Issue 3

Hello

Hi everyone - happy Friday, and welcome to the third issue of Rounding Third. This month we've gathered some wonderful links from various corners of the Internet that we'd like to share with you. Enjoy!

Inside Baseball

August Update

August was a busy month, with lots of time spent on annoying updates to our payment processor. But we did find the time to work on something more fun, and a much-requested feature: Client Archives. Learn how it works by reading this new post on the blog.

Water Cooler

How to make an open office plan work

Some practical advice from Basecamp on how to minimize some of the worst aspects of the open office plan–noise, distraction, general chaos to name a few. Also, really cool interior design inspiration (stacked cork walls!). - Calvin

How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy

Peter Steinberger from PSPDFKit describes his team’s love/hate relationship with Slack (I thought I was the only one!) while giving practical advice for using it more effectively. Be sure to check out the “Today and Out for Today” section for tips on how to use Slack as an alternative to daily standups and project updates. - Matt

Moneyball

How Does Netflix Make Money?

I run an agency and several SaaS businesses, so I know there’s a big difference in how different types of companies make money. In the agency world, it’s deal-driven and you hope for recurring revenue in the form of a retainer. In the SaaS model, it’s based on recurring revenue and you might or might not offer professional services and customizations. But this link is about Netflix, which is a video streaming company…or are they a media company? Whatever. Their recurring revenue model confuses me, because they will eventually run out of new people who can sign up for their services and will see their revenue flatten. They can’t grow forever, right? And their expenses will continue to climb because they have to keep creating new content. So, how does that work? Is it a bad model? Is it brilliant? Is it just an experiment? That’s what this video aims to answer. Super interesting. -JD

Tools of the Trade

Picular

Google, but for colors: type in a word and get a bunch of hex values from photos. You could build a whole color palette in seconds using this tool.

Pushing the Pixels

Flexible Typesetting

We ordered a few copies of this book for the office; we'll report back after we've had a chance to read and discuss. Here's the summary from the website:

In this book, Tim Brown illuminates the complex, beautiful world of typesetting—arguably the most important part of typography because it forms the backbone of the reading experience—and shows us how to parry the inevitable pressures that arise when we can no longer predict how, and where, our text will be read.

The Designer Who Changed Airbnb's Entire Strategy

Forbes interviewed Airbnb's Head of User Experience Research and Design, Rebecca Sinclair, about how companies can use design to master product-market fit. How could the use of storyboards (or Post-it notes) change the way your team practices design thinking? - Calvin

Git Push, Git Paid

Art of debugging with Chrome DevTools

Always looking to step up my debugging game. I found these tips pretty nifty. - Caitlin

On Switching from HEX & RGB to HSL

Sara Soueidan explains the benefits of HSL over RGB or HEX, as relates to color theory and CSS variables. - Andrew

Inspirational Things

Closer

That's it for August, and we'll see you back in your inboxes in September!