seedWatcher

Sunday fun with Wordle

Had a little fun with Wordle today, a java applet that builds a word map out of a chunk of text or someone's del.icio.us tags. I used the seedWatcher blogroll and post categories to whip this one up (font is called Gnuolane Free):

It's a nifty little Java applet, outsourcing the CPU-intensive work to your local machine, rather than bog down the server of what is essentially a side project of IBM Research developer Jonathan Feinberg. In fact, though it's free to use and the images are yours to do whatever with, the code isn't open source and is actually owned by IBM.

Learn from Google's greatest stregth - Design.

Google is a master of design. Their apps are incredibly intuitive, simple and fast as hell. We all could learn a thing or town from them. They brought together a user experience (UX) team to define exactly what are "Googley" design principles. They came up with 10.

1. Focus on people—their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today's and tomorrow's business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people's trust.
10. Add a human touch.

Whether you're a startup or a well-known corporation developing a product, make sure you embrace these principles in your earliest talks about design. Too often design is done after initial product development, or at best concurrently on the fly. It needs to be the first thing you think and talk about when starting out. That will help make all the subsequent feature and marketing discussions have a frame of reference. Google does this very well and it shows.