July 30, 2007
You know you spend too much time in Photoshop when...
You’re in the Finder and you select a group of file folders, expecting you can right-click on them and create a new Layer Group to store them in…
sleep!
Posted by aj_kandy at 11:57 PM
July 10, 2007
hotness is always the tiebreaker: a life in shirts
Global uber-hipster (anti-hipster?) Momus posted an interesting Flickr slide show of his rediscovered collection of vintage T-shirts, many of which he doesn’t seem to like much anymore.
In a decreasingly surprising twist of global synchronicity, my Keep Calm and Carry On and Designer Slash Model T-shirts arrived today. Ten years from now, will they be ironically retro, or just sad?
My upstairs neighbor Joern (a former Philosophy grad from Germany) has his own T-shirt silkscreening biz as well, so I’ll probably launch my own line of designer hipster meme shirts soon…. Watch this space.
Posted by aj_kandy at 1:09 AM
March 2, 2007
The eight types of bad creative critics
A very funny cartoon by Tom Fishburne. So, so true.
via SwissMiss via Brand-Em via Tom Fishburne’s Skydeck Cartoons (collected into the book Brand Camp)
Posted by aj_kandy at 2:28 PM
January 26, 2007
New Concordia Logo: My Take
Ok, rather than just razzing the new Concordia ninja-head logo, here’s my take on it - a stylized combination shield, book and heart enclosing a sunburst with the City and University motto, concordia salus. The font is Beta Sans Bold. I’ve done a main crest as well as a tagline/signature version.
Can you find the hidden historical reference in the design? Answers next week.
Posted by aj_kandy at 5:19 PM
January 19, 2007
Concordia steals sheep
My alma mater unveiled its new logo today.
Seeing the history of former logos alongside it, I long for the heraldic authoritativeness of the 1978 shield, and the typographic friendliness of the 1988 version. This new one could be a logo for a dentist’s office.
Not only does it have atrocious visual balance, with the “shield” or remnants thereof being too close to the text, the maroon elements completely overshadow the background tan elements. And why, o why, did they use such a heavy font, then letterspace the lowercase letters?
Frederic Goudy is spinning in his grave.
Posted by aj_kandy at 12:14 PM | Comments (4)
December 6, 2006
Rutledge: The Thin PMS185 Line
Andy Rutledge, whose opinions I respect (but occasionally differ with) publishes a good rant about the introspective, award-chasing, client-indifferent nature of the AIGA mafia.
I’m not sure I agree with (or care about) some of the political stuff he mentions in this piece, but the crucial point is that there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the designer’s role. Instead of helping clients achieve measurable results — higher sales or greater market penetration or solving other business problems — they’re still focused on the decorative-arts, academic ivory tower end of things.
Rutledge is a user-experience designer, and I often ask the same question he does when there’s a decision to be made about a project: “What tangible benefit does this have for the client / their customers?”
Questions of ease of use, readability, and accessibility are also balanced by business judgements — the effectiveness of eye-tracking, heat-maps, effective promotional tools, mailing lists, e-coupons, conversion rates and so on.
I have met and interviewed lots of designers, many fresh out of school, who seem to have no understanding of what their role in business is.
In school, they’ll learn the Adobe Suite and Macromedia Flash, but instead of learning problem-solving, they’re encouraged to be self-expressive, to make unreadable posters and busy, clever little Flash sites as part of their portfolio projects, that take forever to load and require a working knowledge of the Myst series of games to navigate.
I’ve seen very few design school grads who had things like a solid “standards-y” xhtml/css site, traditional typographic projects like newspapers, books, manuals or brochures, or proper statistical tables, charts, infographics or plain old graphs in their portfolio.
So — if you come to me with rave-graphic T-shirts and dense, layered, “thornamental” poster designs, it may be impressive, but it isn’t going to help me decide to hire you.
Design schools need to teach information design, strong traditional techniques and more than a bit of business 101. After all, who’s going to be paying their graduates’ salaries but businesses, and how can they help them if they don’t understand how they work?
Rutledge mentions a kind of anti-business, leftist ideological perspective among designers. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I do know people, even some with successful design businesses of their own, who have a tenuous grasp of what marketing really is or how it works, beyond the fact that Adbusters told them it was sinful, and therefore they want to avoid sin…
Anti-business? I don’t think so. I also think Rutledge makes the fallacy of equating Republican with Business, like there are no Greens or Dems or Liberals who are millionaire businesspeople… The greater problem is perhaps indifference or condescension to the needs of business, stemming from misinformed counterculture thinking. From my persepctive, today’s generation is either apathetic to the ‘business is evil’ meme, or at best is engaged in trying to transform their clients’ businesses by introducing green / ethical solutions as part of their practice.
That said, in general, I agree that there’s a shocking lack of general business, political and economics knowledge among the design community. There’s a willingness to focus solely on small-picture, western-white-liberal-guilt issues or get tangled into The Big Idea, as Andrew Potter wrote recently for THIS’s 40th anniversary issue (scroll down for his bit, “small ideas”), vs. doing system-level thinking (is the root cause of global poverty Western overconsumption, or failed states, the World Bank and the IMF?)
That said, it’s always a two-way street. Businesses, for their part, need to understand the designer’s role, as was recently memorably phrased by Jeff Croft; “Bring me problems, not solutions.”
Even today, in 2006, companies still waste their own time and money by asking for “solutions” without even knowing what the original problem is; and the usual result is Flash intros that annoy and bore. (Today’s example: chaoshats.com. Whoever did that site really ought to hand the money back to their client, because no customer’s going to sit through a five-minute loading screen just to get to page one.)
Posted by aj_kandy at 3:38 PM
March 2, 2006
37signals Gets Real
Jason and the fine folks at 37signals have published a new PDF book called Getting Real.
