Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the Design category.
Designs 101 - Scale
This is the first in a series of posts on design. On the, elements of design. Nothing to do with Photoshop brushes or textures, or cool vectors or styles. Just design at it’s most elemental state. Taking fundamentals and introducing them with current examples. Number one:
SCALE
Regardless of how simple the form, color or texture, scale can take a minimalist form and make it into something incredible. It is by far, one of the most powerful elements a designer can use.
from Walt Disney Animation Studios - Glagos Quest
Pyramids at Giza
Design study and contrast
Infiniti G37
Acura TL
Design is more than pretty pictures. It can actually save you REAL money
The resulting makeover at the Seattle airport is likely to save almost $8 million a year (and means they won’t have to spend $500 million building a new terminal).
Alaska Airlines saves millions by rethinking check-in flow
Tags: design, alaska airlines, alaska, terminal, flight, planes, airport, kiosks, efficiency
On designers, coders and all the rest….
This is from a comment on a blog post I read today. The feelings though have been pent up for a loooong time.
I love the guys at 37 Signals. No truly I do. But like the Lakers (I was rooting for them) last night vs the Celtics after being so far ahead, they started to believe a bit too much of the hubris and are drinking a few cups too many of their own Kool-Aid. There are coders that can design, and designers that can code. There are architects like Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry that know how exactly their designs will be built. Does that mean they have to go out and build the darn thing?!?!?!!? I don’t think so!
The crew at 37 Signals are probably the best “masterbuilders” of our era but I do not believe it is always necessary for the designer to have to build/code. Photoshop, in their article, I believe is being a bit over-maligned as some sort of hocus-pocus concept builder that does nothing but present no ends of problems to the “engineers on site”. After graduating from the hallowed halls of architecture, this much I know. There have always been conflicts between the draughtsman and the builder, the architect and the engineer and now the designer and the coder, this has led to the merging of functions in web development. This is what 37 Signals has and it has served them incredibly well. But UI design, site architecture and all the rest is as important as the pixel perfect crafting of a design in Photoshop. This kind of argument leads to seeing the use of Photoshop or the other aspects of design as mere…decoration. The fluff after the heavy lifting has been done.
This ticks me off a bit.
Design, UI development and coding MUST go hand in hand from the get go. Beauty exists in code but it is not design!
For me coding is a high craft but my dear friends..it is not design. Design is more than aesthetics just as how code is more than integers and letters on a screen. Design is meaning. Meaning, believe it or not adds value. It heightens the experience (ever picked up an iPhone?) Also, design is more than meaning, it is the expression of the “one-ness” of a that which is created. There is no “fusion” of form and function. BULL!
They are the same.
Form is function and function is form.
When you listen to how Jonathan Ive describes in such succinct prose the creation of the iPhone or iPod from a manufacturing point of view then weaves in the user experience then how the whole is expressed with such eloquence in the resulting form you begin to understand just how design works.
There has always been a backlash from hard core coders that can design against all things WYSIWYG. In some regards it is deserved because there are many Photoshop jockeys that don’t understand how a site concocted in Photoshop will be built but on the other hand don’t whip the tool because the master abuses it. All tools have their place. TextEdit, CSS Editor BBEdit , Photoshop even the “lowly” iWeb - all have a place depending on the production workflow needed to get a specific site done. We as designers, developers and everyone in between just need to know how best and when to use them as needs be. THAT is what makes us professionals. Time to quit my rambling. Now…lets get back to work.
Tags: design, designers, coders, architects, Signal vs Noise, svn, photoshop, architecture
Do not forget this day….Apple’s iPhone is twice as fast for half the price.
Today’s message is pretty simple: Apple is going for iPhone market share in a big, big, way.
If you have money in any form, buy Apple stock…now. This isn’t just some Mac fan boy reveling in the afterglow of another great Stevenote, but someone who has gotten an intensely acute view of the immediate future.
Apple will be the next great global tech company.
Forget who has the greater share of the PC market. That metric is for saps! If Apple has it’s way, the baby on the breast in Sub-Saharan Africa will be wielding a glossy black brick of 3G goodness.
My friends, Windows was just the beginning, Dell… a passing fancy. Jobs knows that these guys are beaten even though Apple currently only has a sliver of the global computer market. But for those who saw Monday’s keynote, remember the image of the 3 legged stool at the very beginning. One of those legs is about to get very FAT.
While very few people worldwide can afford a computer, the real pool of black gold that is waiting to be tapped is mobile phones. Apple has realized that it’s global dominance is tied not to beating up on Vista but spreading it’s design DNA pollen globally on the back of the iPhone not the iMac. Apple’s global roll-out strategy for mobile market dominance is nothing short of the same poetry with which it designs, builds and markets all of it’s other products. Study how they did this with almost every product since Steve returned to Apple. It’s simplicity is deviously disarming.
Create the market before you sell the product.
Make the consumer start sucking vigorously on the teet long before the milk is even there. How did they do this? Design, create and sell to the market segment with the most disposable income. Establish the product as a must have for the rich. Once the halo of I-gotta-have-it is sufficiently bright around the product (hence justifying it’s existence) you sell it to everybody else for a song (pun intended). By this time you have made back your R&D money on the back of the richest of the rich. You are now going for the jugular that’s throbbing with the real life blood of revenue. The Mass Market. You have achieved critical mass in global mind-share now all you have to do is put a couple cracks in the glass ceiling of price and watch global dominance flood the earth. It is a small world after all.
So forget this old metric of PC market share. The mobile market is where the real moola is at. Cell phones are the platform of the future and every IT company worth it’s salt knows this. But no one has a product like the iPhone. And for a long time no one ever will. Apple is just too many design cycles ahead of the rest of the field. So while the rest of the world copies this gleaming brick of techno-lust, Steven “Plainview” Jobs is drinking their milkshake. And his big fat straw is the iPhone.
Tags: apple, iphone, market, stock, genius, steven jobs, jobs, global, marketshare
Mediocrity in Design…a repost
Originally posted waaay back in 2006, I thought I’d repost it.
I read this article by Bob Garfield on Advertising Age. Excellent passionate commentary, just up my alley. As he whittles the grand Saturn/GM ad down to size I can see why brands like Oldsmobile eventually went belly up and why GM is in the financial mess that it’s in.
Mediocrity.
For decades whimpy design got pumped out of Detroit, now they have some fresh thinking but they are serving it up on cliche driven visuals and copy. The same thing is happening with Panama’s real estate advertising.
I am getting sick and tired of the same visuals and same copy EVERYWHERE. The low angle shot of the building, the infinity pools, the rolling view of Panama city. It’s nauseating! Then every other paragraph is genorously sprinkled with the word “lifestyle” Just typing it now gives me the hibby-jibbys. And of course the overtly repeated marble dripping luxuriousness of the apartments.
