I don’t mind figuring things out.  I like a little mental stimulation. But when it turns to mental frustration I don’t like.  On the other hand, I give a lot of credit to the people behind WordPress and ClassiPress.  They’ve built and maintain fantastic products/services.  My only complaint, is getting started.  I am always reminded of is what Jason Fried of http://37signals.com/ said.

“I’d rather have people grow out of our products as long as more people are growing into them.”

My point is, ClassiPress is a wonderful tool, but as far as a ‘manual’ for how to use it not just install it, would be helpful.  But, you know what, I really can’t knock it.  I need to put in effort too.

Can't. I never really did much in the first place.

There’s buzz building around the new book, REWORK, by 37Signals founder Jason Fried, due to hit stands in early March.

In fact, there’s enough buzz to make omnipresent super-marketer/deep-thinker/bald-guy Seth Godin say of it, “This book will make you uncomfortable. Depending on what you do all day, it might make you extremely uncomfortable.”

Brought to you by the guys that created the hit web-based project manager Basecamp (and similarly web 2.0-ish apps), I can only gather the book is designed to let us simple people in on the rule-bending philosophy that Fried and company have used to help revolutionize how design and business is getting done.

I knew to stay away from that dirty ASAP.

Whatever the content – and I’m sure it’s going to be great advice on par with Godin’s own works – the design of the cover is intriguing enough to get us to pre-order it at Amazon.

The bold disestablishment maxims on the back cover – rather than the usually self-serving blurbs and author bios – set the stage for what I hope will be a thought provoking “FU” to the way things are currently done.

We’ll stay tuned to see if the words inside are just as bold in spirit as the ones on the cover.

37signals’ Haystack promises to make finding a web designer easy, offering a simplified way to search for clients looking to hire a professional. While it’s a useful tool for someone with a web design project, it can also prove useful for web designers.

Landing Work

While your first visit to Haystack may leave you with the impression that the site is only meant to help out clients, it’s already proved useful for many designers. Some web designers report landing projects within hours of posting a listing on Haystack. The general idea is that the site can better match prospective clients to your services who are browsing online — you might not be highly ranked enough to be found through search engines, but your skills can make you stand out among other web designers on Haystack. 37Signals takes care of promoting the site via advertising, blogging and marketing to its user base.

Any web designer can post a listing on Haystack for free. That includes anyone from freelancers to big web design companies. The basic listing includes one portfolio image, the type of budgets you generally work with, the nearest big city to where you work and a contact email for your company. A Pro listing, priced at $99 per month, allows you to post more images, change placement and place for your logo. The Pro listings do seem to show up first in search results. Clients can search for web designers based on budget and location.

Scoping Out the Competition

You’ll find that Haystack has a few uses beyond landing clients. It’s an easy way to get an idea of what your fellow web designers are up to. You can check out prices, portfolios and services offered for a whole list of web designers in one place. You can tell quickly how well your prices fall in with your competition’s, as well as learn about how they’re landing clients — valuable business information no matter how you look at it.

There are some design reasons to look at what other designers are up to, as well. Need a little inspiration? Browse through some of those designs that have been posted on Haystack. You might see a technique or style that sparks a new idea for a project you’re working on.

Haystack’s Background

The minds behind Haystack are already well-known for creating tools. The site is a new offering from 37signals, the same company that created Basecamp, Backpack and other well-known tools. Haystack is a logical extension of these tools — 37signals’ original application, Basecamp, grew out of a tool that the team designed for their own use. With the 37Signals team’s roots in web design, it’s easy to understand how they would come to create Haystack.

That background has definitely contributed to the site’s overall usefulness. While it takes a slightly more subtle approach to inviting web designers to join than it does to inviting prospective clients to shop, Haystack is built to be an effective tool for the web designers posting listings.

Have you listed your company on Haystack? Has it generated any leads for you?

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Check out the Latest updates for the 3VU mass add friend follow tool at http://www.3VU.com

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Not only do I love the massive amount of media on the internet, but there are also so many innovative tech companies that are creating the most interesting software products. Sometimes I spent hours browsing through company websites reading up on their latest offerings, even though I have absolutely no need or reason to purchase their products.

