Bow in the Presence of Greatness in ‘Who said it? Kayne West or Your Creative Director?’

I have a really strong allergy to unfounded claims of greatness. It has developed over the years from seeing too many people who claimed that they are an ‘innovator’ or ‘visionary’ while they wouldn’t know a big idea if it landed on their head. For those same reasons it is no secret that I can’t stand Kanye West and that the design and fashion industries give him any forum to express his extreme lack of talent in those fields. That being said, I am also self-aware enough to know that a big part of the reason why I have such a distaste for Kanye is that my ego is big enough that it kills me to see someone getting that much press for not knowing what they are talking about. Creative Directors also tend to have overbearing egos and an inflated senses of self-worth that can run people the wrong way. So today when I saw the site ‘Who said it? Kanye...

What the hell happened to Target.com?

Like most people in the U.S. I went online today to try to find some deals for the holidays gifts I need to give this year.  I made the rounds of my favorite e-commerce sites and I saved Target.com for last. I do that because for me it has always been the gold standard of e-commerce design. Whenever my team and I are interested to see what other major brands are doing as we design a new site, Target always makes the list. We admire them so much because they have always been able to blend fantastic information architecture, usability and visual design into a deep and complicated site. But today something was different. Something was wrong – horrible wrong. At first I thought maybe the site had been hacked and I raced to check the site in multiple browsers desperately not wanting to believe my eyes. Then the cold truth slowly dawned on me – Target had re-designed their site...

Weekly inspirations: November 18, 2013

Here are the things that I think are worth reading and checking out this week:   Google Reveals Its 9 Principles of Innovation Ever wonder what makes the Google one of the top companies for productivity and creativity? Recently Google’s chief social evangelist, Gopi Kallayil, explained their nine core principles of innovation. While all the principles may not work for every company, it is interesting to see their philosophy laid out like this. Read the article here. A Brand Logo That Morphs Over Time The design firm Ammunition’s designer Brett Wickens created a fascinating new logo that evolves over time to capture the idea of interconnected networks. It is an interesting approach to creating a brand. Read the article and see the logo here. Check out this weeks inspiration from Stephen Gates Blog.Click To TweetPowered By CoSchedule A Look Inside the Mercedes-Benz...

Pharrell Williams ‘Happy’ is the World’s First 24 Hour Music Video

After an interesting year super producer, art collector and fashion icon Pharrell Williams just released a 24-hour interactive music video for “Happy,” at 24hoursofhappy.com. The video and interactive experience features a constantly shifting and seamlessly transitioning set of hundreds of people singing the catchy song. You can either run in real-time or interact with a clock interface where users can click on specific “times” to skip around the experience. Other interactive elements play with the 24-hour concept like the comments which are time-stamped and can be viewed in time with the live video as an overlay. If it hadn’t been so carefully put together, you’d think it was an attempt to one-up the recent interactive video for Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” but this took too much time for that to be true. I found myself...

Zappos and Google show off how to deal with brand critics

I am constantly fascinated to see how brands react to adversity and critics.  This week brought two really interesting a good  examples from two major brands.   Zappos.com vs Kanye West Kanye West slammed Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh during a podcast with Bret Easton Ellis this week by saying ”I got into this giant argument with the head of Zappos that he’s trying to tell me what I need to focus on. Meanwhile, he sells all this sh*t product to everybody, his whole thing is based off of selling sh*t product,” West said in the interview. We will put aside the obvious massive hole in this argument that Zappo’s doesn’t actually make any of the products they sell and move on to Tony Hsieh and Zappos’ responds. They quickly by tweeting “Yes, it’s true that we sell (expletive) product,” with a link to a page on their site that was a toilet,...

inFORM: A digital experience that lets you Interact with real objects

Digital is moving so fast these days that I am constantly looking at emerging technologies to try to keep some type of vision on where the industry is going. The other day I saw a project called inFORM from the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab that is one of the more interesting creations I’ve seen in a while. They call it a ‘Dynamic Shape Display’ which means that it is a table that can let you interact with digital information or let remote users manipulate physical objects. It is that second feature that blew my mind when you see someone in another location manipulating physical objects through the device. The possibilities of what something like this could mean for the future of industrial design or digital interfaces is...

Weekly inspirations: November 11, 2013

Here are the things that I think are worth reading and checking out this week:   Type Your Own Animated Movie Plotagon is a free and ingenious alternative to the traditional screenwriting process. Instead of just writing the script it combines the process with 3-D animation software. So as you type actions, lines and settings for your characters, those characters will actually play out your vision on-screen, complete with auto-directed cuts. I thought it was genius because they are basically treating each line of the script like a line of code that runs the animation. You can read more about Plotagon here or try it for free here. Chip Kidd Shares His Wisdom With The Pre-Teen Set In his new book, Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design, Kidd shares this wisdom with the pubescent set, explaining the basics of typography, form, function, color, branding with playful narration and...

Nest Freezes Out Customers with Latest App Update

A little over  year ago I upgrade all the thermostats in my house to Nest thermostats and have been in love ever since. But I work up in Los Angeles this morning and went to check on my house in New York City to find that they had updated the app that controls the thermostats. Then some weird happened, something that had never happened before and something that really freaked me out. I had an experience with Nest that was badly designed. I love Nest because their founders Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers brought all their experience and attention to detail designing the iPod and iPod software at Apple to Nest.  So every aspect of the packaging, product design and apps were simple, elegant and extremely easy to use.  This why seeing an app that was so badly designed really shook me up this morning. The app has always been based around a simple interface with Home which would control setting...

Google Glass Gen 1 Final Thoughts

Time has flown by and I’ve been living and working with Google Glass for the past five months. I’m about to trade-in my first generate Google Glass hardware for their newer second generation hardware so I thought it would be a good time to update my first impressions. Some of the good and bad points remain the same but there are also a number of new things that have surprised and frustrated me over the past few months.   The Good   Immediacy of information  One of the things I love most about Glass is that it is a new form factor that demands a new way of interacting with mobile technology and it demands a new way of thinking about app design. I continue to believe that if apps are going to be successful on Glass than they need to be experiences that are designed in a completely new way to take into account that interactions on Glass around an immediacy of...

Weekly inspirations: November 4, 2013

Here are the things that I think are worth reading and checking out this week:   How Tesla Protects The Romance Of Driving While Disrupting The Industry I am increasingly interested in the car maker Tesla as I see more and more dealerships popping up in malls, more of their cars on the road and recently read about their national network of supercharging stations that will allow their cars to travel across the country. This article is an interview with their designer Franz Von Holzausen on how thy are trying to revolutions an industry while keeping its traditions and romance. Read the article here. Why Are So Many Social Media Managers Dipshits? I am constantly amazed at how badly major global brands use social media to connect with their consumers. This article with images taken from Condescending Corporate Brand Facebook Page (which I love) highlights some of the lazy ways these...