Archive for July 2007

28 Jul 2007 0726H

Monocle

I’ve just twigged to this newish magazine, Monocle, through a series of videos on city design at the International Herald Tribune, one of my favorite designed readings on the net.
Look at this gorgeous modernism that does not use sans serif type for its headers. It’s simply beautiful. I can even forgive the black background [...]

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24 Jul 2007 2051H

Design notes, on PBS

Was watching NOVA tonight, and saw a sculpture called Kryptos, which contains coded messages about light and darkness, and the wonder of discovery, embedded within it. An awe inspiring piece. (As a complete aside, there was also a marvelous piece about the discoverer of gravitational lensing and how he’s giving back to his community.)
Then followed [...]

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18 Jul 2007 0604H

Designing human error out of windows, doors

Not that windows, made by that firm in Redmond, WA, but glass and wood and plastic windows. Some kid fell out of a window in a high rise in Toronto, reports the CBC and so on Metro Morning this morning, they brought in an industrial designer to talk about how they might approach the problem [...]

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13 Jul 2007 1000H

Customer service as design investment

Just wanted to talk about this article from MSN that says Sprint’s dumping 1000 customers because they complained too much. I can’t say that this is entirely due to consumer fraud, because if it were the case, would Sprint rate so far down the scale in consumer service? (Perhaps Sprint should not have rebranded with [...]

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12 Jul 2007 0911H

The users’ anthem?

Carbon dating myself here, but I propose it is the 1982 hit, “Destination Unknown,” by Missing Persons. (”At #17. I’m Casey Kasem.”)
Life is so strange
When you don’t know
How can you tell
Where you’re going to?
You can’t be sure of any situation
Something could change
And then you won’t know
Where do we go from here?
It seems so all [...]

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10 Jul 2007 0322H

Finding the courage to step back

Today I had the pleasure of working with a recent hire who immediately impressed me as extremely disciplined and perspicacious, and as we were looking at a number of issues related to a web app, she took a step back and said, we’re not serving the best interests of the client to just tack on [...]

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04 Jul 2007 1825H

Two notes for July 4th

We had a Weber grill, a black one, for about 20-30 odd years, which we trundled out every summer for the obligatory cookout. This year, since the family has expanded now that my sister has two kids, and we’re no longer stoked (so to speak) about using charcoal, I bought another Weber to replace it. [...]

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03 Jul 2007 0752H

My Design Barbie making a comeback?

Says this press release on BizJournals. (We wrote about My Design Barbie back in January.) But it’s disintermediating the entire online channel! FAO Schwarz is entering into the customized Barbie thing as a way to drive traffic to stores with an exclusive in-store experience. Of course it will be using touchscreens to put the doll [...]

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01 Jul 2007 2143H

Have you seen Everyday Edisons? On PBS?

Caught it by chance this morning on one of our four PBS HD channels.
Everyday Edisons allows people in competition to take an idea from thought to paper and then the whole design and ideation process, including prototyping, and also there’re some intellectual property aspects. It’s hard to be excited about work after you do [...]

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