Tag Archives: 37signals

Tom Ford’s 15 Things

Design

For the 15th anniversary of Vogue.com noted fashion designer Tom Ford made a list of 15 things that every man should have, which are as follow:

  1. A sense of humour.
  2. A daily read of a newspaper.
  3. A sport that you love and are good at.
  4. Tweezers.
  5. A good cologne that becomes a signature.
  6. A well cut dark suit.
  7. A pair of classic black lace up shoes.
  8. A smart blazer.
  9. The perfect pair of dark denim jeans.
  10. Lots of crisp white cotton shirts.
  11. Always new socks and underwear, throw away the old ones every 6 months.
  12. A classic tuxedo.
  13. A beautiful day watch with a metal band.
  14. The perfect sunglasses.
  15. Perfect teeth. If you don’t have them, save up and get them fixed.

A pretty good list, though I would replace the newspaper with Circa, and I must confess I’m not sure sure what #4 the tweezers are for.

Om also has Tom Ford’s 5 tips for a modern gentleman.

Saying No?

Design,

Via Boris I came across a post on Susan Mernit’s blog called the No Patrol. It is supposed to be a defense of saying “no” to things in the product development cycle, but as I read each bullet point it struck me as actually a brilliant summary of why big companies often fail to create anything truly interesting, or put another way, why a product like Yahoo Personals is so impersonal. No one would advocate bloat or cruft in software, but sometimes a little silliness, a little frivolity, a little “novelty outweighs the business impact” is what separates a Youtube from a Google Video. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

WP.com in Red Herring

Asides, WordPress, WordPress.com

Just landed in Houston, it’s chilly here. The opening up of WordPress.com got a nice write-up in Red Herring earlier today. Just to clarify two things from the article quickly: I’m working on WP.com with Andy, Donncha, and Ryan and I do think our distributed database architecture (which I’ll write more about later, it’s nothing too fancy) will help us scale cheaply but I’m also a strong believer in big things from small teams, much in the spirit of 37signals.