Category Archives: Design

Did you know this was how the peace symbol (as a graphic element) was born?

 Gerald Holtom, a designer and former World War II conscientious objector from West London, persuaded DAC [Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War] that their aims would have greater impact if they were conveyed in a visual image. The “Ban the Bomb” symbol was born.

He considered using a Christian cross motif but, instead, settled on using letters from the semaphore – or flag-signalling – alphabet, super-imposing N (uclear) on D (isarmament) and placing them within a circle symbolising Earth.

Number Eight Wired is a rather interesting experiment(?) – it adopts the very typical WordPress blog style, but implements it in Flash instead of the more typical CSS. You do get some bells-and-whistles that comes with Flash ( ability/control in animations and effects particularly) – the site do feel slick and polished. And you can use your favorite unique fonts without worrying that your viewer not having it (unlike in standard webpages).

For all the polish though, you’d (usually) have to sacrifice the much taken-for-granted things in webpages: ability to right click, deep-link to specific pages, save images off the web, etc (Note: these are in fact do-able even with Flash contents – it’s just that they’re not common).

Which would you prefer? Style vs usability (or is this actually a false dichotomy)?

New Coke was considered an unequivocal slam dunk in taste tests against Classic Coke but was subsequently a failure of epic proportions when it went to market. Conversely, the Absolut Vodka bottle design was universally panned in focus groups. A courageous Michel Leroux, then the brand manager of the new vodka, pressed for its launch, and the brand set international sales records. The Absolut bottle is now considered a contemporary design icon. So when the demand for validating design solutions is so strong, yet research is seemingly so fraught with pitfalls, what is a designer to do?

Design or market research is always a thorny issue. On one hand, we’re always brought up to believe that we should respect the consumers and give them what (they say) they want. On the other hand, we’ve seen how consumers don’t really know what they want (as seen by the short quotation above). So, what’s a designer/researcher got to do?

AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) tries to probe a little – here’s an article giving a quick rundown of the more common approaches in market research: ethnographic research, focus group, eye-tracking and online-testing, listing down a short description of the method, the challenges and the advantages. While the article may not be really groundbreaking in research approaches, it certainly is a very good primer on some of these more common techniques.

It’s the time of the year for Oscars and what-not, where critics and audience can opine on the great movies of the year, hits-and-misses etc. Of course, what the studio “suits” see as hits or misses are perhaps more centered at the basic question – did it bring in good money? The New York Times has a great interactive graphic showing the major movies all the way from 1986. You can see the impacts of the movie and how it pans out – the height being the weekly revenue, while the width represents the longevity. For instance, on the bottom left, the big slice would be the rather persistent Titanic.

Recently I’m getting quite interested in infographics or infosthetics – the art of visualizing information. Beyond the eye-candy factor (many of these are really well-done; the interactivity afforded on many of these infosthetics make it really engaging too), it’s also about making information appealing – and thus promote its usefulness. People like Hans Rosling and Jonathan Harris really earn my admiration for bringing what is usually dead-boring statistics/information into engaging, illuminative and dare I say, fun thing to play/learn?

These cushions are made from recycled cloth care labels – those little tags with instructions like ‘Do Not Iron’ and such. It’s pretty interesting when they are all lined up though – when I first looked at it, I thought it was actually a section of the newspaper’s Classified sections.

Give a man a fish. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Give a man (or for that matter, hopefully many men) an open platform in touch-interactivity, however, and you’d start to get really interesting and creative applications – quite certainly more than you’ve ever envisioned yourself. In this case – it’s for the Apple iPhone. Previously some concepts like Starbucks coffee ordering sprang up on the net – while perhaps useful I didn’t think it was particularly creative in harnessing the iPhone’s capability.

This one, however, is pretty cool:

While it’s still in a rather primitive state currently, it does show potential in really harnessing and leveraging on the iPhone’s touch-sensor capabilities. Imagine a guitar that fits in your pockets! Practice and pluck over with your earphones while you travel, to the accompanying MP3 tune on the phone! Too bad Apple’s still insisting on a closed platform.

With all the talk about reviving the airship in the recent years – it seems like this  peaceful and spacious mode of travel (as compared to the airlines which are still desperately trying to trim half-inches of leg rooms) could be back for a rebirth after the much-documented Hindenburg disaster. If they do come back, I’d wish for it to be in the form of this ‘Manned Cloud’, a concept airship developed together by Jean-Marie Massaud and the French national aerospace research body ONERA.

Airships are certainly no match for traditional airplanes in speed or efficiency – but it’s certainly much more relevant in leisure purposes like an ‘air cruise’. Capable of hovering at much lower altitudes (typically 500-1000 meters above ground), it brings being-in-the-air as an experience in travel itself, rather than simply a means-to-an-end. As described by Massaud:

Living in the sky, watching the Earth from above. Rediscovering the marvel of traveling, experiencing contemplation. Exploring the world without trace

 

Manned Cloud is an alternative project around leisure and travelling in all its form, economic and experimental, still with the idea of lightness, human experience and life scenarios as the guiding principles. The spiral of Archimedes is the driving force of this airship in the form of a whale that glides through the air.

I thought the form had the peace, grace and elegance associated with this mode of air travel. It sort of brings us close to nature again in appreciation.