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BBC News - Home

  • Syrian veto a 'licence to kill'

    Syria's government has been handed a "licence to kill" by Russia and China, opposition activists say, after the countries blocked a draft UN resolution.

  • Greek PM in crucial bailout talks

    Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos will meet party leaders in his coalition to discuss a proposed 130bn euros EU rescue plan.

  • Ice alert on roads as snow eases

    Motorists are urged to take extra care in treacherous conditions as snow across much of the UK turns to ice.

  • Seven dead in Kandahar car bomb

    At least five police officers and two civilians have died in a car bomb attack on police headquarters in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, officials say.

  • Mitt Romney wins Nevada caucuses

    Front-runner Mitt Romney declares victory in the Republican caucuses in Nevada, as he seeks to win his party's presidential nomination.

Soccernet

  • Triesman: FA right to take Terry's captaincy

    Former Football Association chairman Lord Triesman has welcomed the decision to strip John Terry of the England captaincy while he is facing allegations of racist abuse, insisting it is the same sanction any other public figure would face.

  • Tevez guests but does not play in testimonial

    Carlos Tevez was present for Martin Palermo's testimonial match but did not play in the encounter.

  • Prem: City cruise as Arsenal thrash Rovers

    Arsenal turned up the heat on Chelsea ahead of the Blues' forthcoming encounter with Manchester United, moving within two points of their London rivals with a thumping 7-1 victory over Blackburn on Saturday.

  • La Liga: Real Madrid sneak past Getafe

    Leaders Real Madrid did just enough to earn a sixth consecutive Primera Liga win, as defender Sergio Ramos returned from injury to secure a 1-0 victory at city rivals Getafe.

  • Jol took recommendations on Pogrebnyak

    Fulham manager Martin Jol has revealed he took the advice of fellow Dutchmen Guus Hiddink and Dick Advocaat before signing striker Pavel Pogrebnyak from Stuttgart.

BBC Sport - Sport

BBC News - Science & Environment

  • PM urged to cut wind farm subsidy

    More than 100 Conservatives are among MPs who have written to the prime minister calling on him to slash subsidies for onshore wind turbines.

  • Prince optimistic for fisheries

    Prince Charles says there are reasons to be optimistic about the state of the world's oceans, but it is "critically urgent" to tackle overfishing.

  • Largest optical telescope created

    Astronomers at the Paranal observatory combine four telescope to create the world's largest virtual device with a 130m-mirror.

  • Striking galaxy image from Hubble

    The Hubble space telescope captures an image of a "barred spiral" galaxy that could help us better understand our own Milky Way.

  • Oil spurs Canadian PM China visit

    Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will visit China next week to discuss Canada's oil products, after the US blocked a key pipeline.

NYT > Global Home

Cool Hunting

  • Rachel Craven Textiles at Heath Ceramics

    Textile designer Rachel Craven works out of her home in the Los Angeles suburb of Angelino Heights, a historic neighborhood that provides the perfect setting for creating her Southwestern-style, handmade printed pillows, tablecloths and linens. Craven, who cites influences from Agnes Martin to Marimekko, grew up in New York...

  • Triumph Speed Twin Concept

    For their final year project while studying transport design at Northumbria University in Newcastle, budding English designers Roy Norton and Tom Kasher wanted to create a bike that would borrow from the past while looking to the future. The result—an exceptionally sleek take on the classic Triumph Speed Twin,...

  • Link About It: This Week's Picks

    1. David Lynch Coffee Last year famed director David Lynch created his own line of coffee beans, and in traditional Lynch style he released a bizarre and entertaining advertisement to promote his new brand. Check out his latest spot, which unsurprisingly offers up a creepy flash of the filmmaker's...

  • Sqirl Jam

    One bite of crusty bread spread with Sqirl raspberry and fresh lavender jam made by Jessica Koslow creates an explosion of local flavor. From the taste of such a juicy creation, it's hard to believe that Koslow swears she barely ate fruit as a child. Now, her sweet preserves...

  • She

    French photographer Lise Sarfati's new series "She" captures a striking sense of melancholy in intense portraits shot over a span of four years between 2005 and 2009. To explore the ideas of duplicity and identity, the body of work focuses on four women in an American family, with sisters...

