A good example of storyboarding as used in movie production, using a Coen Brother’s flick as an example. Storyboarding applies to user interface design too, beating out notations like UML in terms of utility.

A simple web based tool for designing fonts (Flash-based).

An OmniGraffle stencil for mocking up iPhone applications.

A complete set of Logo trends for 2007, useful for the designer in all of us. Personally, I like the Urban Vinyl look. (via)

It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. – Steve Jobs

Capacity planning isn’t to figure out what’s impossible, it’s a tool to guess how big things might be.

As Joyeur suggests,¹ EC2 isn’t an uber-scalable webhost yet,²³ but it does present some incredible possibilities for the data processing side of web applications. Several of my product ideas hinge on a significant amount of back-end processing, for rendering things from data definitions to picture and movie formats. Scaling that sort of problem with the standard web setups is expensive, but when you can parallelize it on the cheap you’ve hit gold.

1. Joyent, of course, has good reason to tell us that EC2 isn’t ready for scalable web hosting, as they build a competing product … but their article is still a worthy read ↩
2. Though I can see ways to apply EC2 to the Rails-Mongrel proxy problem ↩
3. And with management front-ends, scalable web serving is possible ↩

One of the best developers I know pointed me to a Django tutorial. Django is a Python-based Rails equivalent, that’s even less imposing than Rails. It’s a good corollary framework to Rails,¹ as the approach is different enough to make you think a bit.

1. Especially useful if you’re still trying to find a good framework, or thinking about design approaches ↩

We don’t use personas. We use ourselves. I believe personas lead to a false sense of understanding at the deepest, most critical levels. –37Signals

I believe that Use Cases are mostly bullshit too, especially when written about users¹ who are vastly different than anyone on the team. Not to mention that Use Cases use a misleading, trivial notation that most technical people believe they understand (but can never seem to agree on)².

I respect the no-bullshit approach to thinking about software design, thanks to the 37Signals guys for reminding us.

1. Use case “users” are kind of like Personas in design and development ↩
2. I have some horror stories about companies mis-using Use Cases, but I’ll save those for another day ↩

Fog Creek’s new sites slide into the painful state of design by “a committee of tasteless slobs,” a condition to be aware of, and run screaming from when encountered. The Fog Creek guys started over again, gaining sanity and a cleaner, honest design.