This was a project I started a couple years back that I lost between moving, packing and unpacking. I found it a few days ago and finished stitching it over the weekend. It was inspired by my favorite t-shirt back then.

I like cross stitching for it's obvious connection to pixelated icons and images from the web. I made the pattern by grabbing a picture of the shirt, knocking out the background, and posterizing the colors down to just red, yellow, and black. Then I blew up the image 400% and added a grid to show each stitch. Now, you can just upload an image here and have it spit out a pattern. You'll still need to spend time simplifying and sizing the source file, though.

I've always liked images of robots - especially mid-20th Century anthropomorphic representations. I like that style, but I also like the metaphor. Robots represent our approach to technology and, frankly, how wrong we usually are. We had hoped to create tech in our own image, like Rosie, the Jetson's maid who zipped around the house cleaning and cooking. We hoped that robots would enable a life of pure leisure - walking, talking butlers that do our bidding.

Our present reality is far from those idealistic days, but in a way I'm grateful for that. Instead of technology serving us, we've created powerful tools that amplify our abilities. We use computers to make us smarter, the web as an outboard brain, networks to stay connected. Rather than building robots as better humans, we've used technology to become better ourselves.

But that's just me at my most optimistic. The truth is I like to stitch things like this to get me away from the damn computer. I think I'll start another project...

Last month, while attending the fantastic @Media conference in London, we paid a quick touristy visit to a street corner in the heart of Soho. There, we found a small monument - an old hand-drawn water pump on a stone pedestal, its handle notably missing. We climbed up on it, had our photo taken, then ducked across the street for a pint in an old pub named The John Snow.

The pub's name was interesting to me for a couple reasons. I had just finished the Steven Johnson book, "The Ghost Map," a riveting account of the neighborhood's 1854 cholera outbreak. Johnson tells the story of Dr. John Snow, who had lived near where we had our picture taken, and how he followed a hunch that the disease could be spread by water, rather than being airborne. After days of investigation, Snow proved to London's health commission that this Broad Street well was the source of the outbreak, convincing them to remove the handle. It was an early instance of science and evidence winning against superstition and prejudice.

But even more interesting to me was one of the tools he used in his work - a data visualization showing cholera deaths marked on a map correlated to the location of the pump. In the speech I gave that week, I pointed out how his graphic techniques are still a model for good design over 150 years later. Contrary to the popular myth, Snow didn't create that famous map; he was working from an existing visualization first drawn by sanitation engineer Edmund Cooper months earlier. Snow did, however, redesign the work by carefully eliminating elements and emphasizing the casualty data until the narrative of what had happened was perfectly clear. You can't look at that map without thinking, "Yikes! Stay away from that pump!" Snow's early geo-mashup can still inspire.

So back to the eponymous pub. As we stood near the crowded bar, I decided to do a little experiment. Even though there was a plaque on the wall detailing the establishment's history and namesake, I started asking the folks around me, "Hey, why is this place called 'The John Snow'?" hoping to find fans of the historic story - or maybe even someone interested in the visualization. Instead, here's what I got:

The tall Irish guy with a ponytail: "No bloody idea, brother."

The group of women laughing in the corner: "Oh, he's some wanker on the telly who bought this place years ago." (They were thinking of this Jon Snow, who is actually quite respected.)

The bartender, who came close, but really should know better: "Before this was a pub, there was a hospital here and he was the doctor in charge of it."

How quickly history fades - especially after a few drinks.

One of the nice things about organizing your own conference is getting to choose who you want on stage. That's been particularly fun these last couple weeks as Bryan and I have been thinking about who we'd like to talk to and what we'd like them to tell us.

We started with some good friends whom we've worked with and respect. Ev Williams, for example, was an easy choice. We've known him forever, and worked on a redesign of Blogger together a few years ago. We're talking to him about how his new thing, Twitter, is growing and evolving, what the challenges and opportunities are, and the lessons he's learned so far. I've had similar conversations recently with both Matt Mullengweg of WordPress and Mena Trott of 6apart. Their stories have interesting parallels, but even better divergence.

So, yeah, a lot of our friends are in the blogging world. But we do know a few people outside of that world. Julie Davidson and Narendra Rocherolle, for example, are joining us to talk about their unique partnership, both in business and in life. They've built Webshots, one of the first photo sharing apps, as well as 30boxes, a fantastic calendar app that stands as a fantastic example of how to do the Right Thing when building on the web.

On the other end of the entrepreneurial spectrum is our pal Merlin Mann. He's built a solid brand out of his productivity site 43Folders and we're looking forward to talking to him about how he did that. But also, I'm particularly interested in his ideas for how small teams can find the best ways to work together and communicate with each other. Also, he is a bit, um, energetic on stage. We should have a good time.

We've got a bunch more people joining us on stage - people who follow the industry, comment on it, invest in it, and help companies get started. I'll post more on them soon. I hope you can join us.

When I recently decided to leave my job, I began a little personal project I called "100 Lunches." I wanted to sit down with a bunch of people over a meal and just listen. What was interesting to them these days? What where they building? Were they nervous about the state of the industry? Excited by all the new opportunity?

As I started the project, I quickly realized that the stories I was hearing needed a wider audience. My friends and colleagues told tales of late nights, harrowing server crashes, exhilarating growth, and touching emails from their users. Not one of them knew what they were getting into, nor would any of them change their paths.

Wouldn't it be great, I thought, if everyone could hear these amazing start up stories?

So I got together with my long-time friend and business partner Bryan Mason and started planning. We decided to get a great group of entrepreneurs, investors, and other people associated with new web companies together for a day of discussion and advice. And that's how the Start Conference came to be.

