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We love design. We love it for how it looks, how it makes us feel, and how it shapes the world around us. Here, we write about things that inspire us. Maybe they'll inspire you, too.
In the past decade, there have been thousands upon thousands of scientific and technological advancements, though arguably, the largest single trend within all of these steps forward was the democratization of the tools of production – putting in the hands of amateurs the tools that previously only the professionals could afford.
That simple fact has changed almost every industry on the planet, and has made obsolete a few more. But practically any industry that relied on specialized equipment versus specialized expertise has seen a seismic shift in innovation that caused by providing tools of creation and distribution to the masses.
It’s especially true in the realm of the Web. No, not just anyone with a keyboard and a can of Rockstar can write code, but the huge code repositories and libraries that exist today make it easier than ever to build the next hit game, app, social network or tool. Social networks, viewed by many as the shiny object of the week a mere five years ago, now provide APIs to allow apps to easily integrate a social layer to allow sharing and enhance the user experience.
When everyone has access to the same tools, what’s the competitive advantage?
The answer is design. Yes, this industry is another one that was disrupted by the proliferation of tools like Photoshop and digital cameras, but unlike many other industries, the industry embraced the shift. Kids with Photoshop meant design students with a better eye, digital layouts meant more efficiencies and digital photography meant quality imagery for a fraction of the cost.
Yesterday, Facebook bought Instagram for one billion dollars. The more important point may be that they didn’t buy Hipstamatic – the competitor app that’s pretty much the exact same thing. The big difference? Even though Hipstamatic was first to market, Instagram had a better UI, better design and better social features. In short, the experience was better, so more people used it. Certainly, there were other factors at play, but one could make the case that in this instance, better design was worth $1,000,000,000 – give or take a few million.
It’s nearly impossible to quantify the value of great design. But, in a world where the barrier to entry is so small that the value of an unexecuted idea approaches zero, all that matters is the experience. The look, the brand, the way it works, the way it connects, the way it makes us feel. Yes, your business needs to have a great idea and needs to work, but that’s just the first level. It’s no longer good enough to be good enough – you need to stand apart from the competition.
Design is the differentiator. Returns may vary, but it’s one of the most important investments you’ll make in the success of a business.
A pizzeria in Dubai has launched a refrigerator magnet that literally orders pizza to your door with the push of a button. Thankfully this brilliant idea hasn’t made it to Ottawa yet, or I’d be kissing my summer weight-loss plan good bye.
The “VIP Fridge Magnet” is a pizza box-shaped device that’s connected to Red Tomato Pizza via the the Bluetooth connection on your smartphone. Push the button to order your usual, and you get a text message confirmation right after. You can update your pizza order online at any time which then syncs to the device. Talk about efficiency.
Many “Smart Appliances” have recently been in the spotlight for embracing modern technology. Samsung just unveiled a refrigerator that plays music and displays your Google Calendar. LG announced a refrigerator that helps you maintain your diet, notifies you when you’ve run out of certain groceries, and has a feature that can chill a bottle of wine in eight minutes — something I need to stay far, far away from.
Nowadays, we don’t just communicate with brands through phone and internet, something as simple as a magnet can be a communications device. Designing an experience doesn’t necessarily have be through web or print anymore. Brands used to have only a few media to worry about — now the path for innovation is practically limitless. The future of connected devices has the opportunity to capture a large, emerging market if companies manage to develop comprehensive, integrated solutions.
Just imagine a magnet on your fridge that hails a cab — you can finally remove the drunks from your home at 4am and happily pass out on your couch beside your empty box of pizza.
If you’re like most creative workers, you probably feel pangs of self-doubt that get in the way of both creativity and productivity.
Enter: science. It turns out that what you need isn’t another cup of coffee or to steal a few of your kid’s Ritalin – it’s a transcranial direct current. In other words, electricity applied directly to your brain.
An article in New Scientist outlines research being conducted at Advanced Brain Monitoring in California to use currents applied to the brain to enhance mood, concentration, and ability to focus, or “flow.”
