You Had Me at First Tab

Customer and user experience is not always about the website, the phone call, or person-to-person interaction in a store. It can also come through the form of packaging.

I just bought a Mac mini recently (for a living room media server) and was blown away by the unboxing. Apple has always been really great about their packaging. Having worked at Apple, I’ve seen the extreme extent of explorations that go into creating the outside of the box (over 500 comps were created for the Power Mac G5 box). (Incidentally, I worked on the second generation iPod package that featured musical artists like Jimi Hendrix.)

What really impressed me about unboxing the Mac mini was not the outside (although nicely designed), but the inside. The package anticipated my every move. How? Let me illustrate.

Mac mini Package

After removing the slip case, the typical “Designed by Apple in California” copy is printed on the thin box of manuals and DVDs. This box sits flush with the larger box. Nicely protruding from the right side is a tab to pull the manual box out. The tab also acts as a closure for the box. Multipurpose.

Mac mini Package

Removing the manuals reveals the Mac mini. What most companies would do in this situation is force you to turn the box upside down and shake the product out. I’ve done this many times and have found it to be quite maddening.

Mac mini Package

Instead, Apple thoughtfully supplies two plastic tabs that allow you to lift the mini out of the box. Also very cool.

Mac mini Package

For the bottom of the box, another cardboard layer hides the power supply and cord. Again, there are pull-tabs here built in to help you lift it out of the box. Did you notice the graphic design pattern here? The tabs are all in the same place and of the same size and shape.

After being so impressed, I thought that surely Apple would fail on the one thing that companies always fail at: tape around the power cable would be impossible to remove. Nope. They read my mind and included a little tab to unwind the tape.

Nice work Apple. You had me at first tab.

Links for 2009-04-20

Blowing Up Pepsi

Fascinating story of PepsiCo America’s CEO Massimo d’Amore, who spearheaded the rebranding by Arnell, and what he’s done to revive the brand.

Pulp Friction: Why Tropicana’s Redesign Was the Pits

One of d’Amore’s projects was to rebrand Tropicana, also done by the Arnell Group, which failed miserably.

Goodbye, Speak Up

One of my favorite design blogs is shutting down.

David Lynch Directs This Moby Music Video

Conceptually it’s pretty literal. Still beautifully done though.

Sprint Now Network: Anthem

This is my current favorite commercial. Turns out that my former boss was the CD/AD on it. Great work, Christian! [Direct link to QuickTime movie]

Creation with a Crowd

crowdspring

A couple of weeks ago, I happened upon a site called crowdSPRING. I forget exactly how I got to the site, but what I found there made me feel a little icky and left a bad taste in my mouth. I wrote a tweet about it (which in turn updated my Facebook status) and many of my designer friends had strong negative reactions too.

Stepping back a bit, what is crowdSPRING? It’s a website that allows companies to post briefs for design projects (mostly logos and websites), with the expectation that dozens if not hundreds of designers from around the world will post their solutions to those projects. Finished solutions. Not portfolios, resumes or even sketches. But the finished logo, website comps, CD packaging design, etc.

Why the ick factor? It took me a few days to process it internally, but I eventually came to this conclusion: the site sucks time away from thousands of budding designers. They are all working for free. Only the lucky ones whose solutions get chosen are paid. Imagine if you ate dinner at five different restaurants and only paid for the one dinner you liked? That is what’s happening on crowdSPRING: free work.

This Forbes article talks about pushback from the design community. I’ve long been against spec work. It’s just plain wrong from the free work angle as I’ve already illustrated. The AIGA has also had a long-standing policy against spec work because in their mind it compromises the quality of the work. How? Company asks for free submissions; young, inexperienced and unqualified designers submit solutions; established professionals stay away. That is a recipe for sub-standard creative work. Or how about designer Mark Boulton’s argument that spec work is bad for business? “Architects are invited to submit bids, proposals and designs for prestigious competitions. The winner gets the contract and the glory. The losers get nothing; the work is conducted speculatively.”

