It's like a message board with a brain. And it's as easy to use as our paper Post-it Notes. Post-it Digital Notes is a simple to use software that lets you make and organize lists, plan projects step by step, sort your notes by category, personalize messages with photos, even set alarms to remind you of appointments or key dates. It's a quick and easy way to manage your busy life. See how simple it is to use Post-it Digital Notes software. Or learn how to buy Post-it Digital Notes software online.

The Post-it note is a piece of stationery with a re-adherable strip of adhesive on the back, designed for temporarily attaching notes to documents and to other surfaces. walls, desks and table-tops, computer displays, and so forth. While now available in a wide range of colors, shapes, and sizes, the most common size of Post-it note is a 3-inch (76mm) square, canary yellow in color (however they can be other colours). The notes use a unique low-tack adhesive that enables Post-it notes to be easily attached and removed without leaving marks or residue, unless used on white boards. It was invented by 3M's Art Fry using an adhesive developed by a colleague, Spencer Silver. Until the 1990s, when the patent expired, Post-it notes were only produced in the 3M plant in Cynthiana, Kentucky. Although other companies now produce them, most of the world's Post-it notes are still made in Cynthiana. The name "Post-it" and the canary yellow color are trademarks of 3M. Accepted generic terms for competitors include "sticky notes" or "repositionable" or "repositional notes." 3M manufactures other products related to the Post-it note concept, leveraging the success of the brand. Computerized versions of Post-it notes include 3M's own "Post-it Software Notes," and Apple's "Stickies."

A year later Post-its were launched in Canada and Europe. Post-It Notes are produced exclusively at the 3M plant in Cynthiana, KY

In 2003, the company came out with Post-it Super Sticky notes, with a stronger glue that adheres better to vertical and non-smooth surfaces

Standard post-it notes have only partial adhesive coating on the back, along one edge. Similar products are used for specialized purposes with full adhesive coating. the US Post Office uses such yellow address labels to forward mail.

In 2004, Paola Antonelli, a curator of architecture and design, included Post-it notes in a show entitled "Humble Masterpieces." Rebecca Murtaugh is a California artist who uses Post-it notes in her artwork. In 2001, she created an installation in her bedroom using $1000 worth of Post-it notes. She covered the whole room in Post-it notes, using the ordinary yellow for objects she saw as having less value, and neon colors for more important objects, such as the bed.

Since 2002 Jésica López from Monterrey, Mexico (1979), has been painting series of figures and portraits with acrylic on Post-it notes to depict, for instance, the faces of the so called "101 most powerful women" of the "Forbes" list of 2006. Some artists create entire murals of colored Post-It notes. In 2000 the 20th anniversary of Post-it notes was celebrated by having artists create their artwork on Post-it notes. One note that was made by artist R. B. Kitaj sold for £640 in an auction, making it the most valuable Post-it note on record.

In 2003 the Post-it Note was a central role in a new play titled Inside a Bigger Box that premiered in New York at the 78th Street Theatre Lab (written by Trish Harnetiaux and directed by Jude Domski.) In conjunction with the show Harnetiaux, Domski and the artist non-profit NurtureART curated an International Post-it Note Art exhibit and a panel discussion took place with various artists. Post-it Note inventor Art Fry participated in the panel which was curated by current MOMA head of design Paola Antonelli.

Post-it Software Notes Lite us. Post-it Software Notes Lite us. Post-it Software Notes Lite us. Post-it Software Notes - Lite us. Post-it Software Notes Lite us. Post-it Software Notes 2.0 Post-it Software Notes 1.5

Solve problems, create solutions and find answers fastall with the help of Post-it® Notes. Tens of millions of Post-it® Notes users can now learn how to do far more with these great little tools.

In 1977, test-markets failed to show consumer interest. However in 1980, 3M implemented a massive consumer sampling strategy, and the Post-it® note took off.

Today Post-it Notes are one of the five top-selling office products in the United States, and Dr. Silver's flubber is now the basis for more than 200 products.

[Five Neon Colors, 14 100-Sheet Pads/pack, 1.41 LBS] From. Post-it® 130 more matching item(s) in Pads / Self-Stick Note

[Four Aquatic Colors, 12 90-Sheet Pads/pack, 0.61 LBS] From. Post-it® 130 more matching item(s) in Pads / Self-Stick Note

[Four Aquatic Colors, Five 90-Sheet Pads/pack, 0.50 LBS] From. Post-it® 130 more matching item(s) in Pads / Self-Stick Note

[Four Aquatic Colors, Five 90-Sheet Pads/pack, 0.83 LBS] From. Post-it® 130 more matching item(s) in Pads / Self-Stick Note

[1-1/2 x 2, Assorted, 24 50-Sheet Pads/pack, 1 LBS] From. Post-it® 130 more matching item(s) in Pads / Self-Stick Note

[Black, 2.33 LBS] From. Post-it® 17 more matching item(s) in Desk Accessories / Self-Stick Note Holders

[Five Neon Colors, Five 100 Sheet Pads/pack, 0.50 LBS] From. Post-it® 130 more matching item(s) in Pads / Self-Stick Note

[Aqua Wave, Lavender Mist, Neptune, 3 90-Sheet Pads/pack, 0.77 LBS] From. Post-it® 130 more matching item(s) in Pads / Self-Stick Note

[Five Neon Colors, Five 100-Sheet Pads/pack, 0.58 LBS] From. Post-it® 130 more matching item(s) in Pads / Self-Stick Note

[Four Colors, 24 90-Sheet Pads/pack, 2 LBS] From. Post-it® 130 more matching item(s) in Pads / Self-Stick Note

[Four Neon Colors, 12 100-Sheet pads/pack, 0.41 LBS] From. Post-it® 130 more matching item(s) in Pads / Self-Stick Note

[3 x 3, Five Colors, 14 100-Sheet Pads/pack, 1.41 LBS] From. Post-it® 130 more matching item(s) in Pads / Self-Stick Note

[3 x 3, Assorted, 24 50-Sheet Pads/pack, 3 LBS] From. Post-it® 130 more matching item(s) in Pads / Self-Stick Note

[3 x 5, Five Colors, Five 100-Sheet Pads/pack, 0.87 LBS] From. Post-it® 130 more matching item(s) in Pads / Self-Stick Note

[Breast Cancer Awareness, 3 x 3, 3 75-Sht pads/pk, 0.25 LBS] From. Post-it® 130 more matching item(s) in Pads / Self-Stick Note

[3 x 5, Five Colors, Five 100-Sheets Pads/pack, 0.83 LBS] From. Post-it® 130 more matching item(s) in Pads / Self-Stick Note

[2 x 2, Assorted Ultra Colors, 3 400-Sheet Pads/pks, 0.55 LBS] From. Post-it® 130 more matching item(s) in Pads / Self-Stick Note

[Ruled, 3 x 5, Assorted, 180 Cards/pack, 1 LBS] From. Post-it® 130 more matching item(s) in Pads / Self-Stick Note

2006 3M, all rights reserved|Legal Information|Policy Information3M, Post-it, the color Canary Yellow, There's a note for that, Pop 'n Jot, Scotch and Littmann are trademarks of 3M.

Product Description Problem Solved! Uses your favorite top-drawer tool—.the Post-it®. Note. Great for individuals, great for groups—.large or small. Problems come in all shapes and sizes, yet most have common characteristics that can be addressed with the techniques found in this book. Rapid Problem-Solving with Post-it®. Notes shows you how to use six types of techniques. The Post-up—.Provides methods for getting information into chunks The Swap Sort—.Shows listing and organization methods The Top-down Tree—.Works when the nature of the problem is unknown The Information Map—.Maps messy problems and complex relationships The Action Map—.Plans actions or maps an existing process More than 70 diagrams and examples for solving everyday problems. This refreshing book reminds us the simplest ideas are often the most effective. Solve problems, create solutions and find answers fast—.all with the help of Post-it®. Notes. Tens of millions of Post-it®. Notes users can now learn how to do far more with these great little tools. Post-it®. Notes can be used to help solve difficult problems because they. Are the right size to hold one piece of information from a problem Are easily to attached to flat surfaces and stay put Can be moved and reattached many times About the Author David Straker, MS, is a quality consultant with Hewlett Packard, UK, where he researches, writes, teaches and consults on business methods. His previous experience includes teaching, managing, engineering and marketing. This is his third book.

As an IT Consultant I am always looking for different methods to solve problems. I found this book to be simple but yet valuable. When I first started reading this book it took me back to a book called Visualizing Project Management where the authors Forsberg, Mooz and Cotterman use the process of Cards on the Wall technique to encourage group thinking and visually determine dependencies. This book introduces an effective way to solve problems with Post-it® Note. It starts off by showing simple key principles. (1) Chunking. capturing small information of data, (2) Problem Patterns, arranging and determining relationships, (3) Guiding decisions and keeping clear objectives, and (4) the *FOG* factor (Facts, Opinions, Guesses). The core of the book provides 6 easy to use methods. (1) Post up, (2) Swap sort, (3) Top-down Tree, (4) Bottom-up Tree, (5) Information map and (6) Action Map. Note that Information map has nothing to do with Information Mapping®, which is both a registered trademark and different method owned by Information Mapping, Inc. These methods are represented graphically with many examples to help you determine which method is best suited to find the solution for complex problems. What I found most helpful in this book was the step-by-step procedures in every chapter. Every method has a clear definition of what it is and how and when it should be used. Grasping these methods will paint a clear picture towards the direction of a solution. I recommend this book to those that are looking for an effective, yet simple, way of solving problems.

A quick way to organise your ever flowing thoughts. This is a great book to manage and organise big or little thoughts of yours onto Post-It notes. Then attempts to show you how to put this in some sense of order that helps you to.

Rapid Problem Solving with Post-It Notes (Purchased on 11/12/2006 I have not recieved the book. I vant you to find out why te delivery is so slow.

Simple, common powerful techniques. organized. Don't get fooled by the title, this is about using Post-It notes but the core of the book can be used easily without them.

Post-it notes may have been a God-sendliterally. In the early 1970s, Art Fry was in search of a bookmark for his church hymnal that would neither fall out nor damage the hymnal. Fry noticed that a colleague at 3M, Dr. Spencer Silver, had developed an adhesive that was strong enough to stick to surfaces, but left no residue after removal and could be repositioned. Fry took some of Dr. Silvers adhesive and applied it along the edge of a piece of paper. His church hymnal problem was solved!

Fry soon realized that his "bookmark" had other potential functions when he used it to leave a note on a work file, and co-workers kept dropping by, seeking "bookmarks" for their offices. This "bookmark" was a new way to communicate and to organize. 3M Corporation crafted the name Post-it note for Frys bookmarks and began production in the late 70s for commercial use.

In 1977, test-markets failed to show consumer interest. However in 1979, 3M implemented a massive consumer sampling strategy, and the Post-it note took off. Today, we see Post-it notes peppered across files, computers, desks, and doors in offices and homes throughout the country. From a church hymnal bookmark to an office and home essential, the Post-it note has colored the way we work.

Art Fry and Spencer Silver In the 1970s, Art Fry invented the Post-it Note. But he could not have created this without the previous invention of his colleague, Spencer Silver.

Damon has been playing tricks on me for a few days now. So I came in on the weekend and did some "re-decorating" in his office. He didn't see it until Monday morning when he came in and walked into his office. His office blinds were closed, his door was shut and locked with this post-it right in the middle. It says "Can you pick up some more post-its, we're running low"..) Damon was confused. He orders the office supplies and knew that we had plenty of post-it notes.

Solve problems, create solutions and find answers fastall with the help of Post-it® Notes. Tens of millions of Post-it® Notes users can now learn how to do far more with these great little tools.

In 1977, test-markets failed to show consumer interest. However in 1980, 3M implemented a massive consumer sampling strategy, and the Post-it® note took off.

Today Post-it Notes are one of the five top-selling office products in the United States, and Dr. Silver's flubber is now the basis for more than 200 products.

To get enough of the colors needed, we had to buy about 14,000 post-it notes. This is what 14,000 post-it notes look like. Assembly. (all night shots are Jo Chou) More assembly pictures. Some daytime shots Contact. inioiniogmail. com

What we did to Walt's Jaguar in the parking garage on Friday (not that I was there or anything.). UPDATE 1 (2006). I am amazed at how these photos have taken off, with hundreds of thousands of visitors to this page. They have been blogged all over the world and were featured as the Yahoo! Pick of the Day and on ABC World News. Read the story or View the ABC News Video. UPDATE 2 (2008). After all the completely free publicity we generated for the folks from 3M Post-Its, they contacted me asking if they could use these photos on their Post It Notes back-to-school store merchandising this summer. When I asked what their budget was, they wrote back and said they didn't want to pay to use the photos. Instead, they copied what we'd done, took their own photos, and used them to create a national marketing campaign. So if you saw this in a store, you saw a copy created by 3M. UPDATE 3 (2008). Oh my, it doesn't die. Links to some sites discussing 3M's marketing misstep are at the bottom of the page (IncludingPopular Photography and The Consumerist). Now as a marketer, I'm sort of feeling sorry for those guys. Lesson learned. Don't mess with social media unless you know what you're doing. Thanks for pointing out in your comments all of the other places you've seen them. VG (Norway) Noticias Automotivas (Brasil) Pocacola (Italy) Hans-Wurst (Germany) binte (Germany) Deu Vos Guard (Spain) Outono (Spain) La Gatera Digital (Spain) Think Wasabi (Spain) Caradisiac (France) Le Blog Auto (France) Gigazine (Japan) 秋元 (Japan) Metrashka (Singapore) SPBCar (Russia) Kadriks (Sweden) Londonist (England) Veloce Automotive News (England) Info Overload (Scotland) Damien Mulley (Ireland) A Welsh View (Wales) TBIT (Canada) AJQKW (Chinese) Autoblog (Chinese) Limk (Turkey) Jaggle (Netherlands) ExoticsOnRoad (Netherlands) VK Mag (Netherlands) Autoblog (Netherlands) Plus loads of coverage here in the U. S., including. Yahoo! Pick of the Day Dave Barry’s Blog Digg Home Page Autoblog BoingBoing Minneapolis Star Tribune Drivers Drive Good Magazine EBaumsWorld Eponymous NeatORama Pranks. com Daily Buzzer UneasySilence The Blog Dark Roasted Blend Dream Chaser The Car Showroom Beyond Cars Gangstas Hugs Skoopy Clipmarks StumbleUpon Public Forum My Single Mom Life About Miche Elkit in Wonderland Boboroshi Tweedler Tihea The Daily Drip Eszter's Tony Rocha Post-it Notes Rock Blog David Thompson The Finer Things Vault The Cash Box Inspire. Unexpectedly Bart! plus many more I'm sure I haven't seen. and last but not least. FlickrCentral Flickr Top-V Admin's Blog Flickr Blog And (2 years later) the (possibly) last word. All About Content. 3M Carjacks The Post-it Note Jaguar Popular Photography The Consumerist MicroExplosion Media AdRants The Worst SEO Blog Ever Can someone please explain.? Autoblog (again) A Photo Editor What's Next Blog Aper(cul)ture AutoENews UK Dorkaliciou5 Ogilvy PR molt.n core Social Media Revolution The New Marketing Free Thought Forum Euro RSCG 4D Between 0 and 1 Wheels Weekly WOMMA WebInkNow Her Media Conversation Agent (a good read!) and more. IMPORTANT. All of these images are posted under a Creative Commons Attribution license, which means that you may post these photos on your site for non-commercial purposes provided that you ALWAYS ATTRIBUTE AND LINK back to the source (linking to this page is fine). If you'd like me to link to your blog from here, let me know via Flickrmail. If you would like to use these photos for commercial purposes, please contact me for a quote. 41 photos | 315,317 views items are from between 15 Dec 2006 18 Aug 2008.

