Intelligent Design

Why clothing sizes make no sense

2012-01-29T11:49:00.003-02:00

Julia Felsenthal writes in Slate Magazine on A Size 2 Is a Size 2 Is a Size 8.

The ASTM recommendations have evolved over time to accommodate a very real trend: vanity sizing. Women don’t want to know their real size, so manufacturers re-label bigger sizes with smaller numbers. In 1958, for example, a size 8 corresponded with a bust of 31 inches, a waist of 23.5 inches and a hip girth of 32.5 inches. In ASTM’s 2008 standards, a size 8 had increased by five to six inches in each of those three measurements, becoming the rough equivalent of a size 14 or 16 in 1958. We can see size inflation happening over shorter time spans as well; a size 2 in the 2011 ASTM standard falls between a 1995 standard size 4 and 6. (This may also explain why smaller sizes are constantly invented. The 1958 standard listed 8 as its smallest size. The 1995 ASTM standard listed a size 2. In 2011, ASTM lists a standard for size 00.)

[...] a private organization called the Textile Clothing Technology Corporation conducted the first widespread study of American women’s bodies since O’Brien and Shelton, called SizeUSA. They installed body scanners at 13 different locations across the country and, over the course of about a month, scanned the bodies of almost 11,000 people between the ages of 18 and 80. The main finding, says Boorady, who was involved with the study, is that people are bigger than ever. The study also distinguished five to seven distinct body shapes for women, as opposed to the single hourglass ideal that has long determined the proportions of clothing (and which only 8 percent of American women have). Boorady says the results mean “it would be extremely difficult to come up with a single sizing system.”

[...] in 1986, the Times reported on manufacturers’ resistance to the development of ASTM standards. “The Laura Ashley woman is different from the Liz Claiborne woman, who is different from the woman whom Calvin Klein envisions,” opined the article’s author, who then quoted a designer saying, “Fit is a type of identity.”
There is something to this. My sense of brand loyalty is as much about the way a designer’s clothes fit as how they look. I [Ms Felsenthal] do pretty well with J.Crew sweaters, Urban Outfitters jeans, and Frye boots—because those have become, after years of trial and error, my brands. If these companies suddenly changed their sizes to adhere to some synthetic average of the American female form, I’d feel annoyed—even indignant.

The article is an interesting introduction to an intriguing topic, one that combines design, statistics, economics, business, and psychology.

Web

2012-01-05T12:13:00.002-02:00

The Oatmeal presents "How to make your shopping cart suck less" Vulgarly amusing advice on design.

What not to ask

2011-12-22T15:55:00.003-02:00

Sometimes the secret of successful design is to not include a feature. Boing-Boing reports on a company that increased its sales by $300 million by removing its user log-in feature.

http://boingboing.net/2011/08/05/300-million-button-making-customers-create-logins-to-buy-cost-etailer-300myear.html

Iterating good design

2011-11-15T11:10:00.003-02:00

Rob Beschizza writing for Boing-Boing contrasts Sony's and Apple's approaches to solving design problems.

Misunderstanding Apple

"At a recent event I attended, someone involved in marketing said that Apple's success is founded on it creating substantially new designs every year to keep everyone keeping up. In his view, Apple ownership is about getting the latest thing to impress people."

"It's weird that a company under such constant scrutiny is misunderstood like this, often by people who have been watching it for years. Isn't it obvious that Apple rarely changes its designs?"

"I imagine that Apple is delighted to see rivals convinced that every year's model is different to the last one; talk about a reality distortion field. Companies like Dell and HP will chance across good design every so often, but companies like Sony make good designs then abandon them intentionally because they're blind to their own good design choices."

"... Sony rarely iterates, even when it's onto something good. Everything is a one-off. It treats a billion-dollar business the way a microbrewery treats ales with silly names."

"Apple isn't the only company that persists with a good design, either. If you want an ultraportable laptop that's Windows or Linux-friendly which works better than the Z and isn't outrageously expensive, look no further than the Lenovo X series."

His essay is illustrated with great comparison photos:
"Check out these two iMacs. The one on the left is from 2007, and the other is the latest model. They're more than four years apart. Here's the first and the latest iPod. While they're not identical, bear in mind that nine years passed in the interval... Here's a Mac from 1984 and one from 1994. Though Apple made all sorts of other desktop towers and pizza boxes in this period, this popular design saw more than a decade of refinement." See them at http://boingboing.net/2011/11/14/what-the-vaio-z-says-about-son.html

Websites that leave a bad taste in your mouth

2011-08-30T11:13:00.003-03:00

Slate Magazine on Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad?

Over the last few weeks I've spent countless hours, now lost forever, plumbing the depths of restaurant Web hell. I also spoke to several industry experts about the reasons behind all these maliciously poorly designed pages. I heard several theories for why restaurant sites are so bad—that they can't afford to pay for good designers, that they don't understand what people want from a site, and that they don't really care what's on their site. But the best answer I found was this: Restaurant sites are the product of restaurant culture. These nightmarish websites were spawned by restaurateurs who mistakenly believe they can control the online world the same way they lord over a restaurant. "In restaurants, the expertise is in the kitchen and in hospitality in general," says Eng San Kho, a partner at the New York design firm Love and War, which has created several unusually great restaurant sites (more on those in a bit). "People in restaurants have a sense that they want to create an entertainment experience online—that's why disco music starts, that's why Flash slideshows open. They think they can still play the host even here online."

The article illustrates its points with great links to expensive websites that may satisfy a chef's ego but don't work for the customer. The whole article is well worth reading.

Watch design

2011-08-17T17:24:00.003-03:00

David Pogue writes on How to Build a Usable Watch

Good interface design is darned hard:

"Your inclination is to stuff a lot of features into your product — “hey, that’ll make it sell, right?” And yet every feature has to go somewhere. It has to fit on some screen, in some menu, under some keystroke. So the more you stuff in, the more difficult to use your product becomes, and the less pleasure it will bring your customers.

I had recently bought my daughter a $9 digital watch from Wal-Mart. It had three buttons. You were supposed to be able to perform all of the watch’s functions using only these three buttons: set the time, set an alarm, turn the alarm on and off, start and stop the stopwatch, record lap times, and so on.

It was, as you can guess, a disastrous user interface. Every button wound up performing multiple functions. Double-press. Press-and-hold. Press two at once. There’s no possible way you could master it without the 3-by-3 inch sheet of instructions in 2-point type."

Read his students' suggested design improvements at:
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/11/how-to-build-a-usable-watch/

What you say isn't what I hear

2010-12-15T08:00:00.000-02:00

"We think direct written and verbal communication is clear and accurate and efficient. It is none of those," writes Seth Godin. The implication: "Plan on being misunderstood. Repeat yourself. When in doubt, repeat yourself."

Getting Lost in Buildings

2010-12-14T15:36:00.000-02:00

Donald Norman wrote about designers who can't figure out why users can't use the products they've designed. Boing Boing reports on a study by psychologists on why users get lost in award-winning buildings:

"Architects, on the other hand, may be among the class of people with very strong spatial skills, because their craft requires numerous spatial transformations, such as needing to envision 3D space from 2D depictions. One unanticipated consequence of such abilities is that they may not be very good at taking the perspective of a user with poorer spatial skills, and therefore may not be able to fully anticipate where users may have navigational difficulties within their buildings."

PowerPoint and Cognitive Science

2010-12-14T15:07:00.003-02:00

Good design is more than making things pretty; good design communicates. IO9 posted on How Cognitive Science Can Improve Your PowerPoint Presentations based on a lecture by Stephen M. Kosslyn, author of Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations.

Here's an overview:

1. The Goldilocks Rule: present the "just right" amount of data. Never include more information than your audience needs in a visual image.

2. The Rudolph Rule: make information stand out and highlight important details — the way Rudolph the reindeer's red nose stood out from the other reindeers'. If you're presenting a piece of relevant data in a list, why not make the data of interest a different color from the list? Or circle it in red?

3. The Rule of Four is a simple but powerful tool: the brain can generally hold only four pieces of visual information simultaneously. So don't ever present your audience with more than four things at once.

4. The Birds of a Feather Rule is another good rule for how to organize information when you want to show things in groups. "

The examples in the original post are worth reading.

Thanks to Boing Boing.

Egg drop

2010-10-21T20:19:00.004-02:00

First day of class

2010-09-18T08:44:00.007-03:00

Our characteristics for evaluating a product:

1. comfort
2. durability
3. price
4. appearance
5. needs
6. stability
7. weight
8. efficient to produce
9. size
10. age
11. fit
12. material
13. reputation
14. type of use

If you're interested you can see last year's list

Welcome Kalamazoo College class of 2014

2010-09-03T16:44:00.002-03:00

Welcome to K!

And welcome to the Design Intelligence seminar. This course is part of the Shared Passages Seminar program at K College. Like all of the First Year Seminars, much of our time will be devoted to discussion and writing. The topic of this particular seminar is design.

