Have you ever wondered what are the words that make the community tick? Which news and companies are making the headlines?

We dugg into it and created this infographic to visualize some answers. How did we get all those Hacker News data?

Well… we mainly hacked

Enjoy:

More than being a great designer, Rand was a phenomenal thinker. I’ve had a chance to put my hands on an out of print copy of “Paul Rand – A Designer’s Art”. In this book he shares his thoughts on what the design process should look like, giving examples from various projects he worked on. It’s a masterpiece.

A while ago, I bumped into a booklet he created explaining the thought process behind the creation of the NeXT logo. I’ve never been more excited to read a design presentation. It is so beautiful and smart in its simplicity that it made me shed a tear. Seriously. (I tend to get emotional about good design).

It is not surprising then that two months ago, when it was time to design a logo for Base – our Simple CRM and Sales Tracking App, I went back to this genius NeXT booklet and read it again. Twice. It really helped me think through the process of creating our new logo.

So while Paul Rand is not alive anymore, his spirit was definitely all over the process of creating the Base logo. With deep respect to his NeXT booklet, I put together this presentation to explain my thought process to our team. I decided to share it here as well.

Thanks Paul.

We love Dropbox. We really do. Everyone on our team is using it and we think that they solved a big problem in a beautiful and elegant way.

We are now working on a *mind-blowing* integration between Base and Dropbox so we were very happy to hear about the recent updates to their API.

Excited and happy, we started working on the integration only to find out that the Dropbox API Ruby SDK is, well, let’s call it “not cool”. We love Ruby, but the SDK does not take advantage of this beautiful language!

As builders and hackers we knew that this could not stand and so we decided to write our own Ruby SDK for Dropbox.

So what’s exactly cool about our solution you might ask.

Well, here are the highlights:

1. It’s using the oauth gem, instead of reinventing the wheel and implementing OAuth communication all over again
2. It treats files and directories as Ruby objects with appropriate classes, on which you can perform operations (think file.copy “here”)
3. It is thoroughly tested
4. It’s lightweight and clean – it does not extend any of Ruby’s internals

We are all about sharing so we open sourced our Client and you can now access it on GitHub. We’ll be happy to hear your thoughts.

First, the name. Starting today, PipeJump will be called Base. Why Base? Well, Base is where you touch … base with your customer … base. Got it? We will share more details on the rebranding and the thoughts that went into it in an upcoming post.

As for the pricing, this is where it really gets interesting. Base now offers you a powerful version for the amazing price of $0. Yep. That’s zero. Nada. Zilch. Nothing.

If you’ve been following us, you know that we were always committed to small businesses. We decided to give this version for free (with unlimited users and contacts!) in order to help small businesses get on trying a simple CRM tool and see how their business grows.

Finally, we’re also launching today a new and exciting referral program. You can now get even more free Base if you refer colleagues and friends to start using Base. The fun part? They get more free Base as well!

We plan to keep growing Base at a staggering pace, soon adding native applications for the iPhone and the Android,  and more super exciting features.

If you are among our customers, we’d like to thank you for your loyalty and trust. If you aren’t a customer yet, you should become one now.

Forget about Jonathan Ives and Philippe Starck. Dieter Rams is THE father of modern design. The German-born designer studied architecture at Werkkunstschule Wiesbaden and, after a short stint as an architect, joined Braun in 1955. Six years later, he became Braun’s chief of design and for the next 34 years (!!), almost single-handedly, changed the history of product design. He has had a profound impact on the way his company, and the world, think about designing great products.

There’s no chance that you’ll walk around the MoMA and not see a at least one product that Rams designed as many of his seminal works are featured in top museums around the world. As a big advocate of user experience and simplicity, he designed hundreds of products, from cameras to projectors to shelving systems. His motto was “Weniger, aber besser” which translates to “Less, but better”. Sounds familiar? Yes, he has inspired many of Apple’s products. Actually, Gizmodo once featured a comparison of Apple’s products with some of the most famous products that Rams ever designed. Looking at these pictures, it’s clear that Apple was inspired by Rams.

The Ten Principles of Good Design

However, Rams was not only a designer but also a design philosopher. He cared a lot about design and constantly strived to improve it and push it forward. It was around the eighties when Rams noticed that the design world is losing direction. He was very concerned about that. He took some time to reflect on his own work, thinking whether his design is good and if so, what is it that made it good. This thinking process led him to craft the ten principles for good design. Some designers refer to them as the “ten commandments”. Here they are:

Good design is innovative

There are endless ways to innovate and new technologies are offering exciting opportunities to do so.

Good design makes a product useful

A product is meant to be used. It must satisfy certain needs, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic . Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product and removes anything that can detract from it.

Good design is aesthetic

Products we use every day affect our personality and our well-being. Hence, their aesthetics are critical. However, and this is very important, only well-executed designs can be beautiful.

Good design makes a product understandable

Gone are the days of RTFM. You didn’t need a manual to operate the iPhone, did you? Rams used to say that good design can make the product talk and be self-explanatory.

Good design is unobtrusive

Products are neither decorative objects nor works of art. It’s important for the design of products to leave room for the user’s self-expression.

Good design is honest

Our favorite! Good design does not make a product more valuable or innovative than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with false promises.

Good design is long-lasting

Do you know the IBM logo? Did you know it was designed 43 years ago? 43 years and it was never redesigned. Like Paul Rand (the designer of the IBM logo), Rams believes that good design avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears old fashioned. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years.

Good design is thorough, down to the last detail

Think that Steve Jobs was a details lunatic? Well, he had a great teacher. In good design, nothing is arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in designing a product show respect towards the user.

Good design is environmentally-friendly

Good design conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

Good design is as little design as possible

Less, but better. Good design concentrates on the essential. Everything else is left out. In Rams’ words: “Back to purity, back to simplicity”.

Why does it matter to you?

While Rams wrote these principals thinking about the design of physical products, they certainly apply to planning and designing digital products. The design of a product or a feature involves three steps (at least this is how we do it for Base):

Vision and planning

Look around at the latest technological developments and use them as a ground for innovation. Think how can you leverage these changes and create something that is useful for your users. Do you really understand their needs? Go out and speak with them. The more you do so, the more useful your first product iteration will be.

Prototyping and designing

How can you create something that needs none or minimal training? Dropbox works because you simply save files to a folder. It couldn’t get much simpler than that. Create many prototypes. Play with them. Experiment. Try to put yourself in your customer’s shoes.

Refining and polishing

“The details are details. They make the product.” said Charles Eames. At this stage, you take a close look at the smallest details of the product. You make sure that every pixel on the screen is there because it needs to be there (we call that pixel-proofing). Every single pixel must have a reason to exist. It can be there because it is an essential part of the feature, it can give a visual feedback to the users or just be there for an aesthetic reason. However, be careful to distinguish aesthetics from mere styling.
An important part of refining the product is removing unnecessary parts. Dave McClure calls that “killing a feature” and he suggests doing that on a weekly basis.

Final Thoughts

I believe that software, and specifically business software, is undergoing a revolution. People are tired from the cumbersome business applications out there. Guess what, in terms of user experience, there’s no such thing as B2B anymore. At the end of the day every product is B2C or should we say B2P – Business to People. Yes, those are people just like you and me that will be using it, and they will ALWAYS prefer better, smarter and easier user experiences. Amen!