May 2021

Great rundown from Discord creative team on just how much detail goes into building a brand
 
May 27, 2021
 
 

Most of the time, you’ll see old Clyde within a rounded rectangle chat bubble. Technically, being inside this bubble is Clyde’s “home”. Whether it’s on our website, within a profile icon on our social pages, or inside the app icon on your computer or mobile device, Clyde was always “in” something, like a hamster stuck in a rolling ball. Only the most eagle-eyed may notice, but the old logo was horizontally asymmetrical — something our Design Team’s been waiting years to fix. Small details such as “Clyde lives within a bubble” and “not symmetrical” can be deceivingly restrictive when creating new interface elements, art assets, and even merch items. So, we took a step back and thought to ourselves: How can we give Clyde a refresh without going too crazy? And what makes Clyde, well… Clyde? It took a while for us to land in a good place — people around the world are already familiar with the Discord logo, so we can’t have them wake up one day seeing something weird like a banana as our icon. Below is a preview of all the ideas and experimentation we went through when determining how Clyde should look. We went from lots of circular shapes to what’s basically a :) and eventually refining the more squared-off shape that you’re seeing today.

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Great rundown from Discord creative team on just how much detail goes into building a brand
  Nelly (blog.discord.com) and   Julian Hebron (thebasispoint.com)
May 27, 2021
 
 

Most of the time, you’ll see old Clyde within a rounded rectangle chat bubble. Technically, being inside this bubble is Clyde’s “home”. Whether it’s on our website, within a profile icon on our social pages, or inside the app icon on your computer or mobile device, Clyde was always “in” something, like a hamster stuck in a rolling ball. Only the most eagle-eyed may notice, but the old logo was horizontally asymmetrical — something our Design Team’s been waiting years to fix. Small details such as “Clyde lives within a bubble” and “not symmetrical” can be deceivingly restrictive when creating new interface elements, art assets, and even merch items. So, we took a step back and thought to ourselves: How can we give Clyde a refresh without going too crazy? And what makes Clyde, well… Clyde? It took a while for us to land in a good place — people around the world are already familiar with the Discord logo, so we can’t have them wake up one day seeing something weird like a banana as our icon. Below is a preview of all the ideas and experimentation we went through when determining how Clyde should look. We went from lots of circular shapes to what’s basically a :) and eventually refining the more squared-off shape that you’re seeing today.

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Why the U.S. is facing a housing shortage
  cnbc.com and   Julian Hebron (thebasispoint.com)
May 25, 2021
 
 

The U.S. has a housing shortage. With city dwellers moving to the suburbs and potential sellers unwilling to show their homes during the Covid pandemic, in April there were only 1.16 million U.S. homes for sale, down 20.5% from a year earlier. That lack of inventory has helped push prices higher. Home prices surged in March, up 13.2% from the previous year, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index. Watch the video to find out why is the housing supply so meager.

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U.S. home price-to-rent ration highest since 1975, meaning the average house sells for way more than its “fair value”
  stlouisfed.org and   Julian Hebron (thebasispoint.com)
May 24, 2021
 
 

The nationwide house price-to-rent ratio, a widely used measure of housing valuation that is analogous to the price-to-dividend ratio for the stock market, is at its highest level since at least 1975, as shown in the figure below. Rapid house price appreciation since last May, combined with a slowdown in rent growth, resulted in a surge in this ratio. By February 2021, the national house price-to-rent ratio had surpassed the previous peak reached in January 2006; in March 2021, the ratio was 1% higher than its level at the peak of the housing bubble. This suggests the average house now sells for quite a bit more than its “fair value,” as explained [in the link below].

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Reddit traders appear to be targeting a heavily shorted mortgage lender United Wholesale for their next squeeze
  Natasha Dailey (markets.businessinsider.com) and   Julian Hebron (thebasispoint.com)
May 24, 2021
 
 

Wall Street Bets traders claim to be pouring thousands of dollars into a company called UWM Holdings. Shares of the mortgage lender are "undervalued and over shorted," one Redditor told Insider. Social media sentiment around the stock is largely positive, Hype Equity data show.

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What Expertise Do You Want? What Are You Willing To Do For It? – The Big Picture
  Barry Ritholtz (ritholtz.com) and   Julian Hebron (thebasispoint.com)
May 21, 2021
 
 

Your professional success is a function of your skillset, your knowledge base, and what you can provide to the people who buy your services or pay your salary. There are many more nuances to this, but that is the basic formula: What you know, what you can accomplish, and how that gets monetized. The big takeaway to consider: The next 7, 10, and 20 years are going to roll by, whether you are developing expertise or not. It’s up to you what expertise you have or not after that time has elapsed…

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