- Most Recent | Since 2004
- List View
- Archive
- December 8, 2011
Dream Job for Purveyors of Office Supply Hotness
December 8, 2011Read moreA friend of mine forwarded me the online job posting for a new company/store called Material, saying it was right up my alley. And so I looked, and they caught my attention with the opening lines:
Dream Job Available: Entrepreneurial Bad-Ass Who Believes Work/Life Balance is a Crock Everyone talks about Work/Life balance. But they’ve got it all wrong. Work and life aren’t rivals. They’re best buds, inseparable partners, and both inherently good.
Points for opening by identifying life philosophy that speaks to me. Good to know I’m not alone in thinking this.
Anyway, Material is a new venture from the people who run PhotoJojo, an online store that stocks gadgets that photographers like to geek over. I’ve lost many an hour there myself, as it’s a fun place full of stuff that I’d love to have. Now, they want to do it for office supplies and stationery. That’s totally hot. If I didn’t want to make my OWN products for a living, I’d be all over it.
So check out the job page. It’s gorgeous, snappily written, and brimming with hunger for entrepreneurial excellence. That’s you, right? Go apply already at via mtrl.co.
- December 8, 2011
European ETP Pad Update
December 8, 2011Read moreIf you placed an order for the Emergent Task Planner European A4 Pad in the past 4 weeks, it looks like the order got hung in the system.
We’re using a plugin called WP-Ecommerce, which is a popular free plugin that has premium add-ons. I’m not sure what it is about e-commerce, but this is an area filled with all kinds of confusing terminology and murky processes, and any mis-step gives rise to silent failure.
I dove into Google Analytics to see if the pages were even being visited, using the unexpectedly-cool “goal funnel” feature:
On the left is the source traffic, sorted by region/country. Google sees that 2500 people hit the Productivity Tool page in this time period. About 1500 of those people hit the Emergent Task Planner Page. Of those, 264 people soldiered on to the ETP PAD page, and 16 people then visited the CHECKOUT page. But after that…nothing.
Was it something about the design of the page itself? I looked at it again and saw just how poorly positioned some of the autogenerated content is (the “PAY” button, for example, is small and tiny). This can clearly be fixed. But then I clicked to order and was surprised to see that nothing seemed to happen. I checked the admin dashboard and saw that an order had been registered by the system, but nothing else happened. Silent failure.
After a bit of digging, it turned out that there is a “transaction results” page that wasn’t being triggered, because it wasn’t named as expected. A pop into the secret WordPress Options Editor fixed it, and now it appears to work. So if you’d like to try again, the A4 Pads are still in-stock and available. If you have any problems with the order process, feel free to email me via the contact form.
- December 6, 2011
12 Months: a Compact Calendar-inspired iPad App
December 6, 2011Read more
Entrepreneur Kristian Dupont sent me a link to his app 12 Months, a strategic planning app for the iPad that is inspired by the Compact Calendar. I haven’t been able to try it, but it apparently integrates with the iOS built-in calendar.
- December 5, 2011
Alternate Fast Book Outliner Design
December 5, 2011Read more
I was starting to outline a book, and was finding the bottom of the Fast Book Outliner hard to write on. So I moved the page lines to the top, which is where the action is when actively reading the book. This way, I can put the paper to the right-side of book I’m reading and do the page indexing on-the-fly, without having to cramp my hand to write at the bottom until I’m ready to make notes. Or so goes the theory!
If you’d like to put it to practice, the 50-page version has a new “alternate layout” you can download on the FBO Page.
- December 5, 2011
Treading on Sacred Ground: Logo Design
December 5, 2011Read moreJohn McWade’s latest DesignTalk post on logo design, and it describes how one can emotionally approach the client’s desire to ‘create a new flag’:
The logo is not “just a graphic” any more than a flag is a piece of colored cloth. That’s why it’s so hard to design. You’re working on sacred soil. I’m exaggerating only a little, but I’m not kidding.
This describes the situation well. Personally, I’ve always felt the discomfort from the client knowing that this was very much the case; I tend to shy away from logos for this very reason. McWade’s post goes on to describe an approach to handling the client with courtesy and understanding.
Correlated thought: I’m not crazy :)
