The business news pages are blazing with the news that two of the U.S.’s legacy airlines are to merge to become the world’s largest. United Airlines, the name the new entity will retain, will aim to improve its competitiveness by offering the widest range of destinations to its domestic corporate clientele, while offering emerging markets [...]
We recently launched a new brand for esteemed maritime law firm DeOrchis & Partners. The process began with a holistic, cross-media design exploration in which we looked at multiple typographic and photographic ways to express the firm’s primary legal focus and prestige in the field.
We designed a new identity with a stylized monogram evoking maritime imagery.
A simple and bold direction, combining traditional elements in a unique way, struck the right note.
The firm’s lead touchpoint—its website—furthers the modern, nautical system through imagery, layout, and interaction. Visit the site to see it for yourself.
The website is interactive, with animated page transitions evoking a seafaring perspective.
OK, Steve just killed Flash, but did you see the really big news buried in the six-pointed death knell?
Is the magic gone? The multi-touch magic mouse may be the last rodent on my desk.
In his fifth point about touch/mouse/hover (our lament since iPhone came out), Steve notes that Flash was “designed for PCs using mice’ and that Flash content would need to be rewritten for touch”. In his conclusions puts a finer point on it saying, “Flash was created during the PC era — for PCs and mice.” This is some seriously intentional past-tense, and is meant to be read, “This is the era of mobile and touch.”
Steve and Apple have been notorious for picking up technologies before their competition and dropping them just as fast. They had floppy drives, double floppy drives, and then, with the iMac, they dropped floppies completely, together with legacy ports like SCSI and serial. People actually got upset! Who now can say what they’d do with a 1.4mb storage device?
Well, the peripheral that started it all, the mouse, is going to go the way of the floppy disc, too. They grabbed the mouse by the tail from Xerox and ushered in the PC revolution 30 years ago. They’ve even stood by their mice, stubbornly holding to simplicity and beauty where most made mice into eight-headed, mangled desk-vermin.
The death of the mouse makes perfect sense. It is an abstraction, a thick layer of separation between user and object. The only thing it has on touch is accuracy (down to the pixel). One might say hover is a benefit, but I’d argue that hover is a technical hurdle for touch, but ultimately a natural extension. With multi-touch, the possibilities explode. Nobs can be turned (the mouse was never good at curves). Drawing can be done on the screen (holy meat-brush-stylus, Batman). Awkward key commands can be dropped for gestures. The physical nature of touch will also improve the GUI metaphor, extending the usable space to infinity rather than being confined to the pixel dimensions of the screen (the screen will be a portal to dragging and pulling content, not a container for it).
I expect that I just set up my last desktop computer to come with a mouse and a touch-less screen.
Let’s remember and celebrate the mouse (and its virtual avatar, the cursor) for all that it’s done for us—the zillions of pixelated arrows in print ads, the cute anthropomorphic illustrations, the internet—and forgive it the carpal tunnel syndrome.
Update 2010 07 27: Apple has rung the bell again for the mouse, launching the Magic Trackpad, a large wireless touch pad that brings the laptop’s trackpad to the PC.
With books, magazines, and newspapers flocking to iPad with hopes of a new working model, and the calls for the death of print that feel like echoes of the 90s, I present a quick, non-exhaustive, biased, romanticized list…
iPad newspapers, magazines, and books can’t
swat flies
be stored for 20 years for the next generation to uncover in the attic
be stored for 100 years for the next 5 generations to uncover in the attic
be left at the cottage to separate ‘real books’ from ‘vacation books’
be left on an airplane to dispose evidence of having ever read ‘US Weekly’
Again late to post, but we found our friend and sometime collaborator Christian in the pages of Wallpaper. A handsome portrait taken inside his gallery in Berlin, Exile, is accompanied by a bit about his venture.
A video showing a two and a half years old girl’s first encounter with the iPad. Although we can’t prove it was really her first encounter, it is indeed shocking to see the ease with which she figures out some of the interface elements on her own, notably the swipe across the home screen, and the maximizing.
Much has been said about the iPad’s potential as an educational tool, and clearly this is something Apple is banking on in promoting heavily academically-minded apps such as Elements. It will also be interesting to see what effects a more elemental, basic interface (touch VS keyboard and mouse) has on other aspects of computing and learning.
If computers keep increasing in simplicity, will we still need ‘Computer Classes’? What other apps will be able to bridge the gap and between complex notions (science, maths, spelling) and kids with increasingly short attention-span.
Not to kick a man when he’s down, but Toyota may want to recall its communication design while it’s reworking its pedals. Just four years ago, while conducting competitive audits for Chevrolet at a previous job, Toyota was setting a good example of consistency and quality in its visual communications, with typefaces limited to overarching branding and one augmenting it’s “Moving Forward” campaign. Red was it’s clear brand color and everything evoked the core tenants of their products: reliable and safe.
Chevy demonstrates cohesive auto design in lock-step with consistent graphic design.
At GM and Chevrolet the brand communications reflected the state of the organizations: fiefdoms with a lack of perspective and inspiration. The noble effort to organize and centralize branded communications reflected an edict to pull things together. Even pre-recession GM brands showed improvement due to new industrial design standards for each brand in the GM portfolio.We synthesized Chevy’s communications to a single customized typeface, Klavika, and a few strict base elements which have lead to a strong, global unity. With the now necessary fat-trimming, GM could start to look like a nimble and relevant brand some day, and certainly Chevrolet appears to be taking the bold action inferred by its brand, communications, and design.
Toyota page sports a random range of type and lacks clarity. Note the only red is for the recall.
In recent years Toyota’s communications have exposed its growing pains. A mess of typefaces, a lack of vehicle design perspective and forgetting their color—the strongest red on their website indicates recall info—leaves them looking just as harried as Mr. Toyoda in front of congress. Moving Forward, for Toyota today, means good old bootstrapping, and we’ll see it not just under the hood but on the screen and on paper.
I’m geeked (and slightly nervous) about an interview I did with Stephen Watson at Stack Magazines about my recent publishing venture, Remedy Quarterly. The focus is on Kickstarter, an online microfunding site that allows ideas to be pitched and for the people to decide if they are worthy of funding by literally voting with dollars.
Stack is both a fantastic idea and a fantastic perspective on the world of magazines.
Stack, by the way, is a brilliant service and business model. Subscribe to stack and receive a handful of indy magazines on a regular basis, discover some new favorites and see the publications that are pushing the boundaries. It’s definitely worth checking out, I know I can’t wait for my first package.
Traditional media and the journalism industry are scrambling to locate a profitable business model. Many companies are trying a shotgun approach to target the wide-ranging, flowering market of digital devices and platforms, hoping to chance upon a model that will work across its increasingly fragmented audience.
While this method may be fine, many companies are losing track of the actual value audiences have come to expect. Any user of the New York Times’ iPhone application, one of the very first to be released in the App Store less than 2 years ago, probably knows what I mean.
While the original releases received much grief for their poor speed and propensity to bugs, the current New York Times app is quite dependable and speedy, and offers a suitable selection of features.
The main pitfall lies in the interface itself, which, despite following the Apple-issued iPhone application guidelines closely, fails to provide the chief curatorial benefit of the paper’s design with the omission of the mythical Frontpage.
I expect that I just set up my last desktop computer to come with a mouse and a touch-less screen.
