Just like a lot of you guys, the vast majority of my ideas and “oh yeah!” moments for my day come when I’m getting ready in the morning. Especially when in the shower.

For years I’ve let those ideas go down the drain, or I run into my office after getting ready to try and jot down whatever I can remember.

It’s not so much that a truly great idea will actually go down the drain if I don’t have a notepad in my shower, but when an idea does come to me I want a place to capture it. Because doing so encourages the getting of more ideas. (Waste not want not, right?)

And so I finally ordered an AquaNotes waterproof notepad to use for any ideas or to-do items which come to me when showering.

The AquaNotes notepad is made with waterproof paper and is pretty cool. But it’s small (about 3″ x 5″) and non-renewable (you have to keep ordering notepads). But Cameron uses a diving slate. Which sounds much more manly, comes in significantly larger sizes, and will last much longer.

Capturing Ideas When in the Shower

Jim Ray:

Besides all of the new typography, navigation, color and multimedia, the real story is the fundamental rethink of what a story page should be. For too long, the formula of online news has been a spine of text that media elements hang off of like a sad Charlie Brown Christmas tree, competing with ads and widgets for attention. What these new pages do is suggest that a story is more than a jumble of these parts, in fact, it works best when every element ties together cohesively.

More on the msnbc.com Redesign From Jim Ray

Mike Davidson on the just-redesigned story page for msnbc.com:

This weekend, msnbc.com launched a sweeping redesign of the most important part of their site: the story page. The result is something unlike anything any other major news site is offering and is a bold step in a direction no competitor has gone down (yet): the elimination of pageviews as a primary metric. […]

We like big risks with big payoffs though and we feel that when you take care of the user and the advertiser at the same time, you’re probably onto something.

The new design really is fantastic. It’s readable, clean, has all related content inline, and seems to be showing the least amount of ads I’ve ever seen on a news site. Also: how clever is that “upscroll” header?

“Another Nail in the Pageview Coffin”

Michael Slade in response to my tongue and cheek link yesterday about CSS being the new Photoshop. Michael’s point is that CSS, HTML, and JavaScript are to the webpage what PostScript was to the printed page, and what’s missing is a webpage version of PageMaker (now InDesign). (Sure there’s apps like FrontPage and iWeb, but no serious Web designer would be caught dead using these tools the way a serious print designer uses InDesign and Illustrator.)

Is CSS the new Photoshop?