From the class syllabus:

This course will look at the role of design in the world around us. Our emphasis will be on features, feel and function of design. We will consider why some designs work well and others work poorly. We will think about how and why things are designed in particular ways. We will look at design choices from various perspectives.

The broader goal of this class is to develop and refine skills necessary to succeed in college and beyond. We will work on discussion skills, presentation skills, analytic skills, and writing skills.

If you are interested, you can find out more about the course by exploring some of the posts below or following some of the related links on the right.

Material world

2009-12-16T15:43:00.005-02:00

New materials allow new designs. The Financial Times reported on the Materials Library at King’s College London

Materials libraries are one of the newest and most intriguing manifestations of materials science, which is itself a relatively new term to describe an age-old discipline – the study of the relationship between the molecular structure of materials and their perceptible physical properties, such as hardness, softness, flexibility or brittleness. In the past, the study of materials fell under metallurgy, chemistry and solid-state physics. But in the last half-century, with more new materials being created than in all previous history, their sheer variety – plastics, semiconductors, biomaterials – could no longer be understood merely within the classical disciplines.

Take Aerogel: the world’s lightest solid consists of 99.8 per cent air and looks like a vague, hazy mass. And yet despite its insubstantial nature, it is remarkably strong; and because of its ability to nullify convection, conduction and radiation, it also happens to be the best insulator in the world. Sitting next to the Aerogel is its thermal opposite, a piece of aluminium nitride, which is such an effective conductor of heat that if you grasp a blunt wafer of it in your hand, the warmth of your body alone allows it to cut through ice.

Read the whole article: "A library of the world’s most unusual compounds" by George Pendle.

Thanks to Boing Boing

Photo from Tanakawho's Flickr stream, used by Creative Commons permission

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28481088@N00/ / CC BY 2.0

Should design be a policy priority?

2009-12-14T17:13:00.002-02:00

Allison Arieff for the NY Times wrote"Designs on Policy"

Design touches all sectors of our daily life, and increasing awareness of that reality can result in tremendous benefit for all. Is design about aesthetics? Of course it is, but that’s just one of its many facets. Design can save time, money and one’s sanity. It can simplify use, enhance enjoyment, and keep us safe and well. I believe the National Design Policy can help to tangibly illustrate design’s value and help to keep it from being reduced to an afterthought, that “denim patch on a satin dress” Beirut is talking about.

Some designers I spoke to are less than thrilled with the whole design policy idea. An architect said emphatically, “Good design needs no spokesperson, needs no voice other than itself.” Yet I’m not convinced that’s always the case. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be living in, as I’ve heard one homeowner describe it, “a house with a Spanish Gothic front”, or driving Pontiac Aztecs through poorly designed intersections, and signing on for balloon payments, among countless examples. Design doesn’t need good PR; it needs to be recognized as essential to good practice. Anything that can help facilitate the importance of design as part of larger systems thinking is a positive.

She writes frequently on design for the New York Times Opinionator section

Thanks to Patrik for suggesting this.

Details matter

2009-12-08T18:22:00.003-02:00

Dustin Curtis posts on Disney's sound system.

"To get the original audio system at Disney World to work, engineers simply attached large speakers to several hundred light-posts randomly scattered throughout the park. ... [T]here is actually a minor flaw with this system. Because the speakers are placed on arbitrarily-positioned light-posts throughout the park, the volume of the music slightly fluctuates as visitors walk along pathways. As they get closer to a speaker, the music gets louder, and as they walk away, it gets quieter."

Although no one complained about this, Disney re-engineered the park's sound.

"Today, as you walk through Disney World, the volume of the ambient music does not change. Ever. More than 15,000 speakers have been positioned using complex algorithms to ensure that the sound plays within a range of just a couple decibels throughout the entire park. It is quite a technical feat acoustically, electrically, and mathematically."

Read the whole post at http://dustincurtis.com/how-mr-q-manufactured-emotion.html

Photo by Joe Penniston used under Creative Commons

http://www.flickr.com/photos/expressmonorail/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Thanks to Boing Boing

Intersections

2009-11-25T14:11:00.001-02:00

From Indexed.

Downtown Kalamazoo

2009-11-09T02:05:00.005-02:00

An hour of observations...

Egg drop

2009-11-05T02:14:00.002-02:00

Lots of great designs today!

See more photos on page 4 of my Facebook album.

On the general topic of designing for impact my faculty colleagues recommended this YouTube NASCAR video.

Pockets contents

2009-09-24T17:31:00.003-03:00

While the things we carry in our pockets serve many different purposes, they have many common elements.
1. similar sizes
2. common shapes-- lots of rectangles with rounded corners
3. muted colors-- black, dark brown, greys, dark silver
4. durable materials
5. similar weights
6. smooth surfaces
As a result, a wallet looks surprisingly similar to a phone when both are designed to travel in pockets.

Name sign exercise

2009-09-23T11:28:00.003-03:00

A few things we learned:

1. Different solutions exist for the same problem
2. Many things affect legibility
- size
- lettering style (or font)
- color
- line thickness
- contrast
- background
3. Color, shapes, and complexity can be intriguing and can draw the eye
4. There can be a trade-off between aesthetics and readability
5. Quality depends on time, effort, and thought

Design Characteristics

2009-09-18T16:05:00.008-03:00

In our first class, we developed a short list of characteristics we could use to evaluate a product.

1. materials
2. sturdiness
3. consistency
4. comfort
5. aesthetics/visual appeal
6. cost
7. production (how easy is it to make?)
8. economy of materials
9. purpose
10. portability

If you want you can see a similar list from last year

Welcome

2009-09-14T17:55:00.003-03:00

Welcome Kalamazoo College Class of 2013!

This seminar will look broadly at design and will meet the K College writing requirement for First Year students.

Here's a brief description from the syllabus:

This course will look at the role of design in the world around us. Our emphasis will be on features, feel and function of design. We will consider why some designs work well and others work poorly. We will think about how and why things are designed in particular ways. We will look at design choices from various perspectives.

The broader goal of this class is to develop and refine skills necessary to succeed in college and beyond. We will work on discussion skills, presentation skills, analytic skills, and writing skills.

If you're curious, you can explore various design topics or look at student blogs from previous years by following the links at the right.

Designing Scientific Posters

2009-08-04T11:23:00.002-03:00

Colin Purrington of Swarthmore College has a great page of advice for poster session design.

Unlike a manuscript, posters can (and should!) adopt a variety of layouts depending on the form of charts and photographs. As long as you maintain sufficient white space, keep column alignments logical, and provide clear cues to your readers how they should "travel" through your poster elements, you can get creative. Make your poster creative! As an example (illustrated below), perhaps you might want to demote the unimportant sections (that few people read) to the undesirable real estate at the bottom portion of your poster, freeing up the right-hand column area for your stunning Conclusions. This strategy might be especially valuable for portrait-style posters where the bottom part of the paper almost touches the floor.

Read it all at:
http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/cpurrin1/posteradvice.htm

Thanks to BoingBoing.

"Before Creating the Car, Ford Designs the Driver "

2009-07-23T09:46:00.002-03:00

From the New York Times an article on Ford's design for users:

Antonella was the guiding personality for the Ford Verve, a design study that served as the basis for the latest-generation Fiesta. A character invented by Ford designers to help them imagine cars better tailored to their intended customers, she embodies a philosophy that guides the company’s design studios these days: to design the car, first design the driver.

Antonella is the personification of a profile created from demographic research about the Fiesta’s target customer, said Moray Callum, executive director of Ford Americas design.

Ford is using characters like Antonella to bring a human element to the dry statistical research drawn from polls and interviews. Based on psychological profiles, these characters are a more modern version of the “theme boards” that designers once covered with snapshots and swatches of material to inspire a design. They are also like avatars, those invented characters used in online games and forums to symbolize a participant’s personality.

“Invented characters get everyone on the same page,” Mr. Callum said. “Personalizing gives context to the information we have. Sometimes the target demographics are difficult to relate to by, say, a 35-year-old male designer.

“We found in the past that if they didn’t understand the buyer, designers would just go off and design something for themselves,” he added.

See the article at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/automobiles/19design.html?_r=3&pagewanted=2&emc=eta1

[Thanks Patrik!]

The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation

2009-07-13T18:09:00.003-03:00

See Peter Norvig's classic: The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

Off Target

2009-07-01T19:49:00.003-03:00

Target tries to use design to distinguish itself from Wal-Mart and K-Mart, but good design is more than stocking flashy products. It also means figuring out how to deal with customers in an intelligent manner.

Last December I was picking up a few Christmas gifts at Target, including a bottle of wine. At the checkout, the cashier asked for my ID to show proof of age. I sighed and opened my wallet to show her my license. Why the sigh? For those who don't know me, I'm almost 50 years old and my beard has more white than black in it. It's been decades since anyone could possibly mistake me for being under 21. Anyway, she needed to see identification, so I showed it to her.

But that wasn't sufficient. She told me I needed to remove my ID from the holder. I complied & held up my license.

Still no good.

