

In his presentation at An Event Apart in Washington DC 2011 Ethan Marcotte talked about applying responsive web design principles and workflows to the redesign of a major newspaper Web site. Here's my notes from his talk on The Responsive Designer’s Workflow:

• Storytelling and crafting an object are intertwined. We create objects that can tell our stories whether they are physical journals or a series of tweets.
• Physical newspapers contain the most important information for a day then their value is lessened over time. And increasingly they have less relevance as nearly half of all American results get their news through a mobile phone or tablet. The industry is trying to catch up through iPad apps, mobile sites, and more. Responsive Web design is another strategy to consider.
• What makes a design responsive? Three ingredients: flexible grids, flexible images/media, and media queries. But these three elements are just focused on layout. Layout is not design. “Design is putting form and content together.” Design is the means. The process of how we get there. How do we become more responsive designers? This is the start of a conversation.

Working Responsively

• Ethan recently got to go beyond layout and apply responsive design principles to a lot of the redesign process for the Boston Globe Web site.
• Creative process is often managed as tasks. Our thinking is often linear. We finish one task before moving on to the next. We have hand-off points where tasks move between different skill sets like visual design and front-end development.
• But the design process of a responsive site is not done at any one point. How do you convey how a design will adapt itself in a single comp? You can’t. Process needs to change.
• Our tools are also stuck in the old model of building Web pages. So new forms of sharing and collaboration need to be figured out.
• To create a responsive site for Boston Globe, there was unified collaborative design and development team.
• Designers “introduced” a comp, developers asked lots of questions about why the page is designed as it is, especially the big one: how will the content adapt? How will the interface adapt to touch, mouse, keyboard? Don’t need to have final answers to these questions but want to understand the process and the decisions made.
• The developers also ask a specific question of every element on the page: what value does this provide for users on mobile? This question help force a mobile first approach to design.

Mobile First

• Why Mobile first: traffic has exploded, new capabilities, and narrow screens force us to focus. In many cases our mobile experiences are focused while our desktop experiences are cluttered. Going mobile first pushes focus everywhere.
• A question of context: what are the different goals of people on mobile & the desktop. We can be focused when using mobile and focused as well. We should leave the mind reading to the professionals. Context doesn’t necessarily dictate people’s intent.
• People click the desktop link because they feel they are missing out.
• When going mobile first you are making a commitment to the content on the page. Everything needs to be there. What is the value of every element on the page? This applies to all device experiences.
• Content first allows you to determine what needs to be in the design. Mobile can be used as a forcing function for simplifying things on all device experiences.

Prototyping

• You need to move past comps quickly then prototype like the wind to explore responsive designs.
• Figure out the proportions of a flexible grid using: target divided by context equals result.
• Can use Scott Jehl’s responsive images code can serve appropriately sized images to the Web browser by swapping out img src attributes. It defaults to the smallest image. Or you can use img max-width 100% if appropriate.
• Media queries: first look at the devices you are trying to support. Then identify common breakpoints. Small screens, portrait & landscape, tablets portrait & landscape, and widescreen.
• Media queries are like conditional comments for CSS. Allow us to serve up different code for different device attributes. Media queries support different break points and define adaptation points.
• Designing in the browser allows the developers to make recommendations for how things adapt and doesn’t require a design comp for very single resolution point.
• Web fonts are limited to desktop resolutions due to files sizes and readability concerns
• Verify your work live on different devices in an interactive design review. How well does the layout adapt? Do individual modules still feel usable? Do any elements need additional design direction? Rinse, repeat, and refine as needed.

Flexible Foundation

• A flexible foundation is really key for responsive design. A flexible foundation allows you to quickly refine new breakpoints. It also means less code to write. And better adaptability.
• The mobile Web allows us to revisit the talk of inclusion, progressive enhancement for everyone.
• A responsive layout meets mobile first. Default to a linear, small screen friendly design. Media queries based on min-width scale up, not down.
• Media=”only-all” is a test to see if site supports media queries. Can create a reading experience that works on less capable devices.
• Then use a few lightweight tests. Test to see if you have @media query support or IE. If so, take the basic stylesheet out of your document entirely. You can also adapt based on touch support and Javascript functionality.
• A designer’s choices are a small limited form of tyranny. The philosophy of a responsive design might not be appropriate for the audience you are supporting. The decision to build a responsive or mobile site is often more about the team’s capabilities and decisions than anything specific to devices.

