eMarketer writes that Twitter’s recent meteoritic rise in the media, especially with recent Time magazine cover, will soon spell doom for everyone’s darling 140-character social media service.
I don’t think so. Because of Twitter’s API and how it’s been drilled into the consciousness of anyone who’s online, I don’t think Twitter will die easily. Nor will Facebook for that matter. The use of Twitter, Facebook and other social media to coordinate protests in Iran proves my point. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.
Now this is pretty sweet for those of us who like to sketch things out on paper first. Mmm. I still remember my green plastic template of zoo animals when I was a kid.
As with most creative people, I have ideas. A lot of them. I’ve got ideas for websites, products and of course iPhone apps. The last bit has gotten me really excited recently, especially with articles about how tiny iPhone app developers have been able to make a lot of money. I’m not necessarily interested solely because of the iPhone gold rush—just partially—but also because of the thrill of exploring the new user interfaces that are possible with iPhone.
I’m not a developer. I’m a designer. Although if I tried really hard I could probably learn Objective-C and hack something together, it probably wouldn’t be the best quality and wouldn’t necessarily be the best app. There’s an old quote from Pixar’s John Lasseter that I love: “Art challenges technology and technology inspires art.” If I am to do anything well in the saturated iPhone appland, I need to find a genius dev.
In my quest to hook up with an iPhone developer—since I only know talented web devs—I found Steve Weller. Fantastic guy. He fits the profile of an Apple developer perfectly, in a good way. He knows his stuff and he lives and breathes Apple. Although we haven’t actually worked on a project together yet, he is of the same mindset: good developers need good designers (and vice versa).
To me there are just too many apps out there that are nice from a functionality standpoint, but really fail in user experience. That’s where we as designers can give an app that extra special sauce to help it reach Apple’s Top 25 lists.
Customer and user experience is not always about the website, the phone call, or person-to-person interaction in a store. It can also come through the form of packaging.
I just bought a Mac mini recently (for a living room media server) and was blown away by the unboxing. Apple has always been really great about their packaging. Having worked at Apple, I’ve seen the extreme extent of explorations that go into creating the outside of the box (over 500 comps were created for the Power Mac G5 box). (Incidentally, I worked on the second generation iPod package that featured musical artists like Jimi Hendrix.)
What really impressed me about unboxing the Mac mini was not the outside (although nicely designed), but the inside. The package anticipated my every move. How? Let me illustrate.
After removing the slip case, the typical “Designed by Apple in California” copy is printed on the thin box of manuals and DVDs. This box sits flush with the larger box. Nicely protruding from the right side is a tab to pull the manual box out. The tab also acts as a closure for the box. Multipurpose.
Removing the manuals reveals the Mac mini. What most companies would do in this situation is force you to turn the box upside down and shake the product out. I’ve done this many times and have found it to be quite maddening.
Instead, Apple thoughtfully supplies two plastic tabs that allow you to lift the mini out of the box. Also very cool.
For the bottom of the box, another cardboard layer hides the power supply and cord. Again, there are pull-tabs here built in to help you lift it out of the box. Did you notice the graphic design pattern here? The tabs are all in the same place and of the same size and shape.
After being so impressed, I thought that surely Apple would fail on the one thing that companies always fail at: tape around the power cable would be impossible to remove. Nope. They read my mind and included a little tab to unwind the tape.
A couple of weeks ago, I happened upon a site called crowdSPRING. I forget exactly how I got to the site, but what I found there made me feel a little icky and left a bad taste in my mouth. I wrote a tweet about it (which in turn updated my Facebook status) and many of my designer friends had strong negative reactions too.
Stepping back a bit, what is crowdSPRING? It’s a website that allows companies to post briefs for design projects (mostly logos and websites), with the expectation that dozens if not hundreds of designers from around the world will post their solutions to those projects. Finished solutions. Not portfolios, resumes or even sketches. But the finished logo, website comps, CD packaging design, etc.
Why the ick factor? It took me a few days to process it internally, but I eventually came to this conclusion: the site sucks time away from thousands of budding designers. They are all working for free. Only the lucky ones whose solutions get chosen are paid. Imagine if you ate dinner at five different restaurants and only paid for the one dinner you liked? That is what’s happening on crowdSPRING: free work.
This Forbes article talks about pushback from the design community. I’ve long been against spec work. It’s just plain wrong from the free work angle as I’ve already illustrated. The AIGA has also had a long-standing policy against spec work because in their mind it compromises the quality of the work. How? Company asks for free submissions; young, inexperienced and unqualified designers submit solutions; established professionals stay away. That is a recipe for sub-standard creative work. Or how about designer Mark Boulton’s argument that spec work is bad for business? “Architects are invited to submit bids, proposals and designs for prestigious competitions. The winner gets the contract and the glory. The losers get nothing; the work is conducted speculatively.”
My friend and colleague at Razorfish, Garrick Schmitt wrote an article at AdAge.com titled “Can Creativity Be Crowdsourced?” He posits that crowdsourcing creativity is here to stay. Whether it’s finished product ala crowdSPRING or inspiration ala FFFFOUND!, there is a place for it. I honestly don’t know if crowdsourcing creative output in an ethical way is possible. Maybe. But crowdsourcing creativity is entirely possible.
