Category: Q & A

I bought a single 10×10 pixel square for deano.com way back in the day… And for years, even that tiny, microscopic, and ill-placed square was delivering me a daily hit or two.
(Yes, people still click on mine… can you find it?)

I just checked the logs… and sure enough, this past month, I've received 2 hits from milliondollarhomepage.com.

I can only imagine what the initial traffic in years 1-2 would've been for companies with larger block ads… I tried to get the company I worked for to go in on a 3×6 banner… I'm guessing it would've been the best $1800 the company ever spent on internet marketing.

Overall, I'd say everyone "got" a decent return on investment, but that by and large, there probably are only 10-20 sites left getting any significant daily hit count from it. Still, that's a spend paid for ONCE, 6 years ago, for basically perpetual traffic being driven. Pretty amazing investment, if you ask me.

Did advertisers who bought on milliondollarhomepage.com get a decent return on their investment?

This question seems to overcomplicate matters – the best use of gamification in taxation would be to simplify the game ruleset to allow for "more efficient/enjoyable play".

Still, to stick with the question as asked – if the process of doing taxes actually assisted people in learning more about their current and future financial health, that might make the "game" more fun. One possible example of this are online tax prep services like turbotax.com – which provides help with confusing line items, as well as vaguely-useful advice on how to improve one's position in the current and future tax years.

It doesn't get all the way to fun, but I think that's largely due to the overall complexity/length of the process before any positive feedback is given (other than a constantly-changing "amount owed" figure up top, which can certainly help if it's in the 'refund' column).

When gamification hides market signals, is this necessarily a bad thing?

If there's one thing I learned in school, it's this:

Use 18 point Geneva, and you'll get credit for a full page (or, in this case, a full back piece?)

In seriousness, though, your best bet is to ask for good places to find interesting/unique/appealing typefaces in general, rather than a specific face for a specific tattoo – which is actually going to depend a lot on size, skin tone, and the skill of your artist.

A few places I'd advise looking at:

fontshop.com
veer.com
itcfonts.com

And, of course, reading good graphic design and font-focused blogs/sites until you start to really get a feel for how something like a ligature might resonate with the quote you've chosen.

I'm having a quote from one of my favourite stories tattooed on my arm but I want a really cool typeface for it. Can you suggest good places I can find interesting/unique/appealing typefaces?

Hands-down, my choice would be Quantum and Woody.

Amazing mix of serious action super-heroism, and slapstick comedy… Not over the top, but over the top of the top, or something. I really can't do it justice here without ruining it… Let's just call it the Lethal Weapon of Superhero comics, and leave it at that…
(Er… I guess they agree with me!)

A parody of just about every major comic cliché, Quantum and Woody somehow still managed to deliver the goods every time (up to cancellation, anyway). It always made me laugh and think, which is something a whole lot of Hollywood movies could use these days.
(Also, goats. Hollywood needs more goat movies.)

Suffice to say, it's the only comic I ever started a letter campaign to get Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes to make it their fourth reunion pic. Both could handle the action, and the comedy. These days, this option looks better and better – come on, guys, something has to pay for all that weed and taxes, non?

What are the best comic books that have not yet been made into movies?

The reason is simple:

The latest version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, may (or may not) lack some feature of OS X Lion required to run iTunes Match. Given that Snow Leopard runs both iTunes and the Mac App Store just fine, I'm not sure what such features would be, and it seems unlikely it will be a Lion-only feature on release (at least parts of iCloud, including the iTunes re-download support, certainly aren't).

The latest version of Windows – Windows 7 – is basically the same as Windows Vista, and both OS versions run all the same third party apps, including Apple's iTunes Match. If someone has a convenient and thought-provoking list of apps (not DRIVERS) that are Windows 7-exclusive (and not made by Microsoft), please let me know…

Long story short, it's not that Windows has a feature Mac OS X lacks, but rather that currently writing Vista and Windows 7 apps aren't two separate processes for developers… It's exaggeration to say Windows 7 is just a patch for Vista, but in terms of large-scale under the hood changes, there just aren't many.

Why is iTunes Match for Vista and Windows 7 but not Snow Leopard?