AdPulp

  • College Student Uses Physical Comedy To Win Super …

    Making Super Bowl commercials is an annual activity at Weiden + Kennedy, but there’s another Portlander with a Super Bowl commercial this year, and he’s not even out of school yet. According to The Oregonian, Lewis & Clark College student Remy Neymarc, 21, won a competition to make the Super Bowl spot via Poptent, a [...]You just finished reading College Student Uses Physical Comedy To Win Super Bowl Ad Competition And Get His Idea On Air! Consider leaving a comment!

  • Go Mobile Makes Sense Of The Medium We’re All Sc…

    If you read a lot of marketing advice these days, then you’ve seen the word “mobile” used as the key to the future – much the way “plastics” was in The Graduate. But for those businesses and brands that can’t quite grasp the mobile world, Jeanne Hopkins and Jamie Turner offer a good overview in [...]You just finished reading Go Mobile Makes Sense Of The Medium We’re All Scrambling To Understand! Consider leaving a comment!

  • Bacon Lovers Rejoice, Jack’ll Marry You Up

    Regional media buys are often overlooked during Super Bowl advertising coverage. But not here. We leave few Super Bowl advertising stones unturned. Portland’s office of StruckAxiom, combined forces with Secret Weapon Marketing, creative agency of record for Jack in the Box, to create a “Marry Bacon” campaign promoting their new BLT Cheeseburger Combo. The TV [...]You just finished reading Bacon Lovers Rejoice, Jack'll Marry You Up! Consider leaving a comment!

  • Oh Canada

    Susan Krashinsky, Marketing Reporter for The Globe and Mail in Toronto, reports that this Sunday’s menu of adverts won’t be on air north of the U.S. border. The prevailing notion is that the game just does not have the cultural resonance here that it does in the United States. And yet, the Super Bowl was [...]You just finished reading Oh Canada! Consider leaving a comment!

  • Conceived, Incubated and Delivered in L.A.

    David&Goliath and Siltanen & Partners in El Segundo; Saatchi & Saatchi in Torrance; Team One in El Segundo; RPA in Santa Monica; and Innocean in Huntington Beach. All have been toiling away on Super Bowl commercials for their clients. Meg James of Los Angeles Times notes that 20 of this Sunday’s Super Bowl commercials, including [...]You just finished reading Conceived, Incubated and Delivered in L.A.! Consider leaving a comment!

AdWeek: AdFreak

  • 'Billboard' Covers the Music and Musicians of Supe…

    As always, music will be a big part of Super Bowl XLVI. Madonna is doing the halftime show, of course, and musicians will appear in a number of ads—from Elton John and Melanie Amaro for Pepsi, to Mötley Crüe for Kia, to the Pussycat Dolls for Go Daddy. Our sister magazine Billboard is keeping tabs on the night's music, so check out their collection of stories: Super Bowl XLVI: The Music Behind the Big Game.

  • Chevy Guys Live, Ford Guys Die in Silverado's Supe…

    General Motors is airing three 60-second spots for Chevrolet during the Super Bowl. We had already seen two of them—"Stunt Anthem" for the Sonic, and the "Happy Grad" consumer-generated ad for the Camaro (which drags a bit compared to the :30, but apparently GM didn't think so). This morning, GM unveiled the third Chevy :60 for the game—an end-of-the-world spot by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners for the Silverado in which the Mayan apocalypse, scheduled for this year, has happened, and only Chevy truck owners have survived. (Ford owners never stood a chance.) The spot is a bit reminiscent of Goodby's old E*Trade ad from a decade ago, with the monkey wandering around the post-dot-com-bubble wasteland. Twinkies make a humorous appearance at the end of the Silverado spot—cockroach-like in their ability to withstand the apocalypse. The damn box doesn't even have any dust on it. Hostess should feel insulted, but they'll take what they can get at this point.

  • Melanie Amaro Banishes King John in Pepsi's Super …

    And here's your 60-second Pepsi spot that will air during the Super Bowl. It features The X Factor winner Melanie Amaro impressing, and then exiling, the evil king Elton John (who's wearing some serious platform boots) with her stained-glass-shattering rendition of Aretha Franklin's "Respect." What do you think—aside from being annoyed at all the full spots being released this year? See Adweek's full Super Bowl coverage here.

