The measure of a good brand is what it can do.

My co-founder Rich Ziade and I are out in San Francisco for a conference. The hotel we're in is very...designed. I think the designers wanted the rooms to look like a summer cottage designed by Muji but the overall effect is more like a timeshare designed by Sharper Image.

It's not every day you get to redesign a product used by hundreds of thousands of people, virtually overnight. But that's what happened when we launched Mercury Reader, a Google Chrome plugin for formatting articles into a clean reader view.

By Paul Ford, Co-founder, Postlight

Software product designers can take a lot of cues from great educators, because both groups work with information. Let's consider a user looking for information on jousting. We know three things: The user has a way of thinking about the information they want.