Snapchat removes the record
Every messaging product ever built kept the message. Saved, stored, searchable, sitting there afterwards. It was not a feature anyone chose — it was the one part of a messaging app nobody thought could be taken out, because without it there is apparently nothing left.
In 2011 Snapchat took it out. The photo showed for a few seconds and then it was gone. Nothing kept, nothing retrievable.
Removing the most essential-seeming part did not leave a lesser product. It left a different one. People sent things they would never have sent to a permanent archive — unflattering faces, half-thoughts, the ordinary nonsense of a day. The app was closer to talking in a room than to writing a letter, and it reached a generation who had grown up being told the internet never forgets.
The record was load-bearing right up until somebody removed it and the building stayed up.
Source: Lessons from Snapchat's founding — Blossom Street Ventures
The cookbook without recipes
Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty is organised by ingredient rather than by dish. Aubergine. Brassicas. Mushrooms. You come to it holding something you already have, not looking for a specific recipe.
That sounds like a filing decision. It changes what the book is for. A conventional cookbook teaches you to reproduce a dish. Organised this way, the book teaches you what an aubergine can do — after which you no longer need the recipe, which was only ever scaffolding.
Remove the structure everyone expects and you find out what the book was actually meant to teach.
Source: Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi — Cooking by the Book
No holiday policy at all
Most companies manage leave by writing rules. How many days, how far in advance, who approves, what carries over. When something goes wrong, the response is another rule.
Netflix removed the document. There is no vacation policy — take time off when you need it, as long as the work is covered.
The point was not generosity. It was that a company spending its energy writing rules about holidays is a company that does not trust the people it hired, and the rules themselves quietly communicate that. Removing them forced a harder conversation about whether they had hired the right people at all.
They did not improve the policy. They removed the thing the policy was standing in for.
Source: Work life philosophy — Netflix
Designed for a hand that hurts
Sam Farber's wife Betsey had arthritis. Using an ordinary vegetable peeler — a thin metal handle you have to grip hard — was painful.
He could have designed a specialist product for people with arthritis, sold in a medical supply catalogue at a higher price. Instead he treated her hands as the design brief for everybody's peeler. Thick rubber handle, soft grip, shaped to need less force.
OXO Good Grips became one of the most successful kitchenware ranges ever made, bought overwhelmingly by people with no arthritis at all.
The extreme user was not a niche to accommodate. She revealed what everyone had been putting up with.
Source: Behind the design of OXO's Good Grips handles — OXO
A typeface for a screen the size of a fingernail
When Apple designed the Watch, the display was smaller than anything they had made type for. Existing typefaces, refined over decades for paper and then for larger screens, fell apart at that size — letters closed up, characters became indistinguishable, and nothing was readable at a glance.
So they designed San Francisco specifically for it. Round letters were opened out. Characters were made more distinct from each other. Spacing changes automatically depending on how small the type is set.
Working at that extreme revealed something useful: much of what a typeface carries is inherited from the size it was designed for, not from what a reader needs. The constraint separated the two.
Push something to a size it was never meant to work at, and the parts that survive are the parts that were always doing the work.
Source: San Francisco, part 2 — MartianCraft
Don't buy this jacket
On Black Friday in 2011, Patagonia ran a full-page advertisement in the New York Times showing one of its own jackets under the headline Don't Buy This Jacket.
The copy listed what the jacket cost the world to make — the water used, the carbon emitted, the waste left behind — and asked the reader not to buy anything they did not need, including this.
Every rule of retail advertising on the busiest shopping day of the year says do the opposite. Sales went up.
They were not pretending. The ad worked because the company meant it.
Source: Don't Buy This Jacket, Black Friday and the New York Times — Patagonia
A woolly hat the size of a bottle cap
In 2003 Innocent asked people to knit tiny hats. Not for anything — just small woollen hats that fit over the cap of a smoothie bottle. For every bottle sold wearing one, 25p went to Age UK to help older people through the winter.
That is the entire idea. The drink did not change. The price did not change. The only difference was a hand-knitted hat about five centimetres across sitting on top.
The first year brought in just over five thousand hats. The campaign has now passed ten million hats and more than three million pounds. Knitting groups formed around it. People who had never picked up a needle learned to, so they could send some in.
Nothing about the product changed. One small odd thing was added to it, and people crossed a room to pick it up.
Source: The Big Knit — Age UK
Sheep with cameras
Google Street View had mapped most of Europe, including the top of Mont Blanc and places well above the Arctic Circle. It had not come to the Faroe Islands — eighteen islands in the North Atlantic, around fifty thousand people, and considerably more sheep than people. Some world maps leave the archipelago off entirely.
Durita Dahl Andreassen worked for the tourist board and had no way to make Google arrive. What the islands did have was sheep, roaming everywhere, including up hillsides and along cliff edges no vehicle could reach.
A fellow islander built a harness. Local shepherds agreed to lend their animals. A solar-powered 360-degree camera went on a sheep's back, firing once a minute, sending images with GPS coordinates to Andreassen's phone, which she uploaded by hand.
The results were not professional. One ram photographed the back of his own head. Another sheep mostly documented other sheep. Plenty of the pictures came out crooked. She lost a camera.
Google called it shear brilliance, lent them proper equipment, and in 2017 sent its own team. The Faroe Islands are on Street View.
She could not get the thing she needed. So she built a worse version of it out of what the islands already had, and the worse version worked.
Source: Sheep View — Google