In their own words:
Getting Real details the business, design, programming, and marketing principles of 37signals. The book is packed with keep-it-simple insights, contrarian points of view, and unconventional approaches to software design. This is not a technical book or a design tutorial, it's a book of ideas.
Sample chapters (in PDF format, boo) are available to peruse. Seems like a good documentation of their own internal process, a bit of the it's-so-obvious-why-doesn't-everyone-do-this, cluetrainy thing about it, but probably worth reading.
What I like about it is that it's largely applicable to any sort of startup or product launch process, not just web or software applications. (Although I don't know how iterative you can be about cars or dishwashers. Hmmm.)
Oh yeah, on the Web 1.56 front, our Transcribr podcast transcription service is doing better than expected...Look for more announcements on that front soon.
Posted by aj_kandy at 12:39 PM
February 28, 2006
What if Microsoft designed iPod packaging?
"More bullet points!"
A very funny - and sadly, accurate - YouTube video, via Todd Dominey.
Posted by aj_kandy at 10:30 AM
December 13, 2005
The Value of Timelessness in Design
Originally published at The Creative Forum. While you're there, my latest article is up today.
Frank Gehry's Stata Center at MIT is a riotous jumble of cones, curves, bricks, metal panels, and glass. It's a building that could only have come to life in today's world of modern materials and computer-aided design. The afterword of the official MIT book about the building says that it:
"[...] does not aspire to the classical virtues of unity and timelessness. [...] it works, instead, like a giant transponder. You can ping your preoccupations, thoughts, and desires at it on different cultural wavelengths and get surprising and challenging messages back."
I see this as an analogy for the precarious, ungrounded state of the entire design profession at the start of the century. Ephemeral design, which marked the changing decades and seasons, was secondary to a solid core of more timeless design and a craft tradition. Now, it has upended the entire continuum; it has subsumed it completely. Who cares if a design, a product, or a building lasts longer than a couple of decades -- we're in the business of surprising and challenging, not just "making good things," now. And that's potentially a big problem.
Art directors in the 2D world of print, Web, interface design and photography face the same questions as architects. We have at our fingertips the possibility to design anything we can imagine, with the entire gamut of historical styles to draw from — but it seems that designers prefer historicism to history. Thus we have the Fossil watch and half the faux-used T-shirt stock at Urban Outfitters accounted for.
Of course, imitation is how we learn. When I was just starting out, at the dawn of desktop publishing when traditional design schools didn't cover the subject, I imitated the styles of the moment. In the early 90s, this meant a lot of stretched type, pseudo-Constructivist layouts, contrasting reversed-out fields, and lots of typefaces like Insignia: the look of every C+C Music Factory video. But as I grew older, I grew out of mere emulation and started looking at what made good design good design.
Today's typographers can reference incised Sumerian tablets, the Latin typography of Trajan's column, medieval blackletter and illuminated manuscript, Enlightenment-era letterpress, electromechanical Linotype, phototypesetting, PostScript, and pixel fonts. But do they?
Likewise, photographers and illustrators have the entire range of visual depiction from the Lascaux cave paintings to Cindy Sherman's faux film stills, and yet I see fewer and fewer original voices, at least in the commercial sector. (That's a topic for a future post.)
We seem trapped in a world of trendy 'anti-design' that feeds only on itself: T-shirts inspired by stencil graffiti inspired by Flash animation inspired by T-shirt silkscreens inspired by old childhood TV staples and B-movies -- and of course, the entire look is efficiently aped and cleaned up for mainstream culture as corporate identity graphics; witness the similarity between Threadless.com's flat-art silkscreen aesthetic and recent ads for HP colour printers.
Today, visual trends sweep through the design field, propagated along viral vectors at Internet speed. We get memetic outbreaks every 6 months like "airline safety card style" or "shaky hand-drawn sketch" or "2-color flat art silhouettes." Designers, always deadline-driven and keen to emulate that which is successful, pick these memes up either consciously or subconsciously and recycle them into their work. I wonder what will be considered "timeless design" from the turn of the 21st century, in 2067. It may not be what we think it is.
More practically speaking, the question for art directors is not what can we do, but what should we do? I feel as if many ADs, even celebrated ones, have abdicated their leadership roles in this debate.
No doubt at least some of that reluctance to take a stand comes from clients who want "something that looks like this cool ad I saw," but also from an inability for ADs and designers to escape a closed-loop visual ecosystem, either for reasons of time, interest, or money. I worry that, like an aquarium without a filter, it's going to choke on its own effluvia.
As always, there's a way out.
If you look closely, all that stuff the David Carson generation tried to smash and burn on the altar of the New has survived – changed perhaps – but still thriving, and likely to for generations to come.
I'm finding it easier to start with the idea of 'an appropriate container for the content,' and then letting the rules of classical proportion guide my grids, lines and leading. I'm finding hidden depths in Swiss humanist typography, Mucha and Cassandre posters, fonts with proper sets of small caps, lining and text figures, and photography that could have been taken 40 years ago or this morning -- like Yousuf Karsh portraits for instance.
Timeless doesn't mean "old-looking" either. David LaChapelle's work is provocative, colourful and powerful, but it also has a quality that transcends any particular moment or place. Timelessness is, in short, above such petty concerns.
The value of timeless design is freeing yourself from the false pressures of the Now and enabling yourself to focus on larger issues — communicating the correct message for the client, in the best possible way. If you are diligent and skilled, you'll create works that will endure in their own right.
Posted by aj_kandy at 12:57 AM
November 10, 2005
Avant Garde Gothic, Now With Ligatures
In the late 1960s, designer Herb Lubalin was commissioned to design a striking geometric logotype for Avant Garde magazine. He and Tom Carnase (both partners in Lubalin Smith Carnase) created a body font and a headline font, notable for its unprecedent number of custom-fitted, hand-drawn ligatures. The font was a hit, and has transcended its "1970s" connotations to become a genuine classic.
