Design Marshall

"As a Typekit user, you’ll have access to our library of high-quality fonts. Just add a line of JavaScript to your markup, tell us what fonts you want to use, and then craft your pages the way you always have. Except now you’ll be able to use real fonts. This really is going to change web design."

"David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. "

This is a fantastic essay by Malcolm Gladwell of the New Yorker, and can be applied to just about every thinkable problem small teams/businesses/campaigns come across. Think on your toes and solve problems in real-time, with the tools you have available. By embracing constraints you'll find that small guys can beat out  the big guys 10-to-1.

It's hard to imagine that a simple UI change involving two fields, two buttons and one link could earn a company $300,000,000... Though it's very easy to understand how something like this goes un-noticed. Glad the knowledge is free.

Lesson: Don't force users to register right before checking out.

I'm certainly not the first to comment, and definitely won't be the last, but I had to post something about one of Kevin Kelly's best articles to date. If you're not familiar, Kevin Kelly is a badass. He helped launched Wired magazine back in '93, is now an editor-at-large, and maintains their 'Cool Tools' site. You can read more about him here.

In general the 1,000 true fans is a simple goal, which presents very real challenges to small & large groups. For the small, it's a solid foundation for building your audience; whereas for the large, is a great way of finding your voice.

From the horses mouth:
"A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living. 

To raise your sales out of the flatline of the long tail you need to connect with your True Fans directly.  Another way to state this is, you need to convert a thousand Lesser Fans into a thousand True Fans.

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day's wages per year in support of what you do. That "one-day-wage" is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that.  Let's peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate..."

Read the rest of 1,000 True Fans at Kevin Kelly's website

Leave it to Lego. Fucking badass.

Some of you may not know this, but I had the honor of interning with Coudal over 8 glorious months in 2007. While I was there,  I mostly packed up orders for Jewelboxing and The CP Swap Meat. There were a few occassions, however, when I broke free from the slightly mundane, to study some of CP's black book ideas. The one I loved the most was the Deck Network. Imagine an advertising network so cool, you'd want to look at all of the ads at once. I'm always excited to see how long some ads run for, and how often others switch out, who's new to the game and sometimes just what in the world the deck is up to next. This time around, lookin' forward to the reader survey; a tribute and parody to finding out who the hell is reading this stuff. I mean where else could you find such awesomeness in 120x90 pixels + 80 characters?

On earth you kern with the best of them. But how well do your skills hold up in a fraction of earth's gravity? Check the gauges, fire the boosters, and do your best to give 80-point type a 3-point landing.

And remember… in space, no one can hear you kern.

via @ilovetypography

In 2002, Ned Kahn worked with the staff of Technorama, the major science center in Switzerland, and their architects, Durig and Rami, to create a facade for the building which is composed of thousands of aluminum panels that move in the air currents and reveal the complex patterns of turbulence in the wind.

via swiss-miss

Guess who gave it to him? ;)

Sketch Block is based on a clever concept – not new, but smartly executed. It is basically a bold slab serif (or block serif, hence the name), hatched with a marker or ballpoint pen. Its effect resembles the mockups that art directors used to make to simulate display type: by hand-sketching the type exactly the way they wanted it set. As Sketch Block closely follows the shapes of the most famous and streetwise slab serif of all, Rockwell, it is a natural display companion to that font family. It works well as a standalone solution too, and the Light version is surprisingly readable at small sizes.