Carlos Segura (founder of online type-foundry T-26)

segura-inc.com
t26.com
5inch.com
cartype.com

T-26 born in 1994, wanted to change the industry in regard to royalties, and permitted their fonts to be sent to service bureaus. They made a music video/commercial for each typeface, and sent the videos out on floppy disks (they had over 2000 (almost 3k) videos); remember that it took a week for the videos to even render. People liked it so much that they started to submit their own movies. Born during grunge era, in the same era of Raygun Magazine; after being invited to speak/present in London, they decided to make very large (almost 2′ x 3′), they put together really beautiful and clean pieces to advertise their fonts and foundry in unique and in limited runs (they were great designs that were silkscreened, letterpressed, etc).

5inch.com designed limited edition cd designs in trigger cases that they were the first to import from Germany.

Cartype.com just launched yesterday (6.5.2008), and it is a collection of car-related designs, advertisements, and photographs. They also have the “I Park Like An Idiot” section.

“Go beyond and think outside of what is requested; take it a step further”. Segura Inc was selected by Express Jeans to design a tag along with like 9 other designers. They did “Dangerously Bold”, and designer 9 labels (only required to design 1), 7 of which were bought by Express. They weren’t normal tags, they were pouches that doubled as pda/phone characters, kung fu fighting stencil templates, iron on patches (black and whites featuring sharks, etc).

Segura Inc was hired by Grant Morrisson and DC to design the covers of his comic called The Filth. Grant’s only condition of signing with DC was that Segura did the covers and that they didn’t look like comics; they were ironic and yet very clean looking design. They were then hired by DC behind Grant’s back to do a design of what they would look like if they were actually designed as comics; they silkscreened all of them.

Segura was hired by SRAM, bike shock manufacturer of Rock Shox. They went in and talked about what you think of when you look at car logos/brands (mini=fun, bmw=reliable, ford=everyone, etc). They went in and designed a 3d topographical catalogue for their “the earth is not flat” slogan.

They also re-invinted Corbis (owned by Bill Gates, who wants to own the stock image business). They re-designed the Corbis personality, and rather than creating a 9″ x 12″ 3″ thick book of thumbnails, they cropped all of the images in interesting ways and made them all large photos (one per page) in a large format made to be shipped in a fedex tube, designing the pages very minimally and beautifully. They called the catalogue CROP, and wanted it to be visually identified with in the same way that macs are recognized without their logo even being visible. They wanted to print them large to show that they would look great when printed as large images (some online stock photos beg the question of whether its going to look good when printed large). [i like the crop image labels]. They won a Red Dot: best of the best award two years in a row for Crop, as well as Crop-5.

They are successful mostly because they pay very careful attention to the details: the smell of the paper, the way it is folded, using transparent ink rather than a photoshop filter, the specific sequences and pairings of images, etc; they really show respect for the audience’s experience, as well as the client’s budget.

When a client said “Money is no object, we want to do something to change the world”, Carlos said, “You know Jim, I’ve heard this all before, and frankly I don’t believe you”. This level of honesty and frankness won them the client and several multi-million dollar jobs.

Great Quotes

“Go beyond and think outside of what is requested; take it a step further”

“I’ve always had this big-mouth reputation where I can help but say what is on my mind”

“I’ve learned that clients don’t want to hear the truth, they want to hear what they want to hear”

“I just didn’t want to feel ‘icky’ anymore, and that is why Jason and I started to do our own things with Coudal”

“I want to work with decent people and I don’t want to complicate my life…”

“We have always had the point of view and goal of staying small and being selective about who we work with”

“I don’t focus on the past experience of someone as much as I focus on their future potential”

“We don’t follow the totem pole model; when we get a new project, everyone works on it from the intern to me”

“The group that created the picked comp is the lead and we all follow their lead in production; we give everyone the opportunity”

“We don’t make you happy just by money, we want to make you happy in your heart”

“Start early and decide who you want to be; be firm with this idea and you will get what you want, slowly but surely. You have to be prepared to deal with the repercussions of your stances with clients, even if it means less money, being less busy than you’d prefer, etc; be honest, and be firm.”

“I’m not interested in your boss’s favorite color, your past in-house designs, re-creating a past design, etc. It is good to explain early on in the process when you are still friends with your clients that they (their internal projects, etc) are irrelevant in this project, and that it is about their target audience, not them.”

“There is value in some research, but what we bring to the table is more grass roots oriented rather than refined and we go off of our instincts more than anything else.”

SkinnyCorp (featuring Jeffery & Jake, founders of Threadless)

threadless.com

Their presentation is called “The SkinnyCorp guide to doing what you love for a living”, and the title page features a cutout of Freddy Krueger saying “Don’t fall asleep”.

