Posts tagged design

Copycats vs. Copyrights

On Aug. 5, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced S.3728: the Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act. He’s got 10 cosponsors—including three Republicans—and a big idea: to extend copyright protections to the fashion industry, where none currently exist. That’s right: none. I—well, not I, but someone who can sew—can copy Vera Wang’s (extremely expensive) dress and sell it to you right now (for much less), and Wang can’t do a thing about it.

Allan Schwartz, founder and lead designer of the label ABS, has already promised to do exactly that. He’ll take the dress, remake it, and sell it to the masses for much cheaper. Is he stealing? Or is he popularizing? Schumer’s legislation suggests his answer: he wants to make Schwartz’s imitation illegal. Only Vera Wang should be able to profit from her designs, at least for the first three years (the length of Schumer’s proposed copyright). But what if he’s wrong? What if copying, despite what your teacher always told you, is … good?

» via Newsweek

When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don’t really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it’s really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s sort of the middle, and that’s where most people stop….
But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem—and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works. That’s what we wanted to do with Mac.
— Steve Jobs via (via ninakix)
In the end, simplicity for its own sake should not be the goal. Balancing the amount of complexity that we engage with is something that UX people deal with on a daily basis. A good experience should be the result of using UX design to find what is meaningful to that end user and present it in the best way possible. Donald Norman puts it best: “Complex things will require complexity. It is the job of the designer to manage that complexity with skill and grace.
A big part of the experience of a physical object has to do with the materials,” says Jonathan Ive, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Design, during a brief chat with Core77. “[At Apple] we experiment with and explore materials, processing them, learning about the inherent properties of the material—and the process of transforming it from raw material to finished product; for example, understanding exactly how the processes of machining it or grinding it affect it. That understanding, that preoccupation with the materials and processes, is [very] essential to the way we work.
Design is not about innovation. Design is about communication. Innovation in design is usually a wonderful byproduct or direct result of a particular need. Design that seeks to foremost be innovative will commonly fall apart under its own stylistic girth.
To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.

The first crop of iPad user apps revived memories of Web designs from 1993, when Mosaic first introduced the image map that made it possible for any part of any picture to become a UI element. As a result, graphic designers went wild: anything they could draw could be a UI, whether it made sense or not.


It’s the same with iPad apps: anything you can show and touch can be a UI on this device. There are no standards and no expectations.

iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

The phenomenon Jakob describes here has always been a problem with touch input.  The affordances available by hovering with a mouse pointer and seeing a cursor change into a hand or seeing alt-text appear is gone in touch interfaces, and for me are sorely missed.

(via thegongshow) (via mikehudack)

A spring metamorphosis — Google’s new look

Using Google today, you may have noticed that something feels slightly different — the look and feel of our search results have changed! Today’s metamorphosis responds to the increasing richness of the web and the increasing power of search — revealing search tools on the left and updating the visual look and feel throughout. While we are constantly rolling out small changes and updates, today’s changes showcase the latest evolutions in our search technology, making it easier than ever to find exactly what you’re looking for.

» via The Official Google Blog

A spring metamorphosis — Google’s new look

Using Google today, you may have noticed that something feels slightly different — the look and feel of our search results have changed! Today’s metamorphosis responds to the increasing richness of the web and the increasing power of search — revealing search tools on the left and updating the visual look and feel throughout. While we are constantly rolling out small changes and updates, today’s changes showcase the latest evolutions in our search technology, making it easier than ever to find exactly what you’re looking for.

» via The Official Google Blog

Websites are looking like web applications that look like websites that look like science fiction that look like Apple that are quickly looking like a design trend of the late 2000’s.
redesignrelated:


new 100 dollar bill redesign: “Know Its Features So You Can Know It’s Real”
The U.S Government has unveiled a new makeover for the $100 note, which is equipped with newer technology to prevent counterfeiting. This looks like a technical upgrade, not the full redesign many have been hoping for.
“…The blue 3-D Security Ribbon on the front of the new $100 note contains images of bells and 100s that move and change from one to the other as you tilt the note. The Bell in the Inkwell on the front of the note is another new security feature. The bell changes color from copper to green when the note is tilted, an effect that makes it seem to appear and disappear within the copper inkwell…
The back of the note has a new vignette of Independence Hall featuring the rear, rather than the front, of the building. Both the vignette on the back of the note and the portrait on the front have been enlarged, and the oval that previously appeared around both images has been removed…” —via press release
The government has put together an “animated tutorial” to get a better look at some of the new enhancements figured into the redesign. The new bills will not be put into circulation until February 10, 2011.

redesignrelated:

new 100 dollar bill redesign: “Know Its Features So You Can Know It’s Real”

The U.S Government has unveiled a new makeover for the $100 note, which is equipped with newer technology to prevent counterfeiting. This looks like a technical upgrade, not the full redesign many have been hoping for.

“…The blue 3-D Security Ribbon on the front of the new $100 note contains images of bells and 100s that move and change from one to the other as you tilt the note. The Bell in the Inkwell on the front of the note is another new security feature. The bell changes color from copper to green when the note is tilted, an effect that makes it seem to appear and disappear within the copper inkwell…

The back of the note has a new vignette of Independence Hall featuring the rear, rather than the front, of the building. Both the vignette on the back of the note and the portrait on the front have been enlarged, and the oval that previously appeared around both images has been removed…” —via press release

The government has put together an “animated tutorial” to get a better look at some of the new enhancements figured into the redesign. The new bills will not be put into circulation until February 10, 2011.

Copy-Editing and Page Design, Far From Paper

By this fall, readers who pick up their local newspapers in Richmond or Tampa will be seeing articles that have been edited and laid out by people more than 700 miles away.

Media General, owner of a chain of Southern newspapers, said last week that it would consolidate the copy-editing and page design for its three biggest papers, The Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia, The Tampa Tribune in Florida and The Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina. It is already in the process of combining those functions for many of its smaller papers.

As it struggles to cut costs, much of the industry has explored centralized editing and layout operations for far-flung papers, but few publishers have gone nearly as far as Media General, whose properties are concentrated in Virginia and the Carolinas. The company has set up copy-editing and design centers for most of its papers in Lynchburg, Va., and Hickory, N.C.; for the three large papers, it will divide those operations between Tampa and Richmond. None will be done in Winston-Salem.

» via The New York Times

We are human beings; our first responses to anything are dominated not by calculations but by feelings. What Ive and his team understand is that if you have an object in your pocket or hand for hours every day, then your relationship with it is profound, human and emotional. Apple’s success has been founded on consumer products that address this side of us: their products make users smile as they reach forward to manipulate, touch, fondle, slide, tweak, pinch, prod and stroke.