Fred Wilson on what’s needed to build product in the early stages of a startup, in The Management Team While Building Product:

Building product is not about having a large team to manage. It is about having a small team with the right people on it. You need product, design, and software engineering skills on the team. And you need to be focused, committed, and driven. Management at this point is all about small team dynamics; everyone on board, working together, and getting stuff done. Strong individual contributors are key in this stage. Management skills are not a requirement. In fact they may even be a hindrance.

Startup teams always have software engineering skills on board from the very beginning – as they should. But too often you see marketing and business development skills being added before you see product/design skills. This leads down a dangerous path that too often ends in a catastrophic lack of product/market fit.

This is a great post by Anil Dash. There’s so much to learn from the Foursquare story, but my favorite part is the last paragraph. In Foursquare: Today’s best-executing startup he writes:

But perhaps most importantly, I think we need more stories that celebrate the success of what seem like small, iterative product launches, but actually reflect triumphs in unsung disciplines such as systems operations, design process, business development and product management. There are lots of loud, pointless headlines about companies getting money from venture capitalists or angel investors. What I’d love to see more of in 2012 (and beyond!) is headlines about how a few small successes with users are a demonstration of a small company outperforming and out-innovating the biggest companies in the tech industry by being focused and disciplined in their execution.

This is why I hope all the cynics are wrong when they publicly wonder when Facebook will buy Path’s design team. I’m done with Path because I couldn’t find a use for it, but some people have found a place for it. I’d much rather see Path succeed as a small, niche social network that continues to push the design envelope, than have them be gobbled up as a “talent acquisition” move.

When we design for the web we often find ourselves balancing the use of established UI patterns with trying out new ways to solve existing problems. Facebook Timeline is tilted towards the former, while Path bet heavily on the latter. Yet both approaches are important. If we’re going to move the web forward we can’t get stuck in the existing ways of doing things without also experimenting with possible better ways. If we shine a bigger spotlight on those small companies that “outperform and out-innovate the biggest companies”, then maybe we can maintain this necessary balance between design status quo and new ideas indefinitely.

They paddled a little further, then Salty looked through his telescope again.
“A pirate ship!” he cried. “Let’s have a battle.”
“Oh dear,” said Button. “I don’t want to meet a pirate.”
“Don’t worry,” said Salty. “I’ll be the hero.”
But when they got close they found that the pirate ship was just a craggy rock.

– Angela McAllister, Salty and Button

I picked up Salty and Button for my 2-year old daughter on a whim. I just felt like we both needed a break from Winnie the Pooh. He’s a nice enough bear, but the dude’s got some serious honey issues. Much to my delight the book quickly became my daughter’s favorite, and we’re now reading it several times a day.

Yesterday something interesting happened. My daughter suddenly became fixated with one specific part of the story. The two friends think they see a pirate ship, but it ends up being just a rock. “Wher’s the craggy rock?”, she keeps asking. “Let’s go find it!” And when we find the page she points to it and says the words “craggy rock” over and over, with obvious delight.

I am now convinced that she does this just because she loves saying the words. She loves the way they sound, and the way the phrase rolls off her tongue. Craggy rock is no cellar door, but it’s pretty close. Seeing my daughter delight in language for its own sake fills me with so much joy. It reminds me of a story I just read in Clay Johnson’s excellent The Information Diet. He quotes Helen Keller, the renowned deaf-blind activist, as she describes her first experience with language:

We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away. I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me.

I can see this realization in my daughter’s eyes as she continues to learn new words. She’s learning that everything has a name, and that names can be beautiful.

I recently wrote about about some problems I have with language the New York Times used in one of their emails. On the Hacker News thread for the post this comment appeared:

Honestly, this just seems like nitpicking. Your main complaint about their email is that their apology isn’t phrased in the vernacular? Don’t we have better things to do with our time than complain about things like this?

The comment got to me more than it probably should have. Is the commenter right? Is it a waste of time to nitpick language? My daughter’s love for the phrase craggy rock makes me think that it’s a worthy cause to fight, after all. At the risk of stating the absolute obvious, language is the soul of civilization. We have to not just protect it, but help it thrive. We have to find the joy and the power in the names of things. In Patrick Rothfuss’ epic fantasy novel The Name of the Wind he describes the power of language like this:

“What do you mean by blue? Describe it.” I struggled for a moment, failed. “So blue is a name?” “It is a word. Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. There are seven words that will make a person love you. There are ten words that will break a strong man’s will. But a word is nothing but a painting of a fire. A name is the fire itself.”