Avant Garde made the leap to digital in the early days of desktop publishing, but ASCII character-set standards of the day didn't have enough room for all of the headline font's extra ligatures - so we've only had the plainer book version for the last 20 years. Designers who wanted access to all those extra tasty bits had to either scan old specimen books or redraw them by hand.
This month, the full, complete set of Avant Garde headline fonts has finally been reissued in OpenType format. It took OpenType for this to happen - because it can have as many as 65,000 character shapes (or glyphs) in a single font, vs. an upper limit of 256 glyphs in PostScript fonts.
Prediction: Many, many album covers imitating Travis' "The Man Who."
Posted by aj_kandy at 4:34 PM | Comments (3)
November 8, 2005
Zen Steve and Complicated Bill
Compare and contrast:
It's generally agreed that Jobs is an excellent presenter, and Gates only so-so, but PresentationZen's article Gates, Jobs and the Zen Aesthetic looks deeper to tell us why - examining not only their slides, but their communication styles, word choices and body language.
Posted by aj_kandy at 10:19 PM
August 17, 2005
Diagonals and Magenta: Two Takes
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Razer.ca and JamieOliver.com both use diagonal stripes and bright pinks as part of their designs. That's where the similarities end, though.
Brand new CHUMCity station Razer bills itself as 'sharp and disposable.' Aimed at a male 20something demographic, its programming lineup is a hybrid of shows from Spike TV, MTV and extreme sports.
The animated Razer promo TV campaign combines almost every popular design element of the past two years: black and white graphics offset by neon green and hot pink, the use of diagonal stripes and/or hash shading, ransom-note typography, cut-up/hand-sketched art, 2D-3D animation like the video for T.Raumschmiere's "Monstertruckdriver", faux-stencil graffiti lettering and overspray spatter, and flat-art wallpaper-y leaves and vines.
I think it's a case of a little too much, too late; it also doesn't really communicate the right tone, in my point of view. Razer's graphic language is derived from the electroclash movement, whose aesthetic is completely at odds with the crude content of the animation (disturbingly, a tv set grabs a broken bottle and stabs someone, resulting in copious arterial spray). The website doesn't really pick up on the graphic language of the promo; it looks more like a fansite for a thrash metal band.
The programming content for the channel is recycled from other networks, in an attempt to be Spike TV for a younger demographic; I have a feeling the designers just sort of threw up their hands when presented with a dog's breakfast of a brief, and decided to passively-aggressively protest it by recycling every design motif of the past two years.
Now let's look at the official website of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. His various cookery shows are staples on The Food Network, and most recently, his Jamie's School Dinners series and Feed Me Better campaign have sparked a minor revolution in school catering.
This website has to encompass many functions - a weblog, a moblog, promoting the various shows, books, campaigns, as well as Jamie's restaurants, Fifteen and the new Fifteen Amsterdam. It could easily have become a dog's breakfast of unrelated ad pods, flashing banners and cross-sell linkage, but instead takes on an elegant, modern and simple look.
Yes, it's got diagonal stripes - but they're made of butcher block, entirely thematically appropriate, and providing a rarely seen natural texture. The main colours are a nice sort of buttery cream white, offset with a taupe-y grey and black and white photography, with sprinkles of hot fuschia type for spice. Overall, it's big, bold and simple, just like his recipes. Plus, it's easy to navigate and a treat to look at. Frankly, with a site like this there are a million chances to mistake 'trendy' for contemporary and bodge it; they went for a raw-hewn classiness instead.
Posted by aj_kandy at 1:19 PM
August 4, 2005
Persona Sketching
D. Keith Robinson, web and UI designer, blogs about an excellent technique to use when designing a new product, website or service: realistic "user personas."
A persona is an simple document that describes, in varying amounts of detail, a typical user or group of users. In essence "giving a face" or personality to those users. On a large, high volume site you could have many personas, each representing a subset of your user base. A good persona is always based on user research and data and will give you a manageable icon to work with when advocating for your user group(s).
All too often, websites seem designed with little to no insight about the potential users of the site - they seem to be more like vanity license plates than usable or user-centric. Keith hits it on the head with this one!
Posted by aj_kandy at 12:12 PM | Comments (2)
August 2, 2005
Mighty Mouse
Apple released its first multibutton mouse today. From their marketing copy:
"Alas the fate of the one-button mouse in today's multibutton world. Who has time for intuitive, elegant design when there is so much clicking to do?"
On the surface it seems like your garden-variety 4-button-and-scroll-wheel mouse, but there's some interesting innovation under the white plastic shell.
To begin with, Mighty Mouse actually has no buttons, but rather capacitance sensors that can detect changes in pressure. And the scroll wheel is actually the world's weensiest trackball, allowing scrolling in any direction. On the surface it would seem to take the best of IBM's Trackpoint nubbin as found on Thinkpads, and trackball mouse replacements - requiring much less finger travel for less strain, but also providing 360-degree freedom of motion.
And of course, there's the Apple twist. Without physical switches, how do you know you've clicked it?
A tiny speaker inside Mighty Mouse produces button-clicking and Scroll Ball-rolling sound effects.
Oh Apple, with this technology you are spoiling us.
Available now from the Apple Store for $49 US, $65 CDN.
Posted by aj_kandy at 10:36 AM
July 30, 2005
Friendstr: UI Case Study
I started using Friendster a year or so ago. It was instantly addictive: at one point it was almost a game of one-upmanship to see who could have the biggest friends list and who could get linked (via a friend of a friend) to some celebrity or other. From a practical point of view, it had good basic features like messaging, message boards and a sort of tag-based search function.
In 2004 Friendster got the first of several additions and revamps to deal with its booming popularity. The underpinnings moved to a faster PHP-based dynamic system, and new features were added such as groups, horoscopes, job searches, chat functions, and photo albums. Jumping on the blogging bandwagon, Friendster brokered a deal with Six Apart to incorporate TypePad-powered weblogs into their service.
