Editor’s note: This is the first column from our new regular contributor, Jason Calacanis. Every couple of weeks, Jason will be offering advice to a company facing a crossroads. This week: Yahoo. Yahoo proves the most underrated rule of business: scale wins. While we live in an age of excellence, where awesome products break out to levels never before seen (DrawSomething, Pinterest and Facebook), the truth is the world is plagued with laggards. These consumers give up their aol.com and yahoo.com email addresses when they, or their seven-year-old Dell computers, die and they can’t remember their passwords any more. Then they tell their nieces and nephews that their email “broke,” and those nieces and nephews set them up on Gmail. Despite a decade of product ... Continue reading →
THANK YOU for the screen shot. I was actually already aware that the type on my site is big. I designed it that way. And while I’m grateful for your kind desire to help me, I actually do know how the site looks in a browser with default settings on a desktop computer. I am fortunate enough to own a desktop computer. Moreover, I work in a design studio where we have several of them. This is my personal site. There are many like it, but this one is mine. Designers with personal sites should experiment with new layout models when they can. Before I got busy with one thing and another, I used to redesign this site practically every other week. Sometimes the designs ... Continue reading →
'Movable Type,' by Willi Heidelbach. Used with gratitude under a Creative Commons license via Wikipedia. Design reigned supreme in the 20th century, when it was an integral part of the way artists, publishers, governments and political parties communicated to the first mass audiences. Message and presentation were inextricably intertwined, with the latter lending power, impact and even meaning to the former. Not for nothing was Marshall McLuhan able to say, with gnomic brevity but not a little insight, “the medium is the message.” Web designers are leading the charge in this wave, just as they have in the first two major waves of web innovation. But in the 21st century, internet standards have successfully separated design and content. The two live more interdependent lives, sometimes ... Continue reading →
A federal judge in Kentucky has ruled that 150 pounds of marijuana collected from a drug suspect’s car is not admissible evidence in court because investigators illegally used a GPS tracker without a warrant to uncover it. U.S. District Judge Amul R. Thapar has barred prosecutors from using the marijuana stash, allegedly found in the car of 49-year-old Robert Dale Lee last year, because they had not obtained a warrant authorizing the use of the GPS tracker they placed on his vehicle as part of a multi-state drug investigation, according to the Associated Press. A Kentucky State Police trooper allegedly found the pot when he stopped Lee’s vehicle in Sept. 2011 after Drug Enforcement Agency investigators had tracked it from Chicago to Lexington, Ky. The ... Continue reading →
Analysts commenting on Facebook’s IPO have highlighted a major issue in mobile computing: that it’s incredibly difficult to monetize on mobile devices. Like many other engineering-led cultures, Facebook has embraced adaptive design, also known as responsive design, where essentially the same code can render itself down from a desktop browser to a tablet to a diminutive mobile screen. Adaptive design is an elegant solution to the thorny technical problem of having to deliver a content experience on multiple devices. And engineers love more than anything to apply the same hammer to multiple nails. Unfortunately, users do not agree. Desktop web browsers, tablets, and mobile devices are fundamentally different and are used in very different ways. Across our properties at CBS Interactive, we have experimented with ... Continue reading →
