Okay, I admit it… I have neglected my fonts. I’d like to blame it on the fact that I am a web designer, and web friendly fonts and extremely limited but that is a poor excuse. Good web designers would slap my hand for even thinking of such a blasphemous thing. This may be a knee jerk, ‘duh’ comment, but I pledged to myself I was going to write my blogs as I think them, so here I am.

From here on out I will dedicate a small portion of my day to really study and get to know my fonts. Even if it is something as simple as typing in a custom phrase in Font Book, rotating through each font, and writing down my favorites and their possible uses. I need to break out of my Helvetica and Univers cycle.

Back in August I had the pleasure off hearing Jason Fried of 37Signals discuss 37Signal’s philosophies and methods. The presentation essentially followed the same script & theme which you can see here.

For those unfamiliar with 37Signals’ software and design principals here are a few examples to give you a flavor of their thinking:

• Less is more.
• Meetings are useless.
• Working remotely and collaborating is better then being in an office and interrupting each other.
• Chunk large projects into smaller bits which can be completed quickly.
• Focus on speed rather then perfection.
• Don’t do specification, wireframing or usability studies. They are a waste of time.
• Personas are bullshit.
• Invest in what doesn’t change like speed and customer service.
• Roadmaps and planning are useless.
• Morale feeds off progress.

Now, I’m a big fan of 37Signals and what they have done; however it’s a mistake for interactive agencies, web designers and developers to wholeheartedly adopt 37Signals’ ways of working without establishing a strong reputation first. It is key to point out that 37Signals is a product development company, not an agency focused on developing marketing sites or building custom client applications. 37Signals builds for 37Signals!

I asked Jason, “Why don’t you do consulting work or client work any longer?” His response was “it isn’t profitable compared to product development.” I’m sure he is 100% correct. The 12 person team at 37Signals is raking in millions of dollars in revenue each year. By contrast client work is time consuming, labor intensive and involves lots of education between both sides of the project. We are a company of 9 people and we haven’t even crossed the million dollar revenue mark yet.

Jason’s presentation did address several audience questions about client work. Which can be summed up as follows:

• Select your client’s carefully. Not every client is a good match.
• Train your clients on how you work, rather then how they expect you to work.
• RFPs and scope-of-work project estimations should be avoided at all cost because the written description can be interpreted differently depending on the reader.

37Signals originally started as a web design company and then they morphed into a product development company because the product work was far more profitable. Therefore I have to be critical of how their recommendations apply to us interactive agencies. Their advice doesn’t come from success in the client services area!

The ONLY way a client is going to be willing to accept those 3 points is if they know your agency’s record, and they RESPECT your abilities above all other agencies. Let’s use an example. If Widget Corp is looking for an agency to redesign their aging ecommerce site, and two other equal agencies are willing to bend to the desires of Widget Corp’s RFP, then good luck getting that project.

There is something to be said about standing your ground and holding true to your principles however at the end of the day if you don’t have revenue, then you don’t have a business. I’m not interested in being a martyr for the cause.

I’ve always admired the work of IDEO. They are a company which solves problems for their clients in a very fluid and evolving manner. They have put themselves in a position of respect, they do amazing work and I’m pretty sure they are VERY profitable. Any web company doing client related work would be well served to study the success of IDEO while blending in the philosophies of 37Signal’s product development methodologies.

At Imulus we plan on doing things differently. We’ll be proof that a interactive agency can develop great products while doing extraordinary client work. We don’t believe the two are mutually exclusive. Our position is the our brand of doing great client work and great product development will put us in a position of respect. This position will allow us to negotiate using the 3 points above.

This is our position and what makes Imulus unique in the realm of interactive agencies.

We don’t use Monster, Dice or CareerBuilder to find our next employee. Instead we are big fans of Craigslist and highly focused community sites. For instance, when we are looking for CSS Expert we’ll target CSS Beauty.

Any job posting usually nets 20 resumes a day for at least 1 week after the posting. Experience ranges widely across any of the resumes we receive. We’ve seen everything from individuals who think they are a God’s gift to us; to people who have amazing web skills but send resumes loaded with typos and broken links.

