So this blog used live at thisusersexperience.com. When I first registered that name, I thought, “Hmmm, that’s kind of long. I sure wouldn’t look forward to spelling that out over the phone — in Spanish.” It occurred to me that ThisUX.com would be much shorter; but alas, just as quickly, it occurred to me that “ThisUX” could easily be read “ThiSUX”, and then imagined myself entering the likes of those who later regretted their logo designs. To be on the safe side, I ended up registering, and operating the site on the longer name.

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When I started Makalu, over a decade ago, I remember longing for a user’s manual to help with questions like, “How much should I charge?” and “How should I price my work?” This article describes how we approached these questions, and includes discussion of the recent controversy over the pricing of the 37signals’s (@37signals) blog redesign project.

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One of the things I'm really enjoying being part of this relatively-nascent — in the big picture, as in "Usenet before the AOL gateway" sense — phase of Twitter existence, is faster customer support.Instead of emailing, I'll now search for a company Twitter address, and then tweet about my problems. Recent examples, just in the past week or so:

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Javier Diaz Carretero, of Andalucia, is one of Spain’s top marathon, half-marathon and cross-country runners. He’s also role model for those willing to take risks in order to follow their passion. Makalu decided to become the exclusive sponsor of Javier in his 2010 season, during which he’ll attempt to become the Spanish national champion, for the second time, in the marathon event. As part of that sponsorship package, we recently designed and launched his personal website.

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Communicating well in 140 characters is one of the newer dimensions of “communication design,” and its importance was discussed at length some time ago by Rands in, “The Art of the Tweet.” Just like blog articles, I often draft tweets outside of my Twitter client, in a dedicated writing application. Since I sometimes have URLs, references and other text sitting alongside the drafted tweets, I really needed a quick and efficient way to count the characters of the tweets themselves.

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This morning we launched the redesign of the Makalu Aerospace and Makalu Interactive websites. Makalu designer, Alex Bendiken (@minimaltwist), loves to add a twist to our designs. To celebrate the relaunch, we’re running a small competition.

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On February 17, Jason Fried wrote an article announcing 37signals’s intention to hire an outside firm to redesign their blog, Signals vs. Noise. Companies wishing to be considered for the project would be required to have a Pro listing on Sortfolio.com — 37signals’s yellow-pages service for finding web design companies. March 8th was the date earmarked for choosing the winning firm.

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I remember, as if it were yesterday.

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