Author: Christopher Fahey
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Designing the Bottle: Opening the Wine, Unboxing the Brand
In a recent interview, Michael Beirut noted that wine labels are one of the purest branding experiences: All wine bottles contain the same basic product (wine), so if you don’t know anything about a particular bottle of wine the graphic design of the label and the shape of the bottle are quite often the only…
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You vs. I
In the responses to my previous proposal to use the second-person perspective in interaction design documentation and literature, Oleh Kovalchuke brought up an excellent concern: Using the word “you” in documentation can risk implying, if only subconsciously, that the reader — who is a developer, designer, etc — is the same person who will actually…
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User vs. You
There’s a huge debate going on in the UX community about the use of the word “user”. Some argue that the word demeans the people we are trying to help, that it distances us from them, and that it makes us unable to truly empathize with their wants and needs. Words like “people” and “humans”…
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Worth Starting, Not Worth Finishing?
Lately I’ve been starting a great number of blog posts, saving them as drafts, and then leaving them, unfinished, in my blog’s drafts queue for weeks (and now months) until at some point I realize the post is either no longer inspiring to me or somehow irrelevant. For example, Khoi Vinh recently posted a great…
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Moleskin Reward: One Million Dollars
I lost a small Moleskine notebook about six months ago (graphpaper, of course). I’ve since replaced it, but the reward for its return is the same as for my current book: One Million Dollars. How many other Moleskine owners have the same reward?
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Would Starbucks tell Dunkin’?
We recently stopped for coffee at an urban intersection where a Starbucks and a Dunkin’ Donuts sat on opposite corners, facing off in a classic retail rivalry like Macy’s & Gimbels. Deciding to avoid Starbuckian yuppiness (okay, we drink there all the time), we walked into the Dunkin’ Donuts. But something seemed wrong… the DD…