Trevor Filter works in branding, media and modern culture as an analyst at Siegel+Gale (disclaimer). He lives in New York City. This is his personal tumblelog, which is mostly a conduit for exploring the proper way to use sarcasm on the internet.
I wasn’t sold on these proposed pylon designs from Choi+Shine until I read the allusion to Easter Island moai—how exciting it must be to think about design from the perspective of eons for a change:
“Like the statues of Easter Island, it is envisioned that these one hundred and fifty foot tall, modern caryatids will take on a quiet authority, belonging to their landscape yet serving the people, silently transporting electricity across all terrain, day and night, sunshine or snow.”
Design is work done today to enact a desired future.
— “The Long Now of Technology Infrastructure: Articulating Tensions in Development,” David Ribes & Thomas A. Finholt, 377.
From two of the former editors of now-defunct I.D. Magazine, Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer, comes this great-looking blog on the stories of design, photography, food, magazines, and artists. The above is their article on Less and more, an 808-page catalog of essays and artifacts that came out of the Dieter Rams exhibit at Suntory Museum in Japan. Older posts go back to Halloween, but I just stumbled on this now, thanks to the always-on-top fellows over at It’s Nice That.
Wow, too much social media today.
My initial impressions: Buzz is pretty cool. It’s far more personal than Twitter and even more accessible. Maybe it even collects all my media together (which should ideally help dearly in a situation like this); but seriously, unread badges are the worst interaction design element ever*, and I think I have finally reached the point where I have too many of them.
So, I’m checking out for a while. I’ll be back soon.
* Unread badges are simply bad design.
I’m going to explain this now, because I know I’ll get crap for it: the problem with unread badges is that they are all designed to draw attention and denote importance (after all, most are bright fucking red), but the number scale that each one uses is completely wrong, because it focuses on quantity and not quality. Three (3) important email messages from friends/coworkers are much more critical to me than fifteen (15) mailing list emails, and yet an unread badge count implies 5x the opposite.
Wow, this first aid station is great. Emergency supplies should have one primary design function, and that’s immediate access; this box is the first I’ve ever seen that’s noticeable, memorable, and accessible enough to perform said function splendidly. Insta-buy.
Or rather, as soon as I have a good amount of spare cash.
The great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else.
— Michael Bierut, from his essay “Warning: May Contain Non-Design Content,” which leads off the wonderful Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design. Read the essay in full, as it’s short and worthwhile. His conclusion, “the more things you’re interested in, the better your work will be,” is also something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
Just when you start thinking you’ve repeated yourself too many times, that’s when they’re starting to get it.
— Alan Spoon (MIT MSM ‘73), over dinner at his house several months ago. There’s a fine line between repeating for clarity and being redundant, although I find that often it’s better to err on the side of the latter.
Yes. Yes yes yes. Method’s new answer to laundry came out this morning, and it’s not an all-in-one solution or simply a new scent. It’s a whole new bottle and a completely new, hyper-concentrated formula. And I am so excited. Which perhaps says more about my own affinity for doing laundry than anything else, but let’s get real here, this is revolutionary.
In fact, this squirt bottle is one of those innovations in product design that literally redefines an industry, inspiring a slew of imitators and bringing new breath to an aisle of consumer products that has basically stagnated for decades (save for high-efficiency detergent, which is just a response to development in another sector; oh, and let’s not forget about color-safe bleach). The whole product delivery is incredibly cohesive and impeccably simple: a thin, elegant bottle; a reasonable number of loads; and when it comes down to it, a push on the spout and you’re done.
I’m so very glad that there’s a company championing great design in cleaning products today. File this one under getting excited about things that are typically not exciting at all: just when you thought it was becoming mundane, laundry is fun again.
Update 15 Jan: There is a whole end-aisle display of Method Laundry at the Duane Reade on 23rd and 6th. Go go go!