You don't need to waste your money for buying paper stickies any more. Packed with useful features, TK8 post it notes software is a far better solution than normal stickies on your monitor. Why, You'll ask? At first, TK8 desktop post-it notes software is very easy to use and it has features the real stickies don't have. For example you can hide your notes temporarily when you need the full desktop area and show them again when you need them. Quickly. You can also change the size and position of every note and set different priorities to them. It means different fonts and colors, even more! The good news is that you can use this software absolutely free. Forever. Use TK8 sticky notes freeware for some days and you'll see it's unreplaceable! TK8 EasyNotes has language support just like our other products. You can use it in English, German, Japanese, Russian, Estonian or in some other language. Click Here to Download Now!

Take quick notes, tasks or appointments on attractive sticky notes on your Windows Desktop. These sticky notes look like 3M Post-It(r) Notes. Stick th.

Man, Post-it notes are so 20th century. Or are they? What if someone attached them to something early-21st-century, like, say, a Flash drive? Darumouse did just that. The company made a slim wooden Post-it note dispenser, shoved a 2GB flash drive, and came up with something entirely new for you to blow money on. Bravo.

On April 6, 1980, though, the endless and complicated march of progress took a short break as a remarkable new technology arrived in stationery stores around the nation. It was so simple to use, even a CEO could master it. It was so perfectly designed, it didn’t require semi-annual upgrades. It was so versatile, it actually performed better than advertised. It was the Post-it Note. Two and a half decades later, as the little yellow notes celebrate their silver anniversary, it’s easy to forget what a recent innovation they are. Thanks to their material simplicity, they seem more closely related to workplace antiquities like the stapler and the hole-punch than integrated chips. Instead, they’re an exemplary product of their time. Foreshadowing the web, they offered an easy way to link one piece of information to another in a precisely contextual way. Foreshadowing email, they made informal, asynchronous communication with your co-workers a major part of modern office life. In the wake of the Post-it Note’s huge commercial success and enduring popularity, its development is often cited as a classic example of business innovation. Most of the time, though, the tale is synopsized, elided, reduced to a few efficient paragraphs. On the face of it, this is fitting for a product that helped usher in the era of PowerPoint presentations and instant messaging. But the story of 3M engineer Art Fry’s invention is a grand chronicle of post-industrial American enterprise. It encompasses skeptical bosses, last-ditch marketing campaigns, and that old Hollywood crowd-pleaser, “inherently tacky elastomeric copolymer microspheres.” It deserves a more in-depth telling than it typically gets. Long before Art Fry decided to build a better bookmark, he would tag along with his dad on weekend trips to the local dump. “We’d bring home stuff, take it apart, and put it back together in different ways,” he recently recalled. Later, as a student at the University of Minnesota in the early 1950s, Fry studied chemical engineering. While he was planning to pursue a career in the field, his father encouraged him to acquire supplementary skills as well. “He told me, ‘You can have great ideas, but if you can’t sell those ideas, you’re dead in the water,’” Fry said. Consequently, Fry took a summer job as a door-to-door salesman, peddling a strategic combination of products. Fry would quickly diagnose his potential client’s vulnerabilities, and tailor his sales pitch accordingly. “If a gal had an itchy foot, I’d hit her with the luggage. If she was a homebody, I got her with the pots and pans.” After two summers as a salesman, though, Fry spent his final break as an intern at 3M. “I asked the engineers if I could try and develop new products, and they said, ‘Sure,’” Fry said. “After I graduated, I thought all companies would let you pick up the ball and run with it like that.” A few job interviews with other companies convinced him this wasn’t the case, however, so when 3M offered him a permanent position in its New Product Development division, he accepted. “I had to work at 3M for five years before I made what I did as a part-time salesman!” Fry said with a laugh. Inventors are often depicted as mercurial, wild-eyed savants. Fry, who is seventy-four years old, is the opposite of this stereotype. He’s persistent but even-tempered, gracious, and inquisitive. He’s been retired for thirteen years now, but in his days in the 3M lab, he never let success go to his head or failure overwhelm him. In the world of commercial invention, this last trait was especially indispensable. During his first two decades at 3M, Fry worked on hundreds of projects, but only twenty or so made it all the way to market. “That’s actually higher than average,” he explained, and he views the ones that didn’t quite make it in a characteristically positive manner. “On every assignment, I learned something valuable. Either about mechanics or chemistry or negotiating the system at 3M, all those tiny things you have to know.” In 1974, Fry initiated a project that would end up tapping the full range of his skills. It started on the second hole of 3M’s private golf course. that’s where a colleague told Fry about an odd substance that another 3M employee had created years earlier. In 1968, while searching for new, patentable adhesives, a chemist named Spencer Silver mixed some simple organic molecules with a reaction mixture in proportions that defied industry convention. This produced an adhesive that, in the lexicon of science, consisted of “inherently tacky elastomeric copolymer microspheres.” On the molecular level, this substance resembled the pebbled skin of a basketball. This characteristic sabotaged its bonding power. the tiny spaces between the microspheres made it impossible to get complete contact between the adhesive and another surface. In layman’s terms, it was a glue that didn’t stick very well. Pessimists would have called this a failure. Silver viewed it as a challenging puzzle. What could an underachieving adhesive be useful for? Silver pondered this question, and he posed it to his 3M colleagues as well. But while many people found the adhesive scientifically interesting, no one proposed any practical applications for it. In time, Silver decided one potential product was a bulletin board, and in the early seventies, 3M introduced a product called the Post-it Bulletin Board. “It was literally a piece of paper that had a photograph of a cork bulletin board on it,” recalls Pat Gaudio Edwards, a former 3M marketing coordinator. The photograph was covered with a layer of Silver’s glue, so you could stick a document to it without using a thumbtack. Sales were disappointing, however. Part of the problem was that it wasn’t just documents that stuck to the board’s surface. dust did, too. Perhaps more importantly, there just wasn’t much demand for a better bulletin board. To create a truly great product, you need a truly great problem, and the truth was, traditional bulletin boards worked fine for most people. Thumbtacks weren’t that costly, and who cared if they left a hole in, say, the flyer announcing the annual company picnic? For super-fussy collectors of corporate communications ephemera, the Post-it Bulletin Board was a dream product. For everyone else, it was just a linty photo of a genuine cork bulletin board. Still, Silver continued to believe in his unusual adhesive, and he continued to evangelize about it to his 3M colleagues. At every in-house 3M seminar where there was an available slot, Silver demonstrated his discovery, and it was at one of these seminars that Fry’s golfing partner first heard about the substance. Intrigued, Fry attended one of Silver’s presentations, too. But like everyone else who’d seen the glue, a potential use for it stumped him. And then one day, in the North Presbyterian Church in North St. Paul, inspiration struck. Fry was a member of his congregation’s choir. before each service, he placed tiny slips of paper into his hymnal to mark the songs the choir planned to sing that day. While Minnesota Presbyterians aren’t especially known for their emphatic performance style, Fry still had trouble keeping the bookmarks in place. Every time he stood up to sing, the slips fluttered from his hymnal. Suddenly, though, it hit him. If he applied some of Silver’s adhesive to his tiny slips of paper, his problem would be solved. The bookmarks would stay in place when he needed them to, without permanently bonding to the pages of his hymnal. Still, Fry couldn’t just drop everything to start working on a better bookmark. He was already in the middle of several official projects. At 3M, however, there is a long-standing policy that permits employees to spend fifteen percent of their time working on projects of their own choosing. So Fry obtained some adhesive from Silver and started making bookmarks. “The first one was about a quarter inch wide and one and a half inches long, on white paper,” he said. When he tried it out in his hymnal, it worked great–– until he removed it. While most of the adhesive left with the bookmark, too much of it remained on the hymnal’s pages. “The first few hymnals I tried it out on stuck together for years,” he said. To solve this problem, Fry applied a chemical primer to his bookmarks. this made the adhesive stick better to them than to any other surface. With a workable prototype in hand, Fry drew upon the skills he’d learned as a door-to-door salesman. “I gave some to my cohorts in the lab, to secretaries, to the librarians,” he said. But when he checked in with them a few weeks later to see if they wanted more, no one did. The bookmarks he’d already given them were still working. his colleagues just kept shifting them from page to page. “That was discouraging,” Fry recalled. “3M liked to make things that people use up.” In fact, Fry’s invention was highly consumable. he just hadn’t realized its full potential yet. A short time later, though, he had a second flash of inspiration. “I was reading a report, and I had some questions about the data it contained, so I cut out a little sample of the bookmark material, stuck it in on the page where the data was, drew an arrow toward the data, and wrote my question,” he said. “Then I gave it to my supervisor.” Fry’s supervisor wrote his response on Fry’s note, applied it to another document, then sent it back to Fry. Later that day, the two men discussed the implications of their exchange. “We realized we’d hit upon a whole new way to communicate,” Fry said. Ironically, Fry’s “bookmark” had morphed into something that was actually a cousin to the Post-it Bulletin Board. The difference between the two products was that Fry’s notes addressed the real shortcoming of bulletin boards. They weren’t limited because it was hard to stick things to them. they were limited because they were immobile. For information that could be transmitted via fixed locations, they worked fine. For information that needed to be transmitted in a more flexible, context-sensitive manner, they weren’t that useful. Fry’s notes, on the other hand, transformed practically any surface into an instant, compact bulletin board. “We got really excited because we knew we had a business,” Fry said. Sticky bulletin boards and sticky bookmarks were both niche products. sticky notes had the potential to be a blockbuster. Or to put it another way, they were a product that people would definitely use up. While the phrase “viral marketing” would not come into vogue for another two decades, an epidemic hit the hallways and offices of 3M. “I’d give a person a pack of one hundred sheets, and that person would end up introducing the product to twenty other people,” said Fry. “It was a geometric expansion.” Almost overnight, the co-workers who hadn’t needed any more bookmarks a few weeks earlier were suddenly hitting up Fry for more samples. Sometimes, secretaries from other buildings on the 3M campus would trudge across five hundred yards of snow-covered lawn just to get another pad of notes. But even as Fry’s invention attracted a cult following at 3M, it remained a sideline project for him. His supervisor, a man named Bob Molenda, allowed him to charge his expenses to “miscellaneous accounts,” and whenever Fry was able to put aside his official assignments for a while, he continued to refine his notes. Eventually, a small team was assembled to explore the possibility of turning them into a commercial venture. Unfortunately, they were up against certain strong institutional biases that permeated 3M. At 3M, superior bonding power was the measure of an adhesive’s value, not its lack of it. In addition, there weren’t any rolls involved in the product. “At 3M, you always had to put something on a roll,” said Pat Gaudio Edwards. “We were working in the Commercial Tape division, but Art’s notes didn’t look like tape.” Thanks to such factors, there was so little faith in the commercial prospects of Fry’s invention that Gaudio Edwards said she was tapped to be the Post-it line’s marketing coordinator because no one else wanted the assignment. “We’re giving the dog project to the girl,” her manager told her. “I hope you enjoy it.” Preliminary evaluations from engineering and production divisions were similarly unenthusiastic. While Fry had perfected the process of making the notes on a small scale, mass production was a different matter. 3M had never had to stack tiny sheets of sticky paper into perfectly square pads. To do that, the company would have to invent a number of new machines. It would be costly, complicated, perhaps unfeasible. The bad news elated Fry. If the production process were easy to implement, he reasoned, the product would be too easy to copy. 3M’s capacity to conquer challenges that would overwhelm smaller operations gave it a clear strategic advantage. Fry’s logic was unassailable, but 3M’s engineers failed to succumb to it. Fortunately, he had a wider range of closing techniques than the average luggage salesman. To prove that the necessary conversion machines wouldn’t be quite so hard to fabricate as the engineering department was imagining, Fry built a prototype machine himself, in his basement. