Pessimism loves company. Optimism makes companies.
— John Maeda

1. We shop online. We buy most of our vitamins and home care stuff on Vitacost. Great prices, and $4.99 flat shipping. I really dig AmericanApparel’s Tri-Blend Track Shirts, but they run $22 in the store. Or $10 on Amazon.com. Whatever you want, you can likely find online for cheaper. Stop paying everyone’s overhead for their physical stores.

2. We use Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap. We dig the peppermint. It replaced soap, shampoo, conditioner, body wash, etc. for me (and Mrs. Blankenship.) Huge savings, and less of me knocking 20 bottles of random concoctions off the shelves every time I shower.

3. We have a Sam’s Club membership. Pick your poison (Sam’s, Costco, etc.), but we made back the cost of our membership the first time we bought toilet paper. We don’t buy a lot in bulk, but the warehouse retail places are great for larger kitchen items like olive oil that’ll run big bucks in the grocery store.

4. Speaking of which, we cook at home. Don’t know how to? Neither did we. After two years all our friends think we hung the moon when they eat at our house. It’s simple, go to the library (free!) and checkout some cookbooks. Follow the instructions. Repeat until you dominate all things culinary. Bonus: it’s healthier, too.

5. We dry our razors off after we use them. Razors get dull from use eventually, but most of the time they just get dull because they’re left wet and the blade oxidizes (e.g. rusts). I use Mach3 blades, shave well once or twice a week, and I haven’t bought a new box of blades since I lived in Dallas. In 2007.

ffffound.com has quickly become one of my favorite sites on the web, and is certainly one of the principle ways I feel like I’m being able to articulate what I’m starting to refer to as my “life aesthetic.” (And no, I don’t have an invite, and if I did, Mrs. Blankenship would get it before you. She’s cuter.)

I’m loving the ingenuity of the Split-Ring-Key. What’s more simple than a key and a keyring? A key that is a keyring. The design solution itself is quite clever, but I wonder how strong it is for the long haul?

[We] didn’t hire you so that you would ask me a thousand questions and be unsure about what you are doing. We hired you to produce amazing work. And you are fully capable of doing that. So, if you have a legitimate question, ask me. If not, just produce amazing work. And if you get it wrong, I’ll show you where, why and how to fix it, and you’ll grow.
— Justine Foo, Brains on Fire

What a fantastic work culture! Eric Dodds recounts this early interaction with Justine in an article on giving employees permission to fail and says, “I think part of my problem was that our society views failure primarily as a negative concept.” I think he’s completely right.

It’s not about failure for the sake of failure; I’d much rather learn from my successes. But if I’m trying new things, I won’t always succeed. I have to get used to failure being an integral part of the process of finding great solutions. I have to embrace that. Otherwise fear of failure will freeze me in my tracks before I can make anything extraordinary.

Avoidance of failure isn’t the same thing as success. If you want to change the world, but your company culture thinks success = no failure, it will not go well for you. Don’t underestimate the cultural peer pressure to silence disruption and avoid failure in most organizations. The human desire to never be wrong is the biggest enemy of innovation.

A person hears only what they understand.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Again with the character design changes! Why can’t moviemakers leave well enough alone?

Up top you see a screenshot from the Japanese trailer for G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra with a glimpse of “Cobra Commander” (I use that term lightly here) having a chat with Destro. Then you see cartoon CC pointing (and likely laughing) because Destro is essentially Dr. Who with a Scottish accent. And cartoon Destro laughing because Joseph Gordon-Levitt Cobra Commander (henceforth referred to as JGLCC) is wearing a hightech SARS mask and a bad suit.

It’s not really the casting I take issue with. (Though Garry Oldman is Cobra commander in my mind.) It’s the incessant need for Hollywood to think they know better, and that they must change things. It’s rarely a good idea.

I believe the accepted model of capitalism that demands endless growth deserves the blame for the destruction of nature, and it should be displaced.
— Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia founder

Mrs. Blankenship and I have been married for two years and it feels like we’re just figuring out how to vacation. It’s a silly thing to say, but it takes awhile to find your rhythm, see what refreshes you, see what drains you, etc.

This last trip was almost restful. We’re getting close

This is the second in an ongoing series of posts about bbbbrands.com, a new project I’m working on with my good friend and fellow brand loyalist Noah Stokes. If you missed it or just need a recap, here’s part 1.

As Noah and I began to talk through the initial gist of bbbbrands and I started some sketches and typography explorations for an identity, I also began the task of thinking through taglines. Not every brand needs a tagline, but in this case it made sense to craft a line of copy that described the site’s core functionality to the user and helped us have a clear mission as we design and build it. A statement of purpose helps the user know exactly what value we’re providing to them and it gives us a main identifier for decision-making (e.g. does X or Y feature fall into what the tagline describes us as? If not, kill it.)

Here’s the first round of tagline attempts:

All of these more or less describe what the site will be full of, but there are problems with them, too. There’s way too much “brand” in there. The site name already has it, so repeating it in the tagline, especially twice, is overkill. These choices are passive. They’re a description of something, not an action or a call to participate. Some of the language of each individual tagline doesn’t hold up. What’s a label recommendation (#2)? What if they aren’t actually new recommendations (#4)? Are they really the best (#5)? All of these fall short.

As Noah and I bantered back and forth on IM (this is a bicoastal operation we’re running here) we settled on the concepts of sharing and discovering as the main verbs we want our users to engage in. Are you looking for recommendations for a new messenger bag? We want you to discover trusted brands on bbbbrands. Do you absolutely love your new American Apparel Tri-Blend Track Shirt? We want you to share that on bbbbrands.

The passivity is gone, but #6 still suffers from word overkill, #7 feels awkward, and #8 is just too long. #9 is close, but stops just short of what we want for users—sharing and discovering the brands themselves, not just the reviews of the brands. And then there was #10. Short, sweet, active, bold, truthful. If we do our job to build a site that attracts like-minded brand loyalists, then they’ll naturally share the best brands with one another. And over time our catalog of brand recommendations will become a playground for discovery.

On a design note, I initially fought myself on #10. Then I realized I was doing it for the wrong reason; I simply liked the typographic lock-up of the lowercase serif “from” in there. I liked how it looked. But this isn’t solely about letters and aesthetics, it has to act as a rudder and identifier. Ultimately, the content has to be more important than the form, even if it hurts.

We want our users to share and discover the best brands, so that’s our working tagline. But is it the best? Are we missing a better opportunity? We’d love your feedback.