Simply enough: do what you love, do what excites you, do work that you would be doing for fun in your spare time even if you weren’t getting paid for it.

Awesome Quotes

“Whenever we start to do something, it usually starts with ‘It would be awesome if…’”

“How can you sell somebody something that you don’t even like?”

“Ride the Exciting” (obviously a reference to Metallica’s Ride the Lightning)

“Create something for yourself, and when you are truly excited about something it will have a unique energy that will make it grow”

Jason Fried (37signals)

37signals.com

37signals doesn’t do wireframes, documents, diagrams, mockups, etc. because there is no difference between building and designing; you get too focused on things that don’t matter and may not even be built, and they don’t want to spend time on things that will ultimately end up unused in a file cabinet. They want to get in and build the applications because building is designing

The 37signals Approach:

• They start out with sketches. They use sharpies because thin pen lines are too open and tend to focus too much on the details, which should come later.
• They then go into html/css and build from there; they don’t mock up in photoshop etc, which has been a massive controversy on their blog.
• * It is all about the details, just like fine furniture or a beautiful building.

Think about the flow (eg – the use of a to do list app where you have to click to make a new list, go to a new screen, add a new item, new screen, type a note, click etc. 37signals’ version you click once, type the name of the list, hit enter, type a list item, hit enter, repeat; sooooo much quicker)

Copyrighting is interface design; writing IS design, there is no separation between the two, you need to be paying attention to the words on the screen as much as the pixels on the screen; design the type, design the words.

Instead of calling it “permissions”, they use logical self-explicative terms (eg – Who can see this person? Everyone, Only Me, etc)

“If you wouldn’t say something in a conversation, don’t use it in a UI” (eg – when selecting items, you say “delete this person”, when more than one is selected, the phrase changes to “delete these 2 people”). User Interfaces are communicating, it should communicate exactly what you are doing in clear language so that users know exactly what they are going to get when they click things.

Timing is everything: set a .25 second delay on hover events so that you don’t rub the user’s mistake in their face; you are showing them respect and forgiveness. You also don’t want to flicker things every time you roll over it, so on some features they will use a .25 second delay.

Photographic Memory: 37signals doesn’t like preferences or settings, the ui should remember where you were and keep the last viewed page in mind. Think about what people want to do as they are moving across a series of products, and anticipate where they will want to go (drop them on similar pages etc). Remember the last state of a checkbox, etc (”Yesterday’s weather is the best example of today’s weather; what was done before will likely want to be done again”)

What Just Happened? In the old days, you reload a web page and you know that something is happening; with ajax nowadays, you need to show what just happened (eg – when adding a new note to Backpack, there is a yellow fade on the background of a list item; deleting an item, the whole page slides up slowly to show that something is happening). Subtly let the user know something, and then get out of their way.

“Extreme Detail is like UI Porn.” Don’t throw in errors unless it is absolutely necessary; errors are abrasive, and no one like to be told that they’ve done something wrong (eg – if a user doesn’t name a list, don’t give them an error, just automatically name it ‘list’). When you click something that would normally expand off of the page, the page automatically scrolls up for you.

Enterprise software is based on the length of its feature list, rather than its usability; Jason says that there seems to be a connection between the expense of the product and the quality of its user interface (meaning: the more expensive it is, the worse the UI is). The buyer is seldom the user of enterprise software.

Decisions are temporary: the timing of your js events could work at .3 seconds for an event, but if it doesn’t feel right a year later, it can always be changed.

Sam from 37signals wrote the javascript library Prototype, which is implemented in all of the 37s apps.

“We try to make sure that our products deliver more value than the price we are charging. We go on our gut feeling: would we pay $xx /month to use _____ product?”

“Interruption is the biggest enemy of productivity.”

Numbers represent what people do, but I’d rather talk to the people and hear back from them than analyze numbers that represent their complaints.

If someone is excited about some new thing that they learned, then they should get to implement that and deal with the bugs next week; I let people work on what they want to work on, and eventually we get around to working out all of the flaws and getting everything done. If shit is really broken, of course we get in there and fix it right away, but we don’t think that bugs are special, and they will all be fixed eventually.

Diffuse points of head-butting and get to the heart of the issue and figure out what the real problem is, then get everyone to agree and get them on the same page.

Jim Coudal (Coudal Partners)

coudal.com

Coudal is a small chicago design firm that share an office space with 37signals; started out as a small advertising firm making work for other people, and then went on to be more entrepreneurial designers. They have gone on to create many things: layer tennis, the deck advertising, fieldnotes, jewelboxing, etc.

