Archive for the ‘information’ Category
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
Nokia Lumia Windows phone (iPhone snap)
Jonathan Ive’s tenure at Apple has produced a long, successful sequence of great-looking product design revolutions leading to the touchscreen interface. This approach is arguably now so dominant that physical design has been usurped by graphic design as the driver of function. Apple’s record in graphic design is mostly strong (I have always liked their – possibly redundant since the products are so intuitive – instruction booklets) but recently they seem less sure-footed: iTunes is much harder work than it used to be (and its ‘new logo’ was widely disliked); the iCal leather/stitching effects are retro and retrograde. Even the ‘candy box’ presentation of apps on iPhone/iPad, once fresh and friendly now seems more irritating than helpful (the sheer volume of apps available making visual distinction near-impossible). The iPhone remains a beautiful piece of work, even if its most impressive features (like the beautifully machined, spookily high-tolerance sim card tray) are hid beneath the bumper required for practical everyday operation – but sentimental airbrush effects are starting to make some Apple products feel a little behind the curve.
This was thrown into sharp relief for me by my wife’s new Nokia Lumia 800 Windows phone (purchased against my sage advice of course. Wrong again, dammit.). The product design is restrained and elegant and it has a crisp customsable ‘tile’-based interface with simple, elegant animations and well-structured, spare typography using Monotype’s Segoe WP typeface. I find myself envious of a non-Apple product for the first time in… ever.
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Tags: accessibility, Apple, graphic design, information design, Nokia, product design, typography, UI design, Windows phone
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Thursday, December 22nd, 2011
photo © Annie Queree
Outsourcing has been a big business idea – non-‘core’ activities executed for you by someone else. We bemoan the loss of skills & knowledge held in companies and have lowered expectations that employees might know much about what a company does beyond an sales script.
On a personal level we are doing much the same. Written a longhand letter lately? Every time I perform the quaint olde ritual of cheque writing, it seems to take more concentration to execute a legible word (admittedly my handwriting always looked like fallen spaghetti). With the simplest typed communication however, we are spellchecked and ‘helped’. Microsoft takes us by the hand, yet I find it hard to be grateful. Does knowing things still matter?
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Tags: cloud computing, communication, information design, information, outsourcing, skills
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Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011
York Hall: terrible drawing, great venue for Boring2011
Taking time out from the everyday for mental refreshment is usually sound advice, as is “Don’t sweat the small stuff”. Conferences usually trade on comfortable and exotic locations and the promise of rest and revelation. Getting away from it all is supposed to help you get back into it all – an appealing (if usually costly) idea. The alternative is to take Art and Science’s great lesson: Anything Is Interesting If You Look At It In The Right Way – and step further in to the everyday.
This weekend, parted with a hard-earned tenner, I made my way to Bethnal Green’s York Hall, venue for the second Boring conference, organised by James Ward (whose business card would surely read Chairman of the Bored had Insurance Salesman James Osterberg not got there first in 1979). This year’s expanded event was thrillingly titled Boring 2011.
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Tags: Boring2011, communication, conferences, creativity, detail, inspiration, words
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Tuesday, July 26th, 2011
Having lately spent far more time than I care to in and around NHS facilities it is hard avoid noticing how much energy / resources are wasted when information is badly managed. I am no systems analyst, but even without an abacus for a mind the potential benefits of sorting out information in the NHS seem clear in three areas:
In some trusts, budgetary adjustments have reduced willingness to create / maintain good patient communications. Visits to dreary GP surgeries are not elevated by leaflet / poster displays that climb the walls like mutant strains of rising damp. Clip art and Comic Sans feature heavily in DIY print productions in which clarity and communication have taken a back seat. Patients should have the right to clear information in support of their treatment.
Physically navigating the NHS, its hospitals, clinics and other facilities can be complex. Some of the larger hospitals have decently planned sign systems and an air of calm efficiency as a result, but many smaller or regional ones do not, and those that are building / reorganizing often fail to consider users by properly re-routing them. How many late / missed appointments are caused by being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Exceptional facilities like the Kentish Town Integrated Care Centre seem to be from another world entirely. Owing its existence to an opportunity of history, the persistent vision of an individual and a gifted design team, such a paragon is unlikely to ever be anything like the norm, in this universe at least.
