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Focusing on the best examples of user experience patterns and design styles, the newly relaunched Pattern Tap 2.0 is working on “improving the intelligence of our interaction design industry”.
Tumblr Architecture - 15 Billion Page Views A Month And Harder To Scale Than Twitter -
One of the common patterns across successful startups is the perilous chasm crossing from startup to wildly successful startup. Finding people, evolving infrastructures, servicing old infrastructures, while handling huge month over month increases in traffic, all with only four engineers, means you have to make difficult choices about what to work on. This was Tumblr’s situation. Now with twenty engineers there’s enough energy to work on issues and develop some very interesting solutions.
A great writeup on the growth challenges Tumblr has faced from infrastructure to hiring the right team of engineers.
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Design to Inspire Confidence -
Inspire confidence with instructions that help users make the jump from one service to another. These need to be rooted in the user’s current knowledge of the system, not their future behavior.
“Don’t ignore your fear. Acknowledge it. As soon as you know you’re going to give that speech or design that training program, take a quiet moment and experience the fear that comes with the importance of the project. … Resist the temptation to minimize your anxiety. That’s a false macho response and it lacks courage. It’s also counterproductive; it gives power to the fear, almost guaranteeing that it will haunt you and prevent your progress.” — Peter Bergman, from his article How to Start the Big Project You’ve Been Putting Off
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“Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.” — from Mark Zuckerberg’s founder letter in Facebook’s S-1 to IPO
(Source: collaborativefund)
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I’m excited to announce that I was invited to speak at Valio Con 2012 in San Diego this summer. Drew Wilson and the Valio Con team have put together an amazing line-up of speakers that I am looking forward to hearing.
Last year’s Valio Con was by far the best web and design conference I have attended in quite a while. This year the conference takes place June 7-10th at the Hyatt Mission Bay resort in San Diego. The $999 conference pass includes three nights hotel stay, beach bonfires, breakfast, local catered lunches and a chance to hang out with some of the best designers and developers our industry.
Check out the Valio Con 2012 site for more details.
A Friday afternoon snapshot of my desk at the Style Hatch office.
Check out our latest Tumblr premium theme Coco! It comes in three beautiful styles, but you can always customize it like the comic and art blog Magical Game Time with a few tweaks in the appearances menu.
Digital shop, Style Hatch and designer Regina Casaleggio, are pleased to welcome the latest arrival to the scene, Coco, a sweet, charming, sophisticated, theme with lots of heart and soul. This beauty is “out of the box” ready to enjoy and be shown to the world. To keep this one-of-a-kind masterpiece from being altered from its original state of beauty the customization features are limited.
Buy Coco for $49 and take advantage of our stellar support - coco@stylehatch.co
Really this post was a good excuse to try out Tumblr’s new KILLER highlighted post feature. You guys are pretty brilliant!
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A showcase of the best typefaces from the Google web fonts directory.
Out of the 404 web fonts currently on Google Fonts, Chad Mazzola put together a collection of some of the better fonts available. Watch the repo on GitHub.
Additionally Sacha Greif recently published a great article, Google Webfonts That Don’t Suck.