The interface design, on the other hand, was, and is, pretty haphazard. There were plenty of boxes-within-boxes with outlines and gutters, perfect examples of Edward Tufte's visual rule that 1+1=3, because the eye perceives the space between boxes as an object as well. The links and buttons are uniformly tiny. Aesthetically, it's less grey-on-grey than it used to be, but it's no beauty, either - it certainly doesn't match up to the design, and promise, of the splash page. At the time, it was a 1.0, we were forgiving, and the novelty and value from the service outweighed its shortcomings.
But a long time has passed since then. How does Friendster measure up today?
First off, the biggest complaint I have with it is the circa-2001, liquid-layout paradigm which makes the placement of user interface items random, depending on how wide your window is. It doesn't let you see more information, as with expanding a window on your desktop, it just creates more whitespace.
There is very little proper information architecture, that is to say, no prioritization of information for the user, to show them what needs attention, what is new, what has been updated. The interface isn't divided into obvious, well-defined tasks or operations, but fragmented into several blocks that have little to do with each other. These in turn are split up by intrusive advertising, sponsored links, pop-up and pop-under windows and the like.
The colour scheme is less grey than it used to be, but it's still boxy and outline-crazy. Do link targets need to be little blocks encased in other blocks?
With all that going on, as happens with a lot of PHP-based sites, the general impression when a page loads is that of a pile of Lego parts shuddering into place - CRASH! - rather than a clean, fast-loading page that presents relevant information and options.
Since Friendster launched, other social software sites have risen up, most notably Ludicorp's Flickr and 37signals' Basecamp.
While they have very different goals and purposes, they both share several common UI features.
- Purposeful simplicity. Rather than piling together buzzwordy features, they'd focus on a solid core and build out as needed.
- Good user feedback. For example, Flickr's dialog messages explain everything clearly in plain English, and many have a sense of humour.
- Opening up. Instead of trying to do it all, Flickr opens its API to let people build their own tools, or use existing APIs as 'hooks' into services that already do it better than you can. Flickr has hooks to blogging services but doesn't offer blogs themselves, and Basecamp uses your existing FTP site for file storage, for example. Both make extensive use of RSS to keep you remotely updated on changes.
- Discoverable richness. Rather than presenting the user with all possible options at all times, the UI focuses on the options you need to accomplish the current task. Similarly, you can start at a more basic level and learn the advanced features as you go.
- Prioritization by size and color. In Flickr, the most popular tags are larger, and the most important UI items are usually also larger and/or highlighted. In Basecamp, color is used to highlight priority and urgency.
I like Friendster but I think it could learn from Flickr and Basecamp - so as a UI design exercise, I created an imaginary version of Friendster, dubbed "Friendstr." The result is what you see above. I've only managed to do a version of the homepage portal for now, but I hope it communicates the ideas.
I started with the premise that Friendster users would want distinct interfaces for task-centric activities, and that the best way to page between them would be to use a tabbed interface, rather than a long bar of navigation links. It's a subtle distinction, but it does provide visual feedback that 'you are now going somewhere else' and 'you are here.'
Across the design, where Friendster has boxes in boxes in boxes, I've tried to eliminate all lines and outlines wherever possible, keeping only a few to mark the beginnings and ends of lists or tables, or to divide information (such as in the calendar views) along natural borders. I've always been a fan of the old Mac OS 9's list views, which had subtle alternate-line shading, so I've adopted that for all lists here. Following Edward Tufte's prescription, small, intense spots of colour indicate important items.
There's no advertising. This presumes they'll move to a subscription-based model with a limited-functionality free version, as Flickr and Basecamp have. After all, if it's that useful, the power users will be willing to pay a nominal fee for it and in turn subsidize some of the free users.
It's a fixed layout - you can zoom the text with your browser within reasonable limits - but it's designed this way to keep UI elements in a consistent position no matter what size screen you're using. Similarly, to help people navigate faster, link targets are a lot larger.
A big part of this design is about presenting a lot of relevant information above the fold. In Friendster's current design, many things fall off the page, and those functions aren't used as effectively as they could be. In this dashboard overview, those secondary functions are now in the sidebars. In particular, the More People (redubbed New People) view provides more detailed information. You can see at a glance if someone is single, dating or married, male or female, their age, and in a nod to Samuel Delany's short story "On the Job1 with Marq Dyeth," a superscripted 1, 2 or 3 denotes their degree of relationship to you.
Items requiring your immediate attention such as system messages, new mail, and pending alarms are directly at top in your Friendster Agenda. As in Basecamp, they're colour-coded and iconned for urgency, importance, and to denote positive/negative feedback.
Where I've diverged most significantly from Friendster's UI design is in eliminating the user's own information from the dashboard. I know what I look like and who I am; I don't need that info to be the first thing I see. That's now stored away in My Profile, which I've placed into the system tools links at top right, outside the main tabbed interface.
Now, when I log into the service, I naturally want to know what's going on with my friends, but Friendster's current design tells me almost nothing. There's just a row of photos and maybe a couple of icons, and in my experience, it's plucked alphabetically from my list, so there's no priority to who's shown there. In my version, we have the Friend-O-Scope. It's divided into tabs for 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree friends; it provides each with a large avatar, a clickable name link to their Friendster profile, and a precis of all the relevant updates since your last login. Most importantly, it shows the most active / recently updated friends at the top, much as iTunes has its "most recently played" Smart Playlist.
Using some API hooks, there are also indicators that show their online status: whether they are also logged into the system to permit chat directly through the site, or if they are logged into AIM, MSN or Yahoo IM.
Of course, what isn't shown here is that you can subscribe to the Agenda and the Friend-O-Scope via RSS...and that brings me to my next point, which is getting information into and out of Friendster via XML. There's great potential to integrate Friendster with other services - Flickr tag clouds, Technorati profiles, Odeo podcast tracking, etc, almost anything really.
