The latest issue of the Austin Chronicle has a great Marc Savlov profile of my friend Marc English, designer extraordinaire. The quote below has one thought, though I just messaged Marc I think he's really the Joe Strummer of design. (I'm not sure what that means, but I don't know what "Stanley Kubrick of design" means, either. Maybe he's the Marc English of design?) Whatever the case, every time I visit Marc's studio, I feel very down the rabbit hole.
His identity both as a human being and an artist is XXL life. AustinDesign Democracy
filmmaker/writer Cary Roberts has rightly called him "the Stanley
Kubrick of design." He fairly burns with passion for his life and work,
and he wants you to burn, too. No sparks or embers here. English is a
conflagration of design theory, overwhelming talent, and
experimentalism, and his work with Criterion meets at the dirty
crossroads of the artistic truth of what has been entrusted to him and
the bottom line, the movement of "product," the allure of the dream
made cardboard, laser-encoded plastic discs, at midnight, beneath a
full moon, with pistols and blood well spent. His aim is truest.
Via Bruce Sterling: Design Democracy is a site and online event all about mass customization, which (according to the Wikipedia entry) is "the use of flexible computer-aided manufacturing systems to produce custom output." It's kind of a contest, where anyone can vote "early and often" on designs posted to the site. I love the logo.
A couple of older notes about emergent information architecture, the first by Peter Merholz, who talks about the range of architectures from those explicitly created by the user to those implicitly derived from user behavior – with tags a hybrid: "They’re explicit in that people have to engage in some explicit act of applying the tag. They’re implicit because the aggregate of that tagging leads to folksonomies and other social metadata that starts making connections between information that was not there before." The other post, by Gene Smith, is about how people co-create information environments, looking not only at the x-axis from implicit to explicit, but also factoring in a y-axis of personal to participatory. These are from back in July, so not new; I ran across them via a post by Adrian Chong at the now-defunct iaslash. (Archives still available to dig through... still yielding goodies.)
Simplicity is complicated. And, as Bryan Trogdon posts in comments, quoting Leonardo, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." [Link]
While we may set out to design a “simple” system, it is shortsighted to force it when it may not be appropriate for the end-users or the tasks. Applying user research methods to guide design decisions will assist in the appropriate balance and placement of simplicity in the product, and the exposure of complexity to the end user. Tackling these issues during the design process is the best approach to displace complexity from where it would otherwise end up: the users’ experience.Portions
"Architectures of Control" ponders our tendency to eat all of a portion we're fed, so that if we get "supersized" portions, we eat more. My wife and I have noticed, with our kids out of the house, that we eat all or most of a dish that used to serve the whole fmaily with leftovers for another meal.
One question which does arise from thinking about packaging and portion sizes is to what extent established sizes (weights, volumes) have affected consumers’ habits. Is it coincidence that, say, a typical bag of crisps (potato chips) in the UK used to be 1 oz (around 28g), and that that’s about the portion that most people ate in one go? In the last ten years though, cheaper brands have reduced to 25g or less, and premium brands escalated up to 38g or 45g - and yet still people eat one packet at a time, even when it may be almost double the weight of another. When the default size of spirit measures in pubs has gradually risen from 25 ml (down from 1 fl oz previously?) up to 35 ml or even doubles (50 ml) unless the customer specifies otherwise, this must have an effect on consumers’ behaviour. Most people do not spend double the time drinking a 50 ml measure that they do a 25 ml measure. They drink it in perhaps a few seconds longer, yet have imbibed double the amount of alcohol. (Equally, the shape of glasses affects perceptions of liquid quantity - more of Prof Wansink’s research.)digitalurban: "Frank Lloyd Wright Architectual Visualisation in Half Life"
Hence, this choice of default can have a major effect on behaviour, and is surely a powerful control technique in itself...
digitalurban posts a rendering of Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufmann House using game engine – specifically the Half Life Source Engine – for the visualization. [Link] Digital Urban is doing a whole series on Cities in Games.
ScraperCoulda used one of these th is week... the Rosendahl Ice Scraper by Erik Bagger, via Core77 Design Blog.
Worldchanging book designInteresting discussion with Stefan Sagmeister, designer of Worldchanging: A Guide to the 21st Century.[Link]
I think the form that we suggested to the publisher was one of a compendium. The one that would allow you to read it at various levels, that you could sneak in here or there or read it in one go if you so desire. The book from the very beginning that was always conceived on uncoated paper. It would have the weight of a novel, so that you can still actually read it in bed.