My latest fascination is 37signals.com. At work I struggle everyday with  illogical databases, and annoyingly inefficient and archaic  Microsoft products (namely Outlook and Sharepoint). I know that Basecamp would make my work life incredibly easier. Too bad I’m not the one making the decisions.

Some good points in here:

Startup School 2009:
37 Signals has some lessons for European startups
By Ciara Byrne
2009-10-29
TechCrunch (comments thread there)

Y combinator’s annual startup school event was held in Berkeley last Saturday… and Jason Fried of 37signals gave one of the talks which seemed most relevant to European startups. His business partner is actually from Copenhagen and they worked together for two years before meeting in person. Here’s a summary of his presentation and a chat I had with him afterwards.

* Bootstrap your startup because it teaches you how to make money. Funded companies are focused on spending it.
* Charging for something forces you to be good. People care about something they have to pay for so you will get very good and honest feedback.
* Useful is more important than innovative. “Cool” wears off, useful doesn’t.
* Software has no edges. This makes it more difficult to stop it from expanding beyond where it should. Think of your product as a museum and the features as the pieces of art you select. Only the most important pieces should make it into the museum.
* You can’t make just one thing. Every product has a byproduct. Again this is harder to see in software than with physical products. In the case of 37signals, books and conferences have been byproducts of the software products.
* Say sorry in the right way. Don’t say “we apologise for any inconvenience which may have been caused” when you should just say “I’m really sorry”. Talk to your customers as you would to any other human being.
* The best are everywhere, not just in the golden California Valley. So live somewhere you love. Don’t feel you have to move just to make your company work.
* Failure is not a pre-requisite for success or a rite of passage. Unfavourable comparisons are often made between the tolerance of business failure in the US and in Europe. Maybe we should worry about that less. Jason advises replicating what succeeded as opposed to learning from your mistakes – the results are much more predictable.
* Europe can be a less risky place than the US to start a company because of the social security system here. You are never going to starve or have to do without medical care even if it all goes pear-shaped.
* In some European countries it may be more frowned upon to succeed spectacularly than to fail. In countries like Denmark or the Netherlands, standing out is often not considered to be a good thing.

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Our last OSLD resulted in a new hudson plugin: a build notifier for Campfire. Right now it is pretty simple and just posts the last build result in a chat room:

You can configure your account data and the room to join in the job config page under Post Build actions:

But there is more to come:

• global config
• SSL support
• a link back to hudson

or what is your favorite missing feature?

I’ve written about BaseCamp for managing construction projects.   I truly believe that using this tool will help revolutionize any contracting firm.  By focusing on collaboration & communication, things just get done quicker and easier.  By keeping a nice trail of everything that has ever happened, information and history can be found quickly. 

This isn’t another rant about BaseCamp however.  This one is about an awesome new tool I’ve found called CashBoard.  On the surface, CashBoard looks like it is mostly a competitor to BaseCamp.  However, after playing around with it a bit and really understanding its strenghts, CashBoard is really just the perfect COMPLEMENT to BaseCamp.  CashBoard simplifies the things that BaseCamp does not.  The two systems work together to cover different aspects of the project management lifecycle and ensure that efforts are never duplicated. 

Check out CashBoard for an extremely easy to use solution for tracking Estimates, Time & Materials on Projects, and automating billing!  Combine CashBoard & BaseCamp and get ready for such an awesome solution that you will never look back.  Also plan on saving a bunch of time and money by eliminating redundant work and sometimes even workers (sorry accounting staff).

One of the things I really love about Basecamp is that their team is constantly improving everything about the web app. Making small adjustments to speed, through the programming, stack improvements, and even hardware. And, although us users will never see these changes, we definitely feel them, through a faster, more reliable service.

When it comes to software changes however, real tangible features that you may already be using as a Basecamp subscriber (or considering using if you haven’t yet signed up), the 37Signals team is no slouch when it comes to increasing usability by adding valuable updates. One of the latest features to hit Basecamp is the image preview tool – and it underscores Basecamp’s philosophy on software modifications.

The image preview tool, check out the product blog release page for more information, essentially allows you to see a small thumbnail of any image, and then, when clicked, brings up a larger thumbnail in a lightbox window – but not the full image. This appears to have been selected as Basecamp is used to view typically larger image files – used for pre-press reviews or screen designs for web. This feature really doesn’t affect you if you are just viewing a small image, but makes things incredibly simpler (particularly if you use the tool to allow clients to login and review everything) for viewing larger images.