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Tags: accessibility, communication, design, graphic design, information design, nhs, service design
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Thursday, May 19th, 2011
That nice Professor Cox was on TV recently (atop some picturesque mountain, waving around the Hubble’s holiday snaps) banging on about space-time being a Woonder o’ t’ Universe™. That’s true enough but down here in office/studio space, time and/or space are scarcer – time to reflect in particular. What with lunch being for wimps and none of us having an attention span any more, non-essential reflection has become so widely discouraged that it’s a woonder the world is not full of humans behaving like headless chickens plunging civilisation headlong into chaos. Oh, hang on a minute…
It’s all too easy for busy designers to get burned out, stuck in a rut, demotivated or disillusioned with a profession that will always consume more mental energy than is strictly available (that probably contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics but I’m no Prof. Cox). To be the best designer you can be requires the cultivation of a continually positive and optimistic outlook. A tangible sense of possibility is required to fruitfully inhabit the mental zone where problems get solved and ideas get off the ground. Pressure directs us away from that zone like never before. For many an old fart like myself starting out decades ago in boom times, the urgent need to eat and provide a roof over one’s head was never more than a faint rumour. Now it looms intimidatingly large over one and all, and sustainable creativity is under threat like never before.
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Tags: creativity, design, design process, graphic design, inspiration, problem-solving, sabbatical
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Monday, April 4th, 2011
Photo: Bernard Gagnon
Is fashion is the only design discipline with colour truly embedded at its core? The search for ‘new blacks’ notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine fashion without colour. Interior design takes it fairly seriously and like fashion, devotes significant effort to forecasting colour trends. Architecture and industrial design sometimes seem timid with colour but project leadtimes, materials & regulatory issues inhibit experiment. Somewhere in the middle is graphic design: sometimes using colour well, often not. What is graphic design’s excuse?
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Tags: brand design, branding, colour, creativity, design process, graphic design, industrial design, visual culture, visualisation
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Friday, February 4th, 2011
Photo: Damon Easley
Most designers prefer visual to verbal communication and often do a poor job of explaining the profession to outsiders, some of whom may have an inkling that problem-solving is involved, but most of whom cling limpet-like to the idea that design is about ‘making things look nice’. If only there were a handy phrase to describe what really goes on… I have just discovered (thank you BBC Radio 4) that there is a name for what is probably the key design aptitude.
In 1958 neurologist and psychiatrist Klaus Conrad coined apophenia to describe “the unmotivated seeing of connections” with a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”. Finding connections and meanings in experience – is that not the most interesting/valuable part of what designers do?
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Tags: apophenia, communication, creativity, design process, graphic design, information design, visual culture
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Thursday, January 27th, 2011
Tags: decoration, decorative arts, ephemera, graphic design, inspiration, ornament, packaging, print, traditional typography, typography, visual culture
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Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
I wrote on this blog some while back that I feared we were losing the art of decoration, in passing referring to Marian Bantjes as bucking that trend. With the publication of I Wonder she has singlehandedly rescued ornament & craft from untimely demise at the hands of modernist graphic design.
For those unfamiliar, Marian Bantjes is a Canadian illustrator/typographer/designer (there is no appropriate single word) living near Vancouver who after a decade in book typography and production reinvented her career to a extraordinary degree. She is a kind of missing link between contemporary design and the rich decorative craft traditions of the religious world(s). Her work is entirely secular but there is a strong sense of devotion in it, and she has a gift for creating something something truly extraordinary—spiritual even—from the most unpromising materials or observations.
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Tags: communication, creativity, decorative type, decorative tradition, graphic design, I Wonder, illustration, inspiration, Marian Bantjes, ornament, typography, visual culture, words
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Monday, October 11th, 2010
The increasing power of brands has also seen the rise of the logo lynchmob, pitchforks and flaming torches aloft in pursuit of another artless arrangement of a few Helvetica characters. This now routine negativity reached a new pitch last week when Gap unveiled its new logo to a tsunami of online invective, much of it from designers. Healthy debates are overheating and professional dysfunction threatens to encourage design-by-mob.
The talking-up of graphic design into rocket science always invited public criticism, but once upon a time the industry avoided attacking itself in public. Somewhere late in the 20th century that began to change. When BP (pre-pinwheel identity) italicised it’s old shield-based logo, the Sun and other esteemed UK print media ran ‘NEW LOGO COST £40m’ and/or similarly misleading headlines (the agency will have been well-paid, but the vast majority of that sum will have been ongoing global implementation costs). A bruising PR fail in itself, but there in the news story text was one of the big branding figures of the time quoted as saying how terrible the logo was—helping to fuel a popular view of designers as overpaid charlatans.
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Tags: brand design, brand names, branding, communication, crowdsourcing, design, design criticism, design industry, Gap, graphic design, iTunes, logo, logo rage, London 2012, MySpace, new logo, Twitter, visual culture
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