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked well enough to show that it could be done. There was just one problem. by the time he was finished with it, it had grown bigger than he’d anticipated it would be. “To get it out of my basement, I had to take out the basement door, then the door frame, and part of a garden wall that was outside,” he said. Fry loaded the machine into his pickup truck and drove it to 3M. And, really, what self-respecting engineering division of a huge multinational isn’t going to respond to a gambit like that? The necessary enhancements were made, the production process was perfected, and eventually, it was time to see what the public thought. In general, early focus group participants were enthusiastic, except when it came to the potential price. “They saw it was a clever little device,” said Steve Collins, who in the late 1970s was an account executive at Martin/Williams, the advertising agency that 3M had picked to handle the Post-it line of products. “Then you’d say it was ten times the cost of their scratch paper, and they’d go, ‘Oh, well, there’s no way we’re going to buy this stuff.’” Still, in 1977, the company decided to test-market the product in four cities. Denver, Richmond, Tampa, and Tulsa. First, however, the product needed a name. One employee thought “Jot and Jerk” was the perfect appellation. Another suggested the name “Mount and Show.” “They were technical guys,” recalled Pat Gaudio Edwards. “They weren’t marketers.” In the end, the name “Press Peel Pads” won out, and the product was released under the Scotch brand label. Unfortunately, it failed to ignite much interest. “Two of the test markets failed, flat out,” said Gaudio Edwards. “The other two were lukewarm. When we did the follow-up research, there just weren’t a lot of people saying this was a product they wanted.” For many at 3M, it was cold, hard proof of what they’d suspected all along. People weren’t interested in glue that didn’t stick well. The Post-it Bulletin board had been a flop. The Press Peel Pads were a flop. In the nine years since Spencer Silver had discovered his inherently tacky microspheres, a president had resigned, a war had ended, the PC revolution was under way, but Silver’s odd creation had failed to spawn a single successful product. Wasn’t it time, at last, to euthanize this underachieving adhesive? Like every inventor at 3M, Fry had some experience with unhappy endings. Most of the projects he worked on, for one reason or another, never made it to market. But he also knew how much people liked his notes once they were taught how to use them. Even many of the naysayers were habitual users. Why, when it was so popular inside 3M, would it not be popular elsewhere? “We knew the test markets failed, but we just kept saying, ‘Maybe it was us. Maybe we did something wrong,’” said Gaudio Edwards. “Because it couldn’t be the product—the product was great.” To see for themselves how people outside 3M responded to Post-it Notes, two 3M executives, Geoff Nicholson and Joe Ramey, decided to return to one of the test cities, Richmond, Virginia, to conduct their own one-day market research expedition. Echoing Fry’s efforts at 3M, the duo cold-called offices throughout the city, giving away free samples and showing people how to use the product. The responses they got were substantially more enthusiastic this time. “Those things really were like cocaine,” said Steve Collins, who ended up working on the Post-it Notes account for more than a decade and is now the president of Martin/Williams. “You got them into somebody’s hands, and they couldn’t help but play around with them.” Based on the success of the Richmond trip, Joe Ramey decided that at least one more large-scale test was in order. This time, however, they focused their efforts on a single city. “We went to Boise, Idaho, and loaded that town up,” said Gaudio Edwards. They got the local newspapers to run stories about the new product. They festooned stationery stores with banner displays and point-of-purchase materials. Thousands of sample notes were sent out to office managers, purchasing agents, lawyers, and hospital personnel. Most important, they put bodies on the ground, some of them 3M employees, some of them hired temps, to demonstrate the product to potential customers. The campaign, code-named the Boise Blitz, was a huge success, and 3M finally decided to give the product a full commercial launch. Still, because of the product’s high price, distributors and retailers remained skeptical. People may like the product, their reasoning went, but only when it was free. No one was going to pay a penny a sheet for scratch paper. “In the beginning, stores would only take two sizes and one color, because they didn’t want to waste a lot of space on the product,” said Fry. 3M chose a shade it would eventually dub “canary yellow.” The debut sizes were three inches by five inches and one and a half inches by two inches. The larger ones went for ninety-eight cents per hundred-sheet pad. The company also decided to change the product’s name. Fry said, “We had candidates like Sticky Notes and Papillon—the French word for butterfly. It sort of sounded like ‘paper,’ and yet it had the connotation of a butterfly landing, staying there for a moment, then flying away.” Higher-ups at 3M had a less poetic notion, however. They wanted to call the product Post-it Notes, to tie them in with the Post-it Bulletin Board. “We thought our names were a lot sexier, but management said, ‘No, we’re going to name it to match the bulletin board—the sales of one will help the sales of the other.’” In fact, that was the case. Post-it Self-Stick Bulletin Boards, in faux-brown corkboard and a variety of other color options, are still available today, along with more than one thousand Post-it brand products that 3M has introduced in the wake of the Notes’ phenomenal success. “We didn’t expect to make a profit for five years, but it only took one,” Fry told me. Once again, sampling played a key role in the product’s acceptance. “We probably distributed several million free notes that first year,” said Steve Collins. But when their free notes ran out, consumers bought more. 3M has rarely released sales statistics over the years, but in 1981, the company honored Post-it Notes with a Golden Step award, which it gave to any 3M product that recorded more than two million dollars in revenues, at a profit. In 1984, a People magazine article estimated the previous year’s sales at forty-five million dollars. In 1998, when Post-it Notes filed a lawsuit against a copycat competitor, a 3M company spokesperson said that worldwide sales of Post-it Notes and their spin-offs was around one billion dollars a year. A year earlier, that same spokesperson had described the Post-it brand as “one of the company’s two or three most valuable assets.” Neither Art Fry nor Spencer Silver received any special financial compensation from 3M for their achievements, but both continued to work at the company and invent new products. In 1984, Fry was promoted to division scientist. In 1986, he was promoted to corporate scientist, the highest designation an employee can achieve on the technical side of the 3M corporate ladder. In 1985, Time magazine declared Post-it Notes one of the best products of the previous twenty-five years. Nearly two decades later, in 2004, the product was still earning raves. New York’s Museum of Modern Art featured it alongside the white T-shirt, the incandescent lightbulb, and 121 other icons of beautiful everyday design in its “Humble Masterpieces” exhibit. But what would have happened if Post-it Notes had been introduced in, say, 1940, or even 1960? They probably would have still been a hit, but they wouldn’t have been so indispensable, so perfectly timed, so culturally apt. “The digital age generates so many documents, and they all look the same,” said Art Fry. “How do you organize all that material?” Indeed, as workers tried to keep pace with all the new technologies invading offices in the early 1980s, the quickest to master them menaced their colleagues with a punishing blizzard of reports, memos, spreadsheets, newsletters, proposals, presentations, and white papers. Functionally, Post-it Notes were a useful tool to manage such information overload. Not only could you highlight the material that was most important, you could also document, via a quick little note to yourself, why you thought it was worth highlighting. But the Post-it Note was more than just a practical tool—it was also a psychological one. Compared to the clunky machines of the 1980s that generated all those documents, it was a vision of high-tech minimalism. Its edges were sharp and square, with no ugly binding, no perforations, no metal rings. Its color, a subtle but attention-getting yellow, was somehow like the color of thought itself, a lightbulb going off in your head. Devoid of any other graphic elements, it had the effect of a clean, calming, blank screen. And, yet, for all its streamlined efficiency, it was playful and user-friendly, a simple embodiment of the same values that would inform the development of Apple’s Macintosh. If MS-DOS made your brain ache, if you were all thumbs when it came to loading your sprocket-fed printer, Post-it Notes offered a fail-safe way to feel like you could stay ahead of the curve. And, as Martin/Williams would eventually discover through its market research, the product also functioned as a form of stress relief. “People would use the notes to write a to-do, or a next-step thing, they’d put that on a report or a memo or whatever, and they’d ship it off to someone else,” said Steve Collins. “It was a really easy way to say, ‘Okay, I’m getting out of here—it’s off my desk and on to someone else.’” “Save time, save money,” declared one early Post-it Notes ad. Another called the product “a giant communications breakthrough.” But in the mid-1980s, when Post-it Notes were evolving from a successful product into an enduring brand, Martin/Williams shifted the message of the product’s advertising, focusing on a phenomenon it evocatively designated “stress dump.” “Take one of these to relieve congestion,” read an ad aimed at doctors. “One-minute managers need ten-second memos,” read another. “Stress dump” is a concept that continues to resonate. Even at a penny a sheet—Post-it Note prices have remained pretty much the same over the years—they’re still substantially cheaper than, say, Valium. But what if you’re not the dumper, but rather, the dumpee? Consider the cult-classic movie comedy Office Space and its note-perfect portrait of life at a nineties-era software company. To illustrate its themes of workplace anomie in a single image, the movie’s producers created a promotional poster depicting a man covered head to foot in Post-its. Only his tie, his glasses, and his briefcase are visible –– all sense of his individuality, his humanity even, has been obliterated by Post-it Notes. Who hasn’t been tyrannized, at one time or another, by some capricious boss armed with a dangerous stockpile of Post-it Notes? At the FBI, they’ve even coined a special acronym for the product. “They call them FLYNs,” said Fry, who learned this one day when an agent interviewed him for an FBI newsletter. “That stands for ‘funny little yellow notes.’ Except I’m cleaning it up when I say ‘funny.’” Fry clarified. “When field agents submit a report and it comes back with a lot of notes on it, that means it’s a lot more work for them. So they’ll say, ‘Man, I’ve really been flynned.’” But while Post-it Notes have bedeviled millions, they’re also universally beloved, a fact Fry attributed to their open-ended aspect. While Fry and his 3M colleagues initially had to show people how to use the product, they also left plenty of room for improvisation. “Everyone discovers their own creative applications, so they really feel a connection to them,” Fry said. By way of example, Fry told me about a secretary who used Post-it Notes to speed up her daily intra-office mail delivery routine. “The building she worked in was eleven stories high. Invariably, she’d get off the elevator, deliver the mail for that floor, and the elevator would have left without her.” In some buildings, perhaps, this might not have been such a big deal, but in this case, the building’s single elevator was extremely slow. To solve this problem, she began covering the elevator door’s electric eye with a Post-it Note, so it remains open until she returns. “It used to take her almost two hours to do the mail,” Fry said “Now she can do it in ten minutes.” Most Post-it Notes are destined for mundane fates, of course, but even so, at least there’s always the possibility of innovation. Indeed, compare them to their closest ancestor, the pink “While You Were Out” form. On April 6, 1980, those forms played Frank Sinatra to the Post-it Notes’ Beatles. Suddenly, they seemed hopelessly dated—too conventional, too uptight, a relic from another era. They were still quite serviceable, but there was only one thing to use them for, and only one way to use them. Post-it Notes, on the other hand, were dynamic, customizable, business casual. They inspired spontaneity, rapid ideation, free association. You could link one seemingly unrelated idea to another without worrying about any logical cohesion of ideas. that’s what the glue was for. After all, the digital drudgery of Office Space and “Dilbert” didn’t tell the full story of office life in the eighties and nineties. It was also the era of Wired and Fast Company, the rebel businessman, thinking outside the box. One day, you might get flynned. On another, you could map out a billion-dollar business plan on half a dozen tiny yellow squares. Or maybe you would simply leave a note on the refrigerator in your apartment, telling your roommate to get more juice. From the start, Fry was thinking about the domestic possibilities. “When we were just about to launch the product, there was a lot of pressure to make the larger size four by six, because that’s how big the average desk dispenser for scratch paper was,” said Fry. He had other plans, however. “If they were three by five, you could fit them into your pocket and take them home with you.” From a marketer’s perspective, Post-it Notes were pretty much the greatest invention since cigarettes. People used them at work, they used them at home, they used them everywhere—and they didn’t give you cancer. And because you could use them in so many different settings, for so many different kinds of communication, it was hard not to develop some emotional bond with them. The fact that they were also a discernible brand only magnified this dynamic. You would probably never say to yourself, “Ah, scratch paper! Thanks for the memories!” But with Post-it Notes, you just might. Because remember the time you used one to make up with your wife, or show off your genius to your boss, or play a practical joke on a friend? In an increasingly automated, digitized world, Post-it Notes stood out as vivid emblems of authenticity. hand-written, informal, they literally required a “personal touch” to do their magic. This, of course, made it inevitable that advertisers would try to leverage their power. Today, preprinted Post-it Note ads appear in magazines, on newspaper front pages, and pretty much anywhere else you can stick a note. Such ads are straightforward and handy. you can tell they’re advertising, and if you’re interested in what they’re pitching, you can just peel off the note and file it for later reference. But the most intriguing form of Post-it Note advertising is a product of rogue direct marketers, the legendary “Letter from J.” It’s hard to say when these missives first started appearing, but consumer complaints about them go back to the late 1980s. Typically, the “Letter from J.” consists of a simple white envelope, an “article” touting some noteworthy product or service, and a Post-it Note affixed to the article. The Post-it bears a message like, “Try this. It works! —J.” In truth, the article is just ad copy masquerading as a page torn out of Time or Forbes (with an authentically ragged edge), and J., whom the advertiser hopes you might mistake for your friend Joe, is in some instances, a low-paid human, or more commonly, a laser printer. Sometimes, the Letter from J. works your first name into the note for extra veracity. One especially chatty example, which in retrospect seems just a little too personalized to have been truly effective, was cited by consumer affairs columnist David Horowitz in 1989. Dan, You’ve got to try this! It really, really works! And I love the cream. —J P. S. Thinking of you, and having a great time in Disney World. At least one marketer of weight-loss products continues to employ the technique. Over time, these devious ads have remained consistently effective. In 2004, a pair of university researchers conducted a series of “Letter from J.” mailings, then wrote about their experiment in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Amongst their findings. “Attaching the Post-it Note resulted in 5.6 percent of the people asking for a free sample, whereas only three percent asked for a sample when they received the ad without the attached Post-it Note.” Perhaps because these funny little yellow notes that didn’t stick so well have managed to stick around for a quarter of a century, many of the best-known Post-it Note anecdotes document their surprising bonding power. For example, there’s the one about the Post-it Note in Charleston, South Carolina, that survived Hurricane Hugo. While homeowner Bruce Brakefield lost eight oak trees in his front yard to the 140 mph winds, the note on his front door—it read “Baby Sleeping”—withstood the storm. Another Post-it Note endured a cross-country trip on the side of a moving van. Ultimately, it’s not their bonding power that makes them so culturally resonant. Instead, it’s their flexibility, their impermanence, their ability to attach themselves to something, then detach themselves from it, then start the process all over again. Their creator, however, enjoyed a remarkably stable career. In 1992, after nearly forty years with 3M, Art Fry retired. Today, he still maintains close ties to the company. For many people, however, the last twenty-five years have been a time of great change in the workplace. People don’t stay with the same company from graduation to retirement anymore. To survive in an era of corporate downsizing, offshoring, and constant innovation, workers jumped from organization to organization to organization. They became consultants, independent contractors, free agents. Often, they switched careers entirely. They had to be flexible, resilient— not unlike the Post-it Note itself.