My friend and colleague at Razorfish, Garrick Schmitt wrote an article at AdAge.com titled “Can Creativity Be Crowdsourced?” He posits that crowdsourcing creativity is here to stay. Whether it’s finished product ala crowdSPRING or inspiration ala FFFFOUND!, there is a place for it. I honestly don’t know if crowdsourcing creative output in an ethical way is possible. Maybe. But crowdsourcing creativity is entirely possible.

Rivers Cuomo from the band Weezer did a collaborative songwriting project called “Let’s Write a Sawng” on YouTube last year. He started with a single video, saying that he needed help writing a song. He led his large base of fans through the process, breaking it down step-by-step, starting with suggestions for a title, through lyrics and melodies. What worked was that he crowdsourced for ideas, picked the best ones and came up with a compelling pop record. On NPR’s Fresh Air he mentioned that if the song were ever officially released, it would probably break a record for songwriting credits.

massanimation

Intel also experimented with crowdsourcing via an advertising program call Mass Animation last year. Via Facebook they invited animators to animate shots that would be part of a larger animated short film. I think it works here too because an animated film is very much like an open source dev project: the work can be divvied up into small discreet parts and worked on by volunteers. Intel goes one step further and has promised to credit and compensate contributors whose work appears in the final film.

I think the aforementioned two examples ultimately work as crowdsourced creative because they were volunteer collaborative efforts. Rivers Cuomo’s fans or Intel’s animators really wanted to be part of a project larger than themselves. Whereas design contests or sites like crowdSPRING feel unethical are because they’re requesting intellectual capital without investing a dime.

Links for 2009-04-02

Sources: Google In Late Stage Talks To Acquire Twitter

If this actually happens, I bet Doug Bowman would be really pissed since he just left Google for Twitter.

Tropicana Line’s Sales Plunge 20% Post-Rebranding

Didn’t we all predict that this was going to happen?

Behind the scenes at Netflix

Fascinating photo essay looking inside a Netflix warehouse.

Web 2.0 how-to design style guide

Now you too can have your own Web 2.0 lookalike site! Most of the cliches originated from Apple of course, but there are a couple of good tidbits in there.

Where Is the Craftsmanship?

quotes_main

Whenever I look at anything with words on it, I look at the typography. Bring me to a local corner lunch cafe with a menu typed out and printed from Microsoft Word and I will have a field day. I would judge even more harshly at a more expensive restaurant. I can’t help it as I—like most designers, I’m sure—just look at everything with a critical eye.

My biggest typographical pet peeve is the rendering of apostrophes, single and double quotes.

It astounds me when I notice this on any piece, and all I can mutter to myself is “Where is the craftsmanship?!” This was not the case decades ago when copy was sent out to professional typesetters. The very thing that democratized graphic design was the the same thing that lowered the bar on what passes for “professional” graphic design. I’m talking about how the computer and software allowed more people access to the tools necessary to create great looking stuff. No longer did designers need to send out manuscripts to a typesetter who would in turn set the type into galleys for the designer to paste up in the mechanical. This spawned a whole new industry called desktop publishing, but killed the entire profession of typesetter, and along with it some higher standards.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no luddite. I put myself through college by working at a desktop publishing service bureau. But because I had some great teachers, and because of my sometimes unhealthy attention to detail, I had a lot of respect for typography, thus taking the time to learn all the rules and standards. But I digress.

Primes and Quoation Marks

What passes sometimes today for single and double quotation marks are actually foot and inch marks (or hour and minute marks). Why is that? My theory is that to be efficient in the manufacturing of some of the first practical typewriters, they straightened out the quotation marks so they could be dual purpose—open and close. In fact in Christopher Sholes’ patent for the QWERTY keyboard, only a single straight apostrophe key is shown, presumably the user would strike the key twice for a double quotation mark. And of course, most of this layout made its way into our modern computer keyboards and software.

QWERTY Patent Drawing

Software companies like Microsoft and Adobe have been trying to mitigate this error by employing “smart quotes” technology. The software will analyze whether the quotation mark is at the beginning of the word (and then use the open state) or the end of the word (and use the close state). Most the time this actually works well. But what happens when you need to use an apostrophe in its close state as a contraction replacement in words like ’Til, Rock ’n’ Roll, and mac ’n’ cheese? The software isn’t smart enough to replace it with the proper close state and the designer or brand ends up looking amateurish.