Wouldn't it be great, for instance, to have chunks of code that you could embed in another site to dynamically populate it with syndicated content from Friendster itself - photos from the albums, friend lists (linked to their blogs, if any), your horoscope, your public agenda.
And what about supporting more business-networking type features - syncing your Outlook appointments or iCal calendars?
Finally, the site provides visual feedback as to the passage of time. There's a day view, as seen above, and a night view. The day view would take on different colour schemes depending on your local seasons, or maybe even depending on your local weather. Maybe it might even pluck the background from appropriately tagged Flickr galleries or webcam feeds, who knows. It might even change gradually over the course of the day.
What do you think?
Posted by aj_kandy at 2:58 PM | Comments (2)
June 19, 2005
Designed Objects: The Next-Generation Game Consoles
A game console is a portal to a dreamlike state of play. In designing game hardware and peripherals, manufacturers have a unique opportunity to create evocative mass-market objects. The design must suggest potential, power, control, wonder, escape. How well do the three new consoles introduced at E3 measure up, on that scale?
The PS3's design is a clean break from the boxiness of all game consoles to date, and continues Sony's tradition of borrowing from the visual language of Kohn Pedersen Fox. Where the PS2 recalled KPF's Clifford Chance office tower in London's Canary Wharf, the PS3 echoes the curved sweep of their 333 Wacker Drive in Chicago, even down to the subtle "folded edge" near the top. This strategy, to me is eminently successful at meeting the above criteria; they're largely abstract, dynamically shaped and well-balanced, but also canvases upon which the buyer can project their own desires. From a functional standpoint, Sony's kept the layout of ports largely identical to the PS2, which from a user interface perspective provides a measure of familiarity.
The PS3's controller (wireless, naturally), at least in the prototype form shown at E3, retains the button layout of the previous generation: Directional pad on the left, the four L1/L2/ and R1/R2 shoulder buttons, the circle/square/triangle/cross buttons on the right, and two analog thumbsticks which can be depressed as "L3" and "R3" buttons as well.
But where the PS2's Dual Shock was an agglomeration of matt-black cones and cylinders that oozed modernist machismo, the PS3 controller is an elegant silver crescent. It recalls the polished metallic sculptures of Jean Arp, or more prosaically, the retro-futuristic designs of Ibanez' Maxxas guitars of the early 1990s.
The Nintendo Revolution console shown at E3 was really a marketing mockup, shown off by Nintendo of America VP of sales and marketing Reggie Fils-Aimé. While the hardware has yet to be finalized, NoA claims the shipping units will be the size of a couple of DVD cases. The mockup oozes mystery with its gloss black finish and blue LED-illuminated DVD slot – it's that mysterious box from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive! – but it's still lacking visual oomph. Nintendo always manages to make its boxes look like kitchen appliances or computer peripherals, and not in a good way. No controllers have been shown yet, and maybe that's a good thing - Nintendo's controllers have always been a little bit unergonomic from my point of view, and maybe this is a real chance for them to get it right.
Microsoft's XBox 360 has got to be the least visually inspired of our three contenders; While slimmer and trimmer than its boxy predecessor, the XBox 360 looks top-heavy and ungainly. Ironically, while the innards have switched from a modified PC platform to custom PowerPC chips, the outside has moved in the opposite direction, morphing from a macho black box into a budget PC.
The front panel does nothing to mitigate an asymmetrical, unbalanced hardware layout. There's a pill-shaped door to hide front-panel connectors; when you feel you have to hide something, instead of integrating it into the design, something is surely wrong? The old-fashioned tray-loading drive is a long streak of platinum-silver (the only occurence of this color) in an off-white main body. There's a big green button in an illuminated green ring, and a scattering of ports and slots. Bizarrely, the unit's hard-drive expansion pack is a big lump on the side (or top, if you stand it up), adding to the lopsided mishmash. Why couldn't they make it a discreet slot-in module that disappears into the back?
The controller looks alright, a modified version of the existing XBox gamepad - unlike the PS3's, however, it doesn't seem to really "belong" to the box it comes with.
Given that the PowerMac G5 (!) is the XBox 360 development platform, it's a shame that their hardware team didn't learn any design lessons from it. Apple's approach since 1998, under Jonathan Ive's direction, is to choose materials for practical reasons and then play to their natural beauty and strengths. The original G3 tower, iMac and iBook were all about the glories of polycarbonate plastic. The current G5s and PowerBooks are all about sleek aluminum, alternating smooth surfaces with perforated panels, straight lines with rounded corners. Compared to that standard, the XBox 360 definitely looks like it was designed in a committee.
Posted by aj_kandy at 4:02 PM
May 26, 2005
The Ikea Thing
Just a thought:
Why doesn't any company make "compatible" accessories for Ikea furniture?
They have these design staples like the Expedit bookshelves (the big square grids) that never go out of the product line.
But Ikea themselves never seem to have very useful accessories. The most I've seen are those little wicker baskets and clear plastic bin inserts, which are inevitably out of stock in the colour you want.
There are probably millions of Expedit shelves out there, so there's a built-in market for useful add-ons.
Insertable CD and DVD racks; doors of various sizes, shapes and materials for various purposes, including lockers; power bars and cable management systems; clip-on LED rope-light-style backlighting; wine racks; clip-in, slide-out drawers with a safety catch at the back; microwave ovens and mini bar fridges that fit in one cube; hanging file folder storage; customized storage for various video game consoles; spring-loaded bookends; sprouting herb gardens with grow lights; square flat panel TVs --
the list is potentially endless.
Send in your ideas!
