Month: October 2013
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What Makes Quartz So Innovative?
My obsession with Quartz continues. Thanks to Phil for pointing at this MondayNote analysis (the first in a two-parter) into their more 'digitally native' editorial practices. Quartz is interesting as an examplar of what the piece calls "the emergence of a new breed of smaller, digital-only outlets that are closing the gap, quality-wise, with legacy media".…
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Doing a Snowfall
The kind of richly designed multimedia article formats that I wrote about here have become quite the thing. Just check out this already lengthy and ever expanding open list of Snowfall-like features that typically use combinations of infinite and/or parallax scrolling, and text set against large images and cleverly integrated with other formats including audio…
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The Ten Types of Innovation
Innovation is often considered in quite one dimensional ways, and yet it is of-course a multi-dimensional thing. In their book 'Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs', the authors Larry Keeley, Ryan Pikkel, Brian Quinn, and Helen Walters identified ten distinct types of innovation. It's one of the best representations I've come across…
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On Company Longevity
Thanks to Tim Kastelle for telling me about this fascinating piece of work (PDF) by Professor Richard Foster of Yale University. Foster found that the average lifespan of a company in the S&P 500 index has decreased from 61 years in 1958 to just 18 years today. His estimation at the current churn rate is that by 2027,…
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Beauty and the Business Objective
Tim O Reilly makes an interesting point picking up on Farhad Manjoo's fascinating piece about Google's new cross-company commitment to design under Larry Page, and what that has meant in terms of how it has had to shift gears from utility to beauty. The Manjoo piece is interesting in that it relates how beauty and…