Interruption vs Engagement: a false argument

There was an interesting article written by Jonathan Salem Baskin in AdAge titled Why Interruption Still Trumps Engagement: It’s the Sales That Matter, and That Hasn’t Changed.

It’s all about the sale

I couldn’t agree more with the statement: It’s the Sales that matter, but why do we have to look at this as interruption vs engagement? While I agree with most of the individual points in this article I think this a false argument. I don’t think we should be looking at this as Interruption vs Engagement. We need to do both and we don’t have to choose one or the other. Continued…

Making decisions

The Harvard Business Review recently made a post titled Five Ways Pixar Makes Better Decisions. It’s an interesting post about how to go about making really great decisions. It made me think about how we make decisions at Creative B’stro where I work. Below is a comment I made on that post, I thought I’d share it here:

This is something I think about a lot. Everyone where I work is smart, talented and hard working.

We’re not a huge company, but we’re not so small that one person can make all the decisions for the company. There are just too many decisions made everyday. Some small and some large. We have to find ways to allow everyone in the company to make decisions intelligently.

I’d say we tackle this with some basic core principles that seem to work for us. Although, my colleagues might tell you something different. Anyways, here goes: Continued…

I love projects with short timelines

I’ve heard this saying in the design community and it’s also on wikipedia. You can pick 2 of the 3: quality, speed and cheap. I couldn’t disagree with this more.

Supporters of this thinking say that if you want something fast and great quality they have to charge you more. In saying that they’re also saying that if you want a project to take forever, be great quality then they’ll make it really cheap.

This is foolish and bad business. First of all, if I’m working on a project with a client and they want it to take a long time, it’s going to cost a lot more. It’s going to take more time and effort than if it was going to be a short and quick project. A project with long deadlines gives the client more opportunity to provide feedback and constant revisions and sometimes to ill effect (sometimes to good effect, too). Continued…

Technology products redesigned for the 70′s

This is brilliant and very well executed. Alex Varanese imagines what four different technology products would look like if they had today’s technology in the 1970′s aesthetic. See the full blog post here.

Modern cell phone redesigned for the 1970s

Small, incremental innovations

Don Norman wrote this wonderful blog post: Technology First, Needs Last: The Research-Product Gulf. I particularly liked the thinking in the paragraphs quoted below. It addresses the reality of business and design and it acknowledges the value in constantly refining your work. I’m a big fan of the iterative process.

More and more I think people need to learn and become good at existing ideas and learnings that are currently available. So many people in the business (and design) world get the basics wrong. If they’d take the time to get those write they’d reap substantial rewards. Continued…

Living with complexity

I just read the first chapter of Living with Complexity by Donald A. Norman and I must say it was a very engaging read.

Donald Norman brought the mind of a philosopher and applied it to the ideas of technology, usability, simplicity and complexity in our every day lives.

In this short chapter he covers topics such as mastering a piano, the beauty of complex coffee machines, the Korean alphabet and our desire for the proper balance of complexity and simplicity (too much of either and we’re confused or bored).

After reading this I found myself with a better understanding of life and our own desires. I also feel I have a keener grasp of the role design plays in our lives (it’s everywhere!). The cover of this book is beautiful designed just as the prose inside is written. Check it out.

Data visualization: a better way to understand statistics

I recently came across this crime-city-light-map of San Francisco. The lights you see above, are not the lights of San Francisco. Each light represents crime data. The more and  brighter the lights are, the more crime there is. For once, good is represented by darkness, and light is represented by evil. I think it’s actually a very deceiving map due to the way the data is visualized. Since the good is represented by darkness, there ends up being a lot of black on the map. But, we typically associate good with light and dark with evil. So, it’s playing a trick on our minds. When I first saw this map, I thought wow! There is a lot more crime in San Francisco than I realized. Looks like a pretty dangerous place.

But if you switch it. If you make the crime black and the good light (white) then it doesn’t feel so bad. Feels fairly safe. The impression you get from the map below is completely different even though it’s showing the same data, just in a different way. Now we see lots of white (good) and just a touch of bad (black and blue) throughout the map. I’d definitely rather live in the city below rather than the one above.

I also found some crime-elevation-maps that I thought were really cool (see below). The mountains you see are not the actual mountains and hills of the city. They’re hills that represent the amount of crime in the city. These were created by Doug McCune, check out his blog post. He also created the first dark city light map you see above. I created the second one by inverting his image.

Continued…

Learning new techniques to create new ideas

There is an interesting article over at the signal vs noise blog titled “How do you turn inspiration into skill?” It’s talking about an interesting problem that I and, I think, a lot of designers I know struggle with. You browse through the web and get inspired by a lot of great design, you then go try and apply all this inspiration to your own work and find yourself frustrated and doing the same old stuff you’ve always been doing. What happened to all that inspiration?

The blog post then switched to talking about copying other’s work like we did in school as a way to learn. It’s a way to study great design, great music, great (insert your trade here). In the process you learn a lot about technique and the ideas in that piece.

But once we become professionals, we forget to do this. We think we don’t need to copy and study other people’s work any more. We’re pro’s. Each piece of design work we do will be better. Well, maybe. Often times we get stuck in ruts and produce the same old stuff. This is our struggle. To constantly get better.

Continued…