Teleute

Good design is innovative. Good design makes a product useful. Good design is aesthetic. Good design helps us to understand a product. Good design is unobtrusive. Good design is honest. Good design is durable. Good design is consequent to the last detail. Good design is concerned with the environment. Good design is as little design as possible. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

Gina Trapani is the much celebrated founder of popular blog Lifehacker, a part of the Gawker Media blog network. She left the lead editor role just over a month ago and is now doing columns only, as well as writing post for her recently launched Smarterware blog. So where does she stand now? Let’s find out!

One of the lesser-known aspects of Gmail Labs’ useful Canned Responses feature is that it’s available as a filter action. This means you can auto-reply to messages that match criteria you set up with a canned response. For example, you can say that any message from Aunt Bertha with “Fwd” in the subject line should automatically get the response: “I love you Aunt Bertha, but please stop forwarding me chain letters.”

What can your phone number do? Google voice lets you do more with your calls. And it’s free. One number for all your calls and SMS. Voicemail as easy as email, with transcripts. Free calls, conference calling, and more.

Hmmmm, no mention of muxtape, surely they can’t be oblivious to it?!

Well, that’s why I’ve come up with T-Shirts for Hairy-Chested Men, with strategic cutouts that allow your hairy chest to show through. They could feature portraits of famous curly-haired celebrities like Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and Harpo Marx (for blondes). At last, the Hairy-Chested Man can finally showcase his own natural chest hair with style.

Mmmmm, amaranthine. Love that they explain aubergine by describing it as “eggplant”. It’s the same plant/fruit, people! :)

Douglas Bowman on leaving Google

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

1. Brownie McGhee (18) 
2. Albert King (17) 
3. Minnie Riperton (16) 
4. Blind John Davis (15) 
5. Buddy Guy (4) 

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

If I put a Paypal tipjar on this blog, to take conscience money from folks who’ve downloaded a (cough) unauthorized ebook or two, the money would come to me, not to the publisher. And without the publisher those books wouldn’t exist: wouldn’t have been commissioned, wouldn’t have been edited, wouldn’t have been corrected and marketed and sold in whatever form filtered onto the unauthorized ebook market. (Yes, they commission books, and pay authors for them up-front — a vital part of the process, because most of us can’t afford to take a year to write a book on spec and then hope somebody liked it enough to buy it. And if you think my bank manager would front me the kind of advance money that Ace, Orbit, or Tor have no difficulty offering for a novel that isn’t even written yet, let alone doing so without charging interest or asking for their money back when the product’s late, well … you might want to think again.) Your typical book publisher is not like the music or movie industry; they run on thin margins, and they’re staffed by underpaid, overworked folk who do it because they love books, not because they’re trying to make themselves rich on the back of a thousand ruthlessly exploited artists. I think their effort deserves to be rewarded appropriately.