Thought You Should See This: Rob Giampietro: Ten Tips for Those Starting Out
Rob Giampietro on Design, Writing, and Pedagogy is Justin Kropp’s interview with Project Projects principal, Rob Giampietro, who gives insight into the graphic design process and the evolution of the discipline. Giampietro concludes with a series of advice for those just starting to…
Russell Davies on screens, buttons, behaviours, and what’s on the edges.
What I’m reading (Nov 6th)
I wish services like Mint.com and Simple (formerly known as BankSimple) would come to the UK: making their customers’ lives easier, using great design and well thought out experiences. Hurrah. A nice blogpost from the guys and gals at Simple here to introduce the service.
Whilst we were in Rome a few weeks ago, we sought out Pizzarium, and this article in the Atlantic describes exactly why. Forget what you know about pizza, and head here (great if you’ve been at the Vatican museums, it’s about a 10 min walk). This is pizza by the slice, cut using scissors, with flavours such as peach, duckbreast and foie gras. Easily the best pizza I’ve ever eaten.
What I’m reading (Oct 31st)
Quote of the week from an article in the NYTimes taste-testing macarons in NYC:
Your slacker boyfriend gives you a cupcake; your lover gives you macarons.
You can now fund social projects via People Fund.it, which I think is a great idea. In fact, I co-funded Food Cycle.
The luck surface
“The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you’re passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.”
I believe there are other factors too in serendipity, but the idea of the ‘luck surface’ is a pretty good one.
As a community of designers, strategists and marketers, it benefits us to remember that we’re not only designing (or strategizing) to solve problems, but also contributing to culture by shaping the behaviors and expectations of a collective audience.
We have an opportunity to not only provide improved function and resolution of friction via the use of every product, website, application or campaign we create — but to design and plan for products and experiences that provide a sense of delight and discovery to those that interact with them.
What I’m reading (week of Oct 24th)
Tom Hulme from IDEO put up his presentation he did at the Wired 2011 conference earlier this month. Great stuff in here about launching to learn, looking at the world through your customers’ eyes and designing flexible systems. I saw him speak at Firestarters #2, and this is a good follow on from that presentation.
One of my profs during my undergrad once told the class ‘Everything is interesting if you’re interested’. And you know what? He’s right. Well, 99.9% of the time that is. Everything *is* interesting if you take an interest. So take that attitude and look around you: what can you redesign, make better, recreate? Thermostats. And beautifully done too. We need more of this type of design. A write-up in Wired describes it in detail.
Mary Meeker, having moved from Morgan Stanley to KPCB, is still creating influential online trends presentations, the latest one is dissected here by BBH. Good read.
I love this poster. In fact, I might buy it (from the Baltimore Print Studios).
Found on the Swiss Miss blog.
So that’s us. We’re now a mr & mrs. The novelty of calling him ‘husband’ hasn’t worn off yet and I’m giggling every time I say it. What I remember most about the day (and loved about it) was the fun and joy and love there was. Especially the love and warmth of our family and friends, the joy of seeing everyone happy and healthy and the joy of kissing my new husband.
What I’m reading this week (Oct 5th)
Steve Jobs died. By now you’ll have heard this and pretty much everything that can be said will have been said by now, or will be said over the next few days. I admire his ability to marry technology and arts, his fighting spirit, his vision and his grit. And I think we cannot even comprehend now what his legacy is or what it will be. I wish his family strength and consolation.
Polyvore has been on my radar for a while, it’s like being a little girl again and dressing up dolls. And who secretly doesn’t want to be a magazine editor? Adweek has a nice article on Polyvore, who apparently have 11 million subscribers!
Digital shops are opening up physical shops! Google has opened one on Tottenham Court Road in London (a store-in-store) and Paypal is rumoured to open one in NYC soon.