37Signals seems to have their major services and features in place, and slowly tweak the usability of every single feature over time as  their audience requests it (although they tend to move more in the direction THEY choose), and as their audience defines those tools through their use. It is a philosophy that has worked out, and I am proud to be using such a tool.

PRESS RELEASE: 37SIGNALS VALUATION TOPS $100 BILLION AFTER BOLD VC INVESTMENT

from Signal vs. Noise by Jason F.

Why I starred it: Personally I just don’t get the idea of a freemium business model. We’re all in business to make money, so let’s start charging accordingly! This post is a great example of how silly the freemium model really is.

The platform vs. the eyeballs

from Seth’s Blog by Seth Godin

Why I starred it: Every day I am met with a single question: how do I get my brand infront of more folks and convert a majority of them to customers? Every day. This post sheds a bit of light on that and what is important for companies today to do for “marketing”.

Leadership and the Law of Replication

from Michael Hyatt’s Blog by Michael Hyatt

Why I starred it: I’ll never forget my high school gym teacher telling me, “Aaron, you need to lead by example. Actions speak much louder than words.” This statement and truth have stuck with me since then.

Example of flow

Flows are just as important to good interfaces as individual screens are. Customers don’t land on screens from out of nowhere. Specific sequences of actions lead customers through your app as they try to accomplish their tasks.

Ryan over at 37signals has written a nice and short piece on communicating flows. Enjoy his post here

(Photoshop.VN) – The most important aspect of designing an individual icon is that it has to be instantly recognizable, you have to know its function, and you need to know exactly what it is

 

. If you are designing a set, the actual design becomes a lot harder, the designer has to face two initial challenges: each icon they design has to be individual and distinctive from the other, and, they also have to have similar features to show that they are related, completing the set. Not an easy task.

Perhaps that is why we love those small indispensible graphical images so much, it’s an appreciation of the hard work, creativity and talent of the designer. And to think, all those hours spent in front of a laptop crafting these little marvels, and then, allowing everyone else to download them for free. To all icon designers we say: “thank you”.

In this post we present a round-up of fresh high-quality icons that are available for free download and (sometimes only for personal) use. Please make sure to read license agreements before using icons in your designs – they can change from time to time.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 50 Fresh Useful Icon Sets For Your Next Design
• 50 Free High-Quality Icon Sets

e-Commerce Icons

Money Back Guarantee Icon Set (registration is required)

100 % Money Back Guarantee vector Icon Set. The set contains 3 versions: 30 day – 60 day and 90 day.

Open Source Icons – (37signals)

<img width="500" height="475" alt="Open Source Icons – (37signals)” src=”http://media2.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/images/new-icon-sets/fresh-free-icons-161.png” original=”http://media2.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/images/new-icon-sets/fresh-free-icons-161.png” style=”font-size: 12px; display: inline; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: underline; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; ” />

10 Free High-Quality E-Commerce Icons

Credit Card Icons

22 Credit Card Icons that are perfect for your sites.

Useful Icons and vectors

Daily Exhaust: Hand & Arrow Icons

Free hand pointer icons

Webdesigner kit

The Webdesigner Sketchup Icons

Web Buttons vector

Compilation of the free web button vectors and elements – useful for wireframing and prototyping!

<img width="500" height="448" alt="Web Buttons vector” src=”http://media1.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/images/new-icon-sets/buttons.jpg” original=”http://media1.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/images/new-icon-sets/buttons.jpg” style=”font-size: 12px; display: inline; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; text-decoration: underline; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; ” />

Top 3 icons pack

500+ Free Vector Traffic Signs

Packaging Vector Pack

This Vector Freebie Pack is created by Ian Yates and is available exclusively from Vectortuts+. If your looking for high quality graphics to mock up your next client presentation with, then check out these packaging graphics.

Exclusive Stationery Vector Pack

This new Vector Freebie Pack is created by Ian Yates. If you are looking for high quality graphics to mock up your next client presentation with, then check out these graphics.

Moderators Icons

How to be Green at Home

Simple and Minimal icons

Free iPhone Toolbar Icons

Icons designed specifically for iPhone developers, available for free for anyone to use commercially under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada license.

