The secret sauce: isn’t it what everyone is looking for? To find some kind of secret sauce? Imagine how amazing it would be if you could just grab a bottle of an exotic substance, and then add a few drops of it to anything. This strange liquid would somehow turn an absolutely normal object into an amazing, delightful, joyful item.

Probably we will never find a recipe for such a sauce (the closest we ever got is bacon), and for now we must understand that in order to create something truly exceptional we must fail, look back and understand what we did wrong.

Our summer campers started to learn that hard truth this week, by kickstarting their project with a design sprint and therefore, getting themselves introduced to the ups and downs of designing and building products.

file

More on this later. Back to work:

We are finally getting everything tidy in our new, shinny office (we were working for a few days with boxes full of stuff everywhere). Probably because of the lack of furniture to build, Fernando got bored and started looking into bloom filters. Here’s his blog post on the subject.

Gabriel was out and since we miss him a lot, we found someone that looks just like him to fill the gap:

Gabriel substitute

Also, our guys in Boston (Luís and Bruno) are getting around, trying to know the city and everyone there, socialising and “networking”. If you get to a meet up there be sure to look for them, they might even have some stickers.

Lastly, our usual favourite content from the web:

Pricing Pages - Curated directory of the best pricing pages

Where Prototypes Fail - 8 Common prototyping pitfalls

Designing Perfect Text Field: Clarity, Accessibility and User Effort

How To Make Your Not-So-Great Visual Design Better

How does gdb work?

Making the Switch Away from Icon Fonts to SVG: Converting Font Icons to SVG