Why is major marketing collateral still published as PDFs?

October 27, 2013

Most enterprise software companies publish assets such as ebooks and whitepapers exclusively as PDFs. I’m not sure why. Publishing this way has at least a few problems: Analytics. When someone reads your content in PDF, you lose the ability to capture time on page and bounce rate, and also you can’t use heatmapping and scrollmapping tools to tell what parts of your content visitors are spending their time on. It’s true that this data is ambiguous (are they spending time on this section because it’s interesting or because it’s difficult to understand?

I can't believe how painful it is to order business cards

August 20, 2013

business cards, entrepreneurship, graphic design

I recently organized an order of business cards for about 150 people. I can’t believe how difficult this process is, and I also can’t believe that (based on my searching) nobody’s solved the problem yet of ordering business cards for large groups of people. It really struck me that every single step of the process is incredibly painful: It’s hard to get everyone notified of an upcoming business card order.

The death and life of great American offices

July 29, 2013

collaboration, desks, offices, urban planning

I’m about to finish a book called _The Death and Life of Great American Cities_. It’s an extremely well-known book on urban planning; Jane Jacobs was one of the first to reject large-scale urban space engineering. As far as I know the book ultimately led to the development of many of the urban trends we value today (mixed use, high density, variety in housing stock, contiguous neighborhoods). There are many things I appreciate about this book.

The 1-bit interface

June 17, 2013

arduino, interfaces, leds, ux

[caption id="attachment_2178" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Off..."][/caption] [caption id="attachment_2179" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Then it blinks (twice) to let you know it's waiting for input."][/caption] Much of what I’ve heard when I hear about UX is: How do we arrange everything on the screen so that a user can figure it out and quickly accomplish their goals? How do we make use of graphic design, layout, text, interactivity, affordances, animation and so on to make things easier for the user?

The startup as a game

February 24, 2013

civilization, entrepreneurship, games, political order, politics, startups

Instead of ‘Washington’, think ‘Light Bulb’, ‘Classic Coke’ or ‘Windows’” I recently read Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order. Here is the barest inkling of what Fukuyama says in the book: The best-functioning states in the world today generally combine (a) a strong central government with (b) rule of law and © accountability to citizens. States like China and Russia have a strong central government, but weak rule of law and no accountability to citizens; states like India have good rule of law and accountability but are centrally weak.

The Manhattan Bridge

February 12, 2013

running

[caption id="attachment_2150" align="alignleft" width="225" caption="Entry to the Manhattan Bridge pedestrian walkway. Photo by Jim Henderson."][/caption] Yesterday, I decided to run home from work, a distance of about 4 miles from my office in Soho to my apartment in Brooklyn. The obvious crossing from Manhattan to Brooklyn is the Brooklyn Bridge, a beautiful span built in the 19th century that is easy to walk along. However, you can also cross the river via the far less popular Manhattan Bridge, which opened in 1909 and puts you pretty much in the same spot in Brooklyn as the Brooklyn Bridge does.

Leapfrogging, or why I'm getting rid of my to-do lists

January 25, 2013

leapfrogging, todo

[caption id="attachment_2142" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="London Souvenirs by Vera Kratochvil; link goes to original picture page"][/caption] Many cities in Africa have excellent mobile infrastructure – beating some places in the United States, that’s for sure. It really helps that African telecom companies have concentrated their resources on building the technology of today, i.e. mobile infrastructure. Imagine if they felt compelled to build a landline network out first, because that may have been a goal fifty years ago?

What do you get when you buy through a third party?

January 12, 2013

aggregators, business models

Last year, I ran the Philadelphia marathon - my first one, hooray! I’d like to run more in the future, though that’s not what this post is about. I had a bad experience the night before the marathon that has made me wonder about third-party sales. To tell the story quickly, the marathon started at 7AM, and I don’t live in Philadelphia anymore, so I needed to come down the night before.

How to write marketing copy quickly

January 10, 2013

copy, marketing, writing

I’ve recently been working on some marketing copy for the website I manage; I’d estimate I’ve written about ten pages of pretty solid, reasonably-well-thought out stuff that’ll go up fairly soon. It’s not perfect but it took me, overall, less than a day to get it all written. I use a method which is just as exhausting as real writing from scratch, but much faster and highly suitable for marketing copy which usually does not need to be groundbreaking or a particularly religious experience.

Handshake Con

January 9, 2013

handshake, management, trust

I’m reading the Marine Corps / US Army Counterinsurgency Manual, available here on Amazon. I’ve never been a news junkie so I never followed the US’ counterinsurgency strategy closely. This manual provides a fascinating in-depth look at how the US has developed its understanding of non-conventional warfare, and how to achieve non-military objectives (regardless of the extent to which the US has actually been successful at this). There’s a lot of useful writing here about various topics, including where power comes from, _how _to cooperate, and where governments get their legitimacy.

Justin Dunham

Why is major marketing collateral still published as PDFs?

I can't believe how painful it is to order business cards

The death and life of great American offices

The 1-bit interface

The startup as a game

The Manhattan Bridge

Leapfrogging, or why I'm getting rid of my to-do lists

What do you get when you buy through a third party?

How to write marketing copy quickly

Handshake Con