If you’re good at something (and I hope you are… it’s kind of depressing if you’re not), you know that feeling of flow when you’re in the zone and you can see through the Matrix. It can happen whether you’re working on something important or playing a video game, but, as most people know… it’s hard to force if you’re not feeling it.
Here’s the best thing about it – all you need to do this yourself is a 9-volt battery and some electrodes, and you’ve got yourself an honest-to-goodness DIY thinking cap. Or, if you’re not the handy type, and you have access to a prescription pad, you can buy one ready-made.
(Disclaimer: Our lawyer says to tell you not to shoot electricity through your head.)
Such a technology does, however, raise some interesting moral questions. Will this create a divide between haves and have-nots among students and workers? If these results continue, will businesses force employees to don electric hats to leverage their full potential? I’m not going to lie – I’m thinking about it a little.
This is really just experiments at this point, but it does raise an interesting thought. As technology advances, it starts to move from a thing we use to a thing we are. I think we’re starting to see the beginnings of that now. I can only imagine how technology like this will be a part of our lives in 20 years.
 Guy actually scans a QR code
Every year around this time, my Twitter feed gets destroyed by 100,000 nerds all polluting the social media waves with prattle from #SxSW. This year, I’m happy to say that our tweets were also among that prattle.
To be honest, SxSW is not something I’ve ever desperately wanted to attend, but since we had two international clients launching projects that we worked on, and because Austin is one of the best cities in the U.S., we decided to head down.
If you’ve never been, it’s a weird experience that balances some of the most world changing stuff you’ve ever seen with the most trivial in the most chaotic way imaginable. Once you get oriented, however, you can start to focus on the positive, and there was a lot of that. Here are some of the things that we came away with.
Creativity is an act of worship.
Rainn Wilson’s talk was unexpectedly amazing. You don’t expect Dwight Schrute to blow your mind, but his talk on the importance of creativity and of using the gift we’ve been given as human beings to be creative – in art, in science, in how we approach every day problems – is an act of worship, regardless of your particular spiritual inclination.
It’s possible for one person to change the world.
Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, saw a problem in the world. 50% of the world’s diseases could be cured by pharmaceuticals, and the other 50% could be eliminated just by providing clean drinking water to everyone on Earth. So, he built a machine that converted “anything wet” into 100% pure medical-grade water and worked with Coca-Cola to distribute it across the world. I’m sure it didn’t make him a million dollars, but he took the step of addressing a problem head-on and working to solve it.
Technology will soon cease to be a thing we use and become a thing we are.
If you’ve never heard Ray Kurzweil speak, change that immediately. He invented the flatbed scanner, text-to-speech, speech-to-text (which pretty much makes him Siri’s granddaddy) and predicted a good percentage of the technological advancements we have today… in 1981. He sees a world where computers 100x as powerful as your iPhone can be made the size of a blood cell, and where humans can be so far advanced by technology, the idea of disease could be a thing of the past.
Overall, the theme of the conference seemed to be about the importance of creativity to the advancement, or perhaps survival, of the human race.
Also, I would be remiss in not pointing out the Coyote Ugly is an accidentally amazing bar.
 Aaron James Draplin / Graphic Designer / Portland OR
The OCC and NA are happy to announce that Portland-based graphic designer Aaron Draplin of the Draplin Design Co. is coming to O-Town on April 19th to talk about design, life, junkin’, and why a simple logo on a 1950s oil-can can take us somewhere we long to be.
We’re excited like it’s christmas morning. Limited tickets are available right here so get ‘em before they’re gone. Update: This event is SOLD OUT. That didn’t take long.
Special thanks to talented designer and all around good-guy Steve St. Pierre for slowly but surely making Ottawa relevant.
It’s Hot Dog Day at the NA office. Buckets of Tang are ready, mystery meat awaits steamage. We’ve got the classic condiments, 40 buns, and one designer that insists on veggie dogs so she can “eat burgers tonight” which absolutely nobody is cool with. Nobody.
