A few months back Victor posted about the difficulty of getting approval to do design research in a project. This reminded me of Don Norman’s post last year about realizing that research actually does not belong in design.
Vic is right–Its hard to convince managers to okay research. His commenters though are wrong. Euphemisms […]

The “username” and “password” fields are required. Yet the the instructions are to absolutely NOT fill out these fields. So “username” and “password” are both required and prohibited.
This is the the UI equivelent of Jacques Carelman’s “Coffeepot for Masochists.” Well done guys!

A couple months ago John over at Brand Autopsy posted a series of simple images from Zag Book that brilliantly illustrates the differences between advertising, marketing, pr and branding.
Your brand is your story, your myth. At its best your brand captivates and fires the imagination, it inspires and seduces people, it marshals markets and […]

I recently had a request from a loyal reader about my attempt to make a custom closet. So here it is…
I’ve been slowly working on renovating my condo. One of the big issues for the reno is maximizing storage space, because there ain’t much of it. So I invited 5 closet builders […]

I live in a part of Vancouver you’d probably call skidrow. It’s denizens are beggars, junkies, strung out prostitutes, the homeless, and the mentally ill. Most of these folks own nothing and have no income. And most of them depend on the neighbourhood’s various social services for bare survival. Most Vancouverites […]

I nice intro to Don Norman and his work. Whether you’ve only heard his name or you one many of his book, this is a nice short intro to Norman and his rather common-sensical work. Thanks to Niti for this one.

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To carry the original analogy into music, Frank Sinatra is a stylist, while Tom Waits is a designer.
Sinatra was a marvellous stylist. He was able to take virutally any song and make it sound like his. But he never wrote the lyrics, and he never wrote the music. Creatively Sinatra […]

Here is another example of the stylists aesthetic of complexity–as opposed to the designer’s philosophy of simplicity (check out Stylists != Designers).

This is a gorgeous diagram, filled with nuanced shadings, a subtle and tasteful color palette (I especially like the orange and green combination), captivating visual patterns, and seductive symetries. Its also an excersize […]

Band & Olufsen have release a new phone called “Serene”. Too bad it looks an aweful lot like those cheap travel clocks and PIM devices you find places like the Sharper Image and airline product catalogs. Of course Serene is about $1200 more than those landfill items.
B&O’s stylistic goals are pretty clear. […]

Last week Daniel over at Innovation Zen posted about the differences between continental and anglo-saxon capitalism. This brought up an old issue for me about the tension between open and closed systems.
The Financial Times has a great article on this question. If we hadn’t created the internet 15 years ago, would […]