Urban inspiration – tracking down the big exhibitions

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A few days ago I was passing by the National Portrait Gallery in London. Two impressive queues were going round the corners of the building. It was sunny and just minutes to 10 am when the gallery opens. In London, it’s normal to have people queuing to visit an exhibition. And it has nothing to do with the sun. They would have opened their umbrellas.

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Design Mistakes That Scare Users Away

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This is the article that had to be written. The one that gave us no choice. Even though the majority of our readers wouldn't ever commit the grievous sins on this list, the sheer magnitude of the problem compels something to be written about it.

This is the culmination of millions upon millions of agonized groans of frustration as users continue every day to discover new depths of the abyss. Terrible has become the new normal, and something must be done about this. Consider the article you are now reading as one small step towards creating a better world for us all. We can only hope…

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Cubes in Modern Architecture

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It is an undeniable fact – highlighted in 2004 ‘Content' by Rem Koolhaas too – that ‘shape is easy'. It is recognisable; works with our subconscious; and in the case of Platonic solids like cubes shape is also a philosophical notion with numerous connotations – starting from symmetry and regularity; stretching as far as our reflections take us. Cubes in particular are also ‘easy' to build but we believe their importance in architects' minds stays on the abstract plane. There seems to be a certain inherent relationship between cubes' geometry and the notions of perfection and clarity of structure. Thus, it is close to the highest honour among buildings to be cube-shaped, conspicuously derivative of cubes, or at least bear a cube name.

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The Rise and Fall of Flash Sales

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This past week, Fab.com made news once again after its co-founder Bradford Shellhammer stepped down. The departure is a bookend to the ecommerce store’s pivot away from flash sales and into the territory of standard online retail, a la Amazon. In its flash sale heyday, the company raised over $150 million in funding and was valued at around $1 billion dollars. Since the beginning of the year, Fab.com has been going through some rapid downscaling in an effort to be profitable.

Flash sales used to be the next big thing in ecommerce, but somewhere along the line, the business model’s wheels started to fall off. Surprisingly enough, Zulily, an ecommerce flash sale store for apparel designed for kids and mothers, is trying to launch an IPO north of $200 million total value. This seems to be an outlier though, as there’s a lesson to be learned from the Groupons, Fab.coms, Totsys, and the others out there. How did the flash sale business model fall apart?

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