The folks behind the book Business Model Generation, Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, have come up with a business “handbook” that is not only user-friendly, helpful and applicable—but brilliant from a business model perspective.

Before launching the book, they created an innovative business model that includes some interesting ways to generate money, a unique visual design approach and a targeted marketing plan. Not only have I enjoyed the book and applied its insights to Malenke | Barnhart, but I also love the model behind it.

The business book publishing space is incredibly competitive and has a horrible reputation for producing puffery. With thousands of business books published per year, many of which fail, they had to do something really different to climb above the clutter. What I have noticed, and they certainly overcame, were common business book pitfalls. Most business books are:

• Boring
• Text heavy
• Too light on visuals
• Lacking in visual design
• Not applicable
• Not tactical
• Too theoretical
• Not modern or fresh
• Fluffy
• Too heady

Here is what they did to create a best-seller:

Made it highly profitable
470 people from 45 countries paid to be a part of the book. Initially they paid around $24, and that quickly scaled to $450 per person–just to be acknowledged in the book. This helped pay for the design and production. They then self-published.

Made it highly visual
With funds raised by the contributors, the authors were able to hire a talented illustrator and designer to create a book full of graphics that appeal to visual people—which is most people. The pages are filled with graphics that tell a story much quicker than a slew of words ever could.  The book is actually fun to read, and most importantly— easy to put to immediate use.

Made it highly usable
The “handbook” is based around the “Business Model Canvas”, a highly usable template for building a business model from the ground up. The template is downloadable from the book site, and there is also an iPad app to help facilitate the process. The canvas helps businesses quickly evaluate current models as well as establish new ones.

The model is based on nine building blocks:

1. Customer Segments
2. Customer Relationships
3. Channels
4. Value Proposition
5. Revenue Streams
6. Cost Structure
7. Key Partners
8. Key Activities
9. Key Resources

Made it highly marketable
The creators gave away the “Business Model Canvas” and a 72-page portion of the book for free. They created numerous channels for marketing: Alex’s website, the book website, Alex’s blog and numerous YouTube videos,  which share the vision of the book.  There are now seminars, conferences and webinars surrounding the “Business Model Canvas” concept. They have a huge unpaid sales staff in the form of consultants and conference speakers using the canvas in their material all over the world. Brilliant.

This book is a must-read for leaders, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, innovators, startups, strategists and consultants.

A few good links:
http://www.businessmodelalchemist.com
http://alexosterwalder.com/
http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com

Another interesting business model:

App Cooker: http://www.appcooker.com/Overview.php
This is a great tool for managing iPad and iPhone development, but what is interesting here is the pricing model. They have created a sense of urgency with a “sliding scale” pricing model. For a limited time, the product is discounted at $19.99, then it will scale to $49.99 as they release new features and reach milestones. But if you lock in now, you get the discounted price. What a great way to get some critical mass and some much-needed funds flowing.

We were lucky to be able to work with Denver Zoo to create Zoo Lights 2010 campaign. Of the three concepts we presented, they chose the “Ode to the Nostalgic” design. The campaign centers on capturing the awe of Denver Zoo’s magical winter wonderland with a father and his daughter enjoying the over two million holiday lights and animal sculptures. The key element in the creative is the imagery, and we searched for the right pairing of people and lighting through various stock image libraries, unsuccessfully.

It was important to have a close-up of the child’s and parent’s face to engage the audience with an emotional image. “I want my child to enjoy this experience and I want to be able to share it with them.” We are lucky to have an amateur photographer enthusiast (who doubles as our Flash Guru) on staff, and as a result, we were able to keep all the photography in-house and keep the costs low. We used our own lighting equipment, props and models. The images were shot with a Canon EOS 5D Mark III SLR, and we think the final image captured the nostalgic and soft feeling we were looking for. Being able to provide our clients with some in-house photography when needed helps to cut costs and get the shot we need without sacrificing quality. Once again, Denver Zoo Lights was a great success, and we are looking forward to hopefully working with Denver Zoo for the 2011 Zoo Lights.

If an App Is Your Content Strategy, You Are Doomed

Bloomberg takes a look at newspapers and magazines that considered the iPad their savior.

Storyboarding iPad Transitions

Greg Nudelman walks through the amazing detail of iPad (and iPhone) animations and shares his thoughts on how to document their design for developers.

How To Build A Mobile Website

This deep dive from Smashing Magazine includes a lot of often-overlooked details of implementing a mobile website.

Progressive Signup: A Better User Signup Process

QuietWrite segments their users by step of the sign-up process to provide a low-effort account creation flow.