Rivers Cuomo from the band Weezer did a collaborative songwriting project called “Let’s Write a Sawng” on YouTube last year. He started with a single video, saying that he needed help writing a song. He led his large base of fans through the process, breaking it down step-by-step, starting with suggestions for a title, through lyrics and melodies. What worked was that he crowdsourced for ideas, picked the best ones and came up with a compelling pop record. On NPR’s Fresh Air he mentioned that if the song were ever officially released, it would probably break a record for songwriting credits.
Intel also experimented with crowdsourcing via an advertising program call Mass Animation last year. Via Facebook they invited animators to animate shots that would be part of a larger animated short film. I think it works here too because an animated film is very much like an open source dev project: the work can be divvied up into small discreet parts and worked on by volunteers. Intel goes one step further and has promised to credit and compensate contributors whose work appears in the final film.
I think the aforementioned two examples ultimately work as crowdsourced creative because they were volunteer collaborative efforts. Rivers Cuomo’s fans or Intel’s animators really wanted to be part of a project larger than themselves. Whereas design contests or sites like crowdSPRING feel unethical are because they’re requesting intellectual capital without investing a dime.
Now you too can have your own Web 2.0 lookalike site! Most of the cliches originated from Apple of course, but there are a couple of good tidbits in there.
Whenever I look at anything with words on it, I look at the typography. Bring me to a local corner lunch cafe with a menu typed out and printed from Microsoft Word and I will have a field day. I would judge even more harshly at a more expensive restaurant. I can’t help it as I—like most designers, I’m sure—just look at everything with a critical eye.
My biggest typographical pet peeve is the rendering of apostrophes, single and double quotes.
It astounds me when I notice this on any piece, and all I can mutter to myself is “Where is the craftsmanship?!” This was not the case decades ago when copy was sent out to professional typesetters. The very thing that democratized graphic design was the the same thing that lowered the bar on what passes for “professional” graphic design. I’m talking about how the computer and software allowed more people access to the tools necessary to create great looking stuff. No longer did designers need to send out manuscripts to a typesetter who would in turn set the type into galleys for the designer to paste up in the mechanical. This spawned a whole new industry called desktop publishing, but killed the entire profession of typesetter, and along with it some higher standards.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no luddite. I put myself through college by working at a desktop publishing service bureau. But because of some great teachers I had, my sometimes unhealthy attention to detail, I had a lot of respect for typography, and took the time to learn all the rules and standards. But I digress.
What passes sometimes today for single and double quotation marks are actually foot and inch marks (or hour and minute marks). Why is that? My theory is that to be efficient in the manufacturing of some of the first practical typewriters, they straightened out the quotation marks so they could be dual purpose—open and close. In fact in Christopher Sholes’ patent for the QWERTY keyboard, only a single straight apostrophe key is shown, presumably the user would strike the key twice for a double quotation mark. And of course, most of this layout made its way into our modern computer keyboards and software.
Software companies like Microsoft and Adobe have been trying to mitigate this error by employing “smart quotes” technology. The software will analyze whether the quotation mark is at the beginning of the word (and then use the open state) or the end of the word (and use the close state). Most the time this actually works well. But what happens when you need to use an apostrophe in its close state as a contraction replacement in words like ’Til, Rock ’n’ Roll, and mac ’n’ cheese? The software isn’t smart enough to replace it with the proper close state and the designer or brand ends up looking amateurish.
How to not look like an amateur designer? (OK, maybe amateur could be considered a harsh term to you pros. Maybe bad craft is what I’m really talking about.) Go ahead and turn on the smart quotes feature of your favorite design app, but pay attention and override when necessary.
Today my friend Aaron Clinger and I launched a project called TweepRoll. The idea for the site came about when my friend Kate and I were talking about celebrities who use Twitter. She said she could see how reading celebrities’ tweets could totally suck her into the Twitterverse. Later in the day it dawned on me that a lot of other people would feel the same way, so I started sketching out a site for the Twitter-lurker, the curious, the toe-dipper.
In the days and weeks after thinking about this idea I kept reading news items about celebrity twitterers. From The New York Times to Entertainment Weekly, Twitter and the famous people who use them were going mainstream.
I brought my genius developer friend Aaron into the project and we designed, built and launched TweepRoll in three weeks. It’s been a really fun side project for us and I hope you enjoy it!
I opened our beverage fridge at work yesterday and noticed a couple of cans of Sunkist in there. I didn’t remember ever seeing Sunkist in our drink case, but what stood out more to me was the new design. Apparently the logo and can were redesigned back in November 2008. With all the talk of the bad redesigns recently (Pepsi is terrible; Tropicana is criminal), it was refreshing to see something that actually works.
The original logo (photo is from 1981, but it didn’t change since its debut in 1978) was pretty contemporary for its time. This new update brings the previous incarnation into the 21st century, but at the same time gives it a little retro feel. The typography reminds me of the Coca-Cola logo or the original Pepsi-Cola logo. I will concede to Armin at Brand New that the blue ocean swirls surrounding the type are a little much, but on the packaging, and really standing on the strength of the typography, it works. This mark has the perfect combo of contemporary and classic. Mmm… I think I’m going to have to make some Sunkist popsicles this weekend.
Although he has been designing since the seventh grade, Roger Wong officially began his graphic design career in 1995. He is currently a creative director at Razorfish in San Francisco.
This site is an outlet for his musings on design and culture.