Also, from the very beginning what was important to me was that it was cheap enough to print that it would be possible for a mass book. It wouldn't be much more expensive than a novel would be. By its design conceit it would actually be able to talk to the masses. That's what I was utterly interested in. We will see a year from now if this will all work out or not, if we can do another book that preaches to the converted. You know, that talks to Ralph Nader voters. I had no interest in that whatsoever. I think these people have enough information out there. The challenge is really to get this information to a lot of people.
White Space
I actually think a lot about white space. I spent several years working for a typographer, and I took that gig in order to learn more about publishing, especially design of the printed page, but I've never done a direct study of visual design... so I had a passing understanding of the value and use of white space, but until now I'd never seen a good article explaining how it works. A List Apart has just such an article, written by Mark Boulton, who notes that whitespace is subjective, its use a matter of practice. He points to a good reference, Typography: A Manual of Design
I'm often inspired in my own thinking and practice by Peter Merholz and his colleagues at Adaptive Path. Earlier this week he posted about the importance of defining, explaining, anjd adhering to an experience strategy, which "defines a product requirement from the perspective of the user, and what they want to accomplish, achieve, do." [Link]
Perhaps the ur-experience strategy comes from George Eastman, who was guided by the phrase “You press the button, we do the rest,” in the development of his original Kodak camera and the processing and printing services he provided.
He posts a call for other good examples of experience strategies, to be posted in comments. One respondent posted a quote from Pandora: "At Pandora Media™ (formerly Savage Beast Technologies™), we have a single mission: To help you discover new music you'll love." (And they do ... go to the main Pandora page and give it a try. Pandora's design is simple and usable; I have a radio station based on characteristics of Cansei de Ser Sexy's music, created in seconds.)
Elements of Web StyleOne of my most memorable teachers was the great Red Gibson, who did the lecture piece of my copy editing class at the University of Texas around 1971. Gibson taught a pragmatic economy of style that was critical discipline given my tendency, at the time, to capture undisciplined prose explosions on the page, thinking I had created poetry. Gibson taught me to appreciate discipline and structure in writing, and to pare down, then pare down again. The book he referred to as Strunk and White was required reading for the course... its full name, The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, a little book (around 100 pages in its current edition) used originally as a textbook for Strunk's class, before White revised and annotated it years later for publication as a textbook.
The last place I expected to find a reference to "the little book" was Boxes and Arrows, which (if you don't know it already) is a popular reference site for web designers. However site founder Christina Wodtke has written a terrific essayabout the impact of Elements of Style on designers, explaining why it's "the most commonly cited book" in "web design screeds." Wodtke is an excellent writer herself, and she extends parts of the little book very effectively into advice for web designers:
Ugly good designThis is an easy translation into the design space—although you may have an impressive design style, make sure that your design is tempered to the needs of the project. A commerce site should probably not evoke gasps of pleasure at its beauty, but rather a sense of security, trust, a wealth of choice and appropriate prices.
You have a style and a way of working that is natural to you; to take on an unnatural style will result in a flawed product. Conversely your style is not necessarily suited to every project. Too often, because we are praised for our natural talent, we think that is all there is to design. But there is craft, there is understanding the product’s brand, and there is understanding not only conventions of the web, but conventions of the domain. Somehow one must balance our design nature with the environment of work.
Here's an eye-popping thought: a web site can be both ugly and well-designed. The opposite is also true: someone once referred tp an e-commerce site we were trying to fix as "a beautiful crappy site" - it was graphically wonderful, but you couldn't find products or get reliable information about shipping costs, and much of the time you couldn't even check out.
The converse is that you could have a site that's butt-ugly, but is very well designed (as in architecture) for what it's supposed to do. Joshua Porter at Vitamin argues that this is the case with Myspace.
To the people who use it, the visual design of MySpace communicates one message loud and clear: MySpace is your social life. Every feature, every design element, serves to reinforce this. It may not be pretty, but as long as people can easily hang out virtually with their friends, it doesn’t have to be. So in terms of communicating value to its users, MySpace actually does a very good job.
Granted, the visual design of MySpace is simplistic, brutely exposing its content. But is that a knock against it, or a compliment to it? Sometimes as designers we feel the need to repurpose and restyle content out of its raw form. MySpace, however, shows that simple exposure might be all that’s needed. danah boyd, who researches MySpace, writes about designing to allow for personal style: “Don’t design for perfection - design for reinterpretation. No matter how perfect you see your design, it will be modified, altered or manipulated in use.”