The cashier needed to take my driver's license and scan it through her computer. I did a slow burn and considered abandoning my selections right there. Why the criminalization of a perfectly legal product? Security theater has trickled down from the TSA to your local discount store.

The difference is that there's no alternative to the TSA if you want to fly. Target, on the other hand, isn't the only place to shop. Wal-Mart, Meijer's, World Market and my neighborhood liquor store have all figured out systems to allow their cashiers to sell me a bottle of wine without recording my personal details. So my frequent trips to Target stopped. It wasn't a conscious boycott, but every time I thought about it I got cranky & decided I didn't need to go to Target.

Today was the first time in over 6 months that I shopped at Target (my daughter needed soccer shorts & we were in a hurry) and I guess I'm still cranky.

10 Questions with Hartmut Esslinger

2009-04-19T18:52:00.003-03:00

Open Forum blog posts an interview with Hartmut Esslinger, the founder of frog design.

Question: Why is it that companies with billions of dollars who can hire any designer or design firm in the world put out such crappy products?

Answer: Excellent products require more then just a good designer or a good design agency—they require humanistic and cultural vision, courage and discipline in execution. There are two reasons why crappy products are so common: first, most “companies with billions of dollars” don’t want to charter new ways because they are in a defensive setting in order to defend their existing business—and when the billions and the business are gone, it’s too late for change. Second, big companies normally have neither the people nor the processes to innovate and there are no real rewards for taking the risks and efforts required in the endeavor for excellent products. In my career, SONY under Akio Morita was the only big company which rejected the common addiction to mediocrity and went for world-changing innovations. Now they are stuck as well…

[snip]

Question: If a young person wants to be a great designer, what should he or she do?

Answer: “Design” isn’t a clear-cut talent profession, but one of coordination and catalyst between human needs, science and technology, business and economy, as well as sociology and ecology. The artistic talent required is more of an enabler at the end of rational and emotional analysis as well as strategic conceptualization.

Therefore, it is vital to learn and study as much as possible especially about business, technology and human nature. In the end, there are flavors in design which are more esthetic—see New York Times “Style Magazine”—but design is only relevant when it improves human lives by appealing both to the mind and the heart.

Finally, a young person with the right talents needs to have infinite desire and never give up. I apply a simple test with young students: smash a teapot into pieces and then hand out the glue. Those who rebuild the teapot won’t make it, those who create phantasy animals and spaceships will.

Read the rest of the 10 questions with Hartmut Esslinger

Constraint

2009-03-26T14:38:00.002-03:00

Wired magazine (March 2009) illustrates Design under Constraint, with examples including cell phone antennae, plastic bottles, and electric cars.

"But for all that we can't do in this static medium, we find enlightenment and wonder in its possibilities. This is a belief most designers share. In fact, the worst thing a designer can hear is an offhand 'Just do whatever you want.' That's because designers understand the power of limits. Constraint offers an unparalleled opportunity for growth and innovation.
...
Given fewer resources, you have to make better decisions."

Return on Design

2009-03-10T10:12:00.002-03:00

Seth Godin has an interesting post on Return on Design. His four categories:

Negative return. The local store with the boarded up window, the drooping sign and the peeling paint is watching their business suffer because they have a design that actually hurts them. Software products suffer from this ailment often. If the design actively gets in the way of the story you tell or the utility you deliver, you lose money and share.

No impact. Most design falls into this category. While aesthetically important, design in this case is just a matter of taste, not measurable revenue. You might not like the way the liquor store looks, or the label on that bottle of wine, but it's not having any effect on sales. It's good enough.

Positive return. We're seeing a dramatic increase in this category. Everything from a bag of potato chips to an online web service can generate incremental sales and better utility as a result of smart design.

The whole thing. There are a few products where smart design is the product (or at least the product's reason for being). If you're not in love with the design of a Porsche 911, you would never consider buying it--same as an OXO peeler. The challenge of building your product around breakthrough design is that the design has to in fact be a breakthrough. And that means spending far more time or money than your competitors who are merely seeking a positive return.

Read the rest of his post

Designing Smell

2009-02-03T17:32:00.002-02:00

A story in today's Wall Street Journal was about a product characteristic I rarely consider: its scent. " 'Your home could look clean, but if there's an absence of scent, you don't really know,' says Scott Beal, a Procter & Gamble brand manager for P&G's Febreze air-care line. 'Scent is a signal you've done something.' "

For decades, lingering whiffs of ammonia and bleach in bathrooms and kitchens signaled a freshly scrubbed home. In the 1970s and 1980s, the scent of pine forests and lemon groves gained acceptance.

Now the smell of clean has become a wildly varied bouquet: mandarin-lime detergent, disinfectant evoking "lavender vanilla and comfort," toilet-bowl cleaner in eucalyptus mint. Bleach can smell like a "fresh meadow." A new deodorizer, which hit store shelves last month, promises a "Moroccan bazaar."

Adding new fragrances to products also lets consumer-products makers employ their favorite phrase: new and improved. Scents are "the lowest-hanging fruit as far as new-product innovation is concerned -- you don't have to change a capability or substantiate a new claim."

Some cleaning-products makers have found they can't let their goods smell too pleasant. Clorox bleach, available in fragrances such as fresh meadow, clean linen and lavender, takes care to keep the original bleach scent faintly detectable. "We tried covering it up, and it didn't work -- consumers still want the bleach smell, just lighter," says Michael Ott, director of research and development for Clorox.

Pine-Sol, also owned by Clorox, avoids fragrances that seem too gentle. Current Pine-Sol fragrances include Wild Flower Blast and Mountain Energy.

"The scent experience needs to be aligned with the message you're trying to communicate -- Pine-Sol needs to scream 'power,'" Mr. Ott says. "You'll never have a rose-petal Pine-Sol; that's almost comical."

from "Is the Smell of Moroccan Bazaar Too Edgy for American Homes?" by Ellen Byron.

digital to physical

2008-12-09T11:57:00.002-02:00

Thingiverse helps take digital design into the physical world.

"Thingiverse is a place for you to share your digital designs with the world. We believe that just as computing shifted away from the mainframe into the personal computer that you use today, digital fabrication will share the same path. Infact, it is already happening: laser cutters, cnc machines, 3D printers, and even automated paper cutters are all getting cheaper by the day. These machines are useful for a huge variety of things, but you need to supply them with a digital design in order to get anything useful out of them. We're hoping that together we can create a community of people who create and share designs freely, so that all can benefit from them."

Thanks to Geekdad

Phone design

2008-11-20T13:34:00.002-02:00

Slate writes on the design of the Google G1 phone and its debt to the iPhone.

"Like the iPhone, the Google phone's best feature is its attractive, well-designed interface. The most important thing about the G1 is not what it does but how it does it. This sounds obvious: Doesn't every mobile phone company set out to create a usable interface? Spend a minute trying to navigate deep lists of drop-down menus on a Windows Mobile or BlackBerry device and you'll have your answer. Before the iPhone, phones were pretty to look at but a pain to use; the last blockbuster mobile phone, Motorola's RAZR, induced aneurysms when you tried to do anything but make a phone call."

Read the whole article at Second Bite at the Apple: What the Google phone stole from the iPhone.

End of the clamshell?

2008-11-15T01:32:00.003-02:00

The New York Times reports on a new trend in packaging:

"A number of retailers and manufacturers have a gift for holiday shoppers: product packaging that will not result in lacerations and stab wounds.

"I shouldn’t have to start each Christmas morning with a needle nose pliers and wire cutters," said Jeffrey Bezos of Amazon.

The companies, including Amazon.com, Sony, Microsoft and Best Buy, have begun to create alternatives to the infuriating plastic “clamshell” packages and cruelly complex twist ties that make products like electronics and toys almost impossible for mere mortals to open without power tools.

Impregnable packaging has incited such frustration among consumers that an industry term has been coined for it — “wrap rage.” It has sent about 6,000 Americans each year to emergency rooms with injuries caused by trying to pry, stab and cut open their purchases, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission."

Read the whole article at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/technology/internet/15packaging.html

Thanks to Patrik Hultberg for sending the article.

Packaging links

2008-10-17T12:19:00.001-02:00

"Isn’t it Iconic?" by Stacey King Gordon
http://www.brandpackaging.com/Archives_Davinci?article=999

"The Power of The Box - Powerful Packaging Design" by Tuija Seipell
http://www.thecoolhunter.net/design/The-Power-of-The-Box---Powerful-Packaging-Design/

Impressions

2008-10-14T10:15:00.002-02:00

Seth Godin posted on the importance of design details.

"If a book has cheap color separations, the wrong sort of gloss on the cover and the wrong hue to the paper, it just feels cheap and self-published and unlikely to be the real deal. It doesn't matter a bit what's inside, who wrote it, anything. You've already decided because this book reminds you of untrustworthy books you've encountered before.

"Visit a website with a brown on brown color scheme, a stock photo of a nautilus, some flashing graphics, a bunch of widgets and a typeface that's not quite right, and you've already decided how you feel. Entirely based on the fact that this site is like those sites, and you didn't like those sites."

