Distilled Template

Kind of random, but uh, wow.

Also.. here’s a link to Timbaland/Nelly Furtado/JT’s latest:
Give it To Me. Hot beat, good chorus, lots of dissing… :]

Just played with the just-launched Like.com, a site whose design reeks of Web 2.0 but whose functionality is seriously unparalleled. This new webapp is from the creators of Riya.com and has stuff that would have Vannevar Bush rolling in his grave. For example: you can search for watches (or browse by watches) select which ones you like, and the backend feeds the user-friendly interface with tons of watches that look like it. What’s more, you can select which of the following attributes you like: the color, the shape, or the pattern on the watch, and the frontend immediately updates to show you watches based on your preference. THEN you can select a part of the watch you like, and find watches with that part! It’s eerily accurate. You can also change what color you’d prefer. Finally, you can look at pictures of celebrities and search based on the products that they’re wearing — you can drag a box around their shoes, or their watch, or whatever, and find products exactly like it!

Whew.

Keep a close eye on this one. Froogle-like functionality + Like.com + cool domain name = a killer app.

I went to Boston this past weekend to pitch an idea with Phil to YCombinator, a venture firm started by Paul Graham — the guy who sold his online store to Yahoo in ‘98 for 48,000,000 dollars. The entire weekend was an incredible escape from school and work (unfortunately as I write this now I’m right back in the heart of it). We applied with a completely different idea than what we pitched. In fact, we had a few ideas so we didn’t really know what we were going to pitch until the day before. Regardless, we put our faith behind an idea that did have a lot of technical problems. While we could have touted the amazing user experience and the sheer amount of pain points that the product could have addressed, in the end we were pushing our beautiful pie-in-the-sky design that would have solved all of these technical problems. I think Robert Morris noticed that the most. Phil and I both agreed that we probably would have done a lot better if we had a demo or if we had come better prepared to tackle the technical issues… or if we had went with the idea that Paul had suggested we do!

The night before the interview we had dinner with about 10 of the teams that were interviewing. Seriously, I met some of the most diversely smart people in the bottom of that Italian restaurant. The guys who probably impressed me the most were the three-member Weebly team. They have an amazing beta of their product with an impressive userbase and a great team organization. A few days ago they were mentioned in TechCrunch and received another 2000 users.

While I was pretty disappointed in not getting YCombinator, it was still awesome getting the opportunity to meet Paul, Robert, Trevor, and Jessica. And hey, everything happens for a reason. I was always upset at the possibility of leaving my friends and abandoning my senior year to work in Mountain View on the startup — although I definitely would have done it if we were given funding from YCombinator. A few hours after Phil called me and told me the outcome I ordered Chinese for the people I was staying with. After good food and a good conversation, I opened my fortune cookie and broke a smile as it read:

“Your true wealth lies with your friends”.

A while back I was messing around with a graphic design project and happened to indefinitely screw up my color settings in Photoshop. I have no idea what I did but I thought, hey, I can live with this. Until I spent two hours trying to fix the color on an organization flyer. I’ve searched everywhere on the internet, tried dozens of color settings but nothing works. The problem is that all of my colors are desaturated in PS. I’ll design something with the desaturated color pallete but when I export a flattened image, the entire image has brightened. All of the highlights go crazy. My browns turn to pinks. The maroons turn into neon reds. The jungle green turns into a bright shade of puke. I’ve never seen anything like it. Here’s an example in CMYK (US Sheetfed Coated v2):

Here’s what the color SHOULD look like (and what it looks like while I’m designing it, even though it’s a desaturated color pallete):

Here’s what the color ACTUALLY looks like, after it’s been exported to a flattened JPEG:

That last image is kind of what I was going for — you can see I actually had to desaturate the colors pretty badly in Photoshop to get it to turn out right in the end. So i’m pretty much working as if I had some weird kind of color blindness.