As they say, a rose between thorns.
Ingredients for a Beautiful Page
So many spot on tips for making your page vroom
Amy Lu
has a fantastic about.me page, let’s take a moment to understand why. Read below for a breakdown of the page including tips on the best use of a free about.me page.
Background
The background image is a photo with nice ‘depth of field‘. Amy’s face draws the eye, while the out-of-focus cityscape behind her remains blurred and less distracting. The page is about Amy, so a sharply focused image helps to convey her personality. The smile helps too!
Name and Headline
The name and headline are easy to read in a clear and simple font. Generally, people are accustomed to reading black and white text. There’s no need to get overly colorful with your text. Before making your page flashy, remember that the best pages are simple, clear, and easy to read.
Colors and Design
Amy does a great job of making her bio readable. The accent color on…
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Swimming for Literacy
This is such a great, inspiring story from about.me/susanmoody. #INSPIRED
This summer, my husband, a close friend and I decided to try to swim from Europe to Africa to raise $100,000 for Worldreader. Worldreader is a non-profit that eradicates illiteracy by delivering a digital library to the world’s poorest people. Our thinking was this: how can educational opportunities between two continents be so vastly different if they’re so close that we can swim there?”
I can’t imagine my life if I didn’t have access to books growing up. Watching my two daughters grow up tri-lingual, I’ve seen up close how they’ve made sense of their world through books. Until a couple of years ago, I didn’t know that there is a book-famine in the developing world. Books simply don’t arrive, and there are over 200 million children in Africa who will never have a book of their own!
Take a moment to think about it: books are heavy, expensive…
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Invite Your Friends
Awesome to see this go live!
Now you can easily invite friends to join about.me. When a friend signs up, we’ll feature your page for everyone to see.
If you’ve been paying close attention to the site, you may have noticed the recent appearance of our invite page. After some extra testing, we’re excited to launch a clean and simple way to invite your friends.
It’s fun to see how people you know present themselves on about.me. You might even discover shared passions (you love needlepoint too!?!) or even connect in a new way or on a new service.
You’ll get featured; more exposure can help grow followers, promote your work, or help you connect with professional and creative collaborators.
But more importantly you’ll show your friends an easy way to express their unique personality identity on the web.
Thank You for an Amazing Year!
Wondering how we did in our first year returning to being an independent company – what a year it was!
It’s our anniversary, and what a first year we had. After buying back about.me, we put so much love into the service, adding Compliments, Collections & Replies, all displayed in a beautiful People Feed that shows you who is interested in you and people you have things in common.
Many of us have been lucky to be involved with great companies (WordPress, MakerBot, Blue Bottle Coffee, True Ventures, Adaptive Path, etc) that embrace openness in sharing their numbers – openness is core to us at about.me and we’d like to share our one year progress:
For our anniversary, help us celebrate by updating your page or sending someone a compliment – hopefully you’ll like what you see.
One last thing: our whole team is plugged in almost 24/7 to reply to your questions and feedback. Whether you need help, have an idea, or just want to say “hello”, we’ll…
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Featured Friday #FFaboutme
I love our Follow Friday series – always great to discover new, awesome people on about.me
Happy Friday! The pages today show off informative bios, display creative work, and share personal interests; all the things that make you unique!
Take a look at other great examples below. Click on each image to see their full page, and remember to leave a compliment when you do! Be sure to also check out Helsinki based photographer Anna Jarske featured in the blog post’s header image.
Don’t see your page here? Give it another try next week. We review them all, but it’s impossible to fit every great page in the blog post!
Make sure your about.me link is in the appropriate section of you twitter bio, and tweet the hashtag #FFaboutme for a chance to be selected next time.
Good luck, and feel free to share you page in the comments below!
Blue Bottle Coffee Growth Round
We’re thrilled about today’s Blue Bottle Coffee news that they’ve raised a $25M growth round of capital. It’s an incredible step forward for founder James Freeman, Chairman Bryan Meehan, Blue Bottle’s amazing Baristas, team and investors. You can read James’ post here & Kara’s post here.
At True, we’ve been incredibly lucky to partner with amazing leaders, mainly in the tech world (Matt Mullenweg at WordPress, Chris Anderson at 3DR, Ayah Bdeir at Little Bits, Bre Pettis at MakerBot, James Park at FitBit, Philip Rosedale at High Fidelity, there are many many more…). What we’ve learned from these inspiring Founders is they do more than just create companies, these type of Founders, they start movements – it’s envisioning a way of life – it’s visionary, a vision of how the world will be in spite of how people do things now (remember when we carried around maps…) and it’s having a sense in your mind, knowing how people are going to use your product to impact their life is what makes it Visionary, and through that vision a movement is sometimes sparked.
When we met James – it was instantly clear that Blue Bottle Coffee isn’t just about coffee drinks, it’s about so much more. What we saw and why we got involved, is that James and his team are part of a handful of people who are founding a movement around coffee. It’s not just the very specific experience around the coffee Blue Bottle roasts, it’s everything they do from the the way they source the product, supporting farmers in developing regions of the world to grow the purest, highest quality organic beans that promote sustainability, the way they choose store locations that often acts as a vote of confidence for a developing neighborhood, how they serve the product [what cup, what glass, what temperature, single origin beans versus blended bean mixes, espresso drinks only on premise….] – thinking through every detail to offer something beautiful in our daily lives – it’s a philosophy/ an approach that has led to a movement around the integrity of experience around coffee.
It fits into a larger movement we’re all experiencing right now around a greater integrity in the experiences that we already have in our daily lives – we’re not just satisfied to have a meal, we want that meal to have greater integrity and be more aligned with our values, to know where the food is coming from, we want it to have a certain type of quality – this is happening in all aspects of life, we don’t just want to work for a living, we want to make a difference.
Our original investment in James, Blue Bottle and their team was a fairly straight-forward, easy decision given the company’s rapid growth, loyal following, founder vision, management team and potential for broader appeal – we see tremendous opportunity to grow this business in a manner that adheres to the principles it was founded. We believe Blue Bottle Coffee is at the forefront of a “consumer movement” or mega-trend in which consumers are moving to higher quality, artisanal, micro-roasters of coffee, where quality, attention to detail, beauty, and a distinctive experience are being sought over more mainstream alternatives. In addition, we believe the Blue Bottle Coffee brand and products appeal to — and are accessible to — a large audience of coffee drinkers who are increasingly interested in expanding their appreciation for fine coffee.
Raising a cup of excellence to all involved!
