MetaLab

MetaLab is proud to present Sonic, Simplefolio, and Photofolio, three new Tumblr themes specially crafted for the new Premium Tumblr theme section. 

Sonic is a bold, rock-influenced theme designed to give your band a fun way to stay in touch with fans, broadcast upcoming tour dates, share concert photos, and promote new songs. Sonic supports all of Tumblr’s media types, and also lets you link up your Twitter feed, Myspace and Facebook pages, and Last.fm profile to keep everyone in the loop.

Simplefolio is a clean, sophisticated theme that enables designers to put their best work on display in a clear and structured manner. Unlike most Tumblr themes, Simplefolio has taken the often cluttered text found in the sidebars and have placed them on separate, categorized pages, which are accessible by the tabbed browsing in the heading. 

Photofolio  is a beautiful and minimalist theme geared towards photographers looking for a modern and simple way to flaunt their photography. 

We like how convenient PayPal is for sending and receiving payments, but the cost of that convenience started to seem pretty steep when we added all the fees up. The PayPal Instant Payment integration in Ballpark gives clients a fast and easy way to pay you, but it’s easy to feel like you get stuck with the fees. Even if you ask your clients to account for PayPal fees, the fees are not automatically added to the invoice total on Ballpark’s PayPal payment form, so the request is often missed or ignored. Starting today, you can opt to include a percentage fee when your clients pay your Ballpark invoices with PayPal.

You’ll find the new option when you enable PayPal Instant Payment:

The additional fee is automatically added to the total in the payment form that the client uses, along with a note:

You’ll also find a new field allowing you to set a default percentage fee in the Defaults tab of your Ballpark Settings. This default applies when you create a new invoice, but the fee can be changed or disabled on a per-invoice basis if you need to adjust it for cross-border payments or other differences in PayPal’s fee structure.

This whole Mozilla thing has been a wild ride. We were floored by the posts on Daring Fireball, TechCrunch, and HackerNews, and read each and every comment.

We spent some time on the phone with the team at Mozilla last night, and we’ve cleared the air. We also heard from John Lilly, their CEO, via Twitter within hours. They made an apologetic post on their blog and said that they are “actively investigating how this happened to ensure that it does not happen again”. I’m still unclear on how such a blatant copycat could get featured in their launch in the first place, especially after more than a month in the wild, but they have since removed all screenshots and video clips that showed our work, and recent Jetpack builds feature a new design. We’re happy with how this has been resolved, and were impressed by Mozilla’s quick response.

Why did we make a big stink?

This really rubbed us the wrong way. There is a big difference between being inspired by a design and outright theft. I’ll admit that a great deal of our work is heavily inspired by other designers. In fact, it would be downright impossible to find a designer whose work isn’t at least somewhat derivative of others. I spent months deconstructing Apple’s aqua buttons when I was first learning Photoshop, and our whole team is constantly scouring inspiration galleries for interesting new interface trends. But something happens when you recreate something on your own: it grows organically. You build your own style and invariably create something new - even if it’s just a minor evolution. When you copy elements outright, you don’t gain anything from the experience. You don’t grow as a designer, you don’t build on the style, and you feel shitty about it. Not to mention the fact that you will undoubtably get busted at some point, and even publicly humiliated.

The worst part is, this stuff happens all the time. Big Spaceship had their portfolio carbon copied earlier this week. Tim Van Damme is constantly having people hijack his designs. Even Microsoft has pulled this stuff. In our case, it was just too much. Typically when this happens, we have a chuckle, get in touch, and hear them out. It’s often the case of a rogue designer they contracted, or a student trying to learn our styles - no need to make a big stink. The Mozilla situation, on the other hand, was the perfect storm. They know who we are, they are a massive company, and we had even bid on the project. It was too much.

A lot of people argued that it was only a mockup and hadn’t been used in any live builds. Our design was featured in their demo video, in screenshots on the website, and shown as a design direction in their wiki for months. Imagine if Microsoft had previewed the SDK for their Windows phone platform and all the marketing materials, press releases, and video demos, showed elements of Apple’s iPhone UI. Of course, there’s a reason for everything: “the iPhone UI was only used during development to help us scope out the feature set”, “it was one of our interns, we had no idea”, “it was never going to be released”. People would start throwing things.

Regardless of the reasons why this happened, it doesn’t change the fact that we got ripped off and that’s not okay. We’re glad that we were able to resolve this amicably, and we hope this will ensure that this sort of thing won’t happen in the future.

We get ripped off a lot. I often spot a button image that’s been repurposed, or a layout that’s just a little bit too inspired by a previous design we’ve done. Generally, we find it really flattering and have a good laugh - if nothing else, it makes us feel that we’re probably doing something right if people are so eager to plagiarize. But earlier today a friend linked me to Mozilla’s new JetPack design and my jaw dropped.

The design goes well beyond imitation - they literally copied images straight off of our site. Maybe they thought we were open source, too?

