The Big Red Fez

What Hacker News says

1. SMAAARTJun 2022
   read this: https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/03213...

   and this: https://www.amazon.com/Big-Red-Fez-Make-Better/dp/0743227905

   that's really all you need.

   thread
2. cdvonstinkpotDec 2017
   A bit dated, still useful:

   Seth Godin: The Big Red Fez

   https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743227905/permissio...

   thread
3. porsJan 2012
   Great concept and very cool design! Two suggestions for improvement:

   - Let users play and organize before they have to log in

   - The home page was a bit confusing to me, as it didn't have a very clear distinct "call to action" (read "the big red fez" by Seth Godin to understand more about that, over 10 years old and still very relevant).

   thread
4. Alex3917May 2010
   In addition to Four Steps to the Epiphany, Crossing the Chasm, and Getting Real, I would add All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin. Of Seth's other books, Permission Marketing, Free Prize Inside, and The Big Red Fez also made a big impact on me. But All Marketers are Liars is the best starting place I think.

   Definitely also read Art of the Start. It's less insightful and more informative, but it's still a good overview of how the startup process works and it's easily readable in a day.

   Show morethread
5. bboettgerMar 2010
   Seems like a visual display of the timeless recommendations by Seth Godin in The Big Red Fez (http://www.sethgodin.com/fez/).

   Although newspapers are dying, this is something any good newspaper designer knows: the eye should immediately go to the most important thing on the page and sequence through the additional items ranked by importance. It doesn't matter if something is first on the page if it isn't the most dominant thing on the page.

   Show morethread
6. nostrademonsJun 2007
   I actually don't read any of the above unless linked from another source - too much noise, not enough signal.

   I read Programming Reddit, News.YC, and occasionally Startupping and LambdaTheUltimate. I try to keep up with some blogs of startup-type people - Dharmesh Shah, Joe Kraus, Raganwald, Paul Buchheit, Mark Fletcher, and Marc Andreesen and Wil Schroter look interesting based on their recently-linked news.YC articles.

   Also, don't underestimate the importance of good old fashioned dead-tree books. I know it's fashionable to spend all day online now, but I still find I get lots more information out of published works than the Internet (the net is great for pointers to books, though). I read a lot of history, economics, corporate histories, some biographies, theoretical computer science, etc. Some selected titles off my reading history (my library's software keeps track of books I've checked out):

   "Founders at Work" (Jessica Livingston), "The Rockefeller Billions" (Jules Abels), "Stocks for the Long Run" (Jeremy Siegel), "The Intelligent Investor" (Benjamin Graham), "When Genius Failed" (Roger Lowenstein), "One Up on Wall Street" (Peter Lynch), "Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes" (Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich), "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money" (John Maynard Keynes), "The Google Story" (David A. Vise), "When the Astors Owned New York" (Justin Kaplan), "Art of the Start" and "Rules for Revolutionaries" (Guy Kawasaki), "Purple Cow" and "Big Red Fez" and "All Marketers are Liars" (Seth Godin), "Microsoft Secrets" (Michael Cusumano), "Damn Right: Behind the scenes with Charlie Munger" (Janet Lowe), "Crossing the Chasm" (Geoffrey Moore), "A Good Hard Kick in the Pants" (Rob Adams), "Innovation and Entrepreneurship" and "The Essential Drucker" (Peter Drucker), "Only the Paranoid Survive" (Andy Grove), "dot.bomb: My days and nights at an Internet goliath" (J. David Kuo), "Accidental Empires" (Robery X. Cringely), "The Microsoft Way" (Randall Stross), "High St@kes, No Prisoners" (Charles Ferguson), "The Making of Microsoft" (Daniel Ichbiah and Susan L. Knepper), "AlmostPerfect: How a bunch of regular guys built WordPerfect Corporation" (W.E. Pete Peterson), "Direct from Dell" (Michael Dell), "Inside Intel" (Tim Jackson), "The Innovator's Dilemma" and "The Innovator's Solution" (Clayton Christianson), "Good to Great" and "Built to Last" (Jim Collins), and "Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh" and "Hackers" by Steven Levy.

   Show morethread