Joe’s Mac ’n Cheese

How to not look like an amateur designer? (OK, maybe amateur could be considered a harsh term to you pros. Maybe bad craft is what I’m really talking about.) Go ahead and turn on the smart quotes feature of your favorite design app, but pay attention and override when necessary.

Glyph Description Mac Windows
‘ Open single quote OPTION-] ALT-0-1-4-5
’ Close single quote (apostrophe) SHIFT-OPTION-] ALT-0-1-4-6
“ Open double quote OPTION-[ ALT-0-1-4-7
” Close double quote SHIFT-OPTION-[ ALT-0-1-4-8

Introducing TweepRoll

tweeproll_home

Today my friend Aaron Clinger and I launched a project called TweepRoll. The idea for the site came about when my friend Kate and I were talking about celebrities who use Twitter. She said she could see how reading celebrities’ tweets could totally suck her into the Twitterverse. Later in the day it dawned on me that a lot of other people would feel the same way, so I started sketching out a site for the Twitter-lurker, the curious, the toe-dipper.

In the days and weeks after thinking about this idea I kept reading news items about celebrity twitterers. From The New York Times to Entertainment Weekly, Twitter and the famous people who use them were going mainstream.

I brought my genius developer friend Aaron into the project and we designed, built and launched TweepRoll in three weeks. It’s been a really fun side project for us and I hope you enjoy it!

Finally! A Good Redesign

sunkist

I opened our beverage fridge at work yesterday and noticed a couple of cans of Sunkist in there. I didn’t remember ever seeing Sunkist in our drink case, but what stood out more to me was the new design. Apparently the logo and can were redesigned back in November 2008. With all the talk of the bad redesigns recently (Pepsi is terrible; Tropicana is criminal), it was refreshing to see something that actually works.

Sunkist packaging from 1981

The original logo (photo is from 1981, but it didn’t change since its debut in 1978) was pretty contemporary for its time. This new update brings the previous incarnation into the 21st century, but at the same time gives it a little retro feel. The typography reminds me of the Coca-Cola logo or the original Pepsi-Cola logo. I will concede to Armin at Brand New that the blue ocean swirls surrounding the type are a little much, but on the packaging, and really standing on the strength of the typography, it works. This mark has the perfect combo of contemporary and classic. Mmm… I think I’m going to have to make some Sunkist popsicles this weekend.

New Sunkist logo image from Brand New. Archival image of old packaging from Beverage World (May 1981), scan linked from Wikipedia.

Apple Envy

applecritique

When us designers start off designing a home page, we invariably create at least one variation that’s based on the Apple.com home page: a large hero graphic and three or four smaller promo tiles below that. That basic framework that Apple perfected is essentially a reference design.

However, their pioneering is more than just skin deep. Spoonfed Design has a pretty good analysis on why Apple.com is so great.

I think it’s a testament to the quality of work that comes out of Cupertino that most of their designs, whether it’s product, OS UI, advertising, print or online is held as the reference standard. Having worked at Apple, I can assure you that seemingly simple and elegant design (product shot with a headline set in Apple Myriad on a white background) is not as easy as it seems. Besides, what other company can you name that has sparked such design trends such as colored plastic, gel-like buttons, and glassy navigation tabs?

Usability Analysis of Apple.com: Why is it so Good?

The Homer

KraftFoods

See the train wreck that can happen when you design a logo by committee? According to AdAge, the logo was the result of a “‘co-creation process’ with consumers, employees, ad agency Nitro, London and another shop, Promise.”

Honestly I can’t believe that Kraft is proud of it! Maybe one sign is that this logo will not appear on their packaged goods. Instead it will appear only in corporate communications materials.

Still, why unveil a stunningly ugly mark like that? Looks like logo salad to me with a burst here, a swoosh there. Throw in a little pseudo hand-written font like Tekton and voila!

Please leave the design to professionals, people! Reminds me of Homer Simpson’s ultimate car of the future design, “The Homer.”

(via Brand New)

P.S. Don’t get me started on how disastrous the website looks.