Through pseudo-science (relativity), Jim is going to try to unify the creative and scientific world during his lecture. Understanding creativity, it is difficult to analyze the original creative spark that is responsible for the great masterpieces because there are a lot of moving parts that create the sum total of the final product. Susan painted the entire bathroom with chalkboard paint; the entire firm played hangman, etc, which went on to inspire something called “Booking Bands” in which the names of bands and the names of books are combined to produce an entertaining result (eg – Megadeth of a Salesman). This game associates the known (the constant [eg - the band name you think of]) with the unknown (the variable [eg - the book titles that you are reeling through]). The essential creative moment is the combination of something that you know and something that you don’t know.

Its that first moment of interest, where it clicks and you get that moment of first love and enthusiasm… that is the moment, that is the juice, the fuel to turn that interest into a powerful thing that will ride that creative fuel. The most important thing is that you have that rush of enthusiasm, whether it gets finished or is monetarily successful of not, it is a success and it was fun. Inspiration is not from outside, it comes from inside of us, and it is our enthusiasm that must be obeyed and cannot be denied. Be prepared to fail as often as possible; failure is lovely. “Let’s crash this ship and see where we go from there”.

Like to the 3rd power

• Like to the 1st power explain with a metaphor (eg – this thing/idea is like this other thing/idea)
• Like to the 2nd power create an executive summary; powerful shorthand (”i was like ‘and i can’t believe it’, and he was like ‘duh’)
• Like to the 3rd power as an aesthetic judgement (”I like brown better than blue”, etc)

Creative relativity: the expected or unexpected fueled by enthusiasm and explained by like to the 3rd.

The 3 Questions We Ask Before Really Pursuing an Idea

• Can we make money from it?
• When we get done are we going to be proud of it?
• Will we learn something new along the way?

There’s the terror of the blank page vs. Constant revision bc projects are never done

Excellent Quotes

“If we hadn’t re-evaluated our company and its approach, we would be a much bigger company doing work we don’t like for people we don’t like.”

“If you aren’t chasing after the next shiny thing in the grass, then you aren’t going to stumble into the accidents along the way (eg – Coudal made some tv show and went to package it and send it off, didn’t like the packaging options, so came up with some alternate packaging system and then decided to market it, so they had to get into advertising because the advertising options sucked, etc)”

“We don’t have a five year plan… hell, we don’t even have a 5 minute plan; we’ve been told that from the outside it looks like we are following our whims to their logical conclusions, and we are pretty much okay with that.”

Gary Vaynurchuk (wine video blogger)

winelibrarytv.com

Commitment: He wanted to have the biggest wine store in the world, and wanted to “kill Sams in Chicago”. He was really passionate and built an multimillion dollar online store.

2008 is the year for the gold rush on building personal equity: build your brand equity.

Do what you love best, and don’t think about it; put yourself in a position to be obnoxiously happy; you will come home and dominate shit. Do what you love and break it down to what you love to do and talk about it (don’t compare it to other things that are out there). When you are obnoxiously happy, you aren’t going to be snippy, you are going to be pumped.

Create your own blog; just talk, get people to know you. Don’t hide anything, be real, be you, and allow everyone to get to know you. Don’t run away from your flaws, embrace them, lay them out, be who you are.

Answer every email; your customers will love you, and it is an unparalleled marketing and research resource

Effing Hysterical Quotes

“I keep things extremely basic, but dream very big… I want to buy the New York Jets.”

“Content is king… but Marketing is queen, and we know who runs the house.”

“If you are really passionate about what you are into, you can take it and own it and be the king of it with patience and persistence… Don’t give up.”

“When you bring straight thunder, people are going to love you because of your confidence.”

“You have to embrace your dna: you have to embrace what you love and who you are, and go toward where you want to be. Make your dna your business.”

“Your intuition is never wrong; people just don’t want to listen to themselves.”

“Keep bringing it every day, what you bring you will get back.”

“A lot of people give up because there is already someone out there doing that in the game; if you love what you do and you get into it, you will own it.”

“We’re in a branded society, and the quicker you can make your brand visible the better.”

Panel Discussion (all of the day’s speakers conversing on general topics)

How do you balance your passionate love affair with work and your home life?
Its all about understanding who you are with, which means understanding your partner and their limitations, as well as them understanding your life and passions along with the limitations that come with them. You shouldn’t be with anyone that can’t understand what you are doing. “Working is breathing, we have to do it.”

*Carlos and his wife have never been on vacation. “Take a vacation from what,’ he asks rhetorically, ‘I am my life; I love my life and have nothing to escape from.”

Quotes to Live By

“Don’t be scared to make money”

“Hire the clients; don’t let them hire you if you don’t like them/the project”

“Relationships are like a shark: they have to keep moving to stay alive.” - Woody Allen