  • E*Trade and Century 21 Release Their Super Bowl :3…

    It's been quite amazing how many finished Super Bowl spots, not just teasers, have been released online before this year's game. This morning we have two more 30-second spots—E*Trade's "Fatherhood" spot from Grey, New York, and Century 21's "Smarter. Bolder. Faster" from Red Tettemer + Partners in Philadelphia. The E*Trade spot focuses on a new father's financial anxieties, and includes one of the E*Trade baby's depraved toddler friends literally robbing the cradle. The Century 21 spot, nicely paced and produced, fits a lot into its 30 seconds, with Donald Trump, Deion Sanders and Apolo Ohno starring. See Adweek's full Super Bowl coverage here.

  • Old Spice Crashes Into Commercials for Other P&G B…

    Isaiah who? Suave Old Spice pitchman Mustafa is just a fading memory when manic spokesfreak Terry Crews is in the house. In fun new spots from Wieden + Kennedy, Crews cuts through the clutter with wall-wrecking, all-capped ferocity, crashing staid commercials for Procter & Gamble sister brands Charmin and Bounce to deliver lines like, "OLD SPICE BODY SPRAY MAKES YOU SMELL LIKE POWERRRR! IT'S SO POWERFUL, IT SELLS ITSELF IN OTHER PEOPLE'S COMMERCIALS!" Whoa. In a third spot (after the jump) not co-branded with another P&G product, Crews uses his powerful magic breath to turn a skinny nerd into a skinny nerd-pharaoh, then into a vending machine, before smashing his fist through the glass to grab some potato chips. Watch these "Smell Is Power" clips at maximum volume for a few minutes and you could lose your mind, much as Terry did in his last Old Spice outing. Such awesome wackiness restores my faith that there really is a god out there somewhere and—HE SMELLS LIKE POWERRRR!

....HOW ADVERTISING SPOILED ME....

  • Volkswagen Coupé Cabriolet Eos: Air collection

    Advertising Agency: Agence V, Paris, FranceCreative Director: Christian VinceArt Director: Frédéric DurandCopywriter: Arnaud LabillePhotographer: Jean-Noel Leblanc-bontemps

  • NATURAL HAIR CARE - HENNA POWDER

    Henna Powder is used in India largely for mehendi designs - a traditional art that uses a woman's hands and feet as its canvas on special occasions, mostly weddings. Henna Powder is also used for hair conditioning and nourishment, making the hair shiny, smooth and beautiful.Agency: Mudra DDB, Chennai, IndiaClient: Natural Hair Care - Henna PowderAssociate Creative Director: Arvind RamalingamArt Director: Krishnamurthy IyyappanIllustrator: MuraliPhotographer: Ramesh Kumar

  • Wonderbra!

    An interesting viral ad for Wonderbra!

  • Pepsi - Dare for more!

    Titles: "Surfer", "Climber" and "Boarder"Creative Directors: Veikko Hille, Sebastian Hardieck, Toygar BazarkayaArt Director: Michael PlückhahnCopywriter: Dietmar Neumann Beratung: Heike Flottmann, Annika LauhöferArt Buying: Birgit PaulatProduction: Stefan Kranefeld Imaging, DüsseldorfAgency: BBDO GermanyThey´ve just won the Grand Prix at the Epica Awards. The motifs are inspired by the famous Pepsi-Logo in red, white and blue and show adventurous pictures. Thanks Markus for sending me the ads.

  • Jump higher!

    Advertising Agency: Advico Young & Rubicam, Zurich, SwitzerlandExecutive Creative Director: Urs SchrepferArt Director: Marietta AlbinusCopywriter: Martin StulzPhotographer: Markus WeberVia: I believe in adv

Design Observer: Main Posts

Authentic Boredom

  • Malware Attack: Update

    This site was hacked pretty severely sometime (or multiple times) in the last few weeks. I’m still ridding the server of the affected files, and still finding new ones. I'm working hard to fix it. Thanks for the patience.