Posted by aj_kandy at 2:43 PM
February 25, 2005
Double Dagger
The first ever "designcore" band, Double Dagger (a reference to this footnote marker: ‡) have songs called "Corporate Logo Preservation Society," "Punk Rock vs. Swiss Modernism," "Lorem Ipsum," "Command-X, Command-V" and "CMYK." What's not to love? (Via the ever-lovin' Optimuscrime.)
Posted by aj_kandy at 6:00 PM
February 17, 2005
Your Future Workspace
Those of us with computer-related back problems, wrist and eye strain watched a certain portion of Steven Spielberg's Minority Report with envy. Now, thanks to advances in low-cost displays and technology adapted from video games, freedom from the traditional desktop may be closer than we think.
The flashy, glassed-in Precrime workstation used by Tom Cruise's character was a slick evocation of several current interface elements: gesture recognition, eye tracking, and translucent data layers. Characters literally manipulate data, while conversing via multiple videochat sessions happening in the background, "underneath" the main layer.
The roots of such a workstation already exist. For example, The National Center for Supercomputing Applications has what it calls "data CAVEs," a sort of proto-holodeck with projectors and motion sensors. SGI's for-hire Reality Centers are used for the same sorts of tasks, usually advanced biochemisty or engineering simulations.
At the personal-computer level, companies have promoted various "interactive visual desktop" concepts, like Sun's Starfire, Apple's Knowledge Navigator, and IBM's actually-prototyped DreamSpace concept. IBM researcher Mark Lucente used to demo it at industry shows, pointing at a screen and speaking to the computer, saying such context-sensitive commands like "Put a globe there, make it bigger, now rotate it."
Researchers at UNC Chapel Hill took advantage of several built-in technologies in Mac OS X to build a prototype layered videoconferencing application that allows users to point to and interact with shared applications.
There are examples of nearly-disposable tech that could be cobbled together into systems today. Voice recognition dialing comes built into even the cheapest cell phones. The EyeToy is a sub-$100 add-on for the PlayStation 2. It's "good enough" technology that's firmly entrenched in the mainstream, and could be improved by decades-old MIT concepts, like voice recognition that uses multiple mics to determine directionality and filter out background noise.
New consumer technologies are also pushing this towards the tipping point, like new super-small DLP projectors with cool-running LED light sources. These projectors, smaller than a Mac Mini and costing about the same, could easily be integrated into a cubicle, above and behind a worker. Rapidly maturing virtual keyboard technology could mean the end of clickety-clacking crumb-catchers.
So in theory, your future office-pod wouldn't even have a monitor, keyboard or other physical clutter at all; maybe not even a traditional desk. Instead, you'll have a curved screen, a projector situated above and behind you, and various sensors in front of you. Need to make your data portable? Drag-and-drop your documents onto smartpads with e-paper displays...or your iPod 2010.
The next step, of course, is the operating system and new GUI paradigms to enable this. What sort of form would this virtual desktop have? Will we see layers appear like Apple's upcoming Dashboard of useful micro-widgets? Or will we finally see something like OpenDoc, an environment without applications per se, just universal document and media editing "parts"?
Over to you. How do you see the future of workspaces? What do you want to see?
For more on the research that went into the Minority Report visual interface, visit Luke Wroblewski's Functioning Form
Posted by aj_kandy at 10:48 AM | Comments (1)
December 8, 2004
Why Are Architecture and Design Sites So Bad?
"An architect who would never dream of placing the front door floating three feet off the ground shouldn't be making a Flash site using 4-pixel-tall unlabeled squares as the navigation elements." - incubus_of_habit, a contributor to Dwell magazine's online forums.
As in architecture, web design has its own commonsense best practices. If ninety percent of web sites put the logo in the top left corner, and it's always a link to the homepage, that's a de facto standard, just like putting light switches just inside the door to a room. No-one says you have to do it that way, but if you don't, people will end up stumbling around in the dark.
These six web sites belong to Firms with Heavy Reputations in Architecture and Design -- but paradoxically, they break almost every standard of proper web design. And I think, finally, that I've figured out why.
Have a gander at these examples. If you have a pen and paper handy, take some notes. Go ahead, I'll still be here. (whistles)
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..dum de dum de dum...All done? Fine. Let's move along.
The examples above all share something in common: they're not about the user.
Most of our example sites are Flash-based: four of them launch the Flash site in a pop-up window. (What's so wrong with the first window? That's really just poor coding, but I digress.) As I posted earlier, there's nothing wrong with Flash per se - it's what they do with it that's so atrocious.
Coop Himmelblau at least has a definite (if hyperactive) menu bar, but makes you read grey text on a grey background with a tiny, tiny mouse-over scrolling mechanism, which violates the time-honoured standard known as Fitts' Law.
The Brian Healy Architects site is a prime example of "Mystery Meat Navigation," as Vincent Flanders wittily named this phenomenon. Fitts would have a fit with those tiny coloured rectangles - not only are they hard to target, we don't know what they are. Decoration? Mouse over them and tiny 4-point type emerges underneath them. Good luck reading that if you have less than perfect vision or a crappy monitor. The text is graphical, so your browser text size preferences are irrelevant. And a cute little @ sign for the email address. I thought that was a speck of dust on the screen. The inside of the site isn't any better, for what it's worth.
AlliedWorks' site has a poetic paragraph with Big Words that are ostensibly links, but we're still not quite sure what to do here, or where those links will take us. I don't want to guess, I want to know.
Enter Charles Rose Architects' site and you'll get a pop-up window with menu items that launch other animated menu items; I went back 3 times and couldn't quite get it to work. Titling the menus with opaque terms like "Core" doesn't help.
