Fernco Donut Size Chart

The second huge counter-intuitive truth I had to learn was the incredible power of constraints. The other eighty percent was defining its behavior in the real world—the part that goes into the manual. The accompanying text is not a short, punchy bit of marketing copy; it is a long, dense, and deeply persuasive paragraph, explaining the economic benefits of the machine, providing testimonials from satisfied customers, and, most importantly, offering an ironclad money-back guarantee. The online catalog had to overcome a fundamental handicap: the absence of touch. His concept of "sparklines"—small, intense, word-sized graphics that can be embedded directly into a line of text—was a mind-bending idea that challenged the very notion of a chart as a large, separate illustration. I imagined spending my days arranging beautiful fonts and picking out color palettes, and the end result would be something that people would just inherently recognize as "good design" because it looked cool.