Presentation advice from Garr Reynolds

2008-10-04T14:27:00.003-03:00

Before your next presentation read Organization & Preparation Tips by Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen. He covers valuable ten points concisely.

1. Start with the end in mind
2. Know your audience as well as possible
3. Content, content, content
4. Keep it simple
5. Outlining your content
6. Have a sound, clear structure
7. Dakara nani? (so what?)
8. Can you pass the "elevator test"?
9. The art of story telling
10. Confidence — How to get it

Read it at www.garrreynolds.com/Presentation/prep.html

Art Hop tonight

2008-10-03T11:10:00.003-03:00

The Kalamazoo Arts Council's monthly Art hop is tonight, Friday Oct 3 from 5-9

Art Hop is a free event that features new art exhibits in a fun, casual atmosphere. Numerous galleries and businesses host the show, and you can hop around from one exhibit to another. Meet the artists and make new friends at the Art Hop.

more info

Design factors

2008-09-20T16:51:00.007-03:00

Here's a list of design factors developed on our first day of class.

1. comfort
2. durability
3. style
4. price
5. function
6. ease of use
7. materials
8. packaging
9. popularity
10. mobility
11. size
12. shape
13. color
14. quality
15. efficiency
16. value
17. producer
18. environmental impact
19. health impact

You can see more class photos as part of this online album

Welcome class of 2012

2008-09-16T12:16:00.003-03:00

Welcome to Kalamazoo College and to the Design Intelligence seminar!

If you're interested, you can use the links at the right to browse earlier posts or look at student blogs from last fall.

Here's a short course description:

This course will look at the role of design in the world around us. Our emphasis will be on features, feel and function rather than on the aesthetics of design. We will consider why some designs work well and others work poorly. We will think about how and why things are designed in particular ways. We will look at the economic and environmental implications of design choices.

The broader goal of this class is to develop and refine skills necessary to succeed in college and in your career. We will work on discussion skills, presentation skills, analytic skills, and writing skills

Design at Disney

2008-06-21T12:59:00.003-03:00

Mickey's Ten Commandments

1. Know your audience
Don't bore people, talk down to them or lose them by assuming that they know what you know.

2. Wear your guest's shoes
Insist that designers, staff and your board members experience your facility as visitors as often as possible.

3. Organize the flow of people and ideas
Use good story telling techniques. Tell good stories not lectures.

4. Create a "come to me" (the castle, the Epcot dome)
Lead visitors from one area to another by creating visual magnets and giving visitors rewards for making the journey

5. Communicate with visual literacy
Make good use of all the non-verbal ways of communication - colour, shape, form, texture.

6. Avoid overload
Resist the temptation to tell too much, to have too many objects. Don't force people to swallow more than they can digest, try to stimulate and provide guidance to those who want more.

7. Tell one story at a time
If you have a lot of information divide it into distinct, logical, organized stories. People can absorb and retain information more clearly if the path to the next concept is clear and logical.

8. Avoid contradiction
Clear institutional identity helps give you the competitive edge. The public needs to know who you are and what differentiates you from other institutions they may have seen.

9. For every ounce of treatment , provide a ton of fun
How do you woo people from all other temptations? Give people plenty of opportunity to enjoy themselves by emphasizing ways that let people participate in the experience and by making your environment rich and appealing to all senses.

10. Keep it up
Never underestimate the importance of cleanliness and routine maintenance. People expect to get a good show every time. They will comment more on broken and dirty stuff.

Source: Marty Sklar, then head of Walt Disney Imagineering

thanks to boingboing

Fight death by PowerPoint

2008-04-12T12:28:00.002-03:00

Alexei Kapterev's slideshow on avoiding death by PowerPoint.

| View | Upload your own

Don McMillan's: "Life After Death By Powerpoint."

2008-02-28T12:58:00.001-02:00

Is PowerPoint so bad it's funny?

Webpage design process

2008-01-28T21:08:00.000-02:00

from stopdesign, A Design Process Revealed

Some excerpts:

1. Research & Discovery

Jumping into any design project before examining the problem or task at hand might spin the wheels, but won’t get you very far. Any project, no matter how big or small, can benefit from research and planning before the work begins.

2. Competitive Analysis

Another helpful task in the process involves looking at pre-existing ideas and executions created by peers, mentors, heros, and/or competitors. Competitive analysis identifies the strengths and weaknesses of those existing designs.

3. Exploration

When tackling a design project with limitless creative boundaries, I like to begin by creating lists of relevant words, topics, and phrases. By creating these lists, I try to gain a broadened perspective of the problem I’m attempting to solve, and often uncover additional ideas and concepts which weren’t so obvious at the outset.

4. Thumbnail Sketching

Once I exhausted the idea branching, I started drawing thumbnail sketches on a pad of paper. Thumbnails are small sketches which can literally be as small as your thumbnail, or as big as a couple inches in width and/or height.

5. Typography

To me, typography is a crucial element in setting the formalness or informality of a design. Evocations of different typefaces are subliminal to most people, but a designer will go to great lengths to ensure the selection and construction of type complements the mood of the piece.

6. Imagery

Imagery is not always necessary in design. In fact, some of the most beautiful designs use type alone. However, selectively chosen photography or illustration can create enormous visual impact for a design, adding dimension, implication, and a deeper level of understanding far beyond a well-written headline or paragraph of text.

7. Execution & Implementation

I started writing the CSS for the design at a high-level, focusing on the layout structure, major backgrounds, and large regions of the page. Groups of elements were positioned in correct locations.

8. And More
The ever-changing design process does not end here. This summary is not an exhaustive one. Additional review and approval cycles, more design iterations, and frequent user testing all may be inserted anywhere into this process.

Present like Steve Jobs

2008-01-27T23:57:00.000-02:00

Business Week writes Deliver a Presentation like Steve Jobs

1. Set the theme.

2. Demonstrate enthusiasm.

3. Provide an outline.

4. Make numbers meaningful.

5. Try for an unforgettable moment.

6. Create visual slides.

7. Give 'em a show.

8. Don't sweat the small stuff.

9. Sell the benefit.

10. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.

Designing webpages

2008-01-05T13:22:00.000-02:00

Ben Hunt writes on the principles of web design

The Golden Rule

Everything that goes into your web site must have a purpose.
Every single element and decision must help users achieve their goals and support the site's goals.

How people use web pages

They move quickly because they don't like looking at the screen
They're impatient - they tend to click the first promising link, and often don't wait for pages to finish loading
They don't like to read, scanning text quickly for clues
They're looking for things to help them do what they want to do

Ideal web design process

1. Know what you're doing
2. Know what the site needs to do
3. Know what the site's visitors want
4. Get a good picture of the personality and style of the web site
5. Sketch out highly successful scenarios
6. Organise views into a site map
7. Sketch the essential features & look
8. Map your visitors' attention
9. Arrange the visual elements to work together

taste, beauty, and design

2007-12-20T19:12:00.000-02:00

Computer scientist Paul Graham asks an interesting question, "Instead of treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy abstractions, let's try considering it as a practical question: how do you make good stuff?"

I've cut & pasted selected ideas from his essay . If you have time, it's certainly worth reading his original post.

"Once you start to examine the question, it's surprising how much different fields' ideas of beauty have in common. The same principles of good design crop up again and again.

Good design is simple. When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.

Good design is timeless. Aiming at timelessness is a way to make yourself find the best answer. Aiming at timelessness is also a way to evade the grip of fashion.

Good design solves the right problem.

Good design is suggestive.

Good design is often slightly funny. Good design may not have to be funny, but it's hard to imagine something that could be called humorless also being good design.

Good design is hard. If you look at the people who've done great work, one thing they all seem to have in common is that they worked very hard. If you're not working hard, you're probably wasting your time.

Good design looks easy. Like great athletes, great designers make it look easy. Mostly this is an illusion. The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.

Good design uses symmetry.

Good design resembles nature. It's not so much that resembling nature is intrinsically good as that nature has had a long time to work on the problem.

Good design is redesign. It's rare to get things right the first time. Mistakes are natural. Instead of treating them as disasters, make them easy to acknowledge and easy to fix.

Good design can copy. [The greatest masters] just want to get the right answer, and if part of the right answer has already been discovered by someone else, that's no reason not to use it. They're confident enough to take from anyone without feeling that their own vision will be lost in the process.

Good design is often strange.

Good design happens in chunks. Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems.

Good design is often daring.

"Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks, I could do better than that."

Excerpts from "Taste for Makers" by Paul Graham February 2002
http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

Thanks to Alyce Brady for suggesting his essay.

The Perfect Thing

2007-12-18T19:13:00.000-02:00

Steven Levy writes about the iPod design process in Wired Magazine

There is no single "father of the iPod." Development was a multitrack process, with Fadell, now on staff, in charge of the actual workings of the device, Robbin heading the software and interface team, Jonathan Ive doing the industrial design, Rubenstein overseeing the project, and Jobs himself rubbernecking as only he could. ... He would pick up the device and say what he liked and didn't like, and he would fire questions at everyone, pushing hard: "What are you going to do about it?" ...