  • My (revised) video setup: Canon EOS 7D

    After just a couple weeks of testing, I gave up on the Canon HG10 w/35mm for shooting HD video. Not only was the quality not stellar, but it's a hack that's cumbersome and really difficult to work with. Following an enormous amount of deliberation and questioning if so many dollar signs were really worth it, I bit the bullet and sprung for a Canon EOS 7D and some quality lenses. No mistaking, this thing shoots incredible photos and equally impressive 1080p HD video. I still have plenty to learn about the camera and photography in general, but so far I'm really pleased with it. I took it with me to film the Colosseo being printed earlier this week, and the footage looks fantastic. (Video coming soon.) I bought the 7D body only and skipped the lens it comes bundled with. Taking cues from Eyepatch Production's 7D tutorials and comments on forums around the web, I picked up a Sigma 30mm f/1.4 EX DC HSM prime lens and Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM zoom lens. Suzanne already had a Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens with her Canon 40D, and that seems to do fine with the 7D for shooting macro stuff. When filming the Colosseo, I kept the Sigma 30mm on most of the time. What's crazy is just two weeks ago I didn't even know the difference between prime and zoom lenses. The mics I'm using right now are the RODE VideoMic, a great little shotgun-style mic, and a wired Audio Technica ATR-3350 Lavalier Condenser Mic. The ATR-3350 lavalier mic can be pretty noisy, but for $30 it's a decent start for now. Additional links and notes about the equipment shown in these photos are available on Flickr.

  • My video setup: Canon HG10 with 35mm adapter

    Update: I've switched to a Canon 7D. I've had a penchant for filmmaking ever since I was a little kid. I've never had the right equipment, though. I'm trying to finally change that, while still trying to stay within budget. The photo above shows the setup I've been piecing together over the last few weeks. I haven't shot anything with it yet, but I'll give it a good run in a couple weeks when I film the Colosseo letterpress poster being printed. We'll see how it goes. Two years ago this would have been a killer setup--it's similar to the setup Benjamin Reece used to shoot "Fifty People, One Question". Nowadays, a Canon 7D or similar is probably the way to go for those of us doing indie-style film stuff. Check out this fantastic video shot with a Canon 7D: I've had my HG10 for a while now, and I've been able to do some decent shooting with it (see "Roma Italia"). I'm not ready to make the step-up investment to a 7D just yet. So I'm doing what I can with the HG10, while making sure much of what I'm purchasing will also work with the 7D at a later date. It's taken quite a bit of research to piece all of this together, so I'm documenting my equipment here for those of you searching for something similar: Canon HG10 HD hard-drive camcorder (you can get these for under $400 on eBay nowadays, though I'd recommend something more recent like the Canon HF S100 if purchasing your first non-tape camcorder) Greg Tay's GT35pro 35mm depth of field (DOF) adapter Nikon NIKKOR 50mm f/1.4 AI manual focus lens (this one is from the late 70s, snatched on eBay) Opteka X-Grip RODE VideoMic Sima LED video light Check back in a few weeks to see some of the video I'll shoot with it. Fingers crossed it turns out okay.

  • Michael Bierut on clients

    Michael Bierut is such a down-to-earth, practical designer (and speaker) who works hard to do amazing work without the typical stigma associated with graphic designers. This practicality is clearly evident in the video above, a presentation given at CreativeMornings in New York City. And if you haven't seen Helvetica, you need to see how his commentary really helps the movie shine. Michael's presentation on clients is one of those "should be required viewing" kind of presentations. It's fantastic. Clients are the difference between design and art. I would go insane trying to work ... without clients.... I really need clients to provoke me as a designer to do work. Thanks to Tina Roth Eisenberg for making this happen.

  • Colosseo: Available March 2010

    Watch the full resolution video on Vimeo. This project began 12 months ago when Suzanne and I purchased tickets to Rome. It's consumed a good portion of my working life since then. This is a sneak preview. Sign up to be notified by email when it's available:

Typographica

  • Zizou

    Roger Excoffon (1910–1983) was the most talented French type designer of the 20th century and probably the most prolific in the whole of French typographic history. Being an admirer of Excoffon’s work myself I was happy to see that 2011 has brought a sudden re-appreciation of his work in the form of no less than [...]

  • Cala

    William Morris’ Golden Type, inspired by the founts of Nicolas Jenson, sparked a mania for Venetian types in the 1890s that continued for nearly 30 years. But since World War I the lighter types of “Garamond” and Francesco Griffo have pushed those of Jenson aside. Dieter Hofrichter’s Cala is notable not only as a contemporary [...]

  • Julien

    I remember the first time I saw Julien. It was in 2010, on a poster from Tipoplakat. At the time I didn’t know that the strong graphics on the poster were from an upcoming typeface by Peter Biľak. I just enjoyed the poster. In general, geometric typefaces can be really boring and many of them are [...]

