Archive for the ‘Design’ Category

I found this two-part advert on the London Underground intriguing.

LloydsTSB is advertising the use of infographics to display accounts information as a way of differentiation from other banks.

Where this gets interesting is that it puts a management accountancy-type function directly into the bank account. This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

A really simple execution by OTC medicine Otrivine that I saw on a Jubilee train carriage. It’s a nice play on the London tube map which catches the eye.

This was cross-posted from my personal blog.

I ventured out west to the Saatchi Gallery the other week and discovered their contemporary art shop. The way they define contemporary art also includes product design. The work of Korean designer Seongyong Lee caught my eye. Lee’s Plytube collection uses laminates and veneers inspired by cardboard tubing to create incredibly light but strong furniture.

I also liked Lee’s ‘rules of design’ which seemed to channel Dieter Rams for the art community:

• I like things that look simple but have thorough consideration behind
• I like things that are good to look at and can be used intuitively
• I respect the power of hand craft
• I respect the wisdom of mass-production

Lee has the talent to be the next Charles and Ray Eames if the politics of art versus design could be left aside for Lee to work with someone like Vitra or Herman Miller. I managed to break my DSLR earlier in the day so had to make do with taking these pictures on an iPhone. This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

I was inspired to write this post whilst traveling into the office on the tube. If you haven’t been to London the Central Line at rush hour is pretty similar to this experience in Tokyo...

I usually treat my iPhone as a messaging device and turn off the vibration function, so that I don’t become a slave to my email. The vibration has a similar reaction to me that a baby crying has to a mother, an almost instinctive reaction to check on it.

I use a Mophie battery pack to give me a decent amount of usable phone life untethered from a charging cable. So I got on to the train and suddenly my phone started to vibrate in the pocket of my soft-shell.

I eventually managed to squeeze my arm in there, pull the phone out and get into the home screen where it told me it was running under its own power and that the Mophie battery pack was no longer charging it.

I acknowledged the message, put it back in my pocket where it then kept on vibrating every two minutes to let me know exactly the same thing. I have virtually 100 per cent charge on the device so the alert so there obviously wasn’t any urgency for the message. More people got on the train and this became as annoying as having an itch that you can’t scratch.

20 minutes went by and I was thoroughly pissed, as Apple’s UI had annoyed me and reminded me how crappy the battery life is on an iPhone 3GS. Now Apple isn’t the greatest sinner on this and it isn’t a new phenomena, I know people over two decades ago who used to be enraged by the Sad Mac symbol (shown when something has gone horribly wrong with the computer on start-up for Macs prior to OSX) which they thought was making fun of their situation.

But it just goes to show how user interactions should be thought about in such a way as to not exasperate or initiate customer frustrations. This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

I have been giving some thought to the Ruder Finn UK presence, my ideas are at an early stage and thought I would ask you, the blog reader what you would like to see changed on ruderfinn.co.uk. What are the sites that you currently like out there? Keep it clean and constructive. Feel free to comment below or drop me an email.

I came across this project at MIT Media Lab by Aaron Zinman. I really like the way it represents what a search term is about rating it against a pre-defined taxonomy of categories. The process of scanning the data was transparent and facinating to watch.

I took a screen shot whilst the process was running.

Here is the finished article. This is reposted from my personal blog renaissance chambara.

I suffer from back pain periodically (hey I’m getting old, these things happen), and I use this medicine from Hong Kong to massage into the painful spot. Wong To Yick Wood Lock is the bomb, kind of like a nuclear deep heat which hits the spot and straight burns out the pain.

The reason why I am writing about it here is the contradiction in the packaging design. Which on one level seems old-school and conservative. However given that the world’s best printing industry is across the border in Shenzhen, it would be ridiculously easy for the unscrupulous to come up with an identical facsimile.

So they trick the cardboard box out with a holographic film (thats the shimmer you can see in the pictures.) A complete contradiction in design wrapped up in this one set of packaging.

This is cross-posted from my personal blog renaissance chambara.