There’s a new book that’s been published by maomao publications called Blogs, Mad about Design, featuring profiles and screenshots from more than 250 blogs about design-related topics—including this blog. Sort of a compendium of sorts. But is it really?

The irony about producing anything about the web in print is that as soon as you’ve published it, it’s out of date. Case in point? We re-branded the company and re-launched the blog before the book ever made it to print. Hence, the Industrial Brand double page spread showcases our old design, back when it was called We’re Not Wired Right. And there are numerous other blogs and websites that have since changed or even been shut down since this material for this book was assembled.

And so it goes with books about Web—as soon as something has hit, it’s almost too late to publish anything that will have any lasting use more that a short period of time.

I guess all new story ideas have been used up in literary circles, and writers have to turn to rewrite the classics. And that’s right, Seth Grahame-Smith went there. Read about it here, and order it on amazon.

Not that I feel guilty when I eat rabbit anyway, but clearly bunnies are suicidal and should be put out of their misery, as is evidenced in these funny cartoons from Andy Riley’s Book of Bunny Suicides.

We’ve used FunctionFox’s TimeFox web-based time and project management tools for years and love it. Their new TimeFox Premier release has added handy functionality such as task management, to-do lists, calendar and scheduling tools, timeline overview, project blogs, email alerts and iCal integration—things we’d been hoping and asking for for sometime.

But that’s not what this post is about.

FunctionFox also regularly publishes a great newsletter and resource centre on their site containing terrific articles about issues creative professionals and firms face on a daily basis. For example, they recently posted an article entitled Balancing Your Business by Heather West that examines issues such as how many clients should you serve? In what categories? Or where?

As a small, but growing agency ourselves, we find we need to regularly re-evaluate our client mix and clarify our understanding of who our ideal clients are. It can be tough, but deciding when its time say no to some clients and good bye to others is a crucial step in growing your business and focussing on what you’re good at, what makes you happy and what makes you profit. This informative article shares some wisdom on this important topic that we should all take to heart—I know I do.

This afternoon, I read David Pogue’s review of a new phone offering, the Shadow, designed and sold by T-Mobile in the US.

The review starts normally enough, praising the phone’s physical shape and layout, hard controls and aesthetics. It then describes the enormous list of features the Shadow has: WiFi, voice dialing, Bluetooth, stereo audio output…

But then Pogue gets into the phone’s software, built on Windows Mobile 6 which he succinctly describes as “a mess.” He describes the dozens of taps required to make the phone go, the wait times between screens (wait times on a phone!?…), bad navigation, hidden menu choices of important items, counter-intuitive functionality…in short, says that “it’s a shame that such bloated, baffling software runs a phone whose hardware is so close to perfect.”

The review is clever and cuts to the heart of the matter.

So why does this matter to me?

Because I’ve been reading Getting Real, by 37signals. And one of the things they hammer home is that it’s better to deliver half a product than a half-assed product. They argue that leaving features out in favour of delivering something simple, smart and coherent is critical. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Get a few things right.

I think that the Shadow phone Pogue describes is the sort of fully-featured, half-assed product 37signals had in mind. It’s loaded with everything a user could want and a lot more, but its navigation is so dreadful that it’s likely to be impossible for them to find what they are after, let alone use it. Whether this is the fault of the software built on Microsoft’s platform or of the platform itself…well, I’ll let you decide once you’ve read the review and handled the phone.

Now, consider Apple or Palm products for a minute…

Palm (and later, Handspring, then Palm again), for all its faults, for an operating system and products that some have described as “stale” in recent years, got it more or less right the first time around: deliver something that works as a phone, syncs perfectly every single time, and delivers single button access to the four major functions. To do this, they dumped a lot of functionality and kept things simple: no multi-threaded operating system, heck, there isn’t even a “Quit” button in most Palm applications. Palm explicitly told its developers that they shouldn’t use one, that they didn’t need one. They told developers to keep important, frequently used things on top, one click away, put less important things in menus or secondary screens.

And Apple’s products: plug in an iPod and it syncs. There’s no button to push, it just happens. Plug in a camera, iPhoto starts. Simple…not simplistic…just simple and smart.

The complaints about the iPhone have been loud and long – that it lacks features that are “obvious” like GPS, no flash on the camera, no picture messages, no file organiser, no Flash support. I can’t help but wonder if Apple chose to leave all these out to make sure they delivered a phone with half the features, fully realised, instead of a fully featured, half-assed phone.

You can stack complexity on Apple’s products; witness the number of developers running MySQL, Ruby on Rails, Subversion or a hat box full of excellent development environments that find a happy home on OS X. But that’s not where you start with Apple; you start with Safari and Mail, iPhoto and iTunes, simple, smart applications.