  • Outsiders

    Somewhere between the lands of slab, sans serif, and typewriter there lives Outsiders. In the roman it appears an elegant, sartorial slab, somehow holding itself above all others of its kind, with a bit of typewriterly officiousness, like a crisp, upper-level spy in MI6. But under the cloak of propriety in all of its seven [...]

  • Supria Sans

    Among recent Grotesque-inspired releases and Hannes von Döhren’s rapidly growing oeuvre, Supria Sans stands out to me as an especially interesting and useful addition. The design has just the right amount of character to be memorable and unique but also restrained enough to remain thoroughly useful. Bypassing the polished rationality of Neo-Grotesques, it builds upon [...]

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report

  • My Glamorous Life: Lucy Ricardo, C’est Moi

    TRYING A NEW breakfast place. I tell the cashier, “Extra crispy bacon.” “Extra bacon,” she says. “No, not extra bacon. Extra crispy bacon,” I say. A fast-paced volley of shouted Spanish follows, between the cook, the cashier, and the server. A customer in line behind me chimes in. He is either describing my order to [...]

  • A List Apart: a change is gonna come, I can feel i…

    TODAY, TWO invaluable contributors to A List Apart move on, and a new member joins our ranks: Aaron Gustafson (@aarongustafson), author of Adaptive Web Design (the clearest, most beautiful explanation of progressive enhancement I’ve ever read) and nearly a dozen brilliant A List Apart articles, has been a technical editor at A List Apart for [...]

  • A List Apart: Pricing Strategy for Creatives

    FREELANCERS AND STUDIO HEADS, learn what your rates say about your brand, and discover how to make more money by raising your rate strategically. A List Apart: Pricing Strategy for Creatives by JASON BLUMER. Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart Magazine.

  • A List Apart: Responsive Images: How they Almost W…

    RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGNERS, don’t miss Mat Marquis’ essential article in today’s A LIST APART, for people who make websites: Responsive Images: How they Almost Worked and What We Need. Mat shows why responsive images as we currently use them don’t quite cut it – and shares a way forward that involves the creation of a [...]

  • Dyson to NY: drop dead

    DYSON’S WEBSITE won’t sell me a vacuum cleaner. It claims New York, a U.S. state it provides in its own drop-down menu, is “not a valid state.” I have previously ordered Dyson products from the Dyson website and shipped them to a different address in New York. I have an account and everything. But the [...]

Hicksdesign - The Hickensian

  • Apps of the moment

    There are a few apps that I’m particularly enjoying using at the moment, so I thought I’d share in case any of them are news to you: Choosy Choosy does a seemingly simple task, and does it very well. For a start, it provides a central preference pane to choose your default browser, but its main thrust is letting you choose which browser to open a link in. You can do this either manually via a chooser display (right), or automatically depending on order of preference. My favourite feature is ‘behaviour rules’. For example, I get emails from Opera’s internal bug tracking system, and I always want to open these in Opera, no matter what my default browser is at the time. I can now do that with one simple rule set up in Choosy! For someone like me who still uses several browsers (mainly, but not exclusively, Safari, Chrome and Opera) it doesn’t ‘arf make life easier. Fantastical Quite simply, the best calendar app I’ve ever used. Its always handy (sits in the menubar), doesn’t have the vulgar leather stitched interface of iCal (yes I know about Busycal) but is small, neat, and made for humans. Yes, it still has an element of skeumorphism, but in my view its done right – just enough to make it feel warm with the distracting superflous details. As well as the mix of traditional calendar and agenda views, it allows events to be added using human language, with the calendar view filtering live as you type, and adding people and locations. Its a joy to use, and I use it as my one and only desktop calendar app. And then, two well known apps that I continue to enjoy… Evernote This is still my central collection source. I’ve tried all sorts of ways over the years, but the Evernote ecosystem of desktop-web-mobile is still the winner for me. Shared notebooks works brilliantly, and they are constantly evolving the UI (such as the recent subtle Notes redesign). It all goes in here – images, PDFs, notes, draft blog posts, anything I want to remember or keep for later. Its my travel diary, design scrapbook, UI library, recipe and notes book. It was invaluable in writing The Icon Handbook: There’s still a few niggles with Evernote – for example you can now drag a thumbnail out of the app to export it, but it does so in a format that only Evernote can read. Not really export is it? Despite a few niggles like this, I remain a big fan. Spotify I’ve had a on-off relationship with Spotify. In general, I treat it as a way of previewing whole albums before deciding whether to buy them, creating collaborative playlists and getting access to a large music library on my iPhone without any syncing woes. They’ve done a few wonky things recently (such as requiring Facebook to sign up, sharing everything with Facebook by default) and since joining iTunes match (a service that I’m greatly impressed with) the latter reason is less important. However I’m enjoying a great new Spotify feature: Apps. I love the last.fm and Guardian reviews apps particularly, making it an even better place to discover new music.