We don’t read every line in a resume. We don’t have time for that, instead we believe in the “Blink Test“. We are looking at each resume for “it”, whatever “it” is. This means that each resume is scanned and decided on in less then 20 seconds. If we find a resume which takes longer then 20 seconds to evaluate we move it to the “maybe” pile and it’s passed onto the office for evaluation. If the majority of the office is intrigued then we move the resume to the “strong” pile where we proceed to the interview process.

So what is “it”?
There is consistency to our approach. I believe there is a set of 4 characteristics that the “maybe” and “strong” piles have in common.

• Simplicity: We look at the candidate’s ability to communicate their skills in the most concise way possible. This extends into code and design, not just written communication.
• Honesty: Yes, everyone believes they are hardworking, dedicated and organized. However, let us call references to figure that out for ourselves.
• Show Us: We are not looking a monster list of applications used, but instead we are looking for examples of how the tools were used to solve problems.
• Writing Skills: It’s tough to hide the inability to write. If the resume is fraught with poor grammar, typos and sentence structure then it will lead to ineffective email communication or poor internal documentation. (This one personally is my biggest challenge.)

So, if you know anyone who has these characteristics and is looking for an job, send them our way.

Incase is apparently not just about making sexy and functional cases for devices but they also have great design sense when it comes to their online checkout process. The instant you add an item to your cart the process begins with lightboxed cart contents. This focuses the user specifically on the checkout process, rather then distracting them with items like navigation, banners or other sorts of graphics.

Add to Cart

The Checkout screen makes full use of the display area rather then asking the user to enter each piece of customer data on a separate page. They don’t beat you down to create an account but they make it easy in case you’d like to come back again. Shipping and tax is updated on the fly and you are given the chance to review the total cost before you submit your order.

Checkout is SO NICE!

There are other items about the Incase Web site which I like, but I think it’s important to give them respect for thinking about the user and not following the typical flow of most product driven ecommerce site.

On a daily basis I spend anywhere from five minutes to three hours cursing and wishing ill will upon Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. Sometimes I do this silently under my breath and sometimes, to the dismay of my coworkers, I do it quite vocally. The reason? Internet Explorer 6 is an: insecure, slow, outdated, and non-standards compliant browser.

Let me illustrate this a bit further. If browsers were cars — IE6 would be an El Camino truck that’s been sitting outside in the rain for 20 years. Underpowered, ugly, basically useless in every scenario, and ready to explode and kill you at any moment.

Development of a website that supports IE6 adds about 15 to 20% of additional time to a project. And further, IE6 doesn’t support the everyday commonplace technologies of all other modern browsers. Meaning websites simply don’t function or look as good as they do in today’s browsers.

So here’s the question.

If today’s modern browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, IE7) are easy to get, run faster and safer than IE6, and are free. Why are some company IT departments still forcing users to browse on IE6? In general it seems to boil down to three big reasons.

1. The company has internal software that was built specifically to run on Internet Explorer.
2. The company manages a ton of machines and the workload/headache of upgrading them all to a newer version is too much.
3. The company and users feel comfortable on IE6 because they “know it”.

Here’s the problem. When we as an industry don’t embrace new enhancements in development it’s the client’s viewers and the client’s brand that suffers. We’re still building phenomenal web sites. But the straight truth of the matter is they’re not as good as they should be. The web has soooo much potential but it’s not being utilized. Why? Because we’re still supporting a legacy browser* that was released in 2001.

As I’ve said before. In order for things to get better sometimes you just have to make the jump. Other companies are already doing this. Apple, 37Signals, and Comedy Central just to name a few. Notice anything about those first two? They dramatically care about their user’s experience. So much so that they’re willing to sacrifice incompatibility for some users to benefit the rest of them**. Cheers to that, I hope we see it more.

^{* As long as companies ask us to support IE6 we will. We’re not afraid to share our thoughts on the browser landscape but we also recognize the need to compromise.
** I understand that some users don’t have control over what browser they use. For these poor souls I cry (really, I’m tearing up as write this).}