Sometimes his pronouncements would astound his employees. When one of the designers said that obviously the device should have a power button to turn the unit on and off, he simply said no. And that was it.

Career Websites by students

2007-12-10T18:04:00.000-02:00

Lawyers

Corporate Lawyer

Financial Advisors

Economists

Nursing

Defense Attorney

Seth Godin on Powerpoint

2007-11-28T17:08:00.000-02:00

Seth Godin writes:

"Powerpoint could be the most powerful tool on your computer. But it’s not. Countless innovations fail because their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to, instead of the right way.

Communication is the transfer of emotion.

Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help them understand why you’re excited (or sad, or optimistic or whatever else you are.) If all you want to do is create a file of facts and figures, then cancel the meeting and send in a report."

Four Components To A Great Presentation

1) Make yourself cue cards.

Don’t put them on the screen. Put them in your hand. Now, you can use the cue cards you made to make sure you’re saying what you came to say.

2) Make slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them.

Create slides that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what you’re saying is true not just accurate.

Talking about pollution in Houston? Instead of giving me four bullet points of EPA data, why not read me the stats but show me a photo of a bunch of dead birds, some smog and even a diseased lung? This is cheating! It’s unfair! It works.

3) Create a written document.

Put in as many footnotes or details as you like. Then, when you start your presentation, tell the audience that you’re going to give them all the details of your presentation after it’s over, and they don’t have to write down everything you say. Remember, the presentation is to make an emotional sale. The document is the proof that helps the intellectuals in your audience accept the idea that you’ve sold them on emotionally.

IMPORTANT: Don’t hand out the written stuff at the beginning! If you do, people will read the memo while you’re talking and ignore you. Instead, your goal is to get them to sit back, trust you and take in the emotional and intellectual points of your presentation.

4) Create a feedback cycle.

If your presentation is for a project approval, hand people a project approval form and get them to approve it, so there’s no ambiguity at all about what you’ve all agreed to.

The reason you give a presentation is to make a sale. So make it. Don’t leave without a “yes,” or at the very least, a commitment to a date or to future deliverables.

Miss Teen USA 2007 - South Carolina

2007-11-28T14:40:00.001-02:00

Retailer observation and analysis

2007-11-19T11:33:00.000-02:00

For Monday Nov 26th

Play Paco Underhill for a day by observing a retailer. Retailers frequently target a specific group: by gender, age, income, or ethnicity. Choose a store where you wouldn't normally shop: a store catering to a different demographic group. Spend at least 15 minutes in the store. Look for design details: signs, lighting, images, music, noise level, fixtures, space, brands, quantity of products, color choices, materials, styles.

Answer the following questions on your blog.

1. What store did you observe? Who do they market to?

2. Briefly describe the following

a. appearance of store entrance (from outside)
b. sounds (inside the store)
c. how the merchandise is displayed
d. floors
e. signs
f. cashier area

3. What image does this business try to project? Give specific examples of design elements that reflect this image.

4. How did customers interact with various elements of the store's design?

5. What did you find interesting about the design of this store?

Plastic Bottles, 2007

2007-11-16T14:12:00.000-02:00

Photo 60x120" by Chris Jordan

"Depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes."

thanks to boingboing

Retailing

2007-11-16T02:19:00.000-02:00

For Monday's discussion:

Read The Science of Shopping by Malcolm Gladwell
http://www.gladwell.com/1996/1996_11_04_a_shopping.htm

1. Write a discussion question based on this reading and post it on your blog before 4 pm Sunday.
2. Read the questions posted by your classmates and answer two of them on your own blog.

I strongly encourage you to try using an RSS reader.

For Friday

2007-11-14T19:21:00.000-02:00

Part I. Create a paper mock-up of your website for your profession/career. You can make a physical collage of text and images or do it all by computer. (Or, if you're comfortable creating web pages, you can just make one and print a copy.)

Part II.
Answer the following questions on your blog.

1. We discussed how packaging can be used to draw consumers' attention to a product. What other purposes does packaging serve? Give examples.

2. Read "Continent-size toxic stew of plastic trash fouling swath of Pacific Ocean" by Justin Berton
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/19/SS6JS8RH0.DTL&hw=pacific+patch&sn=001&sc=1000
and
"Germany, Garbage, and the Green Dot: Challenging the Throwaway Society"
http://www.informinc.org/xsum_greendot.php
What do these articles suggest about packaging design? Give examples of how modifications to current practices could have environmental benefits.

iPod packaged by Microsoft

2007-11-14T14:20:00.000-02:00

link

Packages

2007-11-12T13:48:00.000-02:00

For Wednesday's class

Read "The Power of The Box - Powerful Packaging Design" by Tuija Seipell
http://www.thecoolhunter.net/design/The-Power-of-The-Box---Powerful-Packaging-Design/

and

"Isn’t it Iconic?" by Stacey King Gordon http://www.brandpackaging.com/content.php?s=BP/2007/09&p=3

To prepare for our discussion, write answers to the following questions on your blog:

1. To what extent is packaging important in marketing a product? Give an example of how a package influenced your decision to buy (or not buy) something.

2. What other products have iconic packaging?

3. What usability issues exist for packaging? Give examples of particularly good or bad packaging from a usability perspective.

For Monday

2007-11-02T14:03:00.001-02:00

Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015

Optional: see also Top 30 Web Design Mistakes

link for Friday's assignment

2007-10-31T13:42:00.000-02:00

http://www.fusiongrant.org/educational.php

Monday's reading

2007-10-26T12:02:00.000-02:00

13 Things I Wish I Learned In College

Wednesday's reading

2007-10-22T13:00:00.000-02:00

How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and
Learn Complex Material More Easily by Michael A. Covington

Monday's readings

2007-10-19T13:44:00.000-02:00

Three essays by Kathy Sierra:

“Are your users stuck in ‘P’ mode?”

“Why marketing should make the user manuals!”

“How to get users to RTFM”

Building chairs

2007-09-24T10:18:00.000-03:00

Course Description 2

2007-09-18T19:59:00.001-03:00

This course will look at the role of design in the world around us. Our emphasis will be on features, feel and function rather than on the aesthetics of design. We will consider why some designs work well and others work poorly. We will think about how and why things are designed in particular ways. We will look at the economic and environmental implications of design choices.

Successful completion of this course will fulfill the K College requirement for Tier One writing.

Course Description 1

2007-09-17T20:50:00.000-03:00

Some things just feel right. (Do iPods?) Other things—like unprogrammable VCRs or wristwatches that beep every hour—are frustrating. Which leads to an obvious question, why would anyone design a product to frustrate its users?

Design is more than style or fashion. This seminar explores design from the perspective of economics, business, and the environment. We will look at the features and functions of various products and services including: advertising, packaging, websites, retailing, and urban design. We will investigate how intangible experiences and activities can be designed. Observing and analyzing designs can help us better understand the world.

Design for the other 90%

2007-07-01T23:38:00.000-03:00

The Brand Builder blog writes on The Upside-Down pyramid of opportunity: Design for the other 90%

"A billion customers in the world, are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses, a $10 solar lantern and a $100 house."

For starters.

That's something to think about. Not in terms of exploitation, but in terms of wealth and opportunity creation. (The development of the easy-to-use, virtually crunch-proof windup $100 laptop - specifically designed to introduce computers and the internet to 3rd world children - is probably among the most ambitious of these types of endeavors, but also a great example of how we can start to create opportunity in regions of the world in which mere survival is still the order of the day.)

While everyone else is trying to appeal to the richest 10%, maybe, just maybe, the real opportunities are elsewhere

Speaking as perfomance

2007-06-18T12:03:00.000-03:00

Guy Kawasaki writes on Speaking as a Performing Art with advice from Doug Lawrence, a professional singer and speech coach.

Here's his list of topics:

1. Circulate with your audience.
2. Command attention.
3. Snarl.
4. Bite your tongue.
5. Always perform a sound check before you speak.
6. Use your eyes all the time.
7. Move away from center to make your point.
8. Get quiet.
9. “Underline” certain words with a pause or repetition.
10. Take a risk and be vulnerable.
11. Tee it higher.
12. Know when it’s time to go.
13. Use Q and A as an “encore.”
14. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.
15. Perform for a hero.

update: More advice from Doug Lawrence:Eight More Ways To Improve Your Presentations

The value of concrete details

2007-06-05T09:09:00.000-03:00

Dan Heath at Made to Stick illustrates the power of specific detail.

In the book, we talk about how vivid details can make ideas more credible. Here’s an example from the annals of advertising, plucked from an article on the copywriter Claude Hopkins:

Back in 1919, Schlitz beer approached Claude Hopkins. Their beer sales were in 15th place. They asked Hopkins if he could help them sell more beer. He agreed to meet with Schlitz and toured the brewery. He was fascinated with what he discovered. He then returned two months later with an ad campaign.