  • Craft, Parenting and Cheese with Jon Hicks

    Earlier this week I recorded an interview with Chris Bowler for his Creatiplicity podcast. Chris has a very genial style and the whole affair felt very relaxed and enjoyable! Its not just about The Icon Handbook either, we discussed everything from parenting to cheese. Pop along for a listen!

  • Celebrating 10 years of Hicksdesign with The Icon …

    YAY!!! What a way to celebrate 10 years of Hicksdesign (to the very day) – my advance copy of The Icon Handbook arrives! I’m actually holding it in my hands! It has pages that turn with words (what I wrote) and pictures on them! It looks and smells flippin’ gorgeous! Excuse me, I think I need a sit down… If you’ve been waiting for the print version to be available before purchasing, now is your time to pick up a copy!

  • Icon Fonts Follow up

    Since publishing a section from The Icon Handbook as part of 24 Ways last December (Displaying Icons with Fonts and Data- Attributes) I’ve been involved in a few discussions regarding its cons, some of which have since gained workarounds, and it felt a good time to do a follow up post. First of all, its worth mentioning the context of the article – it’s from Chapter 6, where all the various possible methods for deploying icons on the web are laid out. This includes creating icons with CSS, which isn’t something I’d recommend, but just may be a solution for someone out there and work well in a particular context. In the same vein, using fonts to display icons is just one of the options. Lets go over the 2 cons that keep coming up: Unicode Mapping Jon Tan states (rightly) that where matching unicode characters exist, the key should be mapped to that (such as the heart symbol for Favourites) and others that don’t to Private Use Areas where they have no associated meaning or content. This isn’t a problem with the technique as much as the current implementation of the fonts. Its solvable, although doing so will add an extra layer of complexity in specifying the correct letter. There’s also not going to be many icons that can be mapped of course. Drew Wilson has improved this situation with his release of Pictos Server – a typekit style hosted service where you can choose only the icons you want in the font, as well as what letter its mapped to. It also helps another issue with the technique – that of icon choice. Adding a new icon to a font is complex work, but with 650 to choose from, its less likely to be an issue. Another option here is IcoMoon which allows icons to be mapped to Private Use Areas in Unicode, thereby avoiding odd content altogether. See also: http://jontangerine.com/log/2010/08/web-fonts-dingbats-icons-and-unicode http://pictos.cc/articles/using-icon-fonts/ http://filamentgroup.com/lab/dingbat_webfonts_accessibility_issues/ Screenreaders speak generated content Using CSS to insert content has the side effect of the icon letter being read out by screenreaders. Not the worst accessibility issue, but confusing. However Eric Eggert discovered that this can be avoided with the ARIA attribute: aria-hidden="true". This is required for every instance, but Eric also points out that this can be automated with a small snippet of javascript. Read Eric’s post A better way to use icon fonts. Not all screenreaders support ARIA, so it may be best avoiding the need altogether by using Private Use Areas mentioned above. But… For me, the biggest issue is pixel crispness. Unless you spend an awful lot of time hinting the font properly, you just won’t get the same crispness that you can achieve with a PNG. Once everyone has high density screens this won’t be an issue, but in the meantime, I’m thinking more along the lines of SVG Sprites to implement my own icons and gain scalability.