us. -- Several years ago, Ben came up with a (funny) prank where we would go into someone's apartment and attach Post-it notes to everything in the apartment. On each note we would write the name of the object, or possibly some witty commentary (rather, some possibly witty commentary) about the object. For example, if there is a cup, we'd label it "cup". If there's a chair, we'd label it "chair", and then label each "leg", and possibly the "back", and maybe we'd put "ass" on the seat. And so forth and so on.you get the picture. The only problem is that we needed keys to someone's apartment, and none of our friends trusted us after our other apartment pranks. Fast forward to 2005. Ben and Arin leave for a 3 week vacation, and they give Ton the keys to Arin's apartment so he can stay there in the interim (Thanks, Ben and Arin!). Clearly, we are going to have to prank their apartment before they return to New York. We spent a week brainstorming pranks, and eventually we settled on the post-it note prank (the irony of pulling Ben's prank on Ben was just too much). The first task of the prank was to obtain a lot of post-it notes. We tried to raid the supply cabinet at work, but they didn't have nearly enough stickies. The next stop was the Staples down the street. They had a large variety of post-it notes (and fake post-it notes), in a myriad of shapes and colors. We went with the standard 3" x 3" square, canary yellow, "Super Sticky" Post-it notes. The "Super Sticky" notes are the most technologically advanced post-it notes engineered to date. 3M claims that the Super Sticky will stick to anything anywhere. We suspect that they are using barnacle glue, since it is the stickiest substance in the world. All that barnacle harvesting must be expensive because the Super Sticky notes cost a few dollars more than the regular ones. We didn't know how many to get, so we bought 6 packs which is 6000 post-it notes. A few days before Ben and Arin got back, we all met at Arin's place. The participating pranksters were Ton, Kennyb, Jeremy Soffin, Erin Hyland, and Ally. Armed with a pen and a sticky pad, we spread out in the apartment and labeled everything we could imagine. Ally got to work in the kitchen. This was no small task. If your kitchen is anything like Arin's kitchen, then you know that there's a lot of stuff in the kitchen. The objects range from toothpicks to refrigerators, and everything in between. Ally strived to label everything. Here she is labeling a colander. Here is some of her handiwork. All the pots and pans, and all the cooking utensils were labeled. Everything posted on the fridge was labeled too. Labels on the jars, the lids, and the contents of the jars. The five labels near the edge of the wall show the heights of the pranksters. We'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to match the each of these postits to each of the pranksters. A close up of the jars on the kitchen shelf. Labels on all the plants and all the booze. Ally even labeled each of the the glasses correctly (she used to be a bartender). The front door. Meanwhile, Ton and Erin Hyland got busy in the living room. Ben moved his stuff to Arin's place before they left for vacation, so there was a lot of stuff in boxes and bags in the living room. That's okay, we didn't mind rummaging through his stuff. Here Ton is labeling the tools in Ben's toolbox, and Erin is labeling the things in his costume box. She is labeling a tiger tail, which Ben owns for some reason. Labeling each shoe with "left shoe", "right shoe", "left sole", "right sole", "left tongue", "right tongue", "left heel", "right heel", "left insole", "right insole", and "under left insole", and "under right insole". Labels on the shelves, candles, and leaves. The supply of post-it notes and pens. There is a brick wall in their living room and we thought it would be really funny (and quite amazing) if we labeled every single brick on the wall with "brick". Unfortunately, the texture of the brick is not very conducive to sticking things on it, so even the "super sticky" post-it notes stuck only after a lot of pressing and rubbing. Anyway, we labeled as much as we could bear, and it turned out pretty well. Here are some pictures of the labeled brick wall. Jeremy and Kennyb worked on Arin's room. Ben had moved some of his stuff into the room too, so the room was a complete mess. Literally we could not see the floor. Jeremy started off by writing "mess" on a handful of post-it notes and then threw them around the room. Labels on all the stuff on the dresser. Arin's underwear drawer was labeled "drawer", and the contents labeled "drawers". Arin's desk. There was an actual useful post-it somewhere in there. Good thing we labeled it. More of Arin's room. Ben in drag (hmm, that's why he has a tiger tail). Flip and Flop. Wall. In only 2 hours, we had managed to stick 2,500 Post-it notes to the apartment. That's over 20 Post-it notes per minute! That's over 143 squared feet of Post-it notes. Placing them end to end, the post-its would span almost 200 yards! That's almost 1 / 2,200,000 of the way to the Moon! Now all that remained was to wait for Ben and Arin to come back from their trip.

Thanks Ben and Arin for being such good sports! Sorry we rummaged through your underwear drawer. Update us.. [By Ben] Holy stink. This was the most amazing thing I've ever walked into. After reading this writeup, I don't think it really captured the magnitude of this prank. Maybe a small sampling will help. Spoon, Keyboard, Oven Rack, Hot Plate, Bottom Shelf, Middle Shelf, Top Shelf, Trey, Pan, Bowl, Onion, Compact Disk, Leaf, Documents, Couch, Door Frame, Wall, Door Knob, Table, Chair, Pillow Case, Pillow (inside the case), Cactus, Sunblock, Clock, Socket, Tile, Pocket, Mask, Art, Poker Chips, Blanket, Right Back Burner, Left Back Burner, RIght Front Burner, Left Front Burner, Plate, Plate, Plate, Plate, Plate, Glass, Glass, Glass, Glass, Glass, Glass, Candlestick, Speaker, Window, Windowsill, Lock, Outlet, Pot, Pan, Printer, Bed, Radiator, Ceiling, Poster, Bookshelf, Cookbook, Brick, Brick, Brick, Brick, Brick, Brick, Brick, Brick, Can, Box, Vitamins, Doll, Bird, Hamper. This is exhausting! You starting to get the idea? Ton and Kennyb keep laughing when we say that we found them all. I wonder how serious they are. Update us.. [By Ben] I opened the spice cabinet today. Every single spice was individually labeled. Salt, Pepper, Oregeno, Cinnamon, Thyme, Dill, Cumin, Nutmeg, Jerk Seasoning, Char Crust, Basil. Unbelievable. Update us.. [By Ben] Opened my toolbox. And what do you know? Hammer, Screwdriver, Little Screwdriver, Pliers, Wrench, Saw. Update us.. [By Ben] I hadn't found anything in over a week, so I was sure we had exhausted them all. Then we had a party. Of course all our booze was labeled (Gin, Vodka, Rum, Jack, etc), but it wasn't until we started taking out a stack of plastic cups that I totally lost it. Cup, Cup, Cup, Cup, Cup, Cup, Cup, Cup, Cup, Cup, Cup, Cup, Cup, Cup, Cup, Cup, Cup, Cup, Cup, Cup. Update us.. [By Arin] It's been almost 3 weeks since we walked in on the Post-It Notes. I went out walking in NYC today and got caught in a sudden summer thunderstorm. I opened my umbrella in midtown Manhattan, and guess what I found inside? "Umbrella" Update us.. Added Post-It products to the Store Update us.. Looks like we've been inspiring some other folks around the web.

I happen to fall into the artist-designer skill set, so I often find myself trying to prototype ideas on teams rich with programmers. As such, I'm always looking for better game development techniques that work well for this particular team mix. Here is a very lightweight prototyping process using Post-it notes that I quite enjoy.

Post-it note design. I jot down a quick bulleted list summarizing our discussion on a single post-it note. We go over it one last time so there everything is clear. The list isn't very detailed. Mostly it serves as something to jog our memories if we forget what we were talking about.

Play test. When most of the items on the Post-it note are playable, I get called over and we play test it the experiment together. If the results are comprehensible by mere humans, we pull in some play testers for 3-4 minutes to observe some real players interacting with the mechanic for the first time.

Review. Afterwards, we discuss our observations and write up another Post-it note worth of improvements.

One often hears the negative comment that game designs are a dime-a-dozen. And in a waterfall design process, an incessant stream of ideas is indeed a problem. If you attempt to squeeze all those ideas into a typical waterfall development process, you end up with an immense amount of waste. Each designs need documentation, concepting, implementation, testing and bug fixes. In response, project owners will often ask for just one good idea. There is another path. A lightweight prototyping method takes your flurry of crazy ideas and converts them at moderate cost into a well sorted portfolio of working designs. All those ideas are not, in fact, worthless or wasteful. they are the essential fuel that feeds a good prototyping process. Each idea either teaches you something or provides you with a success. The way to make the process work without getting gunked up is to make prototyping incredibly lightweight. Other than our focused conversations, I spend my time on a total of two design docs. The first is the brief list of rated prototypes and the second is a set of discardable, temporary Post-it notes. Design waste in the form of unnecessary artifacts is minimal. Most of the 'programming waste' is better classified as low cost learning. Those wild flocks of churning, swirling ideas end up not being worthless at all. They simply need to be funneled into the project with the right process for their value to be realized.

The "Post-it note design process" has likely been reinvented in one form or another hundreds of times across the history of game development. It is so basic that it feels odd to even write it up in any sort of formal fashion. If you have a designer and a programmer, give it a shot. It is certainly a good functional alternative to the popular process of sticking a lone programmer-designer in a room and asking them to 'find the fun'. Both can produce great games. Pick the one that works best for your current team composition. This process does have an cost since you need to devote at least two people to finding the fun instead of putting all decisions on the head of the designer. However, the end result is well worth it. After all, it is far smarter to spend team time uncovering a portfolio of the right mechanics than it is to 'save your programmers' so they can be off running really fast in the wrong direction. In the end it really isn't about programmers, designers, design documents or features. It is about the team working together to make the right product. Everything else is just ego and waste. And for some reason, it is quite difficult to invest much ego or waste in a little disposable Post-it note. take careDanc, Post-it note fanboy

Never underestimate the power of simple office supplies. Post-It Notes come in many vibrant colors and provide everything from a building block for engaging sculptures to a collection of blank slates for interactive community art projects. Here are 16 projects that involve covering, cladding, sculpting and decorating with simply sticky pieces of paper.

Do you suppose the owner of this vehicle was entertained or furious when he came back to find his car plastered in bright pink, blue, purple and green sticky notes? It might not be high art but it certainly makes a pop impression Warhol may have admired. Its almost hard to look at this incredibly vibrant wall of notes without your vision swimming somewhat. The stark contrast between the wall and the rest of the room creates a surreal backdrop an otherwise ordinary space. Theres no reason that this kind of art needs to be limited to non-representational forms. In this case the artists playfully took advantage of multiple stories of glass frontage to create a nifty illusion recalling a classic video game that appears both day and night. If Donkey Kong, then why not Ray Charles and Elvis as well? Once you get started with this kind of art there really arent many limitations, particularly at a larger scale and from a distance. The outcome is predictable but the effect is nonetheless interesting. Post-It projects also dont have to simply be interesting things to look at. In this case, passers by were encouraged to contribute to the wall by writing their to-do lists and leaving them in place for all to see - a kind of civic group exercise in sharing and organization. Taking things a step further, each note can become a blank slate, a simple and small canvass that can be individualized at a limited scale and then begins to form accidental visual patterns when viewed from a distance. But why stop there? Why not just plaster everything in notes like Rebecca Murtaugh has done in the photograph above? She didnt stop with the living room, either, but also covered her bedroom and various other furniture objects. It may be a bit too much if your boss catches you, but you dont necessarily have to stick to posting over your own furniture and spaces. Still, smothering an office with sticky notes is at least a good alternative to staring at the clock waiting for the day to end, right?

More Unusual Art from Everyday Materials. 16 Post-It Note Pranks, Sculptures and Murals | www. About-Everything. net

Mountain View (CA) - Google has conducted some interesting research relating to post-it notes and paper scribbles. Their studies found that despite having quad-core PCs and 30" monitors, many people still preferred pen and paper for note taking. The reasons offered were easy editing, works offline, mobile and instant boot up. Google examined these needs and has created an iPhone application called Gmail Tasks. Google prepared this YouTube video which explains how it works.

Post-it Notes Contest Display at an office supply store The folks from 3M (the Post It. Some rights reserved Uploaded on Aug 18, 2008 19 comments

More photos of the Post-It Note Jaguar. Here another team member joins in on the roof. View the. Some rights reserved Uploaded on Dec 15, 2006 | Map 0 comments

More details of the Post-It Note job we did on Walt's Jaguar in the parking garage on Friday.. Some rights reserved Uploaded on Dec 15, 2006 | Map 1 comment

Reinforcements come down to join the fun and work on the rear end. Part of the Post-It Note Jaguar. Some rights reserved Uploaded on Dec 15, 2006 | Map 0 comments

Working on the ass of Walt's Jaguar as we cover it with post-it notes. That's the real mastermind. Some rights reserved Uploaded on Dec 15, 2006 | Map 0 comments

We've seen countless attempts to re-invent the Post-It note, but no one's ever really managed to improve on the basic design -- which might be why MIT's "Quickies" concept doesn't even try. The electronic note system is instead based around a digital pen and special pad, which saves your notes as you jot them down on RFID-embedded Post-Its. Software on your PC then does some quick OCR and, according to the inventors, "uses its understanding of the user's intentions, content, and the context of the notes to provide the user with reminders, alerts, messages, and just-in-time information." Since the database can also store location information, sticking the note on a book or other object allows you to locate it later using the RFID tag, and you can even have notes SMS'd to their recipients. Pretty wild -- but we're more impressed someone finally found a good use for all those digital pens out there. Check a video of the system in action after the break.

