Twice this week people have managed to excite me by doing mundane things with brilliant imagination. Which is a feeling i love. & so I’m sharing them.

I now have a favourite stationary company, D!rektrecycling. They make envelopes by recycling old maps.

[photo via notcot.com]

I can assure you it is far more fascinating to receive your invoices along with a snapshot of Schleswig-Flensburg than it is to get them in a plain envelope.

Then later that day, via FriendFeed I came across barcode revolution

Who are doing fantastic things to make barcodes more interesting. Which is a wonderful example of people putting great time & creativity into something that is normally just ignored and left as the standard “good enough”.

In fact both are things that can so easily be ignored, left at the default setting. But when you bother to think about even these things with a sense of vision & identity, well then now you’ve really got my  attention.

So it seems that Amazon are expanding again & have launched their Mechanical Turk service. Which caught my eye largely because it reminded me of The_Turk, which is one of my all time favourite Wikipedia articles.

Amazon’s mechanical turk did grab my attention enough for me to take a look. Offering cash for tasks that can’t be automated in an online marketplace is an interesting idea. The sort of thing I might email to the recent graduates I know who complain that they can’t find a job. Except the remuneration for taking a HIT (Human Intelligence Task) is almost exclusively peanuts.

And you know the phrase - Only monkeys get out of bed for peanuts.

Which brings us to something that IS brilliant, The_Turk.

Which was a chess playing machine built in the late 18th century that claimed to be an automated chess machine but actually concealed a human chess master in a small cupboard. The Turk toured for the best part of a hundred years, and amongst other achievements, beat Bonaparte and was the subject of a Poe article.

A brilliant sense of imagination, wonder & showmanship at work in this story. Which reminds me of the Werner Herzog film Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (Every man for himself and God against them all)

So thank you amazon for reminding me of these. And interesting that you might name your new venture after an infamous hoax. I hope it’s irony I’m appreciating there.

I don”t want to be informed about the webpages you were thinking of building. It can only ever disappoint me that you never got around to building them. The philosophy of worse is better, of getting some kind of working prototype out there is a completely valid one. Something is definitely better than nothing.

But if your something is less than a working prototype, then please don’t tell people about it who are not involved with developing it. If what you’ve come up with is a good idea, then this is especially true.

If you have an idea for a product, service that I would actually be interested in, then telling me that you have had the idea, but not the conviction to actually complete it is worse than me thinking that you never thought of it in the first place. All that you will do is waste your users time & raise their expectations only to have those expectations dashed, and potential users irritated.

If it’s broke, don’t ship it.

I used to work in a bookshop. At one time, a management type decided that it would be a good idea if we published a newsletter to inform customers of signings, new releases etc. I liked the idea.

Until I saw the first draft. Which was, to put it mildly, rubbish. Phrases like “Comic sans is a bad choice for body copy” and “that  lo-res image blown up 300% makes you look silly” sprang to mind, only for me to realise that this was somewhat overanalysing the problem. Which was that this was something just shy of the competence level of a homework project from a seven year old schoolchild.

Instead, I went with

Anyone impressed by that would be impressed by anything.
& is therefore never worth going out of your way to be impress

Which is a phrase that I have re-used extensively since. In fact, I use it as a rule for all of the marketing initiatives that I have to deal with. Who exactly is going to be impressed by this? if the answer is ‘a teenager circa 1997′ then we probably haven’t got this right yet.

Moral of my story: If you aim higher, you impress all those other people by default. Just about good enough leaves you alienating the more discerning people out there, and actively damages your brand.

If there is one thing that impresses me consistently, it is simplicity done well.

Not that I have anything against things that are complex per se. But in things that are more complicated than they need to be. In fact I love complicated abstractions, I am fascinated by Cricket for instance, which is nothing if not a very complicated set of arbitrary rules that seems completely impenetrable on the first encounter.

But if it wasn’t for that, then the game itself wouldn’t be half as interesting. It’s a great example of a situation where adding layers of complexity actively adds to the value of something.

When I have discussions about how the accounts department of my company works though, or when I look at the shrink-wrapped tomatoes at my supermarket, something dies inside at the complete stupidity of just how complicated this thing has become, for no tangible benefit at all.

A little strongly stated perhaps. but the point remains – do we really have to make four payments back & forth where a conversation & one would do, & everyone would be sorted out & happy much quicker? Do you_really_ think that there is enough wrong with the methods of storing tomatoes that people have been using for the last thousand years that there is any real benefit from the waste you are generating? Not to mention the extra hassle involved in my actually getting at them.

So please, can we just keep things simple?