This Shell by the Gamits

Similar to what the Arcade Fire did a while back with incorporating video and HTML5, this hit the webs recently. It was created by some very cool folks at Legwork Studios as well as the Denver band, The Gamits.

Controlling text size in Safari for iOS without disabling user zoom

456 Berea Street takes a look at the intricacies of text scaling and orientation changes on iOS.

iOS Icons Made in Pure CSS

A stunning collection of iOS icon replications made purely with CSS. Be sure to use a webkit browser to check these out.

Learn HTML5, JavaScript and CSS With Mozilla’s Free “School of Webcraft”

Mashable runs down Mozilla’s expansion of their School of Webcraft to 30 classes.

Five UX antipatterns to avoid when designing Log-in & Registration areas

Harry Brignull uses real-world examples to remind us what NOT to do when designing log-in and registration flows.

Apple engineer re-creates ancient computer with Legos

I remember using a computer to control Lego models back in school. Now the computer itself is made of Legos!

Mies van der Rohe Society

An appropriately stunning website for one of history’s greatest designers.

Telescopic Text

A new take on “progressive reveal”.

With the recent release of the new Twitter website, it was time for Malenke | Barnhart to create ourselves a slunky (slick and funky) new design.

The first step to designing for Twitter is to understand the flexible layout of the site. As it turns out, the main tweets column is the only fixed-width element on the page. The right column, and left and right margins, scale with the browser window. On the plus side, there are some PSD templates available to help guide your design across 1024, 1280, 1440 and 1600 pixel widths.

In any Twitter design, you can configure the background image, text and link colors. The background image is always anchored to the upper-left of the window. We took advantage of this constraint to display M|B contact information in the upper-left corner of the background image so it is easily visible to all. More…

iPhone and iPad now support TrueType font embedding. This is huge.

Jeffery Zeldman offers a quick run-down on TrueType support in iOS 4.2.

Elsewhere in the iOS Fonts world…

iOS Fonts tries to maintain a list of the fonts supported on the iPhone and iPad.

Google and Microsoft cheat on Slow-Start. Should you?

Ben Strong provides some interesting investigation on how Microsoft, Google and others violate RFC-3390 to decrease page load time.

Editorial SEO: Get an introduction and best practices.

An overview of SEO tactics for writers and editors by Rob Flaherty.

Farbzauber

Fun JavaScript technique for creating coloring book versions of your image.

Why professional logo design does not cost $5.

Jacob Cass explores what kind of logo you can get at what cost.

Design for content management systems.

Smashing Magazine offers some tips on optimizing your website design for a content management system.

Find your way with static maps.

Guidance from 24 Ways on implementing static maps using the same techniques you use for dynamic maps (and why you might want to do such a thing).

University websites do it all.

Based on our experience in the higher-education space, XKCD hit close to home.

Review the history of CSS Resets.

It doesn’t seem like CSS Resets have been around that long, but Michael Tuck starts a three-part series on them with a great history.

Ben the Bodyguard brings news.

Awesome site introducing a forthcoming app for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Chrome 7 overtakes IE7 to become the world’s third most-used browser.

Sitepoint’s latest data shows that Chrome is rapidly gaining usage.

Firefox Live streams warm fuzzies.

Finishing up with the cutest additions to the Web community this week, courtesy of the Mozilla Foundation.

For years, Web designers had two choices when it came to choosing fonts for their sites: Web safe or graphical fonts.  There are obvious benefits and limitations with each one, and today there are also simple options that capture the benefits of both choices. Before diving into what these are, let’s take a small step back and find out why these new options are needed and long overdue. More…

Inspiration. Where does it come from? How do we get it? Creatives are always in search of the next great idea. Often we turn to CA, TheFWA, Smashingmag, the geniuses at Adaptive Path or the insights of Jared Spool and his cohorts. But sometimes it helps to close the laptop, power down the iPad and hit the street. Some of my best creative jumpstarts have come in the most unexpected places. Here is a list of local road trips that have gotten me out of the Aeron chair, on my bike, on my feet or in the car finding inspiration in a less digital format. More…

Welcome to the M|Blog!

At Malenke | Barnhart, we’ve long clamored for a company blog–a place where we can all take part in sharing what we know and engaging with our peers, clients and friends to learn what we don’t. We’ve been around for 9 years now–through two recessions–which means we’ve created a name for ourselves and had LOTS of great clients to work with. As anyone in the agency world knows, though, client work comes before agency work…so it’s now 2010 when we’re finally launching our blog! More…

Montreal based indie rock band, Arcade Fire, have joined up with Google to created a site that uses the band’s new music to showcase the potential of HTML5 and the Google Chrome browser in some creative ways.

http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/