His ads told of the “crystal clear water from a special artesian well”. They told of the one “mother” yeast cell that produced all the yeast for fermenting the beer. It was the result of over “1,500 experiments and produced a very distinct fresh, crisp taste”. He told of how the bottles were “sterilized 12 times to ensure purity, so that nothing would interfere with the clean taste of the beer”.

The Schlitz people hated it. They explained to Hopkins that this would never work. They told him, “All beer is made the same way.” Hopkins calmly assured them that people would be fascinated with the “behind the scenes” look and, that no other beer maker had ever told the story.

After much discussion, Schlitz relented and let the ads roll out. Six months later, Schlitz beer was the Number 1 selling beer in the nation.

Pitching a new idea

2007-06-05T09:04:00.000-03:00

Paul Williams at Idea Sandbox reviews Life's a Pitch

"New ideas often make people uncomfortable. Many new projects and ideas need a champion to gain acceptance from others. Being able to pitch ideas is an invaluable business (and life) tool.

Basic Disciplines of a Good Pitch

* Find a calm space to think in [for preparation].
* Remember that people's emotions count for more than logic
[appeal to the heart as well as the head].
* Think through your proposition before you spell it out.
* Articulate it in the simplest way.
* Don't go for an unattainable perfect solution, go for what works.
* Focus on what it means to them, not what it means to you."

Make Internet TV

2007-05-14T15:35:00.000-03:00

Make Internet TV has a guide to getting started with video, that includes short online videos that demonstrate the various steps.

Semi-professional videos

2007-05-14T15:14:00.000-03:00

Download Squad has a great introduction to making cheap but decent videos:
Produce your own semi-professional videos - Part 1 and
Produce your own semi-professional videos - Part 2

"

Task One: Setting up your video rig

What you need:
1.Digital still (with video capability) or video camera
2. Tripod or other similar rig
3. A rolling apparatus
4. Duck tape, preferably black
5. A laptop, Audacity and a Microphone

Task Two: Action!
So now you have your camera, securely fastened to the tripod, which is securely duct-taped to the rolling cart (or whatever) which has your laptop and microphone on the back of it. Great, now you're ready to rock, and roll both your cart and roll film. You are ready for action.

Task Three: Pre-production and video conversion
Many times, the video format in which you record will not be compatible with the editing software you have.

Task Four: Editing and effects
To edit my movie I used Windows XP's built-in Windows Movie Maker. Sure it has its glitches and problems, but it is A) free, B) available, and C) quick and dirty.

Task Five: Adding sound loops (optional)
My favorite site for this being Flashkit (registration is free but not required) offers several hundred sound loops, most user-submitted, that are free for non-commercial use.

Task Six: Rendering
This task is simple, but takes time, so don't plan any LAN parties for a while. You'll need all the processing muscle you can get. I would usually use the highest quality setting available to render my videos, and then use a better, non-WMM third-party conversion or compression utility to make a smaller version if needed.

Task Seven: Finishing Touches
Another great idea to help put a glowing touch on your finished video product is to burn it to CD-ROM.
Labeling a CD with a nice gradient or bright graphic on the label always help the customer or other audience feel compelled to pop in your CD-ROM to "see what is on it."

PR Photos

2007-05-14T15:09:00.000-03:00

Marketing and Branding gives advice on How to Take a Decent PR Photo

"

# Try to limit the number of people in the photo to three.

# Solid color clothing works well.

# Plain backgrounds also help to keep the clutter to a minimum. Often the photos are converted to black and white so contrast between the foreground and background is helpful.

# A triangular photo composition is best where the main person is looking at one of the others and is being looked at by the other two.

# If the organization you are trying to promote has a symbol or a logo, make sure that it is seen proximately in the photo.

# Is it possible to show a little action? The best PR photos do not have the subjects looking at the camera, but are actually involved in what they a doing.

Huge images

2007-05-14T14:45:00.000-03:00

Homokaasu provides a free online feature called Rasterbater that takes any photo and returns it as a pdf file suitable for printing huge posters from your home printer.

Bad Charts and Graphs

2007-05-14T14:43:00.000-03:00

Gary Klass writes on How to Construct Bad Charts and Graphs

"The three fundamental elements of bad graphical display are these: Data Ambiguity, Data Distortion, and Data Distraction."

Easy mistakes worth avoiding

2007-05-09T20:06:00.000-03:00

VermontBSD presents a list of common writing errors.

"
They're / There / Their

Than / Then

Apostrophes (when to use them and w'hen no't to'o)

To / Too / Two

Affect / Effect

"Alot" is not a word

By / Buy / Bye

Loose / Lose

Passed / Past

Some spellings are rediculous

Plain / Plane

To unthaw something is to freeze it. (see "thaw")

Wander / Wonder

Weather / Whether / Wether

Where / Were (vs "wear")

Who / Whom

Whose / Who's

Your / You're

Brake / Break

Breath / Breathe

Compliment / Complement

Fair / Fare

For / Four / Fore

Be well, and do good work.

Lead / Led

Allowed / Aloud

Hole / Whole

"

Thanks to Pogue's Posts

Ephemeral stores

2007-05-09T12:51:00.000-03:00

Trendwatching writes on Pop-up Retail

"If new products can come and go, why can't the stores that display them do the same? Well, you guessed it, retail outlets increasingly do. From gallery-like shopping spaces with one-off exhibitions to mobile units bringing innercity-chic to rural areas, TRENDWATCHING.COM has noticed an increase in temporary retail manifestations around the world."

Press release

2007-05-08T15:55:00.000-03:00

Scott Baradell writes Eight Telltale Signs That Your Press Release Is Bull... These lessons can be applied to many other types of writing.

"1. Vague claims. Are you a "leading" provider of this, that or the other? So's everybody else."
Be specific. Provide details. Quantify. Source your data. Where appropriate, include a quote from a third party to verify your claims.

2. Industry jargon abuse.

3. Business nonsense talk. Paradigm shift. Scalable. Best of breed. End to end. Mission-critical. World-class. Targeted completion date. Long tail. Crowdsourcing.

4. Silly superlatives. If what you were announcing were really "revolutionary," you wouldn't need to put out a press release.

So do yourself a favor and keep your press releases straightforward in structure, clear in language, and supported by facts."

PowerPoint defense

2007-05-01T17:29:00.000-03:00

Graphpaper.com writes In Defense of PowerPointism

"Microsoft’s PowerPoint is frequently blamed for the poor quality of many presentations and for a supposedly- disastrous state of communication in both the private and the public spheres. Public speakers are lambasted for their wooden stage presence, crippled by their over-reliance on projected slide shows and meaningless bullet-points. The slides themselves, too, are often rife with design crimes ranging from clip-art diarrhea to impenetrable verbosity."

But, they ask, is it the technology?

"I wonder if the majority of the world’s crappy presentations wouldn’t be just as bad, or even a hell of a lot worse, if the presenter didn’t have the slides to use as a crutch."

They finish with these tips:

"Slim down. If you are a good speaker, yes, consider dramatically limiting your use of slides to help you remember what you want to say...

You and your slides are inseparable. Do not worry about whether or not each slide makes sense by itself. The best slideshows, in fact, are almost completely nonsensical outside of the context of the live presentation...

Explore a variety of alternative presentation styles ...

Evolve. I’ve found that my style has evolved over time specifically because I’ve been watching and emulating other speakers I admire. Every presentation or keynote I attend, no matter how boring or tiresome, usually offers some insight ..."

thanks to Pogue's Posts

Professional Presentation Pointers

2007-04-18T12:09:00.000-03:00

Fast Company has a series of Professional Presentation Pointers

Part 1: Prepare

1. Start to prepare the minute you get an assignment to speak or present.
2. Brainstorm.
3. Organize your thoughts.
4. Practice.
5. Practice more than you think you have to.
6. Practice using mirrors, audio/video recorders or in front of a small group of trusted colleagues.

Part 2: Stage Fright

"Skilled speakers know a secret about Stage Fright: It helps make them more animated, more exciting to watch and better at delivering their presentation. So instead of worrying about it, they embrace it.

There is a caveat: Stage Fright works its magic best when you are prepared. Just as someone who is physically fit and experienced would be better able to fight off or flee from danger, so would a presenter who was well-prepared and/or who had experience be much better able to make Stage Fright work positively."

Part 3: Nonverbal communication

• Voice.
• Hands
• Body and Movement.
• Eyes.
• Facial Animation.
• Dress and Adornment.

Part 4 everything else

"My experience has shown that the most successful, engaging speakers use notes. But they really know their presentation, though it is not completely memorized. They have practiced and/or done the presentation enough times so that they know what's coming next."

"With very few exceptions, it's a good idea to step out from behind a podium."

"Finally, most presentations need to have some spice, some lighter moments that foster the connection between speaker and audience"

Read the whole series: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

tips for successful podcasting:

2007-04-18T11:55:00.000-03:00

The Wall Street Journal provides these tips for successful podcasting:

"1. Be professional. Approach it from your listeners' viewpoint. If you're taking up even five minutes of their day, you want to make it worth their time. Use a high-quality microphone to ensure the sound quality is top-notch and even consider adding some short introductory and ending music to pull the piece together into an engaging segment. There is royalty-free podcast music available on some sites, such as music.podshow.com. When you set up to record, steer clear of background noises like barking dogs. Audio-editing software can help you delete some of the awkward pauses and "ums" that can slow the broadcast down.

