Category: Design
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My Aging Fleet
I’m pretty well-known among my friends and peers to be a gadget geek. But over the last 5 years or so, my gadget-acquisition pace has crawled to a near standstill. Most of the electronic hardware gadgets I’ve been using lately are actually pretty ancient: Mobile Phone: 2002 iPod (3G): 2003 Canon PowerShot Digital Camera: 2003…
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The Manual: How to Have a Number One Hit the Easy Way
This book, “The Manual: How to Have a Number One Hit the Easy Way”, changed my life. It was written by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty (aka The Timelords, aka The KLF) back in 1988, hot on the heels of their doing precisely what the title says: producing a number one hit in the UK,…
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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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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…
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BIKEZ MY RIDIN / TRAIL RAIL UR ON I’M
Quick, what does this sign on the bike trail say? If you’re like me, you will probably initially read it as saying “XING ROAD”. Then, maybe after a fraction of a second, your brain kicked in and told you that maybe you should reverse the order. You do this mental correction because you’ve probably grown…
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Simple is Best
“Simple is Best” is the motto of Jinbei Yamada, founder of Japanese bicycle maker Arrow Bicycles. I love this motto for its elegant phrasing, completely devoid of pretention and utterly consistent with its own meaning. There is no false dichotomy of “form versus function” to drive a pointless wedge between functional and decorative simplicity and…