Busy week again at Mendeley HQ, so just a few short notes of what we’ve been up to. Besides Mike joining us – and of course ongoing development work on both Mendeley Desktop and Mendeley Web – we’re still on the lookout for a new office.

We did see a few interesting ones, such as an old abandoned jewellers’ workshop in a house full of gold and diamond traders close to Farringdon. The place was oozing character (and big safes hidden behind the shelves) while being relatively affordable, but it was in dire need of refurbishment which most likely couldn’t have been completed in time for our moving.

Unrelatedly, I wanted to show you an interesting bit pertaining to the design of Mendeley. Yesterday, I set out to create the new default profile picture shown on a researcher’s web profile before an own photo is uploaded. This is how it went down:

You may notice that I’m certainly not an artist and that I couldn’t draw a straight line if my life depended on it. However, a certain co-founder of mine is even worse. That’s why Paul and I do most of the design work on Mendeley.

As a researcher, you’ve certainly heard the phrase that research is “10% inspiration and 90% perspiration”. I believe that this ratio might be skewed even more heavily towards perspiration when you’re designing things – because it will almost never look good on the first attempt. Case in point: Getting to a decent-looking profile picture didn’t just take the five attempts above, but at least another 20 unsightly failures.

For the 10% inspiration part, I’d recommend heading over to Smashing Magazine – they’re simply amazing.