2. Be consistent. Set a regular schedule for your podcasts so followers know when to expect it. Perhaps you could post it every Tuesday or the first Wednesday of every month. Whatever you decide, stick to the schedule.

3. Make it worth listening to. Face it, lots of people are podcasting these days and nobody has the patience to listen to everything. So you need to make your podcast better than your competitors'. Talk about current issues or provide advice that your customers care about. Or invite an interesting guest to do so. But don't be overly promotional -- your audience will tune out if the podcast starts sounding like an advertisement. And keep it to a manageable length. Most people won't listen to a recording longer than 10 minutes. "

Web design

2007-04-18T10:37:00.000-03:00

Gerry McGovern writes on Why Simplicity Is Essential to Web Design

A few quotes:

"We don't pay for visiting a site with our money; we pay for it with our time. The longer we spend on a Web site, the more we pay..."

"Visiting a Web site is about now. We have a particular need and we visit the website to meet that particular need."

"We like sites that resemble sites we're used to visiting, because they are more familiar and easier to navigate."

"If people loved complexity on the Web, then everyone would be using Advanced Search. We'd all be going to the 10th page of search results instead of clicking on one of the first three results on the first page.

We may still end up buying complex products on the Web, but our Web behavior will remain relentlessly simple and hugely impatient.
...
We simply don't have time to waste on complex navigation, convoluted language, or the vanity publishing of navel-gazing organizations."

Creativity on Command

2007-04-18T09:08:00.000-03:00

Idea Sandbox summarizes the design process presented in the book Zing!: Five Steps and 101 Tips for Creativity on Command (by Sam Harrison.)

1. Explore: Observe & Research - Gather all the information possible about the challenge. Become a sponge. Notice people. Anticipate. Don't just look, see!

2. Freedom: Brainstorm & Visualize - Have a "free-range brain" and come up with as many solutions as possible. Judge not. Assume nothing is impossible. Observations + Connections = Ideas.

3. Pause: Pause & Detach - Step away from the problem and let it stew in the back of your mind... Einstein said his best ideas came while shaving.

4. Embrace: Edit & Select - While you were pausing "the subconscious mind was doing the heavy lifting. Now the brightest idea floats before you." With the embrace step, "we find a solution that zings."

5. Life: Prototype & Implement - "Breathe life into your idea... In this step you add flesh, bones and heart to your idea. You make it lively and likable." Verify the idea. Modify it to make it better. Be the idea champion.

Video game design

2007-03-23T12:55:00.000-03:00

Boing-Boing has an interesting post on video game design.

Five Key Principles to Great Communicating

2007-03-20T14:08:00.000-03:00

Bert Decker says:

1. The Spoken Word is More Powerful than the Written Word.

2. Always Have a Point Of View. Always.

* What’s my point!
* What action do I want people to take!
* What’s the benefit in it for them!

3. Communication Rides Energy

* Eye Communication – the most important, at least five (5) seconds
* Posture and Movement – move, don’t stand behind lecterns
* Dress and Appearance – “thin slicing” or the first three seconds
* Gestures and the Smile – animation reflects our enthusiasm and passion
* Voice and Vocal Variety – beware the monotone voice
* Pausing – rid of non-words and the Power of the Pause

4. Visual Impact Dominates Personal Impact

5. Authenticity Is the Core of Communicating

Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for the cite.

What leads to success?

2007-03-20T10:01:00.000-03:00

Richard St. John answers in this short video.

1. Passion (love not money)
2. Work
3. Good (practice, practice, practice)
4. Focus
5. Push
6. Serve (give others something of value)
7. Ideas
8. Persist

And to get new ideas, he says:

Listen
Observe
Be Curious
Ask Questions
Problem Solve
Make Connections

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

2007-03-19T11:31:00.000-03:00

Guy Kawasaki writes on The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint based on his experience in venture capital.

"It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

Design Dinner Party

2007-03-19T11:04:00.000-03:00

Creating Passionate Users outlines a Product Design Dinner Party as an alternative to meetings or brainstorming. The focus isn't on dinner but rather on presenting and selecting ideas through small groups that change membership with each round.

The method features:

1) Time constraints
2) Forced lack of attachment
3) Random, outside-your-domain inputs

Designing sound

2007-03-17T18:15:00.000-03:00

From metacool

"Why must things sound boring or terrible? Why not design them to sound the way they would sound if you stopped and thought about the right sound for the occasion? You know that ominous landing gear whine and clunk you hear right after take off in a jet liner? Why not make that sound confidence-inspiring? Everything can be designed, and to deliver a total experience, probably should be."

Dialogue

2007-03-09T19:19:00.000-02:00

Seth Godin writes:

"But having a dialogue is different. It's about engaging in (sometimes) uncomfortable conversations that enable both sides to grow and change."

Design Economy

2007-03-05T14:05:00.000-02:00

The StarTribune interviews Thomas Fisher, dean of the University of Minnesota's College of Design

Here are a few quotes:

"The idea of the design economy is that, for developed countries like ours, which cannot compete in a global marketplace on price or even quite often on the quality of a product, we have to compete on the basis of innovation, creativity and imagination, which takes you to design. By design, I don't mean just aesthetics but function and cultural adaptability."

"Look at the car industry. The American segment struggles because it still operates under the old assumption that price matters most. But people will pay a higher price for a Toyota Prius because it has a multiple meaning: It gets you places, but it uses less gas and carries this symbolism of doing something for the environment."

"The reality in this new era is that innovation comes from opportunities to have face-to-face conversations, to stimulate one another with new ideas. But by separating ourselves off from that experience so we can live in our suburban house, get in our car, go to the office, then go back again and never encounter anybody, what you prevent is the unexpected experience that might get you to think about something in a new way. We've designed cities that prevent us from being as innovative and as stimulated as we need to be in order to compete."

tip from Creativity Exchange

Orwell on Writing

2007-03-01T13:05:00.000-02:00

Guy Kawasaki points us to George Orwell's Politics and the English Language

"Apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common... The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose..."

Orwell provides these rules:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Singapore design

2007-02-24T12:27:00.000-02:00

"10TouchPoints seeks to demystify design.
Not just about relative coolness and high prices, or what you see on the glossy pages for the hip and rich. Design makes up what is around you. Design is about the relationships people forge with things. Design is thus something we value as it has an effect on how we get to work, better communicate and the energy we save."

Lessons from airports

2007-02-08T18:02:00.000-02:00

Customer Experience Crossroads makes design notes while at the airport.
Including this:
[Photo of sign-- Do not sit on baggage conveyor]

When you have to have a lot of signs telling people not to do something, you have a design issue. Wouldn't it make sense to do one of the following things:

1. design the carousel so you can't sit on it, or
2. design the carousel so you can sit on it safely, or
3. provide more seating
4. Or a combination of all of the above

Death to PowerPoint

2007-02-06T10:28:00.000-02:00

Fast Company writes on Death To PowerPoint

1. Limit the number of slides. These days, it is not unusual for a 30-minute presentation to contain 30-40 slides. THIS IS WAY TOO MUCH! Think about it from the audience point of view: They have to sit there and listen to a disembodied voice read to them. They have better ways to spend their time. When it's me in the audience being bored, I just wish the presenter had sent the presentation to me and let me read it at my leisure rather than forcing me to attend the event. Bottom line, for a 30-minute presentation, choose the 5-10 most important slides. (Hint: 5 is better –- and so much braver –- than 10.)

2. Limit the information on each slide. There should be no more than 4-5 bulleted items or chart items on a slide. The fewer, the better. These can be fragments. You don't have to write complete sentences or include every thought you've ever had on the subject. These bullets should function as triggers or cues for elaboration. I once watched a terrific presentation by the president of a major ad agency whose slides each consisted of a single statement –- no headers, no details, very powerful.

3. Make sure the slide is readable. How many times have you found yourself struggling to read a slide because the font was too small? This is another happy outcome of cramming too much info onto a slide. Have mercy on your audience. Body copy should be at least 18 points. 20+ is better.

4. Use message titles. Instead of a slide with a headline that says "Performance," which in reality tells nothing about performance, consider a more complete thought such as "Company X significantly outperformed the S&P through 12/31/06". If you're stuck, you can often find the makings of a message title in your very first point on the slide. If you do nothing else as a result of reading this post, do this.

5. Use animation and other bells and whistles sparingly. Most of the effects PowerPoint offers are useless. There is, however, at least one winning effect, the slide transition, "cover down." This effect creates a smooth, professional transition from slide to slide and far outperforms the default transition. Make sure you click "apply to all." If you're bent on animating the information on the slide, experiment with those in the "peek" and "wipe" categories.

6. Automate effects as much as possible. There may be an item or two on an occasional slide that you would like to control by mouse click, but if you're clicking for each item to appear, trust me, it's too much work for you and too much "noise" for the audience.