Filed under. Misc. GadgetsTags. mit, post it, post it notes, post-it, post-it notes, Post-itNotes, PostIt, PostItNotes, quickies

Aww. at first when I saw the article title, and the pictures, I thought this was some kind of e-ink display with a tiny CPU representing a post-it note of the future. Instead it's this. I thought you weren't supposed to care about post-it notes, and what happens to them.s

I'm sure the software would probably have to be open, but most applications that you think should be open all the time have a "startup" option. And most likely have some type of configuration so you can turn off any unwanted features. I know what you're saying about why not typing it directly on the computer. but picture this scenario.you leave your PC on in your room and leave off to work. Your mom/dad/girlfriend/wife wants to remind you of some event happening that same day after you get out of work (assuming you cant pick up your cellphone at work) rather then having to go up to your computer (which might even be password protected) and type up a note on your calendar application. they can grab one of these post-it notes that you left on fridge, write down the reminder, which then gets sent to your computer wirelessly. if you have your calendar app be sync with your home pc and work pc, then you might even get this note directly at work. So i think this innovation could be very useful to some people.

To. iana&ISI. EDU, meobrien1&mmm. com Subject. Request for MIME media type Application/Vendor Tree - vnd.3M. Post-it-Notes Name. Michael O'Brien E-mail. meobrien1&mmm. com MIME media type name. Application MIME subtype name. Vendor Tree - vnd.3M. Post-it-Notes Required parameters. 3M Confidential Optional parameters. 3M Confidential Encoding considerations. 3M Confidential Security considerations. Independent evaluation impossible due to specification non-disclosure. Interoperability considerations. 3M Confidential Published specification. 3M Confidential Applications which use this media. Post-itŽ Software Notes v1.5+ Additional information. 1. Magic number(s). 2. File extension(s). pwn 3. Macintosh file type code. 3MNS 'Post-it' is a registered trademark of 3M Company. Person to contact for further information. 1. Name. Michael O'Brien 2. E-mail. meobrien1&mmm. com Intended usage. Common This Mime-type is used by the 'Post-itŽ Notes for Internet Designers' internet control/plugin. Author/Change controller. Author. Michael O'Brien

There have been a number of attempts to modernize the much beloved Post-it note, but the "Quickies" concept developed by MITs Ambient Intelligence Group may be the most viable to date. Using RFID technology, AI and ink recognition, Quickies relay written information to our computers and cellphonesmaking the notes more effective as reminders, and much easier to archive. To get an idea of the possible applications, hit the jump to check out the system in action.

Make your name stick with custom Post-It notes from CustomInk. com! Custom printed Post-It notes will go a long way to promote your realty, accounting firm, office supply shop, or other business. Its fun and easy to make your own Post-It notes using our interactive design lab -- choose from three styles, select a paper color, and get to work! You can personalize the Post-Its with your logo, message or promotion. With our library of over 10,000 images, youll never be short of ideas. If you need help, our friendly customer service representatives are available by phone or by email seven days a week to assist you. Go ahead and get started CustomInk. com is the place to go for custom printed Post-It notes!

Article of how 3M Corporation attempted to generate buzz for its sticky notes product with a user-generated content promotion about creative ways to use Post-it Notes. Displays promoting the contest prominently displayed in Staples, Office Max, Office Depot and other office supply stores across the country featured a photo that might look familiar to people who spend time on Digg, YouTube and similar social sites.

Its not unusual for corporations to try to reach consumers through social media channels. Savvy execs understand that social media success can equal advertising gold. There are a couple of ways a corporate marketer can leverage social medias power to take things viral. One of them is to find something that is already enjoying viral success and ride its coat tails. Thats apparently the route 3M wanted to take with its current promotion. The perfect idea already existed for the 3M campaign, ready to be exploited. the Post-It Note Jaguar. ~ ~ ~ ~ In December 2006, a bunch of people at an Internet company went down to the parking garage and covered a coworkers beloved Jaguar with tens of thousands of Post-It Notes. Scott, a photographer and Flickr enthusiast, posted the evidence of the prank in progress to his Flickr account intending to show it to the Jags owner. View the entire Post-It Note Jaguar photo set on Flickr. Next thing Scott knew, the Post-it Note Jaguar started to spread on the Internet. The photos took on a life of their own, generating tons of comments and faves from the Flickr community. The photos got reposted on blogs around the world (including the very popular blogs Neat-o-Rama and Boing Boing), hit the front page of Digg more than once, were circulated in millions of emails, were featured as a Yahoo pick of the day, and even appeared in a filmed segment on ABC News.

~ ~ ~ ~ More than a year passes before the maker of the Post-it Note thinks to capitalize on the viral success that was this Post-it inspired office prank. After all, large multinational corporations arent the most nimble players they cant just shoot from the hip. after all, they have to dot their is, cross their ts, and generally make sure everything gets approved by lawyers and stuff, right? RIGHT? So when in the Spring of 2008, the 3M Corporation finally contacts the photographer to ask about using the photos of the Post-it Note Jaguar photos in a marketing campaign, hes pretty sure theyve already thought this through. He asked a friend in the photo business what a typical licensing fee for a national marketing campaign would be, and quoted that amount to 3M. Their response? They tell him theyd rather not pay when they can just recreate the photograph themselves. Heres what floors me. 3M doesnt even

But lets pretend the legality of this move wasnt even a question for now, and focus on this. Social media marketing campaigns rely on the social media community to carry them. As a marketer, you have to respect the community and its members. Ripping off community members and then turning around and asking that same community to generate buzz for your campaign is just ballsy or stupid. The irony. The YouTube contest rules say Remember, creativity and true brilliance will get you noticed. Im hoping that 3Ms creativity and true chutzpah get noticed as well. The original Post-It Note Jaguar ~ ~ ~ ~ Lest anyone think Im slamming all companies and corporate marketers for wanting to take advantage of social media, Im not. I think there are plenty of creative ways to get your products name in front of social communities in ways that dont disrespect the users. For example. create an

Tens of thousands of Post-It Notes LOL, didnt 3M realize that these employees likely burned through a couple hundred dollars worth of post-its? Not to mention the spin-off effect of all the copycats, just wasting post-it-notes! I bet they have earned back more than the requested fee when offices all over the world mysteriously had to restock the post-it-note shelf. Shouldnt that be worth something?

Very cool post. thanks for breaking this down to the details. just another of a long list of examples of how corporations just do not get the internet in any way. as said above I think it would be cool if a generic brand did license the originals. would they not then have a worthy lawsuit over post-it-notes? maybe revenge is not the best answer, but as an artist and writer it just bothers me.

One of many articles about this blatant rip-off by 3M. I and many others wont be buying ANY of their products any time soon. Quite disgusted by them really. Im sure it cost a bomb just to buy the post-it-notes to stick all over the jag, so $2000 to use their idea and cash in on all the publicity it got is chicken-feed. Shame on you Michelle or whoever was responsible at Thieves-M.

Sent a msg through the mmm. com system, and here is the reply. ************ Dear Mr. Storm, Thank you for contacting 3M Company. We appreciate hearing from you. 3M regrets that you feel this way. 3M has a long history of using Post-it® Notes to cover objects of many kinds, something that the company has done all over the world as creative and fun communication ideas. For example, in 2007 3M sponsored the Wish Train program in Korea, where a commuter train was covered with Post-it® Notes written with wishes. 3M also celebrated the 100th Anniversary of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in Korea by covering the walls of a famous museum with Post-it® Notes. In North and Central America, 3M has been well known for creating giant Pink Ribbons in support of Breast Cancer awareness programs. The practice of using Post-it® Notes to cover objects such as cars is well known and widespread. For example, on YouTube alone, there are dozens (if not hundreds) of videos depicting cars being covered in Post-it® Notes - this concept does not belong to any one person. Whether 3M elects to work with any particular individual on such a project or takes another course of action depends on each unique situation, and 3M believes it acted appropriately in electing not to use the Post-it® Notes Jaguar photo. We thank you for your continued interest in 3M products. Sincerely, Liz 3M Office Supplies Division us. 3M Workspace Solutions us. ********* Fair enough that post-it notes have been used on many objects, but in this case they had contacted and then directly copied a particular idea, and even used nearly exactly the same design and type of car in their final ad. Still disgusted.

@Storm - guess they should have used one of their pictures of the Post-it® Notes Wish Train on their POP display instead, eh? Would have saved them a whole nuther thousand bucks and a bit of headache as well.

Frank Long, 88, and Shirley Knappe, 83, of Coral Springs, Florida, who were married three years ago, use different types of Post-it notes to organize their lives.

The romance between Shirley Knappe, 83, and Frank Sterling Long, 88, began electronically, with poetic early-morning e-mail messages from Long to Knappe, who live in an assisted-living facility in Coral Springs, Florida But now that they have been married for three years, their day-to-day affairs are tracked on Post-it notes, which Knappe corrals onto the kitchen cabinets above the toaster oven. her activities in yellow, his in blue."I thought I was going to be knitting and reading when I came here seven years ago," Knappe said. "But when Frank came along after my husband died, we decided to join forces. It was a real love story. We have so much fun together. I developed the system to keep all our activities straight."Knappe was speaking last Thursday as she and her husband were on their way to a wine tasting, which was marked on a blue Post-it (group activities are in blue, Longs color, because "my memory is better than his," she said). Their ID numbers for the Wheel Watchers Club, the "Wheel of Fortune" shows lottery, are on Post-its, along with "everyones cellphone numbers and my odds and ends, like the name of Franks daughters cat, Millard," said Knappe, who had paused to consult the note in question. The couple is working on a mystery novel set in an assisted-living facility. Post-it notes may be a plot device, Knappe suggested. In 1980, when the 3M company introduced the Post-it, no one could have foreseen the effect the 3-by-5-inch Valium-colored rectangle would have on domestic life. Its beginnings were folkloric. 40 years ago, Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M, discovered the imperfect adhesive that would adorn the Post-it. it took another six years for Art Fry, another 3M scientist, to find the application for this half glue, which came in a flash of inspiration after the bookmarks for his church hymnal kept falling out. And for years Post-its were marketed primarily for this purpose as tools for capturing a thought or for marking a spot on a document, among other typically office-bound tasks even as they were steadily migrating out of the office and into peoples homes (and garages), onto vertical surfaces like cabinets, refrigerators, dashboards, mirrors, walls, toilet seat lids, bathroom scales and the edges of pet food bowls. The

Notes migratory tendencies are why 3M scientists developed Post-it Super Sticky notes in 2003, with a stronger glue that hangs on tighter to those nubby, homey, largely vertical surfaces. (Artists and pranksters have used the colored ones like mosaic tiles an online search for Post-it Elvis will provide one impish example as have decorators like Jonathan Fong, who made a randomly patterned Post-it wall for a family room in California and photographed the result for his book "Walls That Wow. Creative Wall Treatments Without Fancy-Schmancy Painting.")Post-its crept into the Museum of Modern Art in 2004, beckoned there by Paola Antonelli, curator of architecture and design, who named the Post-it one of her Humble Masterpieces in a show and, later, in a book of the same name, inducting them, along with the white T-shirt and the rubber band, into the design hall of fame. "Hypertext on a refrigerator door," Antonelli wrote, "the Post-it shook the world."The 3M company would not say what percentage of its annual profits came from Post-it notes or what kind of growth the brand has enjoyed. But according to the NPD Group, a research firm that tracks retail trends, the category known as self-stick notes, which is dominated by Post-it notes, accounted for $106 million in sales at office superstores like Staples between June 2006 and May 2007, a 13.5 percent increase from the year before. And next month the company will sail further into the not yet fully charted, topographically fraught home environment with its first official "home collection," the Samba line of hot Latin colors and patterns, the better to accessorize the conversation you may be having, via Post-it notes, with your memory, your loved ones or your inner vixen. (Post-its are big with life coaches as a vehicle for affirmations.)No mere half-sticky slip of paper, the Post-it is a cache for information that will not stick elsewhere like in your brain. "Outsourced neurons," offered Dan Heath, a business consultant and teacher and a co-author of "Made to Stick," a new book about business concepts and slogans with staying power. "Or lets call them prosthetic memory."Memory experts, in fact, call them retrieval cues, an assist for absent-mindedness. Daniel Schacter, chairman of the psychology department at Harvard and the author of "The Seven Sins of Memory. How the Mind Forgets and Remembers," describes absent-mindedness as an encoding failure caused by distractedness, divided attention or the fact that your mind is filled with bulky and outdated information like the lyrics to "Muskrat Love." The Post-it, Schacter said the other day, works as a "prospective memory cue or an external memory aid" that can compensate for that failure. Even

Chief Creative Officer Todd Coats decided that we needed to rev up one of our conference rooms the one we use for brainstorming and internal meetings. So together we came up with the idea of filling the wall with Post-it notes in a multicolored mosaic of none other than Elvis. Memorial Day was looming, and I had nothing better to do than spend it with the King. We chose to use two contrasting color palettes aquatic and sunbrite for a total of 10 unique colors in the image. Theres something to be said for the psychedelic quality of mixing blues and oranges. There are approximately 34 different colors to choose from, and thats only in the 4- and 5-packs. In the single-pad packages, there are a few others, even dark colors for use with gel and metallic pens and markers not that theyre anywhere to be found on the 3M Web site check with arts and crafts supply stores if you want the darker variety. In all, Post-its, as a medium, make for a fairly complete color palette. What youll need.

