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Regardless of your business model you are competing for time from consumers’ lives. This could be someone choosing to signup for your web app instead of doing laundry or instead of watching TV. Again, don’t just think about direct competition, think about your users and determine how you can convince them to spend time with you, your brand, your product. With this in mind, think about how your marketing, messaging, and features will keep users coming back and building awareness for your company.

Also realize that more and more consumers are consuming media all at once. Consumers are watching televisions while surfing the Internet in addition to talking to someone in person or via a web cam. While conceiving and executing an idea for business, step back and think about your users. What do they typically do throughout their day? How can your messaging reach them in a way that is meaningful and able to “distract” them from other activities long enough to accomplish the objectives that you set forth?

A great starting point would be to review Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

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We managed to snap a few pictures while the facilities team took the old one down, and unfortunately many of the letters crumbled in the process. This was a tragedy in my opinion, because that logo is a piece of internet history. Fortunately, the most important part, the original triangle & circle symbol (pictured in the shopping cart), is in safe hands. After some sleuthing by some friends, we managed to get a tipster to reach out to TrendSlate with the disposal location. It is now residing in a safe place while we decide what to do with it. Stay tuned…

We’ve also considered holding our very own AOL-logo design competition, since the design community has been 50/50 on the version AOL decided upon last month. More on that later. For now, enjoy the pics..

Have an idea of what we should do with the old logo? Share it in the comments below.

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Gehry is a deconstructionist who designed, among many other things, the Walt Disney Concert Hall (pictured here).

Architecture and software development have one thing in common — they both require handing off work to teams with very different skill sets. Gehry points out that its in those transitions that design quality suffers:

“The problem I’ve been railing against is that good architecture gets infantalized by the process. The building is designed for the client, the client loves it, but when the client runs out of money they turn to the contractors who in turn say to ‘flatten this wall’ or ‘change this thing’, not knowing why things were designed that way.

So in order to get great design built you need to go through a rigorous process so that by the time it gets to the contractor there is precision, and this precision has been vetted from a cost standpoint so that the preservation of design begins before you begin building.”

- Frank Gehry

We find a similar risk in software development. A designer creates a beautiful mock, but then the developers either don’t understand or misunderstand how to build certain features. In either case, this results in the a discussion about certain features being too costly, and the original design quality suffers. Not good.

The extra effort it takes to write precise specifications will go a long way toward keeping your products great, saving you money, and even hiring the right team!

Charlie Rose | A conversation with architect Frank Gehry

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