Brian Scates

Designers vs. Developers in Startups – You Need Both!

Brian Scates — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:17:13 +0000

Dave McClure at Business Week recently published an article about the value of design to startups, in which I thought he made some good points about how important designers and marketers are to the success of startups and applications. Predictably, this didn’t sit so well with developers like Steve at Big Dumb Dev, whose sarcastic [...]

Crime & Punishment on the Internet: Should we forgive a thief?

Brian Scates — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 02:06:46 +0000

This is a story of what not to do on the internet. It’s a story of theft, of law suits, of a community coming together to fight a common foe. It’s a story that I thought was over years ago (2006 is ancient history in internet time). It may yet turn out to be a [...]

Getting Started in Social Media: Twitter for Business

Brian Scates — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 00:39:04 +0000

After one of our clients recently set up a twitter account for her company and we connected, she sent me an email that read “OK, seriously – how did you manage to get 439 people to follow you? I mean, I’m sure you’re an interesting guy, but 439? The race is on!” I had to [...]

So this is why it’s so hard to blog!

Brian Scates — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:39:23 +0000

If you’re a regular reader of sxates.com (ha!) you may have noticed that after starting relatively strong, posts have trailed off and are now pretty infrequent. This is a pretty common problem for startup blogs – after you’ve dumped the initial genius thoughts you had that prompted you to start the blog, then you look [...]

Going back in time with vinyl

Brian Scates — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 02:45:06 +0000

Used music stores don’t sell 8-tracks anymore, or cassette tapes. But I’ve found several that sell old records. Something about vinyl gives it an enduring quality. It’s been probably 15-20 years since I played a record, but having found a couple of local caches of vinyl gold, I decided to give it another go. I [...]

Protected: A design community’s crowd-sourced $50 Logo (Part 2)

Brian Scates — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 20:01:27 +0000

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Protected: A design community’s crowd-sourced $50 Logo (Part 1)

Brian Scates — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:29:39 +0000

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

The coming revolt against Apple

Brian Scates — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 05:55:42 +0000

Over the last few years, Apple has solidified itself as the cool kid's legitimate alternative to the Microsoft mainstream. They have excelled at packaging hardware and software together in sexy ways with usability that has put all the first-movers on defense, scrambling to catch up. The iPhone has been a smash hit and helped them expand their Mac market share substantially. broken-iphoneBut when you're at the top of the cool mountain, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep your footing. There are storm clouds on the horizon, and there's a revolution brewing. The torches are being lit over in iPhone land. The iPhone has been a cult success in spite of itself in many ways. Other phones had better hardware and more features, and the iPhone was missing long standard features like MMS. But nothing matched the allure of the all touch screen form factor and the brilliant iPhone OS. When the App store was released, that made up for many of the (still persistent) feature deficiencies. But now that App Store is becoming a real problem for users and developers alike.

Tips and Best Practices for HTML Emails in Outlook 2007, 2010.

Brian Scates — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 02:37:09 +0000

While Microsoft has been making great improvements on the web standards front in IE, they've been seemingly rolling backwards with HTML support in Outlook. For the 2007 version they switched from the IE rendering engine to the Word engine (apparently for security reasons), which is completely crippled compared to IE. For anyone who does email marketing and designs and codes attractive HTML emails, this decision has no doubt had you shaking your fist and cursing Bill Gates' mother. We were all hoping that for the upcoming Outlook 2010 release Microsoft would go back to IE, but they have announced that they are sticking with Word. The pitchforks and torches are waving, but it looks like we'll be dealing with the Word engine for emails for many years. Even if they switch to IE for 2012, we'll have clients using 2007 and 2010 for years. So if you haven't yet learned the ins and outs of designing emails for Outlook, now's the time to learn!

Don’t define your customers, let your customers define you.

Brian Scates — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 02:41:24 +0000

Never underestimate the creativity of your customers. You may think you have a great product, but don't get married to your intended purpose for it. It's quite possible that customers will find alternative uses you may not have even thought of, maybe even better uses. If you're launching a new product, particularly a web app, be prepared to adapt it to the way your customers actually use it, and not necessarily the way you designed it. The most recent, and high profile example of this is Twitter. Twitter was originally designed as a "what are you doing/thinking/status" feed for friends. 140 character limits forced you to keep it short and sweet, and post more often. At first, this is how people used it, but after a while we all grew bored ...