Preferably a good smooth one, uninterrupted by furniture, outlets or other protuberances. It also helps if the finish is one that isnt marked or damaged by the glue on a Post-it (not likely, given the formulation of the glue, but worth a test note or two). While youre at it, make sure its a finish that a Post-it can actually stick to. A big picture window would work just as well, if not better the image will be viewable from both sides.

Open the mosaic image and your palette image side by side. Set your mosaic image back to RGB color mode. Select the magic wand tool, and uncheck contiguous and anti-aliased in the options, and set the tolerance to zero. Select one of the colors of your mosaic image (all blocks of the same color should be selected). Switch to the paintbucket tool and option-click on your palette image to select the color to fill those blocks. Then click back on your mosaic image. Repeat with each color in the mosaic/palette. Step three. reference material. Now that youve got a mosaic in Photoshop thats about the right colors (its fiendishly difficult to match the color of paper on a computer screen, but you can get close) its time to figure out how many Post-its youll need to buy, as well as print out your image as a map to follow when applying your masterpiece to the wall. Grab a pen and something to write on. You'll need to write down some numbers to take with you to the office supply store in step 4. Back in Photoshop, open up the useful histogram window (under the window menu). Select the all channels view. With the magic wand tool, select one colors worth of pixels. Youll see the number of pixels you have selected appear in the histogram window. With some simple math, you can figure out how many Post-its that number represents (if you resized your image 10x in the previous step, youll just have to knock two zeros off the end, otherwise, divide by the square). Write those numbers down, preferably alongside the name of the color or Post-it color family to which the color belongs. In order to better facilitate mapping out your installation, youll want to add a grid to your Photoshop file. The fastest way is to draw with the pencil tool, on a new layer, a box the size of one note (10 pixels square). Leave off the bottom and right sides of the box and select the 10 pixel square with the marquis tool. Go to edit - define pattern and save your pattern as something witty like 10px grid. Select everything on that new layer (with just your half-box on it) and hit delete. Then go to edit - fill. Select pattern to select your new grid pattern. Your new layer should now be filled with the desired grid. Tweak its position if the grid lines dont fall exactly on the edges of your big pixels, then adjust the transparency until it is more pleasing to the eye. Save and print out the final image. Its a good idea to make the page size as large as you can manage on your printer, so you dont have to squint at your printout while applying Post-its to the wall. Step four. gather the materials. From the histogram trick above, you know how many notes to get of each color. Be aware, though, that not every pad of Post-its will have the same number of notes. Different combination packages have pads with different numbers of notes in them, so check the label to make sure you get enough. If I recall correctly, five-packs have five 100-note pads and six- and 12-packs have 90-note pads, so check the label and do the math. Youll inevitably end up with leftovers. You can go crazy and actually use them for taking messages. Step five. notes on the wall. Looking back, I probably could have used a laser level, chalkline, or even a projector with my original Photoshop file to facilitate straight and square application of notes on a less-than-square wall. Oh well. I think it looks pretty good for having been done freehand. Youll find your own rhythm and preferred way to tackle the problem, and the best thing about this medium is

Do we have clout or what. We wrote the giant 3M company inquiring about the glue on Post-it Notes and actually got a reply.

You ask a tough question to answer. The adhesive used on Post-it Notes is a microsphere type adhesive. It sticks lightly and repositions because the microspheres limit the amount of surface area contact between the adhesive and the substrate. We do not sell the adhesive outside of 3M. We make only what we use internally, We do, however, make a repositionable glue stick for the retail market. This product allows the consumer to make their own notes. This product is available at most mass merchandisers. Sorry I couldn't help more. Dave T Office Supplies Division of 3M

Thanks for the help, Dave. Wow - microspheres! By the way, in the movie Romy and Michele's High School Reunion the two women try to dream up an impressive lie to make their nasty ex-classmates think they were a big success. What did they come up with? You guessed it - they invented Post-it Notes. Everyone was impresssed. Well, microspheres - they're impressive.

In the corporate world, climbing ladders and shaking hands run simultaneous. Between lunches, dinners, and meetings, something had to surface among the numbing UV lights of the office to keep everything in line. The Post-it Note, a small square with re-adhearable adhesive on the back, was one such answer. The three-inch bright yellow square was employed as a reminder, a note, or for organization. But some don't see it as only a productivity tool. they see it as a medium for colorful art. Even on 3M's corporate site the Post-it Notes are sold with the slogan "So express yourself in color." Some creative people took that idea to heart and below are several examples of how people have used the sticky notes to create works of art. by lightwerk "TO DO" is a project by the New York based public art collaborative, Illegal Art. Feel free to write your own "to do" list on a Post-it®. Please do not remove any Post-its®. We will be documenting the project as the week continues and installing new Post-its® as the space fills. by Nicolas Rudelle

Although Post-it Notes are generally thought of as their iconic pale yellow color, they come in a fairly wide variety. From the standard canary to hot pink, it's safe to say that all of the colours will stand out. With thirty-four colours at your fingertips, you're able to create some of art of your own -- even if it is only to remind you to buy more eggs at the market.

Haha.I love post-it notes art.) It takes such time, effort and careful planning. Thanks for sharing.

[.] love seeing what other people do with mosaic art made completely from post-it notes. Some of it is just incredible. Some of it evokes happy childhood [.]

[.] 28 Elvis aan de muur Door pellyGeef een reactieOverige Heb je even weinig te doen op kantoor ? Dit is wellicht een mooi tijdverdrijf ook al moet je wel even alle 37 kleuren Post-it notes bestellen die er zijn Hoe je het zelf [.]

[.] of my favorite articles is on how people use Post-it notes to create works of art. This routine piece of paper - most often used to keep track of important [.]

[.] weve seen Post-it® note art before, as im sure many of you have as well (maybe even here), it seems to keep on developing as a very colorful artistic medium. I think, it may have finally [.]

PostIt Notes is a easy to use little program for any version of Windows, it lets create colorful sticky note on your desktop and send them to others. You can use them for messages, reminders, telephone notes, to-do lists, Web and email addresses, office memos or anything else. You can easily change the color and size of each notes as you wish, set them to ring an alarm at a specified time, lock them to protect their contents and move them off the screen by hiding them. They stay around even when you turn your computer off. You can also send your notes to other people via email. When you install PostIt Notes, it sets itself up to run automatically when Windows starts up, so it will always be available when you need it. You can prevent this if you want.

Best prices on Post-It Notes in Notebooks & Pads. Check out BizRate for great deals on Notebooks & Pads from Tops, Global Industrial and Post-It. Use BizRate's latest online shopping features to compare prices for Post-It Notes. Read product specifications, calculate tax and shipping charges, sort your results, and buy Office Supplies with confidence. Easily narrow your search and find the product that's perfect for you. Tops Engineering 8.5 x 11 in Quadrille Ruled Computation Pad - Mead Cambridge 8.5 x 11 in Business Notebook - Black.

This post-it note program provides reminders on your computer desktop so you never miss a meeting, event or idea.

You can create your own notes with pictures and hyperlinks, stick notes on your computer desktop and add alarms to your notes as reminders. You can also subscribe to receive information on a Post-it Software Note from Web sites that provide this service.

Post-it notes are the simple way to leave a message, make a list or just capture an idea. Or try Post-it Index Flags to help find valuable information fast. And for messages that stick on vertical surfaces, buy our Super Sticky notes!

My colleague Philip Virgo who blogs for Computer Weekly and is Secretary-General of the Parliamentary and IT industry body Eurim, sent me a comment earlier this month which raisesimportant matters. He pointed out that NHS consultants may have to keep track of dozens of passwords which change regularly - and those who may be able to help with lost passwords tend to keep office hours only. Virgo says. "Little black books and post-it notes are the only option if you are not to resort to the ultimate sin of shared pass-words - when your professional indemnity insurance (and thus your future employability let alone your reputation) depends on what is done in your name." This raises an interesting question which has never been satisfactorily answered. How can the need for health information to remain confidential be reconciled with big NPfIT databases of medical records and the password-sharing, post-it-note culture of the NHS?

The so-called Post-It Note culture of password management underlines the potential risks that companies and public sector staff take with important data and network access. It is far from being a sensible practice, but we understand why people do it, especially in the case of some NHS staff faced with remembering and using a multitude of different usernames and passwords on a daily basis. However, such activity undermines the NHS Care Record Guarantee, created in an effort to reinforce the importance of patient confidentiality. Taking such a serious risk with IT security is sadly perceived by many as being a better option for maintaining productivity, rather than waiting for a busy IT department to reset a forgotten password. The answer is to deploy easy-to-use and effective tools to enable users to deal with forgotten passwords themselves rather than request IT department intervention. There are solutions available, including Courion’s PasswordCourier, that allow companies to provide quick and effective self-service password management, including issuing reminders and resets, as well as helping enforce best practice in creating and using strong passwords. Such tools work best alongside the prompt provisioning of access credentials for new employees or those moving departments. Ensuring that new accounts and login credentials are issued in a timely manner will reduce the temptation to share existing login information and compromise IT security. What use is an NHS Care Record Guarantee if staff write usernames and passwords on Post-It Notes stuck to desks or monitors? Stuart Hodkinson, UK general manager for Courion (

Over at the MadSilence blog there's a post about using Post It notes as a medium. There's a Post It note covered apartment (pictured to the left), a Post It note covered car, a flaming phoenix, and the Ray Charles portrait that I mentioned last year. I do like Post it notes but my desk is so disorganized I can never find them, so I usually use the piece of paper closest to me to write my message down. As a medium to create art, it probably benefits 3M (the company that makes Post-it notes) more than the artist. Post it notes don't stick to things for very long and I don't think the paper was designed to last. I do love mosaics though and a post-it note covered apartment makes me smile, so I'm not complaining. There's more Post-it note madness over at MadSilence.

For whatever reason I have never been one to keep a calendar on my wall. If theyre not too small to write in, theyre too big to put anywhere near your work space. Plus who likes writing vertically? Recently, I came up with a handy little hack that works for me and makes use of all these little post-it notes I get from surplus medical office supplies. Its the Post It Note Calendar.

The way this works is simple. Get your post-it note pad and take off about 30 pieces to put up on your wall, while labeling each with a number, 1-31, for the days of the month. This month my calendar goes up to 28, but for March Ill have it up to 31. Think of 30boxes. I line 7 post-its, for each day in a week, in each row - Monday to Sunday - so I can keep a visual track of the week ahead. When I want to add an item to a day I can just pull off the corresponding post-it, fill it in, and then stick it back up! No writing on the wall. If I cant fit everything on one post-it, I can add another over the top. I like this calendar is because I can view two months within the 30-31 days. When a day passes, it becomes a day in the following month. The 25th of February was yesterday, so now it is the 25th of March. Every day before that is now a day in March, so I can add events for March already. If a note has been used, next month I will just replace it by grabbing a new post-it and adding its date. If I need my schedule on the go, I can grab todays post-it and stick it in my car, on my fridge or on top of my equally frugal Hipster PDA! Its simple, cheap and can be completely tweaked to suit your visual and organizational style. [I'll post photos soon, but I'm sure you get the idea.]

Windows Vista comes with a handy Sticky Notes gadget that you can place anywhere on the desktop and quickly jot down notes, shopping lists, etc. Similarly, theres a Scratch Pad gadget in Google Desktop for capturing text notes without opening external applications like Outlook or Notepad. Both are fairly decent solutions but if you are looking for more powerful digital post-in notes for your computer screen, consider Hott Notes - they are again free and closely mimic the real 3M Post-It Notes discussed earlier.

Last month at fall SBMU here in Columbus, I was trying to explain Twitter to some folks in my social media session who weren't familiar with it. Since I'm a big fan of analogies, I spent the week before the show trying to come up with a quick and easy way to explain Twitter. The thing that kept popping into my head was the idea of a wall of Post-it notes. If you're still having a hard time understanding Twitter, hear me out for one more explanation. Tracking the Conversation There are millions of people in the world with thoughts, opinions and questions. Some of them say things you'll want to hear, others don't. Some will occasionally talk about you, others won't. Some will occasionally ask you questions or tell you things, and others won't. The question is, how do you keep track of all these conversations? If you want to track it on web pages, you do it with a search engine. If you're trying to track blogs you use Google or Technorati alerts. Either way, you've got a lot of information to sort through. Twitter makes things a tad bit simpler. A Wall of Messages Think of Twitter as a wall of messages just for you. Imagine a wall absolutely covered with messages written on different color post-it notes. Your wall might look something like this.

The 3M Corporation markets a handy little Post-it® Notes Web site utility, but has tied it to an unusual licensing agreement that makes the user responsible for meeting unspecified decency laws everywhere in the world and liable for all of 3M’s legal expenses in any nuisance suit that names the user’s Web site.

Post-it Software Notes for Internet Designers enables Web site designers to stick virtual Post-it notes on a web page. Visitors to the page (once they’ve installed a free plug-in) can drag the notes to their desktops, where the notes can serve as reminders, receipts, hot links to the designer’s site, etc. The notes can contain text, alarms and reminders, sounds, GIF animation, live buttons, and live links back to the originating Web site. The newest release, the Professional Edition, enables a savvy designer to create customized notes that reflect the visitor’s input to the Web site, such as customer ID numbers or shopping-cart contents, and to incorporate video and audio into the note. It isn’t cheap — $300 for each Web site on which the Professional Edition software is used, or $2499 for an unlimited license — but it’s an excellent implementation of a useful idea, and in creative hands could add ease of use and functionality to Web sites and banner ads.

When you install Post-it Software Notes for Internet Designers, an end-user licensing agreement pops up, to which you must agree in order to install the product. This happens with virtually every software product in the solar system, and usually you just click on the “I Accept ” box and move on. Heads up! This particular agreement requires that you agree not to use the software to send libelous or pornographic material to other people, or to otherwise violate “the laws or regulations of any country, state, province, city or other government entity into which you will make the Post-it® Software Notes available for downloading.”

