November 16, 2011, 09:19 PM
I’ve been slowly getting through Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. One tidbit I was struck by:
…he pulled out a device that was about the size of a desk diary. “Do you want to see something neat?” When he flipped it open, it turned out to be a mock-up of a computer that could fit on your lap, with a keyboard and screen hinged together like a notebook. “This is my dream of what we will be making in the mid- to late eighties,” he said. They were building a company that would invent the future.
That was Steve Jobs in September 1982 at a retreat with the Macintosh team. He had imagined the laptop one-and-a-half years before shipping the first Mac, and seven years before the Macintosh Portable saw the light of day.
October 06, 2011, 12:30 AM
I have been a Mac user since 1985, when I was in the seventh grade. For months I lusted after the Mac on display at Computerland on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco. I’d go there after school just to play with MacPaint. It simply captured my imagination. Finally, after many weeks of begging, I got my dad to buy me a 512K Mac. Thus began my love affair with Apple.
Imagine how lucky I felt when I actually began working on the brand and on Pixar in 2001-2002. It was such a privilege to be so close to the magic and to Steve Jobs himself.
The Steve Jobs I knew was human. Not a god. Not someone who could distort reality. Just a man.
But he was sharp and always focused with his opinions and observations. He demanded perfection. Always.
I was a lowly pixel pusher when I worked directly with him. In addition to Pixar.com, I also designed some pitch slides for him. His feedback was always direct and always right. Yes it was surreal to have him call me on the phone and for me to load slides on his Mac.
Near the end of my tenure at Pixar, I wanted to do more. I was hoping to build a little design department there. But Steve didn’t think I was ready, and he told me so—directly. Even though I was crushed at the time, it was probably one of the best pushes I ever got to do better, to stay hungry, and to stay foolish.
Thank you, Steve. You changed me—and more importantly, the world—for the better.
September 14, 2011, 09:00 PM
I’ve been working behind the scenes on a little thing called the RE:DESIGN Conference. It is a whole series of events around Design and the format really encourages intimate conversations led by session leaders.
The first event is themed around Creative Directors and I’ve had the privilege of trying to get many designers whose work I’ve long admired and many friends, colleagues and mentors to come speak at the conference.
Here is a quick rundown of those I know, and how I know them, arranged in autobiographical order:
- Lawrence Azerrad was in my class at California College of Arts & Crafts (CCAC, now California College of the Arts (CCA)). I am envious that he has the pleasure of working with my favorite contemporary band Wilco.
- Mark Fox was my one of my teachers at CCAC and I interned for him. A lot of what I know about logos and symbols I learned from him.
- Neal Zimmermann was one of my bosses in my first full-time design job. Always funny, he would push us junior designers to kern five-letter words for a week, earning him the nickname of “The Kernel.”
- I worked with both Angie Wang and Eric Heiman at Zimmermann Crowe Design (ZCD) and they have both since become inspirational educators and design practitioners.
- Colleen Stokes was my boss at USWeb/CKS (which became marchFIRST). Her designs were always impeccable and she eventually moved to New York to work for a number of style and fashion brands.
- Adam Connelly and I met at marchFIRST (formerly USWeb/CKS, formerly CKS) while working on the Sega account. We would cross paths again at Apple and Razorfish. His wealth of indie music knowledge is amazing.
- Shawn Hazen and I worked at Apple together. Although we were in different groups within Graphic Design, we were both part of the growing team of highly-skilled designers cranking out layouts with Apple Myriad on white.
- I met both Cinthia Wen and Christopher Simmons while working on a side AIGA/SF project dubbed “The Pub Project.” Both are CCA alumni and both are brilliant.
- Dan Buczaczer is the likely outcast of the bunch. He is not a designer, but he and his company are incredibly creative when it comes to innovative ways to get one’s message out. He is also my neighbor in Oakland.
- Dave McClain and I are counterparts at LEVEL Studios. We also both previously worked for Razorfish (formerly Avenue A | Razorfish, formerly SBI.Razorfish, formerly SBI and Company, formerly marchFIRST). Don’t remind him that the Oakland Raiders beat the Denver Broncos at Denver, in their 2011 season opener.
I cannot wait to see all these people in Palm Springs in November. I think it will prove to be a very fun, interesting and inspiring time. More info at the RE:DESIGN website.
