Visit 37signals.com → On Hacker News Apr 2007 – Apr 2024
Tech Industry & Business 104Startups 35Life, Learning & Writing 35Career & Management 33Society, Policy & Culture 28Design & UX 15
Great design from Apple on this interaction with Siri. It was a bit after midnight (which was technically October 21), but since it was so close to the previous day, Siri wanted me to clarify which “tomorrow” 9am I really meant… 9am on the 21st (which was technically wrong, but it…
Christmas 2010 I had the idea to make a video of the 37signals homepage. I’d recently gained access to the relevant source code repositories and It seemed like a fun thing to do over a weekend. The result is the video below. It’s a timelapse of the 37signals.com homepage between Marc…
Ever since I came across Jürg Lehni’s essay on typographic technology and digital fonts, Typeface As Programme, I’ve been fascinated with the story of Donald E. Knuth and his unexpected contributions to typography. You see, Knuth is a professor and computer scientist well known to pr…
Last summer I was driving back to Chicago from Wisconsin. On the Illinois side there are a couple of rest stops over the tollway. It’s a great place to get some gas, grab some caffeine, and stretch your legs a little before the final 50 miles home. The rest stop usually has a booth where y…
When we started thinking about the design of the all new Basecamp, we had three key things in mind: Speed Big picture Focus With that in mind, and many experiments later, we came up with a unique interface that is crazy fast, excellent for big picture broad overviews, and perfectly ta…
Our new office has a dishwasher. It’s sleek, modern, and silent. It blends into the stainless cabinets and countertops just perfectly. It has the same handle style as the drawers and doors to the left and right. It has no buttons or lights or anything on the outside. You don’t even know…
Predictably, some argue the iPad doesn’t do enough. It needs a keyboard or a removable battery or multitasking ability or whatever. But there’s an interesting backlash to that backlash. (Meta-backlash!) The discussion has people openly discussing an ugly truth that doesn’t typi…
When Gruber first linked the TripLog/1040 UI by Stevens Creek, I wasn’t kind either. Bright colors, controls seemingly placed at random. It was the opposite of what designers strive for in our circles. A mess. Soon the Flickr page was a schoolyard of insults. And then something interesting ha…
A couple weeks ago on Twitter I said: “I still maintain the Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web. Has been for years.” A few people agreed, but most didn’t. Some thought it was a joke. I wasn’t kidding. To clarify, my definition of design goes beyond…
Yesterday, during an interview with Andrew Warner at Mixergy, I spoke about my early work experience bagging groceries, selling shoes, pumping gas, etc. There’s nothing particularly unique about these jobs – they are common jobs. But they taught me some important lessons about people, h…
Apple’s design dominance over the past decade has been due to industrial design first, software design second. Their hardware designs have inspired a generation. Over those last 10 years their software has gotten better and better too (it’s really damn good now), but it’s been…
Aesthetics have a bad rap in geek circles. CmdrTaco infamously slammed the original iPod with “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame”. In other words, it’s all about the features and the functionality. If you don’t do more than the other guy, you’re useless. I don…
Don Norman, an author, professor, and partner at the Nielsen Norman Group, read the Wired article about us and wrote a piece asking, “Why is 37signals so arrogant?” Hansson said: “I’m not designing… for other people.” I think that simple phrase speaks volumes.…
When designing a UI we usually go right from a quick paper sketch to HTML/CSS. We skip the static Photoshop mockup. Here are a few reasons why we skip photoshop: You can’t click a Photoshop mockup. This is probably the number one reason we skip static mockups. They aren’t real. Pap…
A couple weeks ago we launched the new Highrise marketing site. We’re still iterating that design post-launch, and we have a big post brewing about that design process, but today I wanted to share some of the iterations we explored for the new signup chart. The start Here’s where we…