Six Apart News & Events: June 2006

From Computer Arts, 50 ways to become a better designer. Usually, these lists are a lazy way to fill up an article, but this one's pretty good:

Despite their very different backgrounds, many of our designers offered the same advice – about reading the brief, and planning your work on paper. Design is a subjective thing, and we all have different ways of getting results, but take heed of the expert advice offered within the following pages and you’re sure to improve the way you work.

(Thanks to Mule Design for the link.)

As you might have guessed, some of us that love blogs are nerds. But maybe you need proof.

If you're a Mac user, you've probably seen MacSaber, a little application that uses the motion sensor in recent MacBooks ot make lightsaber noises. You know, for Star Wars geeks with fancy laptops. Matt Haughey probably had the best use of the app, with his video tribute to the Star Wars kid. (More here.)

The good news is, it gets far, far geekier than that. Our own Tatsuhiko Miyagawa started with a Thinkpad Saber application, taking advantage of the the similar tilt function in the PC laptops. However, he's just posted something even better: A tilt interface to Google Maps. It takes a little bit of tweaking to get it running, but once you're set up, it's a nice feeling being able to fly through your maps just by tilting your laptop. And if you don't feel like geeking out that much, you can just watch the video to get a feel for how it works. May the Force be with you.

As a company that believes in science, Apperceptive is pleased to have played a small part in Seed Magazine's relaunch of Scienceblogs.com, a network of (wait for it...) science blogs.

It's very hip to hem and haw about the return of the "bubble" or Web 2.0, but I get excited when I see people shipping innovative and beautiful web sites that also happen to be informative and educational. Scienceblogs.com is a winner!

Okay, we can't even pretend this one has a practical value, at least not yet. But it is pretty cool just to look at, and we're always in favor of new ways of looking at things. Sala's made a cool application that graphs the HTML tags used to build a page. There's a number of beautiful example images in his post, along with a graph of his Movable Type-powered blog. Even better, he's made the Java app available through the web and provided the source code for the app so that you can make improvements yourself.

And the aesthetically pleasing little graphs have resulted in some nice rewards for Sala and for the community. There's a very active tag community for people who've graphed their own websites. As Sala notes, hundreds of thousands of graphs have been created, and many of his new visitors have found their way to other art projects like One thousand paintings or Phebus. We've got a graph for sixapart.com here on our site; Go graph your own blog!

A recent Om and Niall Podsession about “Startup Do’s and Don’ts” did an excellent job of getting the old wheels a turnin’. The podcast made me wish that podcasts were more interactive the way blogs are with commenting because while listening I wanted to break in with my own opinion so many times. Instead, I was praying my memory would hold up long enough for me to write a blog post of my own to document the opinions I have about what was said.

In this podcast, Om and Niall provide a great primer for people just getting started in building a scalable applications online. It made me think of my own experiences a great deal and reminded me of how much fun it is in the early days of building a product from the ground up.

Continue reading 'My Start-up Do's and Don'ts'...

I will be honest, when I saw that the first style someone submitted to The Style Contest was a port of the Kubrick style, I rolled my eyes. If there is one thing the world needs less of are blogs that employ that style. The Kubrick style is just sooo 2004 with its disproportionately sized header, abuse of the color blue, and its oh-so-trendy rounded corners. What we need are some new styles. Styles that have the same universal appeal that Kubrick had when it first came out, but are fresh, exciting and will give the blog owner a sense of pride.

Continue reading 'Kubrick Killers'...

CBS News' Larry Magid had a chance to interview our own Mena Trott last week at the Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference, and they've just posted the 10-minute audio interview on the site.

The brief chat is a pretty good overview of the many things we've got going on here at Six Apart, from Movable Type (which is now in beta for version 3.3) to TypePad and LiveJournal and a little bit about our new preview of Vox.

We'll be talking more about Vox as we open up the service to more people over time, but until then, you can sign up for an invitation or take a look at Mena's introduction to Vox to get an idea of what's on the way.

Just a friendly reminder -- there's $17,000 in prizes being awarded as part of the The Style Contest, and the deadline is this Monday, June 5. We're thrilled to see all the great designs submitted so far, but also know that some of the best work designers do happens on deadline. If you're not done with your work yet, or you're on the fence about wanting to win four thousand dollars in cash, then here's your wake-up call: It's time to get to work!

We're really proud at Six Apart to be sponsors of this kind of design contest. This is especially true because design is in our blood.

We think your work as a designer is valuable. With everything we do, design isn't an afterthought, where it's just "prettying up" stuff that the programmers have thrown over the wall. We know you feel the same way, and we want to make sure the experience most people have with the web isn't just an accident that happened to get converted into HTML.

Design is in our blood.

Our co-founder is a designer. Ever been asked to do another comp on spec for someone who thinks designs should be free? Our team at Six Apart has worked in the real world, too, and it informs what we do. Instead of hoping to "design" something after the fact, we take designers into consideration, and try to empower both web design experts and everyday blogger to customize and personalize their sites.

And by building for Six Apart platforms like Movable Type, you're buliding on the best plaform for web designers. There's an amazing community of your peers using the same tools as you: Names you know, or at least sites you recognize: Doug Bowman, Heather Armstrong, Shaun Inman, Mike Davidson, Todd Dominey, Derek Powazek, Dave Shea, Dan Cederholm, Cameron Moll, Greg Storey, Heather Champ, Jason Kottke and hundreds more of the most influential and innovative designers on the web use Movable Type to power their blogs.

It's not just individuals -- some of the most influential businesses in design and usability use Movable Type as part of their set of tools. Our friends at 37signals, Adaptive Path, Mule Design, Veer, Blue Flavor, and Behavior are just some of the many design or user experience firms using Movable Type to publish their own sites.

And design firms aren't the only people in the design community who rely on Movable Type to build their businesses. Whether you want to keep up with Ben Goodger of Firefox fame or you want to follow dozens of bloggers at Adobe (including the former Macromedia folks), the people who make the tools you use ever day are using the same blogging platform as you. So if you want to know what's coming next for Photoshop or Flash or Dreamweaver, you can just read up on their work on their blogs.

In short, you're in good company.

And just as importantly, we put our money where our mouth is. Be the grand prize winner, and you can have $4000 of it. By sponsoring efforts like The Style Contest, and by investing in the technology that lets you reach millions of bloggers around the world with one set of designs, we're investing in having better design on the web. We're also trying to make sure that designing blogs stays challenging and interesting, so that working on blogs doesn't become the next equivalent of just cranking out another 468x60.

We'll be talking more about our commitment to good design and to our community going forward, but first we can't wait to see everyone's submissions on Monday. Good luck!