I do this talk called "The Engineer, The Designer, and The Dictator", and it's a talk about the things I love. It's a little bit about the nature of engineers and why I think we might have more power than we deserve. I talk about designers, the creators of art, and how I want the engineers and designers to party together more. Lastly, I talk about the importance of dictators -- forces of nature whose vision is terrifyingly clear and whom we willingly follow even though we're a little scared of them. I explain how a dictator mediates the battle between art and science with a curious mind, an iron fist, and taste.

Yeah, it's about Steve.

My first thought as I stared long and hard at Apple's home page yesterday wasn't a specific Steve story or one of his many insightful quotes. The thought was...

You are underestimating the future. You are fretting about the now; worrying about little things that don't matter. You are wasting precious energy obsessing over irrelevant details. You don't believe that a better future is out there and can be built, that it can exceed people's expectations, because you're spending so much time considering the truth of the present and the seemingly important lessons of the past.

You are underestimating the future because you believe you cannot see it, but you can - you've seen it done before.

My favorite video of Steve was shortly after his return to Apple. He wasn't CEO yet; he was still consulting and was speaking on the last day of 1997's WWDC. It wasn't a prepared speech; it was Q&A, an open microphone where anyone could apparently ask Steve Jobs anything. (Steve starts at 2:12)

I've watched this video a few times, and what consistently impressed me wasn't just his ability to elegantly answer random and sometimes hostile questions from an audience, it was the fact that it was abundantly clear what he wanted Apple to be. Again: 1997.

I was an Apple employee for eight and half years and I didn't see the video until after I'd left the company. For those who worked there and for those who have watched Apple's success, what resonates from this crackly old video is that it was clear that Steve could see the future. He may have given features, products, and strategies different names at the time, but so much of what Apple has become is described in a video from almost 14 years ago.

Steve didn't underestimate the future; he could see it, and, more importantly, he built it.

Shared by Martin Polley
Awesome

/via @assaflavie

I have been enlightened

Shared by Martin Polley
Amy just saved me the cost of the book plus the time it would have taken to read it. She should be charging for this shit :)

Welcome to Biz Book Fridays! I’ve got a whopper of a biz book habit and I’ll read ‘em so you don’t have to. I bring the juiciest morsels straight to you.

Today I’m talkin’ two pricing lessons from the very excellent (if dry) Pricing with Confidence.

Underneath that lame-o, goatse-scented cover beats the heart of a biz book tiger.

First, your customers don’t care about your costs. They care only about the value you deliver.

Let’s say your cost is a cake. The amount you charge above the cost of that cake is the icing on the cake. Result: a cake with a thin layer of tasty icing! Deliciousness.

Too bad this (tasty) model is totally wrong.

Believe it or not, this cake-and-icing model is a real thing, called cost-plus pricing. Only there is no cake. Cost-plus pricing is one of many majestic pricing unicorns: it is easy, appealing, convenient, and in complete denial of reality.

Fact: Your customers do not care about your costs.

A customer will never think to themselves, “Gee. The price is $10, and I’ll only get $8 of value out of it… but it must have been really expensive to make! That poor little company. I’ll throw ‘em a bone.”

Never. Not once. Not ever.

Not unless they’re your mama.

What’s the alternative?

Value is the basis of business exchange. You provide products and services to customers so they can build their own value. In exchange, they take a part of that value you helped them build and return it to you in the form of price. That’s the way business is supposed to work.

You have to look at how much value your product creates for your customer, and price from there.

Let’s say you create a little screencast course that saves would-be Ruby devs hours of ineffective Googling. How much can they charge for the hours you saved them? That’s one way to look at value.

Or what about if you create a tool that helps freelancers close more leads? How many more leads will it help them close, and how much income will they get from each lead? That’s the value.

Work backwards from the value to the price. Create value — then capture it. Mwahaha.

The Bottom Line

Change the way you think about price. Don’t think about your costs: think about customer value.

Then price your product accordingly.

But… where does value come from? How do you design & create a product that creates lots of customer value? Then how do you figure out the price from there? Well, those are two of the main topics from my 30×500 Product Launch Class. Tickets are on sale now, woop woop!

Related posts:

1. A Simple Rule for Pricing Newbs Who Got The Fear
2. Pricing Your Product: The D&D Test
3. Business Book Bonanza: Growing My Biz