Steve’s Updates 9/2/2013

So what’s been going on here?  Well you probably saw but let’s hit the high points!

First, the new book.  No I’m not talking content yet except it’s a mixture of rewrite, expansion, old, and new material.  Right now I want to get at least one editing pass done before I get to it since that’ll determine how long it’ll really take.  It’s gotten a bit bigger than expected anyway.

Seventh Sanctum is now moving into Bootstrap 3.0, which is both easier and harder than I expected, and I’m mostly annoyed it’s not easy OR hard in the way I expected.  New Bootstrap is actually an improvement, but the radical change of some element is a royal pain – though my guess was the plans for 3 are entirely due to wanting to get some painful transitions the heck over.  This added at least a week on to my plans, unfortunately it did so at the wrong time, so I’m not sure if the October launch is valid, or if it’ll be more in November (as you may guess, I want the test the heck out of it).

There is a design for a new logo up, and you can see the results and some opinions here and here.  The designs are by Megami Studios, who also did the MuseHack logo.

Speaking of MuseHack, I’ll have a new series launching next week on geeks, citizenship, and society.  Stay tuned!

I finished up my work at Celsticon.  Got some ideas for next year – and my next con is Kraken-Con!

So what’s up with you?

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Seventh Sanctum New Logo Design – Which Do You Like?

OK I’ve got work going on to develop a new logo for Seventh Sanctum – courtesy of the awesome Megami Studios who did the MuseHack logo.  So which one do you like?

Click below to see full sized!

First Logo

Candidate-1A

Second Logo

Candidate-1C

Third Logo

Candidate-1D

What do you think?

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Workable Drops Free, CEO Nikos Moraitakis Discusses it At Medium

Workable apparently dropped their free membership, and their CEO Nikos Moraitakis explains why at Medium in a must-read essay.

Two things stood out for me:

Limiting design choices to things that can scale infinitely at near-zero cost is a recipe for making mediocre products.

He’s got a point.  When free is baked into your model you are automatically facing a series of constraints.  You can see this in most any model, but when your constraint is “limit what we charge” for that is one freakin’ huge constraint.

When someone tweets “this product sucks” readers can’t tell if this is coming from someone who got the good version of the product or the bad, unsupported one. Oh, and for every paid user you probably have 10 or 100 free ones. They will be louder, by sheer numbers alone.

He’s right.  Trust me.  Been there.  Also he notes people who get “free” are oddly hard to please.

Worth reading.  Think I need to interview this guy.

– Steven Savage