  • From a previous life, in Victorian London…

mezzoblue

Signal vs. Noise

  • Customer support beyond email

    We’re seven members strong now and we’re able to add a lot of things our customers have been seeking. The bigger team also lets each of us work on support projects other than answering emails lightning fast. Since our sysops, developers and designers have been rightly bragging about the great things they’re doing, I thought I’d take the opportunity to tell you about what our amazing team has been doing to improve customer happiness. Basecamp 101 The mere whisper of the word ‘webinar’ used to make my blood run cold. The library and academic worlds (my old stomping grounds) are lousy with them. I found them to be time sinks where people who didn’t have a full grasp of a topic held their attendees virtually hostage as we endured technical difficulties and dry Powerpoint presentations. My bias came with me when I got to 37signals, so I was surprised to see the number of customers who really wanted a webinar. After a bit of research in the Fall, Merissa and Chase started a “Basecamp 101” online class that now runs almost every week. I have to say, it’s really terrific. If other webinars had butts, Chase and Merissa’s would be kicking them. Their class is fun and it gives space for potential customers to ask questions of Merissa, Chase and Michael at the end. It’s exciting tell our customers that we can offer them a demonstration of setting up a project before they even sign up for Basecamp. If you want to check it out sometime, the next one is always listed on our Help page. Help Videos There’s plenty of research demonstrating different learning styles, and the support team can definitely attest to the fact that not everyone learns best by reading help documentation. We have some pretty great help pages, but sometimes words and screenshots can’t do justice to some of the features and functions of Basecamp or Highrise. Chase made it his mission to create some really great screencasts for many of our frequently asked questions. You can see the ones he’s created for Basecamp and Highrise. They’ve been a great asset for the support team and have helped our customers in a big way. Live Chat Through the Summer and Fall of 2011, we ran live help chat (thanks to our pals at Olark) on highrisehq.com to assist potential customers who had a few questions before signing up for a plan. The whole support team spent a few hours on live chat each day and we noticed that a lot of current customers were using the service to get help. We decided to give it a shot in Basecamp accounts as a premium support feature. If you’re an admin on a Max Basecamp plan or any Suite, you’ll see this friendly little box at the bottom of your Basecamp dashboard:  Of course, we did endure some “Who the heck is this?”s and “Are you a robot?”s the first few weeks, but we’re almost two months into offering the feature and it’s been a great experience. The team can answer questions faster and it’s a true pleasure to interact with our customers in a new way. Faster Common Requests Resident support whiz kid Ann is not just great at helping us answer support questions, she’s also quite handy with the console as well. Every day we see some common requests that involve some On Call programmer work and Ann’s been taking on a lot of the common tasks that we used to send to the programming team, including things like: Un-sticking Highrise exports/imports Finding out who deleted/moved something or changed permissions in an app (known in the support team as an “Ooooh, girl, who…” question ) Creating file archives It’s been a huge load off our On Call team and it helps us take care of our customers much faster than they expect. These are all things we’ve been able to add to support in the past five months, and Basecamp Next isn’t even out yet. I don’t know about you, but I’m excited to see what the rest of 2012 holds.

  • PHOTO: Boney Money Brown.

    Boney Money Brown.

  • Developing for old browsers is (almost) a thing of…

    It used to be one of the biggest pains of web development. Juggling different browser versions and wasting endless hours coming up with workarounds and hacks. Thankfully, those troubles are now largely optional for many developers of the web. Chrome ushered in a new era of the always updating browser and it’s been a monumental success. For Basecamp, just over 40% of our users are on Chrome and 97% of them are spread across three very recent versions: 16.0.912.75, 16.0.912.63, and 16.0.912.77. I doubt that many Chrome users even know what version they’re on — they just know that they’re always up to date. Firefox has followed Chrome into the auto-updating world and only a small slice of users are still sitting on old versions. For Basecamp, a third of our users are on Firefox: 55% on version 9, 25% on version 8. The key trouble area is the 5% still sitting on version 3.6. But if you take 5% of a third, just over 1% of our users are on Firefox 3.6. Safari is the third biggest browser for Basecamp with a 13% slice and nearly all of them are on some version of 534.x or 533.x. So that’s a pretty easy baseline as well. Finally we have Internet Explorer: The favorite punching bag of web developers everywhere and for a very good reason. IE represents just 11% of our users on Basecamp, but the split across versions is large and depressing. 9% of our IE users are running IE7 — a browser that’s more than five years old! 54% are running IE8, which is about three years old. But at least 36% are running a modern browser in IE9. 7% of Basecamp users on undesirables In summary, we have ~1% of users on an undesirable version of Firefox and about 6% on an undesirable version of IE. So that’s a total of 7% of current Basecamp users on undesirable browser versions that take considerable additional effort to support (effort that then does not go into feature development or other productive areas). So we’ve decided to raise the browser bar for Basecamp Next and focus only on supporting Chrome 7+, Firefox 4+, Safari 4+, and, most crucially, Internet Explorer 9+. Meaning that the 7% of current Basecamp users who are still on a really old browser will have to upgrade in order to use Basecamp Next. This is similar to what we did in 2005, when we phased out support for IE5 while it still had a 7% slice of our users. Or as in 2008, when we killed support for IE6 while that browser was enjoing closer to 8% of our users. We know it’s not always easy to upgrade your browser (or force an upgrade on a client), but we believe it’s necessary to offer the best Basecamp we can possibly make. In addition, we’re not going to move the requirements on Basecamp Classic, so that’ll continue to work for people who are unable to use a modern browser. Basecamp Next, however, will greet users of old browsers with this:

  • Giving away the secrets of 99.3% email delivery

    We send a lot of mail for Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire (and some for Sortfolio, the Jobs Board, Writeboard, and Tadalist). One of the most frequently asked questions we get is about how we handle mail delivery and ensure that emails are making it to people’s inboxes. Some statistics First, some numbers to give a little context to what we mean by “a lot” of email. In the last 7 days, we’ve sent just shy of 16 million emails, with approximately 99.3% of them being accepted by the remote mail server. Email delivery rate is a little bit of a tough thing to benchmark, but by most accounts we’re doing pretty well at those rates (for comparison, the tiny fraction of email that we use a third party for has had between a 96.9% and 98.6% delivery rate for our most recent mailings). How we send email We send almost all of our outgoing email from our own servers in our data center located just outside of Chicago. We use Campaign Monitor for our mailing lists, but all of the email that’s generated by our applications is sent from our own servers. We run three mail-relay servers running Postfix that take mail from our application and jobs servers and queue it for delivery to tens of thousands of remote mail servers, sending from about 15 unique IP addresses. How we monitor delivery We have developed some instrumentation so we can monitor how we are doing on getting messages to our users’ inbox. Our applications tag each outgoing message with a unique header with a hashed value that gets recorded by the application before the message is sent. To gather delivery information, we run a script that tails the Postfix logs and extracts the delivery time and status for each piece of mail, including any error message received from the receiving mail server, and links it back to the hash the application stored. We store this information for 30 days so that our fantastic support team is able to help customers track down why they may not have received an email. We also send these statistics to our statsd server so they can be reported through our metrics dashboard. This “live” and historical information can then be used by our operations team to check how we’re doing on aggregate mail delivery for each application. Why run your own mail servers? Over the last few years, at least a dozen services that specialize in sending email have popped up, ranging from the bare-bones to the full-service. Despite all these “email as a service” startups we’ve kept our mail delivery in-house, for a couple of reasons: We don’t know anyone who could do it better. With a 99.3% delivery rate, we haven’t found a third party provider that actually does better in a way they’re willing to guarantee. Setup hassle Most of the third party services require that you verify each address that sends email by clicking a link that gets sent to that address. We send email from thousands and thousands of email addresses for our products, and the hassle of automatically registering and confirming them is significant. Automating the process still introduces unnecessary delivery delays. Given all this, why should we pay someone tens of thousands of dollars to do it? We shouldn’t, and we don’t. Read more about how we keep delivery rates high after the jump… More...

  • Benchmarking Basecamp's uptime against five other …

    As we announced at the beginning of the month, we’re always on a mission to improve our uptime. Inaccessible apps are the cause of much frustration and users don’t care whether that’s because they’re scheduled or not. While publishing our own uptimes have been a great step towards getting everyone in the company focused on improving, we also wanted to compare ourselves to others in the industry. So since December 16, we’ve been tracking five other applications through Pingdom to compare and contrast. The goal is to have the least amount of downtime and here are the results from the period December 16 to January 31: Github, down for 6 minutes Freshbooks, down for 14 minutes Basecamp, down for 16 minutes Campaign Monitor, down for 21 minutes Shopify, down for 1 hour and 53 minutes Assistly (now Desk), down for 6 hours and 46 minutes Congratulations to Github for the number one spot on the list. We are definitely going to be gunning for them! We’ll publish another edition of this list in a month or so.

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