I’ve been wanting to hop on a plane to NYC to visit the BMW Guggenheim Lab, but sadly won’t be able to, so I’m lapping up everything that’s being written about it online. Great blogpost here with pics that makes me want to jump up and down with excitement.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be reading lots of stuff, but probably not so much online, it’ll hopefully be travelguides (including my latest pride and joy, an 1899 Baedeker for North Italy) and novels.
The cookbook of all cookbooks
Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine cookbook. To call it a cookbook is doing it such a disservice. It’s much more. It’s the cookbook to end all other modern cuisine cookbooks. It’s a masterpiece, a landmark. A book that is hailed as as important to cooking as L’Escoffier’s book was. A masterpiece that will change the face of cooking. Amongst the kitchen tools needed is listed military grade lasers. We saw and handled it at Selfridges over the weekend. Man, it’s good. And heavy, at a cool 24 kilograms for the set. And a whopping £395. But I reckon well worth it. Get it now before it sells out.
It has a great page on Amazon.com with super detailed reviews, it has its own website, here is an eGullet thread of people going nuts over it [at the count of writing it has 50 pages of comments].
5 years ago
5 years ago in August I was working at a WPP company, doing an internship.
4 years ago in August I had just started a new job
3 years ago in August I had a year’s worth of branding consultancy experience design under my belt and was looking forward to my birthday and that nice guy
2 years ago in August I had started a new job, was laid off in a massive round of lay-offs, got together with the cute guy, found a new job which I was just about getting into the swing of.
1 year ago in August cracks started to appear in that new job and I was about to start on my final 3 months of my design degree.
This year I’m planning my wedding to cute guy, and still trying to figure out life.
On speed and keeping users happy
Right, this might become a bit rant-y. I discovered this week, to my own great surprise I’ll admit, that I became an old lady. Ranting about how things used to be better in the olden days. Before they started messing around with, after email, twitter and google reader, is probably the online utility I use most: delicious.
I was super happy when Delicious got bought (though to make sure they wouldn’t screw up my collection of almost 9,000 links I did set up a pinboard account) from Yahoo. It’d been lingering in a state of comatose staid-ness for a while and it’s good that someone came along and is kissing it back to life.
However, there’s ways of bringing back things to life (or relaunching as techies like to call it) which are slightly better than others. And far be it for me to claim to know how hard it is to de-cobweb Delicious and move forward, but I fundamentally both agree and disagree with this statement of one of the new owners:
“We’ve been focused on making the transition from Yahoo happen as fast as possible. Because of this, we needed to reduce some functionality in the short term and introduce a basic set of new features to get the site out the door. From our standpoint, it’s a competitive market and we’re going to err on the side of speed versus perfection to hopefully build a larger, more compelling experience. We’ll always be listening to the community and will literally be updating the product on a daily basis.” (source: AllThingsD)
I agree that speed is a good thing, and I understand that you might need to reduce some little used current functionality, but what you can’t do is take the basics away in order to make new shiny things to attract new shiny users.
The basics need to continue working, in the short term you’re not going to attract hordes of new users, but you want to make sure that you don’t lose your current super users. The basic stuff needs to keep going to keep them happy (don’t care too much about occasional users, you’ve probably lost those anyway). And you can have a slightly crippled version for a little while, but damnit, basic stuff such as how long it takes to save a link, how easy it is needs to either stay the same or become better. And it hasn’t. It has become worse, takes longer with more frustration and it makes me feel like I’m stupid, which is not good.
In short: I love Delicious, it’s a big part of my online habits, I’ve collected years worth of links on there, and I don’t want to use something else. But you guys have to work with me: don’t make my life harder, show a bit of love for the superusers, and then start chasing new prospects. Make me feel loved. I’ve been loyal all these years. And you can go after all the new shiny features and users as soon as you have kept the basics. But love me a little too, will you?
End of rant from what is now officially an old lady.
The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a toy. This is one of the main insights of Clay Christensen’s “disruptive technology” theory, which has been widely studied but I think is still rarely applied because it is so counter-intuitive to conventional management practices.
Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” their users’ needs. The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading incumbent of the time, Western Union, chose not to acquire telephone technology because they didn’t see how it could be useful to businesses and railroads – their best customers. What they failed to anticipate was how rapidly telephone technology and infrastructure would improve. The same was true of how mainframe companies viewed the PC, and how modern telecom companies viewed Skype.
The list of top internet companies in 10 years will look very different than that same list does today. And the new ones on the list will be companies that snuck by the incumbents because people dismissed them as toys.
What I’m reading this week (Sept 29th)
[originally intended as an email, hence the laziness in the links]
Google Quarterly
Google bring out a people focussed issue of their magazine Quarterly. As per always, it should be an interesting read. And people… Yep, that is Google talking about people, not algorithms. And that hot on the heels of them buying Zagat, the people powered restaurant review guides. Interesting to see where they’ll take this people-focus next. Google Quarterly: http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/quarterly/people/note.html and check out in particular the article on Kickstarter and Making Things.
Kindle Fire
Kindle releases the Kindle Fire, at a lower price point than the iPad. This is probably the first real contender to rival the iPad, it runs Android, and is cheap! No news yet on when it’ll launch in the UK or for how much. A good overview of the new Fire is here: http://www.the-imagazine.com/in/index.php/2011/09/28/kindle-fire-amazon-cloud-table-ipad-music-movie-newstand/ and a good commentary of what the Kindle Fire might mean for the tablet industry is here: http://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/the-kindle-fire/. Even the Apple fan blogs are loving it! http://www.cultofmac.com/116164/not-only-is-the-kindle-fire-the-first-real-alternative-to-ipad-it-foretells-the-ipad-mini-opinion/
Iphone 5
Get your seatbelts on for another big product announcement: Apple will announce their new iPhone 5 (at least, those are the rumours) on October 4th.
Firestarters
And another piece of note from Google: they host an irregular series of provocations/talks called Firestarters, which are curated by Neil Perkin. They’re gatherings of planners, strategists, thinkers on topics such as design thinking and new operating systems for agencies. Firestarters #3 happened earlier this week, and for more, check out the #firestarters on twitter here: http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23firestarters which contains links to people’s presentations, quotes from the presentations etc and a handy blogpost summarising and giving links.
[edit on Oct 3: Neil’s written up a nice blogpost capturing thoughts, presentations and in general giving a good overview.]
Power of Making at the V&A
Exhibition not to miss: Power of Making at the V&A, free exhibition about how people make things. Brilliant stuff, on til the end of the year. Brilliant and inspiring catalogue too: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/power-of-making/ (and coincedentally, this forms part of a much bigger trend, heck, even in the Google Quarterly mentioned above one of the pieces is about making things).
Wolff Olins’ new website
Website to check out: Wolff Olins have redeveloped their website, and no prizes for guessing where they got their inspiration from: http://www.wolffolins.com/
Blogpost of the week
And finally, if you only read one blogpost this week, let it be this about Minimum Viable Personality: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/09/minimum-viable-personality.html which boils down pretty well why personality matters:
“MINIMUM VIABLE PERSONALITY
MOST IMPORTANT STEP FOR BUILD PRODUCT IS BUILD PRODUCT.
SECOND MOST IMPORTANT IS BUILD PERSONALITY FOR PRODUCT.
NO HAVE PERSONALITY? PRODUCT BORING, NO ONE WANT.
PERSONALITY BETTER THAN MARKETING
WHEN CHOOSE PRODUCT, HUMANS ONLY CARE ABOUT DOES WORK, AND IS INTERESTING.
WORLD ALREADY FULL OF THINGS DO WORK. MOST BORING.
PERSONALITY = INTERESTING. INTERESTING = CARE. CARE = TALK.
EVERYONE CARE AND TALK ABOUT PRODUCT? YOU WIN. ”
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