So, here’s the point I’m trying to make.

Those of us who write for the web need to remember that the words we choose are not just about comprehension, but also about feeling. Phonaesthetics teach us that the sound of certain words and sentences have an inherent pleasantness or beauty (euphony), while others can be quite unpleasant (cacophony). Just as a typeface (the artistic representation or interpretation of characters) adds emotion to letters, word aesthetic can be in total harmony with other design elements.

Beauty in design isn’t just the job of visual design. Content strategy has a specific role to play in creating the desired aesthetic of a web site. And beauty is quite important in a changing landscape where aesthetic longevity is the new product expiration date. So the next time you write a paragraph for the web, ask yourself the following question:

Will the sound of these words make that one guy’s 2-year old daughter’s face light up?

Update 1/4/2012: “Nick” emailed and pointed me to the fascinating essay Politics and the English Language, where George Orwell discusses “language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought”, particularly in politics. He ends with some great writing tips.

Jeffrey Zeldman in The maker makes: on design, community, and personal empowerment:

I sometimes become impatient when members of our community spend their energy publicly lamenting that a website about cats isn’t about dogs. Their energy would be so much better spent starting bow-wow.com. The feeling that something is missing from a beloved online resource (or conference, or product) can be a wonderful motivator to start your own. I created A List Apart because I felt that webmonkey.com wasn’t enough about design and highfive.com was too much about it. If this porridge is too hot and that porridge is too cold, I better make some fresh, eh?

Sounds to me like a good mantra for 2012. Happy New Year, everyone! In the coming year, may we all make porridge that’s just right.

How designers and engineers can play nice is a really great post by Jenna Bilotta. I nodded along enthusiastically to this point in particular:

Too often I observe my fellow designers rip into the aesthetics or interaction design of an early engineering prototype. When an engineer is met with critical feedback from a designer about issues they haven’t even begun to think about, it doesn’t encourage that engineer to include the designer in future reviews. This is how designers end up begging for massive changes the week before launch, and how we almost never get them.

One of the most difficult skills for a designer to learn is restraint during the early stages of implementation, when things aren’t perfect yet.

There are some great suggestions in the article – well worth reading.

Last night Seal (@Seal) tweeted about his displeasure with the latest Twitter iPhone app. Doug Bowman (@stop), Creative Director at Twitter, asked him to elaborate:

@Seal I’m listening if you have feedback (about Twitter’s design).

— Doug Bowman (@stop) December 29, 2011

What followed is one of those exchanges that make me absolutely love the Internet. A world-famous musician has a conversation about an iPhone app with a world-famous designer, and we get to sit in on it. I think my favorite part of the conversation is Seal’s honest apology:

@stop Thank you. Redownloaded Official Twitter app and a public apology is in order. It’s great now that I understand it. I was wrong.

— Seal (@Seal) December 30, 2011

I can’t quite put my finger on why I find this random chat so great. Maybe it’s because it shows the power of Twitter to reduce degrees of separation to zero in a matter of minutes. Maybe it’s the fact that I can sit in Cape Town, South Africa, and listen to two people who I admire a great deal have a respectful disagreement in real time. Or maybe it’s because I keep thinking about the bizarre exhilaration Doug must have felt, defending an app he worked on with a musician he’s a fan of.

Whatever the reason might be, it’s just really cool. Unfortunately Twitter still isn’t great at showing us conversations (apparently that’s being worked on), but luckily Aaron Swartz built a tool to help us with that. I’m posting a screenshot of the conversation below, but you can also view it here.
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Pico Iyer in The Joy of Quiet:

The urgency of slowing down “” to find the time and space to think “” is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

As I’m making my way through The Information Diet, I’m starting to think that this longing for some peace and quiet will be a recurring theme for many of us in 2012.

Rachel Swaby wrote a great piece for Wired on the complex problems that Dropbox had to solve to arrive at the simple solution they have today. This sentence stopped me in my tracks:

Almost immediately, those who didn’t actively search out the solution outnumbered early adopters.

Think about that. About 100,000 early adopters signed up for the Dropbox service in the six months leading up to the official launch. But because these early adopters started sharing folders with coworkers, friends, and family, they immediately hooked an entire network of regular users into the service.

Dropbox solved a problem most people don’t know they have, and made the solution simple enough so that non-tech savvy users immediately get the beauty of it and how it can fit into their lives. That’s innovation.