It began, as it usually does, with sketches. Cocktail napkins, receipts, small animals, whatever happens to be on hand at the time. This is a glimpse into my design process – a rare and unadulterated look at how I do what I do.
In this case, it was a napkin on Hang’s kitchen table.
My cellphone dictionary doesn’t contain any profanity. Whenever I want to send a text message which contains swearing, I need to laboriously enter in the word letter by letter and it’s a pain in the ass. Once I get over the brief annoyance though, I can’t help my smile a little every time I do it because it’s just all so… quaint.
I despair that, even over a decade into developing for the web, so many companies still get the obvious, basic small things completely and utterly wrong. Here’s a tip for any aspiring web developers: Make it as easy as possible for me to give you money. When I want to pay you for your product, don’t make me fill in another damn registration form and send me an email confirmation before I can continue. I want to give you money but I have a short attention span. Make it too frustrating for me and I get annoyed.
I’m not even pretending to say anything original here. This has been said by people far more eloquently by far more experienced people than me. Still, the fact that so many companies manage to thrive despite so many of these obvious flaws shows the obvious potential still left untapped by the internet. If people are willing to put up with such a hostile experience, imagine what it will be like when we do it right…?
Michael completed the first version of the Bumblebee Labs logo tonight and I gotta say, I’m very impressed with it:
We printed out the inaugural version of the logo on some very nice hand made fabriano paper I had lying around and the effect was striking. Whenever I’ve embarked on some grand new adventure like moving away from home or writing my first non-trivial piece of software, there’s always a point where I can’t manage to convince myself on a gut level that this was all there was to it and it’s all so simple. Surely starting a company must involve more than just two guys, sitting around and figuring out problems that need solving? I know intellectually this is how many a company starts but my gut is run by narrativium, not common sense.
Holding that piece of paper in my hand and feeling the weight of it suddenly made all of this seem more real, more substantial. It may be a minor thing in the scheme of things but it was a sign, to me, of forward motion…