The best part of all of this is that we actually sent Mozilla a proposal for this same project. Mark spent an hour on the phone with Daniel Buchner and Aza Raskin, going through our proposal in detail. Here’s the estimate we sent:

They ended up deciding not to go ahead with the estimate on December 27th, and we didn’t hear from them again:

I don’t understand why companies think that they can get away with doing this. The internet is a surprisingly small place, and we were notified almost immediately. We’ve all had a good chuckle about this, but we’ve contacted Mozilla and demanded that they take the design down. I’d expect better from a respectable company like Mozilla. It’s one thing when a student or fledgling company does something like this, but Mozilla is a big company with the resources to create original design.

In the meantime, let Mozilla know this isn’t okay. Tweet at @MozillaNews or leave a comment over on HackerNews.

Update: I just got off the phone with the team at Mozilla, who apologized and clarified a few things. The design which used our site’s design elements was a development build and according to them the design has been changed in newer builds. That said, it was used in their launch video as well as their blog post announcing the product. They told me that that the team who put together the blog post and video was unaware of the similarities at the time of inclusion. We’ve asked for a public apology, and I’ll be doing a follow-up post tomorrow.

“Employees come to the office if and when they feel like it, or else they work from home. I don’t believe in the 40-hour workweek, so we cut all that BS about being somewhere for a certain number of hours. I have no idea how many hours my employees work — I just know they get the work done.”

- Jason Fried

We agree with 37signals most of the time, but this is one tenet of theirs that we’re starting to shift away from. Almost by default, we gave our own team this same freedom on day one: the ability to work from home without a set workday, completely free from any Orwellian boss peering over their shoulder.

From an employee’s perspective, this is a dream arrangement. Any office drone (and pretty much everyone at MetaLab has been one at some point) fantasizes of the day in which they realize they can stay in bed for another hour or two and won’t have to exhibit any of the soul-crushing suck-uppery and monotony that plagues harshly lit offices the world over.

From an employer’s perspective, though, it isn’t quite so idyllic. The truth is, when someone in charge is considering letting his team work from home, they usually look at it from the benefactor’s perspective rather then their own – so, the decision is really about being a buddy; it’s trying to earn appreciation rather than respect. Bosses kid themselves by saying that their employees will be happier working from home (and therefore more productive), but anyone who’s worked from home can tell you that the distractions are paramount. You might work a little bit more if you’re lying in bed, but it’s stretched out over your entire waking day rather than the 5-8 hours you might have at the office.

I say this not as a manager, but as someone who has worked from home and knows the perils: office hours are important. Personally, I would prefer 5 good hours at the office each day as opposed to spending my entire 16-hour day completing 2 tasks on a completely fragmented schedule.

MetaLab operated for a long time using this laissez-faire approach. We have an office, but until recently, none of our employees were under any obligation to come in at any point. The above Jason Fried quote was our mantra. We assumed that getting the work done was enough, and didn’t think about it too much beyond that.

However, we recently did take a little time to think about it, and we made a few pretty big realizations. We concluded that there may be some virtue to having the team ‘somewhere for a certain number of hours’:

• Projects move along with much better momentum when we have the ability to give direct, face-to-face feedback on designs, as opposed to relying on the glacial pace of obtaining potentially clouded feedback over Basecamp or Notable.
• There’s an undeniable sense of ‘being part of something’ that’s fostered by an office full of people working (this is especially important when considering small companies [like ours] or startups).
• Observing the body language of co-workers provides the ultimate morale/interest meter. A designer working from home may complete a task without apparent issue, logging their time dutifully and posting the final product in a reticent message; working from the office, though, the designer might heave sighs and constantly furrow their brow, which will speak volumes to any remotely sympathetic person.
• Only in face-to-face dialogue will you get the transparency and visceral honesty that is the foundation for good communication (and subsequent ideas).

As a result, we’ve recently instituted office hours. It isn’t much – just 2 hours in the afternoon. Not overbearing, and situated at a time when everyone can feel comfortable.

The last thing we want is to have an unflinching eye on the team. We trust everyone who works with us, and we know well enough that being overbearing and nosey does absolutely nothing for productivity. The irony is that office hours have nothing to do with the individual – it’s about the group, the sum of the parts, and having that group evolve from a bunch of people who know and work with one another into a team that actually wants to talk. A team like this is way more likely to band together, get moving, and produce stellar work that isn’t just the output of a creative director or top-rung brain trust. Every single person’s thoughts and ideas will contribute to everything that your company puts out there. Isn’t that exactly what you expect from the people that you hire?

It’s distressing that Jason thinks that the workweek is just about getting the work done. We’ve hired who we hired because we know that they’re capable of more than just ‘getting it done’ – and anybody with any sense oughta do the same thing. Hiring people to get the job done is fantastic for a company that doesn’t have any interest in growing or evolving beyond their current incarnation, but I can’t think of a single interesting company that operates with such complacency.

More than anything else, though, we want MetaLab to remain a unit, rather than turn into a series of titles and complex delegation. Office hours might just be the lynchpin.