September 08, 2011, 09:39 AM
I’ve been using Mac OS X 10.7 Lion for a few days now. I won’t go through all the new stuff; you can read John Siracusa’s epic 27,000-word review instead. But I do want to talk about one thing: natural scrolling.
Apple calls “Natural Scrolling” the reverse of what we have all been accustomed to for the past 15+ years since Microsoft’s IntelliMouse made the scroll wheel popular. And despite my tweet to the contrary, it is definitely taking some time to get used to it completely so that it’s muscle-memory. But I need to break current muscle-memory that’s been a decade-and-a-half in the making.
Natural scrolling actually does make sense for a complete computer newbie. On a trackpad, the user is pushing the page up with her fingers, just like on a touch device such as an iPhone or iPad. This works fine on the Magic Mouse too.
But there still is cognitive dissonance. As the user pushes up on the trackpad the scroll bar moves down and the cursor stays put. Yes on iOS the scroll bar moves down as well, but the user’s actual finger is directly pushing the content up. Whereas the finger gesture on the trackpad or mouse is physically dislocated from the screen, there’s a another layer of abstraction that’s happening (at least in my head).
And then I thought about how that gap might be closed. What if that stationary cursor turned into a grabber hand and moved with the scroll gesture?
Here’s an experiment.
As soon as the gesture starts, the cursor changes into a grabber hand that will move with the gesture. When the gesture is finished, the grabber returns to its original position and changes back to the normal cursor.
August 26, 2011, 02:06 AM
With everyone sharing their sweet Steve moments, I have to share mine.
I was working at Apple in the motion graphics group within the Graphic Design department. I was assigned to work on the intro animation for the Mac OS X 10.3 Panther setup assistant. We went through the normal design process with our stakeholders (people in charge of “MacBuddy”) and got to an animation that was essentially swarms of dots that formed each of the different translations of “Welcome” on the screen. And then we showed this nearly-final animation to someone higher at the top—forgive me, I’ve forgotten who this was—and he killed it because the dots looked too much like sperm. OK, they kinda did. (Think about swirling points of light but with motion trails. We tried increasing the motion blur, but it was no use.)
It was back to the drawing board and I presented more ideas. Eventually Steve got involved and started looking at the animations. Each week my boss would show Steve a new revision of it, and each time we got a little closer. Then on Round 14, the week my boss was on vacation, I had to go present it to Steve Jobs.
He was eager to see this new revision. No pleasantries. No introductions (actually he knew me from Pixar). Just got right down to business. But he did say this to me, “Wow. We spend more time on MacBuddy than Microsoft does on all of its UI.” And then he chuckled.
The presentation was quick and he only had a couple of pretty minor notes. I think I had one more revision and it was finally done.
What my time at Apple and working with Steve taught me was this: Keep going until it’s right. Don’t settle.
Thank you, Steve.
April 13, 2011, 10:00 AM
The AIGA is sponsoring a 24-hour online conversation about Design (with an uppercase D). This is all happening on Twitter, moderated by some pretty big names like Alex Bogusky, Erik Spiekermann, Armin Vit and others.
I’m happy to see the AIGA doing this online and using social media. And I’m happy there are moderators that represent a couple of generations of designers.
Link: onedayfordesign.org
April 04, 2011, 02:51 AM
I creative directed a client photoshoot last Friday. We shot over 1,600 frames for six people over the course of a day. That’s a lot of pixels.
The photos were taken by Cass Redstone.
February 28, 2011, 11:52 AM
This post was originally published on Bow & Arrow from PJA (my employer) on February 3, 2011.
The New York Times recently published an article about how apps and web services are enabling consumers to customize how they read their online content. From apps like Flipboard and Pulse to services like Readability and Instapaper, users are increasingly demanding to consume content whenever, wherever and however they want.
When Apple introduced the iPad a year ago, many print publishers saw it as a panacea for their dwindling readership. By creating digital editions, they hoped to recapture some of the eyeballs lost to aggregators and RSS feeds. One of the pioneering publication apps was the WIRED Magazine iPad app. Because of its novelty, its debut issue sold 73,000 digital copies in nine days, almost as much as on newsstands. There is a clear desire from users to read magazines on their tablets.