Glyphish

Designed and carefully optimized for use on toolbars and tab bars in iPhone apps, these icons are also perfect for Android apps, websites, t-shirts, tattoos and more.

A travel and business vector pack

Token

Standard Iconset by Templay

RRZE Icon Set

Characters so far

35 very original and eccentric characters.

Beautiful Icons

Philippe Starck Icons

Philippe Starck icons for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux.

Snow Leopard Icon

The new version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, was just released, so the designer decided to celebrate it with a new artwork. Download the Snow Leopard Wallpaper as well!

Billiardo 1

Moleskine Helvetica Icon

Foto Icon

Free Cute Furry Monster Icons

“I’ve put together a little family of monsters, available for free download in the form of icons. Each monster can be found in PNG, ICNS and ICO filetypes for use on your Mac, PC or for inclusion in your website designs.”

LiveJournal turns 10

Anniversary edition icons set, LiveJournal is celebrating its 10th Anniversary.

stratocaster Classic psd

2001 Space Odyssey

Vector Kitchen Icons

Vector Kitchen Icons – 25 different examples of kitchen stuff created in funny cartoon style. Set include: teapot, knifes, saucepan, pot, frying pan, plates, cups, microwave oven, forks, kitchen-range and so on. Soft gradients and colors, smooth contours, creative shapes.

Modern Chairs Icons

Google Talk Icon

Chamber Orchestra

Classic Cameras

Camera Nikon

Lollipop

Desktop & GUI Icon Sets

Gnome Icon Theme

Alcohol

Generic Applications

This icon set is released under a special license which will allow software developers to use this set of 7 icons in their projects.

Bevel and Emboss

Ever wondered how are all these glossy looking icons made? This is not a tutorial how to make them, as there is a lot of these out there, this is a fully editable PSD source you can download for free and use them for your projects (commercial and non-profit) or to see how this look is achieved.

32px icons set

A simple set of icons, available only in the resolution 32×32px, only in the iContainter format.

Windows 7 DVD-Box

Xedia

GiNUX

There are 64 icons in this set, all are 64×64px and available in both PNG. and ICO. formats.

Source: Fresh Free High-Quality Icon Sets

This is a nice presentation by David Heinemeier Hansson from 37Signals about the secret to making money online. He points out how important it is for startups to put their focus on niche markets in order to built a sustainable business. He also mentions entrepreneurs who are brainwashed by the youtube/ facebook /…stories, trying to built the next big thing without thinking about how to make enough revenue in order to be profitable.

Enjoy the video!

Ja wiem, że Basecamp, to klasa sama dla siebie. Ale dlaczego twórcy niektórych aplikacji kierowanych do biznesu uważają, że nieudolne powielenie schematów projektów z pod znaku 37signals wystarczy, aby mieć coś wartościowego? Aplikacje takie jak HumanWay i Returi są doskonałym pomysłem i myślę, że spokojnie odnajdą dla siebie miejsce w chmurce, ale dlaczego chcą być Basecampem?

Jeżeli ktoś zarzuci mi czepianie się, to proponuję screeny pooglądać – inspirowanie się widac jak na dłoni. Tylko dlaczego zamiast inspirować się procesem powstawania wartościowych aplikacji, jak Basecamp, mechanizmami, które towarzyszyły jego kolejnym wcieleniom i dbałością o szczegóły z którą 37 Signals pracuje, w efektach końcowych widać tylko powielanie layoutu?

O ile HumanWay stronę dla niezalogowanych postanowiło zrobić po swojemu, to Returi postanowiło nie myśleć, co to dobra typografia, rytm strony, funkcjonalność elementów i dobre teksty.

Może przesadzam z tą krytyką, ale jak już kopiować schematy od innych, to lepiej wszystkie, nie tylko efekty końcowe czyiś decyzji. To tak jakby projektować samochód, jego podwozie oraz wszystkie podzespoły, a później założyć na to karoserię od konkurencji, młotkiem wyginając nie pasujące elementy. Jeździć będzie, ale czy ktoś kto dba o szczegóły, to kupi? A firmy o szczegóły dbają, szczególnie, jeżeli chodzi o oddawanie pieniędzy na zewnątrz. Szczególnie w branżach, które z tradycji miały swoje miejsce wewnątrz danej organizacji.