In addition, the agreement says, you must “agree to indemnify, defend, and hold 3M harmless, including paying 3M’s reasonable attorneys fees and costs of defense, for any claims, demands or causes of action against 3M by any third party relating to your utilization of the Software and the content of any Post-it® Software Notes you create.” Basically, this says that if someone anywhere in the world seeks to harass 3M by suing them about content that’s displayed on your Web site, you are liable without limitation for 3M’s defense, irrespective of whether the charges are sustained in court. 3M’s lawyers have explicitly confirmed to me that this is correct. How much of your money do you suppose it would take 3M to settle a nuisance suit?

So why is 3M doing this? Because the software notes, unlike paper notes, say “Post-it® Note” at the top. Somewhere along the line, somebody, perhaps in a moment of levity, raised the question of Post-it Porn Notes, and the 3M legal department isn’t laughing.

3M has spent a lot of time thinking about the “brand promise” of its Post-it Notes — the intangibles of a product that are marketed to the consumer. According to 3M, a Post-it Note promises a yellow square that you can take off a pad of similar squares and stick on something else. To me, a Post-it Note also promises that what I write on it is my own business, and is not in any way owned or controlled by the 3M Corporation.

Heres a hard hitting piece of HR news - HR pros like to use post it notes, dig shopping above all else and dream of strangling employees. Guess the provider of that piece of hard hitting, yet stereotypical news? A local newspaper trying to takea dig at stereotypes of HR pros? Perhaps a hard-hitting business magazine like Fortune or BusinessWeek having some fun at HRs expense? Um, no.the source was SHRM, the biggest HR organization under the sun. Nice! Find the behind the wallrundown of the 2007 survey of HRprosat SHRM here(youll need your SHRM member number, which is fodder for another post), based on a Halogen Software sponsored survey of 750 HR people. In any event, here area couple of the hard hitting tidbits. And while it lacks the flash of technology, one HR professional lists Post-it notes as a workplace favorite, observing “I go through almost a pad every two weeks.” Football remains HR’s favorite sport, but the Dallas Cowboys replaced the Cincinnati Bengals in their hearts this year as the favored team. Among baseball fans, the Boston Red Sox continue to rank as HR’s favorite team, although one HR professional pointed out that “shopping is the only recognized sport in my world. As for New Year’s resolutions, one HR professional will strive “to not strangle our employees.” Heres the thing from my perspective. I get that the survey is supposed to be fun, and I really dont care about the results, because I get that Im probably different from the norm. Whats hard to fathom is the fact that SHRM would pick the survey up and rather than sticking purely with what the overall quantitative favorites of HR pros are (cars, TV shows, etc.), they pull non-scientific, single examples of what one person likes, and those examples makethe profession look like dinosaurs, shopaholics and non-professionals who talk about employees behind their backs (we want to help you, until we want to strangle you..) They could have gone for the HR pro who cant live without Firefox, the marathon runner and the person with the resolution to start a career ministry at their local church. Of course, you dont see sales organizations yucking it up by pulling single quotes fromindustry studiesciting a need to strangle customers, the challenge of passing on the fourth martini at lunch and a weakness for harassing receptionists everywhere. Wait, youre right, theyve learnednot to stereotype their members. Its pretty weak. The poll was conducted by Halogen Software, and weve had Sean Conrad from Halogen guest post here at FOT. Ill let Sean or the Halogen teamhit us in thecomments whether they pulled these individuals outof the more scientific results, or if that was SHRMs call. For now, gotta go. Themall opens at 10am, and Ivegot to work through my stack of post-it-notesbefore I can fulfill my shopaholic needs. Plllllease.

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference HR Stereotypes - Post-It Notes, Shopping and Dreams of Strangling Employees?.

While reporting this story, two items came up again and again. Post-it notes and the quest for the Holy Grail. Post-its, the sticky reminder pads invented by 3M, are ubiquitous in TV station master control rooms, usually placed on monitors or other surfaces to prompt operators to communicate "exceptions" back to traffic, like a commercial that didn't air properly, or an unexpected program change that wreaked havoc on the evening's scheduled spots.

The Post-it note, invented by Arthur Fry and manufactured by 3M, is a piece of stationery with a strip of adhesive on the back, designed for temporarily attaching notes to documents, computer displays, and so forth. It’s hard to believe after seeing these pictures that when Post-It Notes were initially launched by 3M the product failed. 3M started out by giving away the product for free in Boise Idaho. By 1980 post-it notes were being sold nationwide and the product took off. It Looks Like It Could Have Been Painted…

A conceptual/installation artist, Rebecca Murtaugh, chose to turn her bedroom into a room full of post-it notes! These pictures show amazing contrast in color, time, and dedication.

Mario! This figure was made from post-it notes by an employee in the company lunch room after hours. What an extraordinary way to use Post It Notes instead of the normal boring uses we all use them in the office!

Reader Paul sent this in, and I totally love the idea of transparent Post-it Notes. I'm not sure if it's just a concept product or something we actually may see one day soon. Either way, I'd totally use them. 3M should jump on this if they haven't already. Transparent Post-It Notes on Noisy Decent Graphics

3M does have something like it. Post-it® Notes in Sheer Colors, 5507-SY 3 in x 3 in.it's a start..]

[T]he Post-it Note was more than just a practical tool — it was also a psychological one. Compared to the clunky machines of the 1980s that generated all those documents, it was a vision of high-tech minimalism. Its edges were sharp and square, with no ugly binding, no perforations, no metal rings. Its color, a subtle but attention-getting yellow, was somehow like the color of thought itself, a lightbulb going off in your head. Devoid of any other graphic elements, it had the effect of a clean, calming, blank screen. And, yet, for all its streamlined efficiency, it was playful and user-friendly. . . .

17. If you drive an older car that doesn’t remind you that you’ve left your headlights on, use a Post-it as a reminder. When you put your lights on in the daytime, stick a Post-it note on the driver’s side window. When you leave your car, you’ll see the note and remember why it’s there.

19. When you go to the supermarket, remove the Post-it from the fridge and stick it on your wallet. At the store, stick the note to the handle of your cart and have both hands free for shopping. Toss the note when you leave the store.

Keep some mini post-its in your wallet. When you go out to eat with friends and pay with a credit card, you can write the amount to be charged on a mini-note and stick it to the card.

Well, I’d better make that “Nineteen Uses.” I had no idea that Post-it Notes can damage books. I’ve de-Posted library books many times when returning them, and no librarian has ever said anything about it.

Out of curiosity, I just removed some Post-it Notes from one of my (not the library’s) books. These Post-its were stuck to pages for at least fifteen years. (Yes, it’s been at least that long since I read the book.) The paper underneath the notes looks and feels the same as the rest of the pages. Maybe I was lucky. Still, I won’t be using Post-its in library books.

Post-its can also make a very nice and secure label for 3-ring binders. Write the title on one, use another to cover about 1/2 of its sticky side and slide it down into the label holder, press against the titled one and pull up on the other.

I’m no librarian, but quality 3M Post-It notes leave very little residue even after being stuck for a long time. Cheap store brand ones leave adhesive behind after even a few days.

I use little Post-it Notes to mark passages that I’ve read and want to copy over later. (I keep a Word document with quotations that appealed to me for one reason or another.)

Ever have trouble getting a sign out of a sign holder (like the little holder outside your office door that says your name)? Slide in a Post-it: it will grab onto the sign enough for you to pull it out.

Keep some mini post-its in your wallet. When you go out to eat with friends and pay with a credit card, you can write the amount to be charged on a mini-note and stick it to the card.

Post-it notes also make useful around-the-house flash cards for studying things (vocab words, etc.). Just stick them where you know you’ll see them, and you’ll jog your memory without any extra effort!

For example, if you need to remember the meaning of the word “defenestrate” (which means “to throw out of a window”), write the word on a post-it note and stick it on your window.

As a teacher and a piler of anything that is paper, I somtimes use Post-its in place of paper clips/staples. If I have a small stack of anything (2-10 pgs), I will wrap the post-it over the top-edge of the stack, with the sticky part showing on top and the rest of the post-it folded over the back. Then, I label the sticky portion, so when I flip through my massive piles of smaller stacks, I can find what I need faster.

Carry around some post-its and a pen in your pocket or purse for instant “business cards” to easily record yours or others’ phone numbers, addresses, web sites, or other information.

As for library books: I once went the post-it route, but I discovered that a digital voice recorder can be more supple for notation than post-its. You can record not just the page number and approximate position on the page, but also your immediate thoughts on what you think is important to note.

I also use post-its to reinforce shop-receipts that I need to keep for guarantees, and which are usually to brittle to survive that long. Another thing where you don’t want holes at the wrong spot.

as a library-lover, I am at odds with my Post-it use. I do use them in library books, even though I know the risks. My feeling is that it’s better than actually writing in the books, and for the short period that I’ll have the books in my possession (I try to use-and-return my books, rather than keep them out for the whole checkout period) it makes my life easier and is a small risk.

Researchers at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a computing application which could replace the Post-It note

dr mc schraefel (lower case international) of ECS is working with researchers at MIT on a project that aims to see computers being as easy to use as Post-It notes.

Researchers in the group, including PhD students Michael Bernstein and Max Van Kleek, undertook a study of the use of Post-Its in an office environment and came up with a number of reasons why the actual physical object of a sticky note would be preferable in certain contexts to a computer program. But they found that one of the main reasons for using Post-Its was ease of use and time taken to make the note.

Too often the computer gets in the way of what a person wants to do', says Karger. 'That’s right', says schraefel; 'we can quickly jot "meeting at 5 with Max tues" on a Post-It and the job is done; the reminder there.

note, but no one's ever really managed to improve on the basic design -- which might be why MIT's "Quickies" concept doesn't even try. The electronic note system is instead based around a digital pen and special pad, which saves your notes as you jot them down on RFID-embedded Post-Its. Software on your PC then does some quick OCR and, according to the inventors, "uses its understanding of the user's intentions, content, and the context of the notes to provide the user with reminders, alerts, messages, and just-in-time information." Since the database can also store location information, sticking the note on a book or other object allows you to locate it later using the RFID tag, and you can even have notes SMS'd to their recipients. Pretty wild -- but we're more impressed someone finally found a good use for all those

Aww... at first when I saw the article title, and the pictures, I thought this was some kind of e-ink display with a tiny CPU representing a post-it note of the future. Instead it's this...

you leave your PC on in your room and leave off to work. Your mom/dad/girlfriend/wife wants to remind you of some event happening that same day after you get out of work (assuming you cant pick up your cellphone at work) rather then having to go up to your computer (which might even be password protected) and type up a note on your calendar application; they can grab one of these post-it notes that you left on fridge, write down the reminder, which then gets sent to your computer wirelessly... if you have your calendar app be sync with your home pc and work pc, then you might even get this note directly at work.

Reader Paul sent this in, and I totally love the idea of transparent Post-it Notes. I'm not sure if it's just a concept product or something we actually may see one day soon. Either way, I'd totally use them. 3M should jump on this if they haven't already.

Last month at fall SBMU here in Columbus, I was trying to explain Twitter to some folks in my social media session who weren't familiar with it. Since I'm a big fan of analogies, I spent the week before the show trying to come up with a quick and easy way to explain Twitter. The thing that kept popping into my head was the idea of a wall of Post-it notes. If you're still having a hard time understanding Twitter, hear me out for one more explanation.

Think of Twitter as a wall of messages just for you. Imagine a wall absolutely covered with messages written on different color post-it notes. Your wall might look something like this:

Beam_from.ZDNet. com. au beam_text.Sydney duo plot end to Post-it notes beam_tags.ZDNETAU beam_label.Send to my mobile beam_icon.12 beamad_category.20 beamad_placement.2183

Make Your Name Stick With Custom 3M Post-itŽ Notes at iPrint. com Who would have imagined that a 4 inch rectangular piece of paper with an adhesive end would become so popular? Sometimes, the simplest things can have the most amazing impact--as is the case with 3M’s Post-it notes, an office staple for more than 30 years. So common have Post-it Notes become, you would be hard pressed to find an office desk without them. In fact, they’ve even become a popular household item as well. Imagine having your logo, brand or image on personalized or custom Post-it Notes--the intrinsic value of this versatile, mini billboard far exceeds traditional marketing tools. They can also be used as promotional gifts or display personalized messages for your clients and customers. Custom Post-It Notes Can Help Market Your Business with Minimum Cost and Effort We offer four different sizes of personalized Post-it notes, 3 ˝” x 2”, 4” x 3”, 4” x 4” and 4” x 6”. You can order as few as 10 or as many as 480 Post-it note pads. Each Post-it note pad contains 50 sheets. You can choose from white, cream, yellow, gray, or sky blue papers. Make your notes stand out with different ink colors of red, green, blue or black. It’s so easy to create custom Post-it Notes online at iPrint. com. We have dozens of Post-it Note layouts from which to choose. Upload your own graphic or choose one from our extensive graphics library. Choose from over 70 different layouts organized in seven different categories to begin creating your own personalized Post-it Notes!

The verdict is in on Post-it NotesŽ and similar adhesive markers! Though they are easy to use and may be removed from most paper surfaces, DON'T be tempted to use them in books. These seemingly harmless markers leave behind their adhesive, even when removed immediately. The adhesive hardens and leaves a film that becomes acidic. This results in eventual discoloration and brittleness of the paper. They were designed for short-term application to expendable documents and have no place being used on permanent records and books. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) conducted research which determined that even when removed immediately, the adhesive residue remained. Even more dramatic effects result when used on newsprint (some of the ink is removed) or on brittle, fragile paper where removal may result in tearing the page. The NARA report concluded that these notes will cause increasing preservation problems when used with permanent records and should be avoided. The UCSD Libraries have the right to charge for materials returned with adhesive markers and any damage caused by their use. Signage reminds patrons not to use these in library materials. The Effect of Post-itsŽ bookmark is available at the circulation desk for patrons to take with them.