What that first generation of attempts miss though, is they are trying to replicate 20th century print experience on a 21st century device. The magazine apps feel very one way. But the iPad is an Internet-connected device and users on the Internet demand more interactive experiences. They want to copy and paste passages to put on their blogs. They want to share articles via Facebook and Twitter. Using Adobe’s Digital Magazine Solution, Condé Nast is starting to address some of these issues.
Meanwhile apps such as Flipboard are aggregating content and repackaging it for their users. Flipboard presents news items according to a user’s social graph, creating a personalized and highly relevant news stream. Additionally, the app presents this content in a unique way: as a paper magazine. The visual is striking, yet it still holds familiarity with users since it loosely mimics the experience of reading a real-world magazine, with the benefits of interactivity. And so far it has been a hit with users, even earning an App of the Year award from Apple.
Different kinds of content demand different kinds of packages. For example as a designer, I—along with most designers and art directors—flip through magazines such as Communication Arts and Print, and peruse blogs and websites like LovelyPackage.com and SmashingMagazine.com. Seeing something cool usually sparks an idea for whatever we’re currently working on.
To get through the hundreds of design-related sites out there, I use RSS feeds to aggregate this content for myself in Google Reader. Unfortunately, because I am so busy, I am not able to keep up with all my feeds. I may manage to check it only every few days. And I dread seeing that “1000+” number next to my unread items.
So last year, when the iPad was introduced, I decided to find a solution as an independent side project. I knew that an app on this large dedicated canvas could be created to serve this need of efficiently consuming visual inspiration. I teamed up with a developer friend and we started work on DesignScene.
We set out to create something that designers would enjoy using and become part of their daily ritual. We had two primary objectives:
- The UI must serve the content and the audience. It has to be beautiful and show off visuals well.
- The content must be relevant. There’s a glut of design-related websites and blogs on the Internet. Let’s help designers navigate through them.
The UI we designed is sparse—a simple grid that takes advantage of the screen real estate afforded by the tablet. Users flick through the various grid cells to see an assortment of images. They can enlarge the images to fill the screen or read the accompanying text from the original source via the built-in web browser. DesignScene surfaces up the latest inspirational images of not only design, but also architecture, photography, art and so on. The content is a curated list of sources and—as a whole—has an editorial point of view to enhance discovery.
It’s been two weeks since DesignScene launched. [This was originally posted three weeks ago on the PJA blog.] So far we’ve had great response from users and media. We built social sharing into the app and we can already see hundreds of discoveries being shared on Twitter. Our users are interacting with content in a way that was not possible just a year ago.
February 11, 2011, 10:49 AM
“but in giving their clients exactly what they asked for… that was their downfall.”
— “Creators of Beloved Peacock Logo on NBC's New Look: Yuck!” by Stephanie Orma
As a practicing professional designer and creative director having created work for clients huge (Microsoft) and tiny (Bimbo’s 365 Club) throughout my career, I find that above quote to be idealistic and naive. It comes from a Co.Design article about Chermayeff & Geismar’s reaction to Wolff Olins’s recent redesign of the NBC Universal logo.
In the real world, our job as designers is to put forward our best recommendations based on the client’s objectives. Of course we try to come up with solutions that are strategic and well-crafted and that will resonate with our client’s intended audiences. These days, to present the one and only solution as Chermayeff & Geismar did with the updated NBC logo in the 1980s or what Paul Rand did with the NeXT logo is a near impossibility, especially with large corporations who are likely paying six figures or more for a comprehensive redesign.
The design process is ultimately a collaboration between the client and the designer or design firm. Ideally trust is built between the two entities. Designers must trust that the client knows their business intimately. And clients must trust that the designer is an expert in branding (or whatever the area of the assignment is). I have found that the final product is often better when that trust is there.
Sometimes for whatever reason that trust isn’t developed and there is only so much convincing we designers can try to do. In the end—to be practical businesspeople—we must know when to stop pushing the client since they are the one signing the check. As the old saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.”
February 02, 2011, 12:34 PM
I discovered this project on Flickr via DesignScene. The artists in this collection were given a single dot as a template for their image. There will eventually be 100 in total.
Link: Dot Collaboration
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