May 2013
13 posts
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Upping Your Type Game →
I want to introduce you to your brother from another mother—another group of humans that, like you, is quite under-appreciated: the type designer. Type designers and web designers have an amazing amount in common, that’s why it’s super wonderful that they’ve been collaborating more lately. Web designers are pumped that they can use more than a handful of fonts on the internet, and type designers...
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“Tumblr is an aesthetic pleasure, like entering a modern art museum for the first...”
– Baig: A Tumblr guide for newbies
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The One-Person Product – Marco.org →
David always obsessed over his newest ideas, features, and designs until they were completely polished and ready to go. He’s a workaholic — he truly lives and breathes Tumblr. I’ve never even seen him show any desire to work on a side project. David is all Tumblr, all the time. […]
We — internet users, creative people, publishers, socializers — will be much better served if David can...
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The Naive Optimist: Profit is good →
ryanleecarson:
Profit is an enabler. It’s usually (not always) an indicator that you’re doing something that your customers really need, at a price point that makes sense. Profit gives an organization the ability to iterate faster, reach more people and beat subpar competitors. And most importantly, stay in business.
Entrepreneurs: Don’t listen to the “must be not-for-profit if you want to...
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“We’re not turning purple. Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t...”
– David Karp, Tumblr Staff: News!
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“We speak of three kinds of laziness. The first is simply to spend all your time...”
– Matthieu Ricard, in his book of conversations with his philosopher father, “The Monk and the Philosopher”
An excerpt from the post The Three Kinds of Laziness by Gary Tan.
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April 2013
9 posts
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lostinspace asked: would i be right in assuming you can not mix video and stills in a single post with soem text on tumblr?
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“The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what...”
– Ernest Hemingway, on the paralysis that often comes when stopping and restarting projects.
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“You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people...”
– Dale Carnegie, from Alex Godin’s post Stop Hustling, Start Listening.
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Stop working (so hard) →
The idea that, without “hustle,” without throwing away nights and weekends, without putting your life on hold for your work, you’ll somehow be more successful, more productive, is ridiculous to me, yet continues to be pushed by participants in our industry left and right. This is, quite simply, insane.
So, dear reader, I implore you: If this post at all rings true, sounds a little too familiar,...
March 2013
11 posts
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“It’s really important to view your life as an entrepreneur as a long journey...”
– Brad Feld, On Not Mourning Your Failures & Overcoming Burn-Out
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Pricing Experiments You Might Not Know, But Can... →
Pricing has far more to do with physiology and the built in perception of value than simply going with an amount people are willing to pay.
People were offered 2 kinds of beer: premium beer for $2.50 and bargain beer for $1.80. Around 80% chose the more expensive beer.
Now a third beer was introduced, a super bargain beer for $1.60 in addition to the previous two. Now 80% bought the $1.80...
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“Perfectionism is not the key to success. In fact, research shows that...”
– Brene Brown, written in her new book Daring Greatly
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Don’t Learn How To Code, Learn How To Make Things →
You know what is fun? Making things. Turning a spark of creative insight into a thing that you can show people — a thing that people can use and from which they can derive some iota of pleasure or utility. Start with a simple website. Basic HTML and CSS. No product is too small. In fact, the opposite is true. If you don’t know how to build the first version of your product in a weekend — a...
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jQuery Photoset Grid →
The photoset option is up there as one of my favorite features on Tumblr, but the default photoset grid that Tumblr generates does not resize and play well with all of our Style Hatch theme’s responsive layouts. As a result we created our own resizable photoset grid jQuery plugin that we rolled out last year.
I recently took the time to clean up the plugin, write documentation, and put...
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February 2013
7 posts
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Typeplate →
Typeplate is a “typographic starter kit”. We don’t make aesthetic design choices, but define proper markup with extensible styling for common typographic patterns. A stripped-down Sass library concerned with the appropriate technical implementation of design patterns—not how they look.
For the last several days we have been refining our base Style Hatch framework for all of our theme builds....
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the...”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupery, via “Weather the Storms of Life”
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“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like...”
– Thomas Jefferson
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January 2013
8 posts
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“You have to design apps for the way people are, not the way they wish they were.”
– Roelof Botha
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Watchstaff:
An upgrade, years in the making…
When we imagined Tumblr more than seven years ago, we dreamed of offering creators a new canvas. Every post would be a raw look through the author’s eyes and mind. We imagined the interface disappearing as these subjects came to life.
For years, this vision was challenged by limits in browser technology and an increasingly daunting set of Tumblr features...
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The Cost of Neutral →
“If you go to work and do what you’re told, you’re not being negative, certainly, but the lack of initiative you demonstrate (which, alas, you were trained not to demonstrate) costs us all, because you’re using a slot that could have been filled by someone who would have added more value. […]
Not adding value is the same as taking it away.”
— Seth Godin
I...
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“God, the devil, beauty, perfection, precision – these aren’t the only things...”
– Jason Fried, from Ignore Details Early On
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December 2012
8 posts
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