Issue 7

Hello

You may have noticed we didn't write a December newsletter.

The holidays tend to be a blur of frenetic activity as everyone tries to finish up their work in time to take a few days off. And inboxes fill up with ads and automatic "out of office" replies, followed immediately by a dozen "year in review" emails from every product you use or brand you follow.

So, we decided that instead of being bulk deleted when you got back in the office, we'd wait awhile and send our monthly update at the end of January. Er, beginning of February. Did it work? Are you there?

Inside Baseball

January Update: Explaining Average Billable Rates

Awhile back, we learned about a really interesting way of calculating profitability of projects from our friends at Summit CPA. Over at Summit, Jody and his team work on the accounting and finances for digital agencies exclusively, and we've learned a lot from his book, Digital Dollars and Cents: A Virtual CFO’s Playbook to help Digital Companies Create a Financial Roadmap to Success. The formula is called Average Billable Rate. In case that term is new to you, here's a little background and an example of how you can use ABR to better understand profitability.

Water Cooler

Meghan McInerny: Level Up, PM as a Leadership Role

A talk that tells you to watch Fixer Upper to learn how to be a better Project Manager is all the reason you need to click this link. – Kayla

Moneyball

Chris Voss: "Never Split the Difference" | Talks at Google

Fair warning: this video is a good bit longer than a typical “cats doing crazy things” YouTube video, but it’s well worth your time. In this interview, former FBI negotiator Chris Voss shares insights on how to effectively negotiate with other humans in business, at work, or even at home.

If you don’t have a full hour to spare, jump to the 6-minute mark to learn the magic behind the simple words “that’s right." – Matt

Pushing the Pixels

Humaaans: Mix-&-Match illustration library

An amazingly versatile library of illustrated humans for your next design project. Created by Pablo Stanley, who you should definitely be following on Twitter. – Andrew

Squoosh

I would nominate this interactive tool for image compression for 'Best App Name 2019', if that was a thing. – Calvin

Git Push, Git Paid

The Great Divide

It's hard to miss the growing divide between front-end developers. Being able to produce well-written semantic markup and CSS is becoming increasingly undervalued. –Kyle

Unbuttoning Buttons

This is a deep dive into markup, but worth knowing by heart. Important accessibility issues are discussed throughout as Scott examines use cases in which a button seems like the right answer, but looks like the wrong one. This is the kind of work–and the kind of detail-oriented thinking–that we at Simple Focus love to do. – Calvin

Inspirational Things

Beautiful Posters of USA National Parks

The Fifty-Nine Parks Print Series seeks to "get poster fans into the parks and parks fans into posters."

Making Rubber Bands

Calling this 'inspirational' might be a stretch (har har har) but this is a short little video showing the process by which rubber bands are made. It's way more manual than I thought it would be, and looks way more like food than I'm comfortable with. – Calvin

Closer

That's it for this month. We'll see you right back here in your inbox at the end of February.