7. Make liberal use of the "B" key. Most people don't know this, but if you press the letter B on your keyboard during a PowerPoint presentation, the screen will go dark. This is a wonderful feature if, for example, you get into an audience discussion and want to eliminate the distraction of the projected image. When you're ready to move on, press B again and you'll be right where you left off.

8. Do not use a laser pointer. I don't know whose brilliant idea this little piece of technology was, but not only is it distracting, it is quite ineffective, magnifying every movement or tremor of your hand. Can you say Stage Fright?

How random?

2007-01-30T12:32:00.000-02:00

Creating Passionate Users writes on how to add a little more random to your product.

Amazing Powerpoint Presentations:

2007-01-29T23:50:00.000-02:00

Seth Godin writes:

Here are the five rules you need to remember to create amazing Powerpoint presentations:

1. No more than six words on a slide. EVER. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken.
2. No cheesy images. Use professional stock photo images.
3. No dissolves, spins or other transitions.
4. Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have. If people start bouncing up and down to the Grateful Dead, you’ve kept them from falling asleep, and you’ve reminded them that this isn’t a typical meeting you’re running.
5. Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They don’t work without you there.

Making Ideas Stick

2007-01-27T23:29:00.000-02:00

Guy Kawasaki says:

We spent lots of time researching sticky ideas—ideas that people understand, remember, and that change the way people think or behave. The ideas we studied ranged from the ludicrous to the profound, from urban legends (no, there is no kidney theft ring) to great scientific theories (yes, the land we walk around on does ride on giant tectonic plates and when they collide they cause mountain ranges and earthquakes). We found there were six principles (“SUCCES”) that link sticky ideas of all kinds. Sticky ideas won’t always have all six, but the more, the merrier.

For example, JFK’s idea to “put a man on the moon in a decade” had all six of them:
1. Simple A single, clear mission.
2. Unexpected A man on the moon? It seemed like science fiction at the time.
3. Concrete Success was defined so clearly—no one could quibble about man, moon, or decade.
4. Credible This was the President of the U.S. talking.
5. Emotional It appealed to the aspirations and pioneering instincts of an entire nation.
6. Story An astronaut overcomes great obstacles to achieve an amazing goal.

and he continues:

... the villain of our book: The Curse of Knowledge. Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise.

Here’s the great cruelty of the Curse of Knowledge: The better we get at generating great ideas—new insights and novel solutions—in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly. That’s why knowledge is a curse. But notice we said “unnatural,” not “impossible.”

Retailers and Customers

2007-01-27T10:50:00.000-02:00

Edge Perspectives writes on Retailers and Customers

Let’s take a simple, yet very revealing, indicator of business focus. What are the relevant metrics of profitability? Most retailers focus relentlessly on profitability by store and, even more granularly, profitability per foot of shelf – these are facilities-based measures of profitability. True customer relationship businesses focus on profitability by customer, yet few retailers (with the possible exception of some direct marketers) even have a clue of their profitability by customer. Ask them which 20% of their customers generate 80% of their profitability and you get a blank stare. Ask them about customer churn rates and they start looking for a way to change the subject.

Or, take a stroll down the aisles of your nearest “big box” retailer. Try to find someone to talk to in order to get a suggestion for a product you need or to get a question about a product answered. Good luck. It is pretty hard to talk about being in a customer relationship business when you are not available to talk to a customer. Big box retailers are the epitome of an infrastructure management business – reducing operations to high volume, routine processing activities with as few people as possible. They dream of even eliminating the cashiers and automating the check-out process.

Of course, merchandisers live or die based on their ability to anticipate the evolving needs of the market. Some retailers have become very sophisticated in understanding certain customer segments – teens, techies, suburban soccer Moms, etc. In this sense, they are very customer focused. But that’s a pretty shallow notion of customer relationship – all businesses have to do that to stay in business.

True customer relationship businesses set a much higher bar. Deep, lasting, trust-based relationships with customers – the hallmark of a customer relationship business – are generally built one customer at a time. They require the investment to learn about each customer’s needs and then they require the skills to take that understanding and turn it around into relevant, timely suggestions regarding products and services that might be most meaningful for that customer. Think of a good Mom and Pop retailer where the clerk knows you by name and greets you with a suggestion about an interesting new product when you walk in the door.

Ah, but that’s not scalable, the skeptic will say. Ever heard of Amazon? They do something pretty much like that for millions of customers. Ah, but that’s on the Internet and not in a physical store, the skeptic responds. True, but that’s one of the problems – with few exceptions, we still draw hard lines between physical facilities and virtual services.

Now, this is not just an opportunity; it is rapidly becoming a necessity, shaped by the shift from shelf space scarcity to attention scarcity, something I have written about frequently. In the face of this shift, retailers have two choices. They can become vast, automated warehouses with a high return on assets – in other words, infrastructure management businesses. Or they can find creative ways to build real relationships with customers in ways that significantly increase the return on attention for their customers – in other words, customer relationship businesses.

Kohl's

2007-01-27T09:59:00.000-02:00

Hee-Haw Marketing has a great post on how not to do retail.

I wouldn't be what you would consider a 'luxury" shopper. Generally, I'm more comfortable in a vintage shop rather than at a Nordstrom's, but, jeez, some level of decency would be nice.

I've got this Kohl's right next to my house, and with that proximity, I'll make a stop by every few weeks to check out the sales. Its always bad, but this Dallas, Texas Kohl's would look more at home in New Orleans after the flood.

See the pictures and full post here:hurricane Kohl's and also see Kohl's response and a Kohl's employee's response.

2007-01-27T08:55:00.000-02:00

From Science News
Weighing In on City Planning
Could smart urban design keep people fit and trim?

Lawrence Frank is no couch potato. Taking full advantage of his city's compact design, the Vancouver, British Columbia, resident often bikes to work and walks to stores, restaurants, and museums. That activity helps him stay fit and trim. But Frank hasn't always found his penchant for self-propulsion to be practical. He previously lived in Atlanta, where the city's sprawling layout thwarted his desire to be physically active as he went about his daily business.

"There was not much to walk to," says Frank, a professor of urban planning at the University of British Columbia. For example, he recalls that there was only one decent restaurant within walking distance of his old home. Many restaurants and other businesses in Atlanta cluster in strip malls that stand apart from residential areas

.

and

n 2004, Frank and his colleagues produced additional connections among urban form, activity, and obesity. The data on more than 10,500 people in the Atlanta area indicated that the more time a person spends in a car, the more obese he or she tends to be. But the more time people spend walking, the less obese they are.

Frank's team, like the other groups, found that areas with interspersed homes, shops, and offices had fewer obese residents than did homogeneous residential areas whose residents were of a similar age, income, and education. Furthermore, neighborhoods with greater residential density and street plans that facilitate walking from place to place showed below-average rates of obesity.

The magnitude of the effect wasn't trivial: A typical white male living in a compact, mixed-use community weighs about 4.5 kilograms (10 pounds) less than a similar man in a diffuse subdivision containing nothing but homes, Frank and his colleagues reported

.

thanks to Boing Boing

Innovation and diversity

2007-01-26T18:21:00.000-02:00

Scott Page writes

Most people believe that innovation requires smarter people, better ideas. That premise, though intuitive, omits what may be the most powerful but least understood force for innovation: Diversity.

and continues

Some of the innovation policies of Toyota Motor Corp. and Google Inc. illustrate a similar understanding that differences in the composition of their work forces boosts their bottom lines.

To appreciate the full potential of the power of difference, however, requires opening up the pumpkins. What we find inside people's heads is that people possess ways of seeing problems and solutions—oftentimes different perspectives depending on the kinds of people viewing particular problems and solutions. People's perspectives are accompanied by ways of searching for solutions to problems, something scientists call heuristics. When confronted with a problem, people encode their (often quite different) perspectives and then apply their particular heuristics to locate new, possibly better, solutions.

A person whom we think of as smart is generally someone who has lots of interesting perspectives and many effective heuristics. A smart person performs well, and often innovates, because of the many tools she possesses. Yet most of these tools won’t work on a given problem, which is why innovation is 99 percent perspiration. That's why Edison once claimed that he knew “a thousand ways not to make a light bulb.”

But how would several dozen Edisons, or several dozen Edisons from different social, racial and educational backgrounds, approach the making of a light bulb? To answer that question requires a fuller grasp of the pitfalls and idiosyncrasies of innovation and the power of diversity, which in turn requires a slight detour into theory.

First, for any problem there exists a perspective that makes it easy to grasp a solution, though that may mean waiting for a person as unique as Edison to come along. Second, across all problems no perspective or no heuristic is any better than any other. In plain English, any approach may be just as good as any other until it is tested.

Third, teams of problem solvers—viewed as bundles of perspectives and heuristics brought together to solve a particular problem—do better when the diversity of perspectives and heuristics is greater than the overall ability or talent of the team’s members. In other words, diverse teams outperform teams composed of the very best individuals. Diversity trumps ability.