So here's the deal: On August 7, we'll spend the day at the beautiful Fort Mason Center talking about starting companies. We've got a lot of fun things planned, including a fantastic party on the Bay afterwards. And we're making it cheap - just $200. We didn't want to turn this into a conference filled with investors hunting for the next big thing. We wanted something for people who make web apps and dream of starting their own thing. (Also, we understand that you probably won't want to submit an expense report for a conference that encourages you to quit your job.)

If you've ever thought of staking out on your own, we hope you'll join us. It's going to be great fun.

All the details are on the Start Conference web site. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments here.

Isn't it nice to get reacquainted with an old friend?

This morning, the fine folks over at Wired relaunched Webmonkey. Somehow, they managed to pry it out of the dying hands of Lycos and revive it as a collaborative site based on MediaWiki. I couldn't be happier to see the site come back; I've just spent a nostalgic afternoon digging through everything that's there.

The original site was founded at HotWired back in 1996 by my friend June Cohen. She pulled a small team together and started publishing tutorials, news, and opinions about how to make the web. They asked me to write a column, which I did for a couple years, and eventually I joined them to redesign the site. I loved that project - it was one of the first sites we built that was dynamically driven through templates rather than as static HTML files - a real separation of content and presentation. It was a big deal for us back then, and it influenced a lot of my future work.

The new site is equally dynamic, but in a much more contemporary way. As a collaborative wiki, it embraces openness in a way that really resonates with the original mission of Webmonkey. The team wrote about it in the new site's introduction:

When Webmonkey debuted in 1996, the site was sort of a soapbox for HotWired's engineers and designers -- a place for them to evangelize emerging web standards, rate the newest browsers and demonstrate their bleeding-edge code hacks. Those engineers also produced stacks and stacks of tutorials on all aspects of building for the web. [...]

Faced with the prospect of going back into the archives to continuously update and rewrite the older articles, we decided to turn Webmonkey into a collaborative project. It was an easy decision.

I completely agree. And I'm thankful that we have another chapter to follow what really looked like the end.

You may not be familiar with the name Charles Joseph Minard, but it's likely you've seen his work. He served as a civil engineer in 19th century France and developed an interest in cartography later in life. In particular, he was intrigued with showing variable data on maps - how quantities of shipped goods moved along waterways, for example, and later troop movements in military maneuvers.

Minard started drawing in his mid 60s and didn't create his most famous work until he was 80 years old. In it, he shows the progression of Napoleon and his army to Moscow and back in the campaign of 1812. This chart was renown as a masterpiece of economy and insight, and imortalized in Edward Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" - a virtual bible for information design since its publication 26 years ago. Tufte even sells the chart in poster form from his web site, making it a staple in designers' cubes at nearly every creative office I've ever visited.

So I was researching Minard a bit more deeply for a presentation I've been giving and came across the following quote. In it, he talks about his "carte figuratives" - a phrase referring to his particular style of data visualization mixed with geography:

"The aim of my carte figurative is ... to convey promptly to the eye the relation not given quickly by numbers requiring mental calculation."

I really like how this idea of making something visually apparent while reducing intellectual work - a sort of cognitive ergonomics. Minard was suggesting that stories and meaning can be found in any collection of data. It's up to us to uncover those stories and tell them clearly and accurately.

It's a strong lesson for much of the work we do today. Much like the patterns in data visualization, designers seek out stories and meaning when crafting interfaces. Well designed sites "convey promptly to the eye" what's possible, while doing so intuitively as to avoid "requiring mental calculation." That's not to say we should treat people as stupid. Rather, we should help them focus on what they're trying to do, rather than struggle with the means for achieving it.

Or, another way, don't make me think.

Today marks my last day at Google and an end to a truly remarkable period in my life. If feels like just yesterday we were signing the papers, telling our friends, and announcing to the world that our team had been acquired.

We were nervous, of course. Acquisitions can be tricky - different cultures, different values, different technology platforms can all conspire against successfully merging companies. But moving to Google couldn't have been a better fit. We immediately jumped into the Analytics team and started working with them on a redesign of their product. Their openness to rethink every aspect of the app still amazes me. It's one of the most meaningful professional collaborations I've experienced in my career.

I also had the opportunity to work with Google's User Experience Team - a shockingly talented and effective group of designers and researchers. I wish I could talk about all the amazing things they're working on; all the ways they're changing how we'll connect to the world's information and to each other.

The decision to leave was a tough one. Google clearly is an amazing company to work for. After consulting with many companies during my time at Adaptive Path, it's clear that Google is like no other: they move fast, think clearly, and push strategic decisions out to the people closest to their users. But in my career, I've always swung between the big and the small and it's time for another shift.

So what's next for me? I've got a couple of small projects in the works, but mostly I'm going to take a little break, travel a bit, and catch up on some serious miles on my bike. It's been a crazy couple years ... I could use a nap.

There's a job opening posted over on the Adaptive Path blog that's particularly interesting - they are hiring a CEO. Considering the company's commitment to openness and transparency, it doesn't surprise me to see them conduct this search in such a public way.

I haven't had a desk there for over two years now, but I still keep very close ties. It has been exciting to watch how my former partners Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett have grown the company while hanging on to the core values we started with. They' will continue to serve as co-presidents of the company, but with a new emphasis on the content of their work. I like the way Peter talks about the change:

I tend to think about it as "What do you geek out to?" When I geek out, it's to experience design practice, events programming, supporting the team. I don't geek out to Running A Business. We're looking for someone who geeks out to Running A Business, and who appreciates the impact that design can bring to the world.

If you know someone (or are someone) who would excel at this opportunity, contact Bryan Mason, Adaptive Path's COO, at bryan dot mason at adaptivepath dot com.