Post up on A Brief Message

I have a brief piece called Gone in Sixty Seconds (or Less) up on A Brief Message. It’s about the importance of design in first impressions.

Thanks to Liz Danzico (who edited it) and Khoi Vinh (who illustrated it) for putting it on their wonderful site!

If you haven’t checked out A Brief Message before, you should.

A Brief Message features design opinions expressed in short form. Somewhere between critiques and manifestos, between wordy and skimpy, Brief Messages are viewpoints on design in the real world. They’re pithy, provocative and short — 200 words or less.

Link: Gone in Sixty Seconds (or Less) on A Brief Message

CommandShift3, As Seen on TV!

My friend Ben Stein pointed me to this pod about CommandShift3 that’s currently in rotation on Current. It’s a brief segment that’s aired five times over the past couple days.

Current is channel 366 on DIRECTV, 196 on Dish Network, 107 on Comcast, 189 on AT&T U-verse, 193 on Sky (UK), and 155 on Virgin Media (UK) more

p.s. Look for a future pod on Jelly, shot by Matt and the 10ton folks at tomorrow’s NYC event.

CommandShift3 hits 1 Million Pageviews in first month

It’s been just under a month since we launched CommandShift3, here’s three highlights:

• We crossed the 1 million pageview mark!
• We got some great press, even some around the election hoopla.
• We started inspiring rip-off sites.

We’re hard at work on some great new features, launching soon.

See also: The story on Silicon Alley Insider (Thanks, Dan!)

Political Website Design Trends

I’m as apolitical as they come, but I was still interested to see the rankings for political websites on CommandShift3 when Adam twittered them this morning.

Since the lions-share of these rankings come from battles across CommandShift3 (ie. pitting one of these sites against another site on CommandShift3, not against another political site necessarily) it’s freer of political bias than you’d expect.

A few quick observations:

• Obama’s site is clearly the cleanest and most modern. Lots of room for design elements to breath, gradients, and well thought-out typography. This feels like a Web 2.0 site. It’s ranked #1
• Hillary’s site has the clearest above-the-fold calls to action. If you check out Hillary’s design history, you’ll notice that wasn’t always the case.
• Ron Paul’s site features a live donation counter, with a callout to the most recent donor. Neat idea!
• Red, white, and blue.. Especially blue, are the dominating colors everywhere.

Link: Design rankings for political websites on CommandShift3

(See also: CommandShift3 voters rank the designs of candidate sites on 37 Signals Signal vs. Noise)

HubWear — T-Shirts for people who live in airports

A fun spin on t-shirts — custom-printed with your airport codes. Also, really beautiful and slick javascript interaction and shopping cart. (Via CS3)

More interesting finds:

• M.I.T. changes its homepage design every day. You can flip back through some of them in the CS3 history.
• IsItChristmas.com design history

A few more quick CommandShift3 hits…

Khoi blogs us at Subtraction, Christine at PSFK, and the editors at Buzzfeed. (Plus a quick hit at CenterNetworks)

CommandShift3 Press Roundup (Wired, 37Signals, ReadWriteWeb, Delicious, Reddit, etc.)

Last week we launched CommandShift3, and we’ve had an amazing response.

Silicon Alley Reporter was first on the scene, 37Signals linked to it, Wired blogged it, calling it a “refreshingly quirky twist on a popular online face-off model.” (And they liked our About page), SEOMoz mentions CS3 in their weekly roundup, saying “It’s a great way to prove to bosses obsessed with look and feel that those things matter…”, Women Tech blog geeksugar declared it their Website of the Day, LVHRD wrote it up, and so did Metafilter (thanks Matt!).

Dan Cederholm (SimpleBits), Jeffrey Zeldman (Happy Cog), Cal Henderson (Flickr), Airbag Industries, Cameron Moll, Ben Brown, Josh Spear, and Elliot Jay Stocks (Carsonified) also gave us some link love.

We were also #1 on Delicious Popular, on the front page of Reddit, and got lots of friends twittering.

Today, we hit Read/WriteWeb (Thanks, Marshall!)

Thanks times 60 million to everyone who’s spread the word and checked out he site. We love you, and we’re working on a lot of awesome new stuff for CS3 for you. Stay tuned.

CommandShift3 Launches Today

A new project I’ve been working on with Darrell Silver, Erin Sparling, and Lee Semel launches today: CommandShift3.

It’s like Hot or Not, but for websites.

Started on a lark during a NYC Jelly session with Adam Varga, Darrell Silver, Dan Lurie, Erin Sparling, and Lee Semel, we’re really proud to open it up to the world today.

Much thanks to everyone who’s given us advice and support, including the celeb designers who recorded short videos we’ve hidden in the site for you to find. (Khoi Vinh, Matt Linderman, Taylor McKnight, Derek Powazek, Brad Smith, Ryan Sims, Dan Cederholm, Chris Messina, Ben Brown)