Like many people out there, I keep thinking about starting a business. I really enjoyed this back-to-basics reality check from David Heinemeier Hansson from 37Signals  (more about them here )

via inter sections blog

p.s. I also love the Omnisio video player interface & features…I looked them up and (predictably) they’ve been acquired by Google.

As you can see, the Web is always changing – This is the place where the things happens, so, the companies are always trying to launch the next Killer App – that applications which let you say: Whoa! or Wow! But innovation is not about Adding Changes specifically, it´s about making real functional changes, it´s about do less (If you already read Getting Real from 37Signals, you really now what I´m saying) so Companies like Microsoft are always shooting themselves in the foot, because every update they do, bring a new complain from the user. It´s the reason behind the fact that Windows XP is now 8 years old and it´s still the most popular Microsoft´s and World´s Operating System. The fact is: Companies like Microsoft really don´t feel the need of  innovate until they feel they are getting back . Because of  it, the Microsoft is now lauching  Bing, something that Google does better since 1998 – Microsoft is, at least, 10 years delayed. Another good example I usually say is: Twitter is the actual Web´s fad, why?, Twitter is thousand times simpler than Facebook, I never liked Facebook, it´s almost equal Orkut: Pictures, videos, messages, useless and odd apps, and more shits. Twitter is really simpler, just post something small, get followers, follow people, and you can use intuitive and fast apps to tweet wherever you are. This is the message: If you are Developing something, Make something Simple, update it always as possible, but keep it simple, try to just add Usable and Really Functional Features and when possible remove the Beta from the Logo

Right after I posted my Q&A with Morfunk’s David Kaneda a couple of months ago (I’m still a big Outpost fan!), I received a great outreach email from Overcommitted, telling me about Ember. Ember brings Campfire (the 37signals group chat application) to the iPhone – and fills a huge gap in my own productivity needs. I’ve been using the new version of Ember for about a week (in fact, a lot of the follow-up questions were discussed in Campfire), and I have to say it’s a noticeable improvement over V.1 in speed and feature set.

Ember features include:
• Streamlined user interface
• Multiple accounts: access all your Campfire accounts from one client
• Chat transcripts
• Inline browser
• Infinite scroll back to view previous messages in room
• Live image previews right within the chat room
• Inline viewing of popular file formats, Excel, Word, Powerpoint…
• Unlimited chat rooms: access to all your Campfire rooms
• Take and upload photos directly into Ember using the iPhone built-in camera
• SSL accounts are fully supported

Overcommitted is three guys who completely personify the Getting Real philosophy. Like Morfunk, these three guys, Phil Cohen, Jonathan Younger and Harold Emsheimer, hold down day jobs and build their own business (remotely, they all live in different states/places) by working 6 days a week on what they love. In fact, they built Ember by working from 5:30 to 7am Mondays thru Saturdays for 6 weeks. I was really impressed by the way they initially contacted me and continued to talk to me about Ember and it’s growth. Also – any company that uses Abbott and Costello to illustrate how their app works absolutely gets my money.

> Tell me a bit about Overcommitted (best name ever, btw)- how did you start?

Overcommitted started with the simple desire to create applications for the iPhone that we wanted to use ourselves. The three of us have worked together for several years as part of a Rails development team in the Biotech sector. We made the decision earlier this year to finally jump into development for the iPhone and the rest is pretty much history. As far as the name goes, all three of us tend to be overcommitted in anything we do. Knowing this, my wife Brigit suggested we go with the name Overcommitted.

> Pricing apps has been extremely controversial – How did you decide what to price Ember?

It’s going to sound pretty simplistic, but we looked at what we would pay for it and priced it accordingly. Ember isn’t a one-off game or an app that people will use for 30 days and never again. The people that use Ember use it quite a bit, including us, so we priced based on that.

> The reviews for Ember have been pretty much fantastic – and I was impressed by your outreach efforts prior to Ember’s release. How difficult is it getting Ember noticed on the AppStore? And did having sale pricing for a week work?