You’ve seen lots of terrible software and bad interfaces, as have I. I confess to having a very personal beef with an LCD display in the light and fan control in an overhead stove vent (“…Light…is…off…”). So there is no shortage of examples for the issues raised in Getting Real. But the clash between the sleek simplicity of this phone’s hardware and the transcendental awfulness of the its software really got my attention.

Perhaps simplicity is what separates passing fetishes from disruptive technology; witness Facebook, My Space, iPod, GMail, Flickr and others. I also think that this might be what’s driving the market away from Microsoft Vista. Start with the fact that you have to choose which version of Vista to use. We don’t want to think about versions, antivirus, antispyware, firewalls. We don’t want to play the whack-a-mole game with the interface. We don’t want to think about the interface. Rightly or wrongly, we want appliances — plug it in, insert bread, push the lever, wait, and toast pops out.

Thanks to Mark and Amanda for putting Getting Real on my radar.

It’s common knowledge (among those who know me) that I love Cuba. My wife and I were married there. I may not entirely agree with their politics, but the Cuban people are amazing—perhaps the warmest and most enjoyable culture I’ve encountered in my travels. To visit Havana is an adventure in history, politics, architecture, music, food, drinks and language. If you haven’t been, go.

In the past few years, my role with GDC has happily collided with my love of Cuba, first with the sold out Colours of Cuba holiday fiesta party we hosted in 2005, then the Shared Dreams Cuban design exhibit we were able to bring to Vancouver in 2006. Now, I am again fortunate to be able to travel back to Cuba as part of a small delegation of GDC designers to the Icograda World Design Congress being hosted in Havana October 20–26, 2007. We’re also bringing with us two deserving young GDC student members selected from an impressive field of entries to expose these young designers not only to the diverse Cuban design scene, but to the international design landscape early in their career.

A GDC colleague of mine, Robert Peters of Winnipeg’s Circle Design, is also a fan of Cuba and has made numerous trips there, studying their culture and design community. He recently published a wonderful and well-researched article in Communication Arts called Cuba Si! about life, history and politics on the embargoed archipelago and their impact on the design community. Peters himself is an inspirational Canadian design leader—there’s a great interview with Robert Peters on NetDiver if you’d like to learn more about his personal history and perspectives.

William Gibson’s stretched stooped figure curls over book and microphone under yellow lights that hang like a field of beauty salon hair dryers before an unlit neon sign tracing out the words Studio One on a wall deep within the bowels of the CBC. This was the setting for the latest installment of CBC’s Studio One Book Club. Gibson has just returned from touring in the States and Europe, hitting a dozen cities in twice as many days while promoting his new novel, Spook Country. He is honed at this point. Listening to him read, you realize that this is how his writing is best taken in. He reads like a jazz musician plays his horn, echoing Kerouac and, of course, Burroughs in the way that the words fall into punched syncopated rhythms, sentences building into what has been described by one reviewer as “miniature aesthetic jolts”.

He will tell us later that the part of the brain that writes fiction is also the part that reads it, that in fact “writing and reading are two halves of the same activity”, that the exercise of reading a book is as active a part of the process as the writing. Only upon doing so, when the words of the writer project their world onto the back of the reader’s skull is “arch of the text” successfully completed.

So went the discussion at tonight’s CBC Book Club, with Gibson delivering poignant, often comic takes on how Google has replaced our memories, the inevitability of blended reality and the “complications” of sci fi, all the while riddled with deep, cerebral observations on the writing process. You got a sense that writing for Gibson — if not for all writers — is an act of discovery. “My own experience with creativity,” he tells us, “is that it is incremental.” The development of a character will begin simply as a point of view, a camera angle. Often characters are not so much created as they simply show up on the scene with their own demands and opinions so that all the writer can really do is try to “keep them on topic”.

He tells us of a fan site called Node, named after the under-the-radar magazine that the protagonist is hired by in Spook Country, on which Gibson fans have mapped any and all linkable references found in the pages of the novel. Gibson marvels at the speed that such endeavours can be executed in this day and age. A dozen people, in different time zones, “who are crazy” can achieve enormous things. Gibson describes it as cheap A.I. In fact, as he continues talking, you come to understand his view of the human race as something that has evolved well past nature, that our present “natural state” is more cyborg than animal. Gibson seemed to mark the point of no return down this path as the dawn of broadcast television: “We still have no idea what the impact of broadcast television has had on us and it is pretty much a dead medium”. But none of this is to be interpreted as a pessimistic world view; a writer like Gibson has a tendency to remain agnostic on most accounts:

“I’m kind of OK with where we are,” he says with a smile. “It’s interesting.”

