john:
I should log out more.The new Why Tumblr page is off.the.hook.
Excuse me while I gush for a moment.
Not too long ago Christopher wrote about how Tumblr’s Markdown support was “the very first thing that gave me that ‘oh shit, cool’ feeling about Tumblr”. This “Why you’ll love Tumblr” page is one of those moments for me.
As an engineer whose design abilities have barely progressed beyond the <h1>, I see things like this and just feel wholly inadequate. It’s true, as Steve Jobs says, that “it’s not just what it looks and feels like… design is how it works”, but there is an enormous difference between a tool that works well and a tool that works beautifully well.
I’m regularly blown away by the simply absurd level of polish at the Tumblr shop. You can scour the site to the depths of the account settings section or even the API documentation and not find a single page that hasn’t been exhaustively finished and re-finished. The same goes for engineering features you can’t see, such as when you post from your phone and don’t see a “sent from my iPhone” sig at the bottom of your post, or when you page through your dashboard without having new posts alter the pagination.
But this page really hammers the point home: logged-in users won’t see it unless they go looking for it, and new users are still a click away from this page when signing up. Yet it has a jaw-dropping level of polish: there isn’t a pixel out of place; the signup form is exquisite; there’s even a sick tumblelog collage built entirely out of JavaScript. It’s apparent that the operating prinicple at Tumblr is that if so much as one set of eyeballs is going to see something it better look damn good.
Seriously, compare this to landing pages at Blogger, TypePad, Wordpress, Twitter, and Posterous, and it’s almost like you’ve got to be wearing beer goggles to sign up for those other services.
