Change you better believe in.

Thanks for the link, Maggie!

To the Letter Born – Campaign Stops – 2008 Elections – Opinion – New York Times Blog

He brought his own frustrated consumer experiences to bear in creating the business model, and eliminated many of the usual array of motor-oil choices—startup, high-mileage, various blends—from his inventory. “You get the shit out of the ground,” he said, referring to standard Castrol GTX, “or the shit made in the laboratory that’s the perfect lubricant” (Syntec). “Meaning, it’s either A or B. It’s not about the oil. It’s about the people. They got confused.” He stocked the places with baseball memorabilia and flat-screen TVs, and served free coffee (“the good kind”), so that customers would associate the experience with luxury rather than with cumbersome chores. Although he recently divested, owing in part to a rise in the minimum wage, he gave me directions to the Team Dykstra Automotive Center in Simi Valley, so that I could see for myself. “It’s the Taj Mahal of car washes,” he said. “Ask for Carlos.”

The Sporting Scene: Nails Never Fails: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Lame joking aside, this passage resonates right now as Maggie and I are building up her bookbinding empire, which is arguably a design process within a business context. As we experiment with different ideas, layouts, or plans, we’re “recognizing accidents” all over the place as a result of our past experiences. I never thought of it in those terms until today.

Nancy Skolos remembers that one of her teachers used to say, “A good failure is worth a lot of mediocre successes.” To varying degrees, we carry this sensibility through into professional practice. For example, Jonathan Hoefler says, “Increasingly I think about the work that I do not so much as a directed effort, but as the ability to recognize accidents and interpret them productively. Even failures have their place, since without them there’s no progress: anything that’s truly ‘experimental’ has to run the risk of failure.”

Design Observer: writings about design & culture

Today marked my third day at SXSW and it has been a really bizarre experience. There are times when I feel like I’ve been swallowed whole into the tubes of the interwebs. I keep seeing “famous” people walking around and all I can think, “OMG! IT’S [INSERT A-LIST BLOGGER/INTERNET FAMOUS PERSON] FROM [BLOG/URL]! OMG!” I keep imagining these people walking around with their URL and Technorati rank floating above their heads (sort of like the Sims). All the while, I couldn’t help but feel like I was back in high school again.

I hated high school.

on attending SXSW as a nobody :: Just Add Social

I strongly believe the latter, though I understand the reasons why museum sites tend toward the mundane. Of course, my ideal museum website does both: a unique, wonderful experience online that motivates further exploration in the museum itself.

If you’re interested in museum websites, this discussion on MetaFilter (linked below) is worth checking out.

Full disclosure: I often think about art museum websites.

“Websites were a wonderful way around the famous museum swamp.” | MetaFilter

This infographic is notable from an information design perspective, too. It mixes text and graphics seamlessly (ha, seams, get it?) and uses time-shifting, focus, and abstraction to explain why Johan Santana’s changeup is so effective. Try making the same points with just text.

03santana_GFX.jpg (JPEG Image, 1125×1149 pixels)

Let your type breathe. Don’t be afraid to leave blank spaces in your pages. This negative or white space will help focus attention on the text — and it’s the text that speaks loudest, so let it be heard. Next, remember the line-height CSS property; a good rule of thumb is line-spacing that’s at least 140% of your text size.

A Guide to Web Typography | i love typography, the typography blog

The new repository is intended to be an insurance policy for individual countries and also for humanity more generally, should larger-scale disaster strike (anything from pestilence to an asteroid impact).

The Norwegian government put up more than $7 million for construction. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is providing money to help developing countries package and ship seed samples, as part of a broader $30-million project to protect the genetic diversity of the world’s main food crops.

Buried Seed Vault Opens in Arctic – Dot Earth – Climate Change and Sustainability – New York Times Blog

Ask H&FJ | Hoefler & Frere-Jones

10 Insights From 11 Months Of Working At Google | Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

Avinash’s blog and book are must-reads for anyone interested in web analytics.