It’s pretty difficult. Most people hear about Ember through non-AppStore channels, things like the Signal vs. Noise blog, Twitter and word of mouth recommendations. Ember’s sales seem to happen in chunks. We have a theory that this might be due to small teams that end up purchasing Ember all at once as they sign up for Campfire. Having the sale price brought an expected bump in number of purchasers, but the overall revenue was pretty much on par with our normal weekly sales.

> How do you guys use Campfire and why was that the app you wanted to focus on first?

None of us live in the same city and rarely get the chance to work together face to face. Campfire has been invaluable for helping us keep in touch across time zones and work schedules. We use it to discuss iterations for the various apps we’re working on, show sketches and talk through code. We developed Ember first because we knew we could get immediate use for it and felt other iPhone development teams could benefit.

> Tell me a bit about the development process – How closely were you able to work with the 37signals team? Was everything you needed in the API?

Once we decided to develop a Campfire client, we looked at the existing unofficial Campfire client API to see what was available and what would be involved in communicating with Campfire. Being an unofficial API, it’s not so much an API as it is a reverse engineering of what the browser client is using to communicate with Campfire. It’s mostly regular expression matching of HTML tags and other text. That being said, it hasn’t been terrible to work with. We’ve had a couple issues where the content we were expecting to get back from the service has been different because some cellular carriers reformat the content before sending it to the client, and because of that, it was breaking our regular expression matching. Overall, it has worked out really well. Wanting to come in under the radar, we decided to keep all development of Ember under wraps until it was just about completed. We didn’t work with the 37signals team at all until the product was pretty much completed.

> Any plans to take advantage of some of the iPhone 3.0 features, like Push Notifications?

In Ember 2.0, we’re using a lot of the new iPhone 3.0 APIs under the hood which has saved us quite a bit of time over what we were doing in Ember 1.0. The biggest feature by far that we’re taking advantage of is Core Data. Without Core Data, we would not have attempted to add Transcripts or loading previous messages. Obviously push notifications would be a big feature to take advantage of but we are not yet ready to comment on those yet.

> One of the big challenges I’ve seen on the AppStore has been supporting applications – we covered this with Morfunk – how is Overcommitted dealing with support issues?

Support is pretty manageable for us at the moment. We actually enjoy when someone contacts us through support because it gives us the opportunity to hear directly from our users. Like many developers, we’ve gone the route of using Get Satisfaction and email as our support system, which has worked pretty well for us so far.

> You just submitted a pretty substantial update to the AppStore -what’s included? Any new features?

We’re really excited about this release of Ember. It has been completely rebuilt under the hood to take advantage of Core Data. This provides better overall performance, and has laid the ground work for some additional features. The biggest feature in this release is multiple account support. We’ve planned to release this from day one, and we’re happy to have it out in Ember 2.0. Along with multiple accounts, we’ve also included support for Transcripts. Other notable changes in this release include a streamlined interface based on feedback from our users as well as inline browsing.

> What’s next for Overcommitted?

We have several applications in the works at different stages. Nothing we can comment on directly but we can say they won’t be in the productivity category of application.

Ember works on iPhones/iPod Touches running version 3.0 software or above and is available on the iTunes AppStore here.

37signals is a small, Chicago-based company which prides itself on simplicity and offers a well-honed suite of Web-based productivity and collaboration software. In their words, “Our products do less than the competition — intentionally.”

Their founders have made a few waves in the business and developer communities because they’ve been vocal about how:

1. Companies shouldn’t always listen to their customers (especially when it comes to new feature requests);
2. Businesses should focus on generating revenue with products that offer real value (versus trying to monetize ‘free’) and;
3. Venture capital isn’t the optimal method of financing a new venture.

Several months ago I read their popular publication, “Getting Real” — which is about building a successful Web-based application and business — and thoroughly enjoyed the author’s honesty and openness about what has worked and hasn’t worked for 37signals, as well as his view on business and quality of life.

In addition to focusing on simplicity, it’s apparent that the folks at 37signals know a thing or two about persuasion, and specifically around the principles of social proof and contrast. In today’s post I’ll again use screenshots to highlight how this company is converting visitors into customers:

So there you have it.

37signals’ design team offers up some great examples of how to effectively weave social proof, authority, contrast, and credibility messaging throughout your site. While I question their choice to pack so much content into their home page, it wouldn’t hurt (even a little!) to emulate the company’s overall approach to persuasive design.

~Lance