I never thought a thermostat would be something that I’d be proud to put on my wall. Tony Fadell, former Apple employee who oversaw eighteen generations of the iPod, recently announced The Nest Learning Thermostat.
After about a week of usage, Nest learns your behavioural patterns and begins to adjust automatically to the appropriate temperature levels. It has a combination of sophisticated sensors and algorithms that allows it to create a personalized schedule that adapts to your changing life. For instance, its 150° wide-angle activity sensors know when to set the device to “Auto-Away.” Its sensors detect your approach and adjust its light accordingly. Its Wi-Fi compatibility tracks current weather conditions to help it better understand how the outside temperature affects your energy usage. Another awesome feature is that with Wi-Fi and an internet connection at home, you can monitor and adjust the temperature in real-time from anywhere using a laptop, smartphone or tablet.
The ability to program a thermostat to reduce heating or cooling while away from home can significantly cut your heating and cooling bill. Fadell has told several publications that users can expect to cut off all the way up to 30% off of their utility bills.
And it doesn’t end there. In addition to its intelligence, it is also an elegantly stylish piece.
“If you don’t make it look beautiful, people don’t cherish it”, Fadell told Wired Magazine.
It’s aesthetic is clean and simple — just the way we like it. It consists of a round shape with a stainless steel ring along the perimeter that acts as a dial which you can rotate to increase or decrease the temperature and a bright LCD screen that turns blue when cooling and red when it’s heating. A small leaf icon subtly indicates users toward energy efficient settings.
Personally, I feel that this is a great idea and I hope to see this product become very successful. Apple is one of the many companies that has taught us the importance of strong design through their products. It warms my heart to see other companies adopting this motive and bringing good design into every day mundane objects such as a thermostat.
Cheers to yet another example of beautiful design – taking over the world one product at a time.
Check out the introductory video.
What is the value of beauty? That’s a philosophical question we may not ever be able to answer, but in an interesting study out of University College London, they found that looking at famous, and ostensibly “beautiful” works of art stimulated the same neurological response as falling in love.
Subjects were shown paintings including The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli, Bathing at La Grenouillere by Claude Monet (above) and Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral. Professor Semir Zeki, the neurologist leading the research, noted that there was an instant increase in blood flow to areas of the brain usually associated with romantic love, triggering a dopamine response.
“There have been very significant new advances in our understanding of what happens in our brains when we look at works of art,” he said.”We have recently found that when we look at things we consider to be beautiful, there is increased activity in the pleasure reward centres of the brain. There is a great deal of dopamine in this area, also known as the ‘feel-good’ transmitter. Essentially, the feel-good centres are stimulated, similar to the states of love and desire. The reaction was immediate.”
So what does all that mean? I’m not a neuroscientist, but if I were to simplify all of this into one sentence: Looking at pretty things makes you feel good.
I’m not sure we needed science to tell us that, but there it is.
So what does that mean for design? Well, I’m not sure you can replace The Birth of Venus with a FedEX logo and get the same response, but I think the basic principle remains the same. We have a natural physiological reaction to beauty, and though there is no mention of it in the article, I’m going to assume we have a similar negative reaction to ugly.
The advertising industry has always known that they can create emotion through advertising – it’s their bread and butter. But somehow, that idea that imagery and text can be powerful is often forgotten by businesses whose only concern is safe design and make the logo bigger, and the cottage industry of amateur designers who have cropped up to serve those clients.
This isn’t a clarion call to achieve fine art status in every insurance company website we design, but rather food for thought. We can create real emotional reaction to our work by aiming higher and exchanging “safe” for “beautiful” when we’re conceptualizing. If nothing else, this study should give us a real, tangible reason for aiming higher in our work.
There are a few things people have said to me over my career in advertising that have stuck with me. One of those things is something that my first boss when I started out as a lowly account coordinator was “Business is not a democracy.”