Help us preserve library materials by NOT using Post-it NotesŽ. Your cooperation is appreciated. Return to Preserving Library Materials.

A wallpaper consisting of four layers of varying grey tones on a bright primary backing. Each layer is perforated in a grid format and backed with a tacky adhesive similar to post-it notes. Pixelnotes is inspired by the way we work within

This program allows you to attach post-it like notes to your Windows desktop. You can use individual settings for each note (color, font, opaque).

Tempo is an electronic reminder which functions under Windows (32 bits) and displays notes at will. Like Post-It Notes block but with time management. Once installed, it starts automatically with Windows and is summarized by an animated sand-glass in the task-bar of Windows.. You can search for a text within notes, any notes with that text in will appear.. Size of notes can be changed and notes can comprise an alarm.. visualizing all the existing notes in continuation.. A list of notes can be consulted, with reference and access on each note.

This small program allows you easily attach post-it like notes to your windows desktop. You can use individual visual appearance for each note. Not overloaded with huge number of features it have nice and intuitive interface and consume minimal system resources.. * You can set individual notes always on top from context menu of note.. * Unregistered program allow you attach to desktop no more than three notes.. Existing note can be edited by double clicking on it.. (only windows 2000, XP) * Fast note creation from clipboard text.

ART FRY & SPENCER SILVER Post-it notes In the 1970s, Art Fry invented what is probably the most significant office supply product since the paperclip. the Post-it Note. But he could not have created this now ubiquitous item without the previous invention of his colleague, Spencer Silver. Arthur L. Fry was born in Minnesota, and grew up first in a small town in Iowa and later in Kansas City. He was a tinkerer and a problem solver already as a child. his earliest engineering efforts were devoted to creating custom-designed toboggans from scrap lumber. Fry began his education in a one-room rural schoolhouse, but in the early 1950s he moved on to the University of Minnesota, majoring in Chemical Engineering. In 1953, while still an undergraduate, Fry began working for 3M in New Product Development --- and continued to work there until his retirement in the early 1990s. Spencer F. Silver was born in San Antonio. He majored in Chemistry at Arizona State University (BS, 1962), then earned a doctorate in Organic Chemistry from the University of Colorado(PHD, 1966), before taking a position as a Senior Chemist in 3M's Central Research Labs. Silver still works at 3M, specializing in Adhesives Technology. But Silver's creativity is not confined to his career. over the years he has also won a reputation as an accomplished painter in pastels and oils. Silver is now named on over 20 US patents. but his most significant invention was not an immediate success. In 1968, Silver developed a high-quality but "low-tack" adhesive, made of tiny, indestructible acrylic spheres that would stick only where they were tangent to a given surface, rather than flat up against it. As a result, the adhesive's grip was strong enough to hold papers together but weak enough to allow the papers to be pulled apart again without being torn. More importantly, the adhesive could be used in the same way again and again. Silver wanted to market the adhesive as a spray, or as a surface for bulletin boards on which temporary notices could be easily posted and then removed. Over the next five years, Silver shared his revolutionary product with colleagues at 3M, informally and in seminar presentations. A marketable form of the product proved elusive, and Silver's temporary adhesive might have been consigned to a shelf indefinitely. but then Art Fry attended one of Silver's seminars. While Silver had been painting in his spare time, Fry sang in his church choir. Fry was frustrated by the fact that, when he stood and opened his hymnal to sing, the paper bookmarks that he used in his hymnal to mark the songs on the program would slip out of sight or even onto the floor. In a moment of insight that has become legendary in the realm of contemporary invention, Fry, musing during a rather boring sermon, realized that SilverÁs reusable adhesive would provide his bookmarks with precisely the temporary anchoring he required. Returning to work, Fry wrote up his idea for a reliable, reusable bookmark, and presented it to his supervisors. Management initially worried that the product would seem wasteful. but the staff could not get enough of the samples Fry was passing around. Soon, 3M gave the invention its full support. It took another five years to perfect the specifications and design machines to manufacture the product, but in 1980 Post-it Notes were introduced nationwide. Within two years, Post-it Notes were established as an outright necessity in the office. As the basic product evolved into an entire product line, Post-its could also be found in most schools, labs, libraries, and even in homes. Meanwhile, both Spencer Silver and Art Fry became heroes of innovation. they have both won 3M's highest honors for research and numerous awards within the international engineering community.

ART FRY & SPENCER SILVER Post-it notes In the 1970s, Art Fry invented what is probably the most significant office supply product since the paperclip. the Post-it Note. But he could not have created this now ubiquitous item without the previous invention of his colleague, Spencer Silver. Arthur L. Fry was born in Minnesota, and grew up first in a small town in Iowa and later in Kansas City. He was a tinkerer and a problem solver already as a child. his earliest engineering efforts were devoted to creating custom-designed toboggans from scrap lumber. Fry began his education in a one-room rural schoolhouse, but in the early 1950s he moved on to the University of Minnesota, majoring in Chemical Engineering. In 1953, while still an undergraduate, Fry began working for 3M in New Product Development --- and continued to work there until his retirement in the early 1990s. Spencer F. Silver was born in San Antonio. He majored in Chemistry at Arizona State University (BS, 1962), then earned a doctorate in Organic Chemistry from the University of Colorado(PHD, 1966), before taking a position as a Senior Chemist in 3M's Central Research Labs. Silver still works at 3M, specializing in Adhesives Technology. But Silver's creativity is not confined to his career. over the years he has also won a reputation as an accomplished painter in pastels and oils. Silver is now named on over 20 US patents. but his most significant invention was not an immediate success. In 1968, Silver developed a high-quality but "low-tack" adhesive, made of tiny, indestructible acrylic spheres that would stick only where they were tangent to a given surface, rather than flat up against it. As a result, the adhesive's grip was strong enough to hold papers together but weak enough to allow the papers to be pulled apart again without being torn. More importantly, the adhesive could be used in the same way again and again. Silver wanted to market the adhesive as a spray, or as a surface for bulletin boards on which temporary notices could be easily posted and then removed. Over the next five years, Silver shared his revolutionary product with colleagues at 3M, informally and in seminar presentations. A marketable form of the product proved elusive, and Silver's temporary adhesive might have been consigned to a shelf indefinitely. but then Art Fry attended one of Silver's seminars. While Silver had been painting in his spare time, Fry sang in his church choir. Fry was frustrated by the fact that, when he stood and opened his hymnal to sing, the paper bookmarks that he used in his hymnal to mark the songs on the program would slip out of sight or even onto the floor. In a moment of insight that has become legendary in the realm of contemporary invention, Fry, musing during a rather boring sermon, realized that SilverÁs reusable adhesive would provide his bookmarks with precisely the temporary anchoring he required. Returning to work, Fry wrote up his idea for a reliable, reusable bookmark, and presented it to his supervisors. Management initially worried that the product would seem wasteful. but the staff could not get enough of the samples Fry was passing around. Soon, 3M gave the invention its full support. It took another five years to perfect the specifications and design machines to manufacture the product, but in 1980 Post-it Notes were introduced nationwide. Within two years, Post-it Notes were established as an outright necessity in the office. As the basic product evolved into an entire product line, Post-its could also be found in most schools, labs, libraries, and even in homes. Meanwhile, both Spencer Silver and Art Fry became heroes of innovation. they have both won 3M's highest honors for research and numerous awards within the international engineering community.

(CNN) -- For most people, Post-it Notes are disposable, ordinary office papers used for note-taking and reminders. But for 19-year-old David Alvarez of Leavenworth, Washington, they were the perfect medium for a 10-foot-tall mosaic depicting Ray Charles.

Using more than 2,000 of those ubiquitous brightly-colored sticky scraps, Alvarez composed a three-dimensional representation of the famous musician. The piece has just gone on display at Wenatchee Valley College in Wenatchee, Washington, where Alvarez is in his second year of studies. It's something so simple. You can still see the flaps sticking out on some of them, he said. Naturally the Post-it Note just sort of flaps out. While learning new techniques in Adobe Photoshop in a class, he experimented with taking a photograph of Ray Charles and making it look like a mosaic on the computer screen. He then translated this idea into the Post-it work. He spent three months constructing the mosaic, sometimes sacrificing schoolwork for his art. At least one of his papers for his summer English courses suffered, but he persevered so that he could participate in an art show July 28 at the Stanley Civic Center in Wenatchee. Originally, the Post-it Notes stayed in this unique format only by virtue of their manufactured stickiness, which does not hold up as well as glue, Alvarez found. When he displayed his work at the show, he monitored the project for 14 hours, continuously replacing notes that were falling off. The aspiring art teacher now uses glue to hold the notes in place.

19-year-old David Alvarez of Wenatchee Valley College in Washington used more than 2,000 Post-it Notes to make this giant image of Ray Charles.

He spent three months constructing the mosaic, sometimes sacrificing schoolwork for his art. At least one of his papers for his summer English courses suffered, but he persevered so that he could participate in an art show July 28 at the Stanley Civic Center in Wenatchee. Originally, the Post-it Notes stayed in this unique format only by virtue of their manufactured stickiness, which does not hold up as well as glue, Alvarez found. When he displayed his work at the show, he monitored the project for 14 hours, continuously replacing notes that were falling off. The aspiring art teacher now uses glue to hold the notes in place.

Link Other Post-It shenanigans previously on Neatorama. Donkey Kong Made with Post-It Notes, Pixelnotes, Post-It Notes Jaguar, and Post-It Notes Elvis.

Johnald August 31st, 2007 at 8.06 am fair enough if it was a point about the stickiness of post-it notes, but 3 months?!? i could do that in half a day, no kidding (with the use of a computer for figuring which shade post-its to use). people are doing similar but more complex works with toothpicks and matchsticks, its pretty easy if you just bother planning

Product Description This combination Post-it®. note pad and flag pen package will really get you organized. Self-stick, removable note pads in pleasant pastel colors compliment home or office. The bonus flag pen in a coordinating color allows you to jot down your notes and mark important information on pages, documents and in files. Product Description Post-it Pastel Note Pads Flag Pen VP

Heres a convenient mixture of office supplies. You have both your tiny post-it notes and your USB drive all in one. Which makes it so you could either make notes about whats on the drive, or use the sticky notes elsewhere throughout the day. The tiny drive keeps it simple too, the wood isnt anything special. It just looks like a cut and sanded piece of wood. Which might look a little too dull for some, but you could also easily add a design to the surface, if youre feeling artistic.

19-year-old David Alvarez of Wenatchee Valley College in Washington used more than 2,000 Post-it Notes to make this giant image of Ray Charles.

He spent three months constructing the mosaic, sometimes sacrificing schoolwork for his art. At least one of his papers for his summer English courses suffered, but he persevered so that he could participate in an art show July 28 at the Stanley Civic Center in Wenatchee. Originally, the Post-it Notes stayed in this unique format only by virtue of their manufactured stickiness, which does not hold up as well as glue, Alvarez found. When he displayed his work at the show, he monitored the project for 14 hours, continuously replacing notes that were falling off. The aspiring art teacher now uses glue to hold the notes in place.

Link Other Post-It shenanigans previously on Neatorama. Donkey Kong Made with Post-It Notes, Pixelnotes, Post-It Notes Jaguar, and Post-It Notes Elvis.

Johnald August 31st, 2007 at 8.06 am fair enough if it was a point about the stickiness of post-it notes, but 3 months?!? i could do that in half a day, no kidding (with the use of a computer for figuring which shade post-its to use). people are doing similar but more complex works with toothpicks and matchsticks, its pretty easy if you just bother planning

Hi I'm looking for a supplier who can give me a good price on post-it notes with my name and a message printed on each page. Anyone know of anywhere I can get that for a good price. The problem is with quantities, it will be a SMALL run! thanks

We have an online printing service that sells post it note pads - 3 sizes, pads of 50 sheets, and you can do some basic layout online or you can upload your own artwork. Smallest quantity is 20 pads. You just can't produce them affordably in smaller quantities - all the time goes into setup. Here's the link. Custom Post-It Notes Regards, ImageMakerGraphics

Have you ever looked at a post-it note and thought, "Why don't you make yourself useful already and get a job? I mean another job. a real job. a job in the arts!"If not, don't feel bad. Illustrator Arthur Jones has already beat you to it anyway. Since 2001 he has been transforming the humble post-it note into heroic narrative canvas. He first got the idea back when he was working at a marketing company in Chicago, laying out advertisements for various hotel chains. It was exactly how you might imagine a job of this sort might be, boring, monotonous, we've all been there. In between pounding his forehead against his particle board desk, Jones spent a lot of time sitting in his cubicle, pondering office supplies, and their untapped artistic potential. He created a huge rubber ball by adding one rubber band to it for every day that he worked. He crafted a little mouse out of masking tape. And every day for month, he drew tiny works of art onto post-it notes using a Sharpie. Eventually he gathered it all up and turned it into an art show called "Day Job." The centerpiece was a portrait of Lee Iaccoca composed of 5000 bright blue push pins stolen from his office, stuck into the gallery wall. Five years later, Jones has transformed his favorite time-kill activity into a full-fledged obsession. He has created the Post-It Note Reading series, where writers read their original stories, while corresponding illustrations drawn entirely on Post-It Notes are projected behind them. please direct questions + comments to Arthur Jones text. Starlee Kine, photo. Maria Schoenherr

Bilingual Post-It Notes. Pick up where Dora left off with these easy and adorable Bilingual Post-It Notes. Pre-marked with cute drawings and labels in English and Spanish, your brilliant bambinoand youcan learn common words and household objects in another language, without having to know how to read. Stick with it from agua to ventana and every uno, dos, tres in between and before you know it, you'll both be inteligente en la cabeza. Now, if they only made an adult edition to help expand your bilingual cuss word vocabulary.

3M Super Sticky Post-it Notes, 3in. x 3in., Samba, 90 Sheets Per Pad, Pack Of 5 Pads. Compare prices