NOTE: A podcast of last night’s Book Club will be available for download on Wednesday, Sept 19th at Worlds at Large. Also, Part One of the CBC Radio Studio One Book Club with William Gibson will broadcast on North By Northwest Saturday September 15, between 8 and 9 am on CBC Radio One (690 on the AM dial in Metro Vancouver).  Part Two will broadcast the following Saturday September 22, same time, same place.   You can also stream live from www.cbc.ca/bc  on Radio One Pacific Time.  After being broadcast both parts will be archived on www.cbc.ca/bc/bookclub.

Read an excerpt from William Gibson’s novel Spook Country here.

It’s certainly no secret that we’re huge fans of William Gibson around here. Well-worn copies of his books Pattern Recoginition, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties and Neuromancer are found on our bookshelves. And we jump on any chance to hear him live and chat with this cool Vancouverite.

On September 6th, CBC’s Studio One Book Club will present Gibson  in person, who will do a reading from his new novel Spook Country. In 2003, he captivated a packed room by reading from Pattern Recognition and you can listen to that reading here. To see him for yourself, email an explanation why you would like to be in the live studio audience. See you there!

I’ve always appreciated defined methodologies and well documented processes with steps, procedures and documentation. It’s long been an accepted approach to developing design or technology solutions. And nowhere has this been more true than with web and software development. But these days, with Agile Programming and Open Source Communities combined with the mind-boggling rate of software change, is there a better way to develop web apps? Jason Fried and 37signals certainly thinks so and calls it Getting Real.

It’s not a technical Bible filled with techno-babble at all. On the contrary, Getting Real is more of a Coles Notes guide filled with common sense rules for building smarter, faster and better ways to build successful web applications. A fast read with good insights into how 37signals developed their products and advice how that can be applied to your own methodology—whether you’re a programmer, designer, project manager, entrepreneur, marketer or even just someone with a really great idea.

The book is written by the brilliant crew at 37signals, who know a thing or two about developing, launching and supporting web applictions, having created the popular Basecamp project management app, Campfire group chat, Highrise CRM, Backpack info organizer, Writeboard collaborative writing tool, Ta-Da Lists, Ruby on Rails web application framework and Signal vs. Noise blog. Originally a design firm in Chicago, 37signals now maintain their own products and don’t take on any design clients—they are their own client! How great is that?

This isn’t a textbook, it’s more like a manifesto-style expression of the philosophies behind 37signals’ team and workflow. It’s written in layperson language that non-coders can understand and is filled with strong opinions. At times I found myself mildly shocked—even mildly offended—by the almost flippant tone toward process and protocols, but for the most part I was releived someone I respected was finally said these things publicly. This book is the antithesis of behemoth reads, such as Bill Moggridge’s Designing Interactions (also an excellent read for web designers), but no less important. Getting Real challenges paradigms, blew apart old preconceptions and was quite fun to read, leading me to often think about my own design firm, inspired to apply the philosophies to our web development processes.

Read it. You won’t be disappointed.

[kudos to my buddy Tyler for the heads up on this great resource]

I love architecture. Heck, at one point in my life my goal was to become an architect. So when I was invited to attend an installment of CBC’s Studio One Book Club to meet and hear renowned philosopher and historian Alain de Botton discuss his new book The Architecture of Happiness, I was hooked.

The author of five best-selling books including Status Anxiety, The Art of Travel, How Proust Can Change Your Life, and The Consolations of Philosophy, Botton’s latest work serves as an exploration into how architecture speaks to us and affects all aspects of human life. The Architecture of Happiness examines how architecture, and the influences of design from various cultures, shape our happiness.

Now, I’ll admit I’m no philosophy expert or Proust devotee, so I can’t comment about his other works, but I can tell you that this book is as easy to read and entertaining as it is enlightening. With humour and an amazing ability to simplify complex concepts, Booton shows us how our surroundings serve as guardians of our identity, both as groups and individuals. It’s the kind of book that makes you realize how little you really knew about architecture and its role in your life.

Botton is a fascinating man in person. He’s humble, soft spoken and rather ordinary at first glance. But let him at the mic and he’ll regale you with his thought-provoking perspectives as he challenges long-standing paradigms in fascinating ways.

And yes, a building CAN bring you happiness, just as it can make you feel sombre or filled with awe. Just ask the kids giggling in the booth next to you in McDonald’s or consider your mood change when you enter a Gothic cathedral. Its a shame so much architecture these days is purely about function now and no longer designed to create a reaction in its users. I wonder…had I actually become an architect, would I have been able to make buildings that made people ‘feel’?

Click here if you’d like to listen to Alain de Botton’s interview on CBC Studio One Book Club.