It’s an important point, and certainly one that needed to be made to me as a 20-year old kid who was too smart for my own good, but not smart enough to realize it. Businesses are the very antithesis of democracy – for the most part, they have a singular goal, and are lead by one person or body. Decisions are made not by the will of the people who work there, but by what will bring the business unit closer to that goal.
Now, let’s consider the design process. I’ve seen many examples of companies that attempt to bring every conceivable opinion into the design process just to make sure nobody feels left out or that nothing gets missed. I.T. needs to make sure of one thing, H.R. needs more space, P.R. and marketing have different ideas of what needs to happen, and someone on the board saw something on another site that “we need to have.” I’ve even seen organizations present design comps to their entire membership for feedback. It ended predictably.
While this type of radical inclusion may make you want to sing Kumbaya around a campfire, it’s also the most likely culprit for bad design. As soon as you start incorporating feedback from anyone with an opinion, the design process starts to rot. As one of the advertising greats, Hal Riney put it, “I’d rather deal with a tyrant than a committee any day. Committees are there to spread blame, not take chances.”
That’s not to say that different points of view aren’t valuable. Even the most despotic of dictator has trusted advisors. This advice is invaluable in the discovery phase of the project, and multiple points of view often force you to reframe the problem. But – and here’s the important bit – when it comes to design, someone needs to be in charge. Strong decisions make good design – compromises do not.
Of course, the goal of this is to be a benevolent dictator – not a tyrant. Your responsibility is still to your end users, who vote through their actions if not their words. The metrics you collect will tell you what they’re voting for by showing you what’s popular and what’s not. If you’re basing your decisions on the wants of anyone other than the will of your people, you’re playing politics. In the real world, that’s a recipe for a revolution – but you’re not dealing with subjects, you’re dealing with customers. It’s unlikely they’ll start a movement- they’ll just move on.
I try to make as much time for events as I can, to meet interesting people, to listen to people with different points of view and to generally squeeze as much juice out of my mind grapes as I can. One of the events I always enjoy, and I’m not just saying this because I happen to organize it, too, is Social Media Breakfast Ottawa.
Since we started the event, we’ve intentionally strayed away from social media because while there’s a lot to be said about social media, there is only so many times you can hear it. As a result, we’ve tried to draw from a different group of speakers with varying backgrounds to shape how we think about digital marketing in general.
Today’s speaker – David Nicholson – spoke about game theory, and the “gameification” of business. It was a great talk with a lot of interesting tidbits, but as is usually the case, the most interesting moment of the talk for me came over dinner the night before.
While discussing the new landscape of game development, David mentioned that online game developers are spending huge dollars on data analysts to guide the development of their games. For giants like Farmville or Frontierville, the entire job is to take a loss leader (the game) and generate money through virtual goods, which means that creating the best game dynamic in the world, the best new level, the best twist on gameplay doesn’t matter in the least unless it drives the desired action. If your users don’t use it, it’s a waste of time, plain and simple… even if you think they should use it the way you lovingly crafted it for them.
Think about how we create websites – how we create experiences – for our users, our customers, our members. More often than not, we create based on how we want people to use our site, rather than how they actually use it.
The reason is because humans are hard-wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain. It feels good to make the logo bigger, to add more calls-to-action and make sure that there are lots of links to our website in all of our emails, but how much does that actually move the bottom line?
Conversely, poring over data, challenging our assumptions and listening to our customers is hard work and can tell us we’re doing the wrong thing, that we don’t understand what our users want, and make us feel bad and bad at our job.
The trick is that the games industry relies on these changes to directly impact the bottom line. They don’t get paid unless their experience generates the right behaviour to make dollar signs happen. Marketing is closely related to the bottom line, but the path from A to B is far more circuitous, so we’re much freer to indulge our marketing id, and ignore the marketing superego who’s just begging you to spend a little more time looking at your analytics.
Before you can create great design, you need to know where you want it to lead, and how you’ll know when you get there. You can choose to be finished anytime you like – the question is whether you wait until you’re happy or until your users are happy.
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