Richard Rogers Partners almost make you miss their HTML site on purpose, like it's an apologetic afterthought. Launch the Flash site and you have to sit through a 30-second morphing buildings animation which, given the paucity of content there, is rather pointless. And it seems as if the HTML site - which is more usable - isn't updated as often as the Flash site, either. Not great for searchability. Their little coloured-numbered squares navigation is so unclear, they need to add labels to it - as in stand-up comedy, if you have to explain it, it doesn't work. The hierarchical menu system forces you to worm your way back up to the top if you want to go somewhere else: I want to be able to jump from any page to any page - that's the whole point of hyperlinks, innit? Further useless widgetry: fading-in and fading-out pink band of quotes from famous people. The "next page" arrows are so subtle, they might as well not be there; I didn't even know some pages had additional content.
The overuse of Flash - and useless Flash, to boot - seems symptomatic of the architecture and design community's obsession with surface appearances. Looking at many of the sites above, there's very little that couldn't be done with pure HTML, CSS, Javascript, and DHTML. As they say in the trenches, don't send in Flash to do HTML's work.
What About Me?
Almost none of these sites seemed to have any interest in me, the end-user. Almost all of them fall into the category of brochure-ware, the Web equivalent of corporate brochures which sing the praises of the firm, their work, their capabilities, the founders, and the lead designers, but provide almost nothing for me to do except be a passive viewer. They don't seem to know who their users are or why they are there; they frankly don't seem to care. Most of them only grudgingly provide an email link which you have to dig deep for.
So...If even staid old corporations like TimeWarner can "get" web usability, and put up user-centric sites with good UI and useful tools, why can't architects and designers? My theory is that they see themselves as Artists, and they want their sites to be as Creative as possible. Problem is, architects and designers aren't necessarily artists. True art has no loyalty but to itself, and no purpose except to be art!
No Commerce Here, Please
To be sure, there's an artistic impulse in what architects and designers do, but there is an even larger obligation to standards and craft. The architecture market rarely rewards trail-blazing to produce Works of Ponderous Meaning, despite what the newspapers say: It rewards developers of suburban tract housing, office parks and luxury condos. The products of architects and designers -- buildings, manufactured objects, interfaces, systems -- are first and foremost, functional. They exist to meet practical needs and the demands of the market. But their designers apparently don't want to see themselves as makers of practical, market-driven products.
THe perception of architect-as-Artist has been skewed by a handful of 'stars' like Saarinen, Mies, Frank Lloyd Wright, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, and Daniel Libeskind. These latter three are known for their really-out-there signature buildings which, in true Corbu tradition, demand to be set in their own little parks, as they have usually nothing to do with the surrounding urban environment. (At best, they are like alien embassies; at worst, they're like the Visitors' mothership looming over the city). It is important to note that these buildings are the exception, rather than the rule - thankfully.
There are celebrity Flash designers, too. Joshua Davis also does really-out-there signature works, like Once Upon A Forest - a kind of Flash equivalent to Libeskind's pointy sea urchin buildings.
But, if you look at Davis' commercial portfolio, you'll see his site for the VW Phaeton and the related Die Glaeserne Manufaktur piece, which are models of restrained design, adherence to standards, and are 100% usable, if not particularly user-centric.
He understands who the users of these sites are and what they are looking for. He does wireframes, he does usability testing, he refines, tests again, then launches. It is done in collaboration with Marketing and Research and frustrating meetings with the Client's Boss who doesn't Get It. That is all part of the boring craft of good web design, but the result is worth it.
To Know, Know, Know Your Users Is To Serve, Serve, Serve Them
User-centric content requires you to know where your audience comes from, who your visitors are, and why they are at your site. Only then can you start to think like a typical user (or ask questions of your actual users - what a concept!) and organize or create content that addresses their needs.
Beyond that, I believe that for architecture and design firms to craft successful web sites, they're going to have to view the Web not as a delivery system for electronic brochures, and certainly not as a Statement, but as a platform to enable two-way personal communications directly between themselves, their employees and their customers.
If they want their sites to attract and retain a clientele, then they have to put a human face and voice on everything. Encourage their employees to start weblogs. Put up UBB Forums and make them centers of discussion for the community, tied in to real-world events like conferences and casual networking parties. If they have customer service agents, they should think about using LivePerson chat, or be brave and publish their personal AIM / iChat handles - all the way from the receptionist to the CEO.
Posted by aj_kandy at 2:20 PM | Comments (1)
February 3, 2004
US Government Bans Courier Font
As reported by the Australian Broadcasting Company, the US government, in a bid for legibility, is banning the venerable monospaced font from official use, to be replaced with (ick) Times Roman.
Font designers - your country needs you! Somebody design a Government Serif and Sans-Serif!
Now can someone please cook up some intelligence reports to get Rumsfeld to "shock and awe" Arial?
Via Todd Dominey
Posted by aj_kandy at 9:20 AM
January 27, 2004
The People's Republic of StarbucKEA
Patrick notes a very interesting post of Adam Greenfield's on the disproportionate amount of energy spent by our young Adbusting types on "uncooling" consumer brands such as IKEA and Starbucks. Greenfield says:
The dynamic at work in both cases is one many of us might recognize from bad relationships: when a deeply wounded person suffering from low self-esteem finally fights back against the various agents of their distress, very often it's the closest, most sympathetic soft target they lash out at first, in defiance of all logic (or justice).
Not the absent father, but the present lover. It feels like the same neurosis at work with young activists of the No Logo stripe: never ADM, General Dynamics, Monsanto, but Nike and Ikea and Starbucks. And never mind that each of these latter firms is, to a greater or lesser degree, founded on what used to be known as progressive principles, or is to a greater or lesser degree responsive to the demands of a politically and socially conscious audience.
There are a lot of arguments that Starbucks edge out "local" coffee shops. I don't buy them. There are places (like Open Da Night or Navarino's bakery, for instance) that go out of their way to be friendly and serve good food, and they are very popular neighborhood institutions. Starbucks can't even be said to compete with places like this, because (aside from coffee) they're selling two completely different experiences.
Greenfield makes the astute point that before Starbucks "swept down from its Pacific Northwest redoubt to cluster-bomb us with franchises," the coffee experience in America was, by and large, pretty insipid. In fact, today's elevated consumer knowledge about coffee in general - fair-trade, shade-grown, organic, Blue Mountain, etc. etc. can be traced back to the arrival of Starbucks on the franchise landscape. Partly also due to the controversy surrounding them. But it can't be argued - we're all drinking better coffee today.
If any "local" places died off because a Starbucks opened down the street, they probably would have gone out of business if any stronger competitor with better coffee and a better experience opened up next door. I've walked into "local" arts-sceney-indie coffee shops in Montreal and been completely ignored; I've gotten alternatingly great and terrible service in locally-owned Starbucks-a-like chains -- and when it's been bad, it's exactly as described in Greenfield's entertaining little rant.
Being local's got nothing to do with the core mission of good coffee and excellent service. The one deplorable thing about chains like Starbucks is that, despite local jobs for local people etc, a large chunk of change heads Seattle-ward.
But we're getting our quiet revenge: we're giving America Couche-Tards on every corner.
"You got your Slöche in my grande latte!"
"You got your grande latte in my Slöche!"
Etc.
Posted by aj_kandy at 9:39 AM | Comments (10)
June 5, 2003
the $12,000 font change
Design consultants charge $12,000 to change city's font from Univers to Rotis.
Can I have that job?
So our new civic logo font is Rotis, beloved of pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies as an alternate for the old Neutrogena-y standard, Herman Zapf's Optima.)
This font was actually designed by Otl Aicher, the German graphic designer most famous for his Olympic pictograms used at the 1976 games...which have come to be very 'Montreal' symbols in my memory.But Rotis is just...wrong.
The city should have used a typeface from a Montreal designer - a trendy distressed typeface from 2Rebels that more accurately resembles our fractured civic politics, the state of our "roads," and the general unkemptness of the city since the mega-merger.
(via Montreal City Weblog)
Posted by aj_kandy at 1:26 PM
May 22, 2003
An Evening with Piero Lissoni
Last night I had the great pleasure of attending a brief talk given by the Italian architect, urbanist and designer Piero Lissoni. Latitude Nord, the high-end furniture store on St-Laurent just below Mont-Royal, played host as they were launching the Lissoni-designed Living Divani range of furniture, co-sponsored by the Italian Trade Commission who provided top quality snacketry and vino.
Lissoni himself seemed more like an academic - which he is, being a professor at the Italian Design Institute. He was charmingly disarming, self-deprecating and funny, speaking in a mix of Italian, French and English, and looking rather like a shorn Salman Rushdie.
He ran through a PowerPoint presentation (just images, no bullet points - Cliff Atkinson would approve) on the theme of human dimensions - how all of his work has involved the concept of scale, from the thousands of tiny parts required for his Alessi wristwatches to the planning of his Boffi kitchens to stunning glass buildings to designing an entire village. Not entirely unlike Niels Diffrient of Humanscale, except Lissoni tends to work on the macro level where Diffrient works at the individual scale, but by branching out into the designed-objects business, Lissoni shows that the same rules apply, no matter where.
Posted by aj_kandy at 9:03 PM
March 25, 2003
Quebec 1970: Graphic Design Peak?
Quebec 1970: Graphic Design Peak?
Anyone living in Quebec has seen the election poster designs of the 3 major parties - and here's my critique. There's the Liberals with their "Pop-Up Video" style word balloons - a style that clashes with their stiffly posed photos of 55+ candidates and their new logo which resembles the "contents explosive" mark on spray cans. The PQ have Quebecor's corporate colours - blue-and-yellow - but at least they have big colour head shots of the candidates. (Although in my neighborhood, I could do without seeing Laurent Malepart's disturbingly goofy mug every 20 feet or so.) The Mouvement des Forces Progressistes - where applicable - have some interesting typography going on, but... too many colours.
Hands down, the best-designed posters of the campaign are the ADQ's. Crisp Herb Ritts-y black and white photography, elegantly square-shaped with generous white borders, reversed-out Helvetica type, and depth of field; Candidate large in foreground, Mario Dumont in the middle ground, Assembl?e Nationale in the background. Their candidates are largely young and photogenic; they look serious but approachable. The visual language seems borrowed more from fashion, not politics. In tone and typography, they remind me of Dior "Higher" ads. Thankfully, Dumont at least keeps his shirt on.
This trend is interesting only for the fact that posters have been so frickin' boring lately. I was searching for examples of the current posters to link to - there are none, apparently - but thanks to the uncanny engine behind Teoma, I found the Bibliotheque Nationale du Quebec's online poster archives. Quebec graphic design from the 50's and 60's seems rather limited and imitative of mainstream trends, but after Expo 67 it seems to have flourished - thanks to Big Events, Megaprojects and a cultural renaissance. By my yardstick, it seems to have peaked in the early 1970s, and degraded soon after that in a haze of trendy airbrushing, 1980s geometric-fragments-in-aqua minimalism and later, 1990s grunge photography and distressed type. The work the Quebec Government commissioned, particularly in 1970 for the Sports and Loisirs category, is striking and timeless, like the Soccer poster above, one of dozens promoting different activities.
But here's the hidden link of the day: erstwhile Britpop band Pulp seem to have nicked their whole visual identity from Quebec government health and employment services posters! Check out the "Service Social" image above: isn't that a Pulp single sleeve, circa Different Class? And isn't that Jarvis Cocker himself walking through the door at the center of the "Placement" poster?
Posted by aj_kandy at 12:50 PM
January 27, 2003
Visual narratives and visual organization
Visual narratives and visual organization.
from boxesandarrows.com
Continuing that thread that started on Ed's blog, here's a good intro to visual organization that I highly recommend sending to those people in your office who type documents in Zapf Chancery in all caps. You know who they are.
Posted by aj_kandy at 1:02 PM
