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The London Design Festival and V&A Logos

The London Design Festival 2011 ends this weekend, at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Brilliant logos.

Emotionally Detached

You can’t improve a design when you’re emotionally attached to past decisions. Improvements come from flexibility and openness.

            – Ryan Singer

Being process-oriented, not product-driven, is the most important and difficult skill for a designer to develop. [It means] removing yourself from prideful investment in your projects and being slow to fall in love with your ideas.

            – Matthew Frederick, 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

Awesome Firefox for Tablet

Nice design for this Android tablet version of Firefox. I really like the landscape tab interface, above.

Peeling the Onion

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there.

– Steve Jobs

Asking for Complications

Complications are mechanical watches that are incredibly difficult to design and build. The reason being: they're asking for it! They try to solve many–and difficult–problems at the same time. Complications are seen as a challenge for pure prestige, a celebration of craftsmanship and virtuosity. The more complicated the solution, the more admirable.
 

These features, once invented by scientists for good reasons, have kept beautiful names: Display of leap year, Equation of time, Display of Easter date, Display of true local solar time, Moon phases, Tourbillon... We surely need that every day!

While we, poor UI and software engineers, struggle to design systems for simplicity and ease of development, these fellows somehow have the opposite objective. In their industry, a remarkable design will comprise as many individual parts as possible, in order to implement as many useless functions as can be imagined.

How fair is that? :-)

Requirements Proliferation

Requirements proliferation must be fought, by both birth control and infanticide.

– F. P. Brooks, The Design of Design

The Perfect Weather Application?

Searched "Weather London" on an iPhone this morning. Got this clear and simple interface, where you move a slider to see how the sky changes from early morning to tonight. Some rain expected, but not until 8pm. Good, I'm going to cycle to the office.

Nothing revolutionary, but exactly what I need for my daily use. Great products are not necessarily packed with innovations. Making existing things work better, more accurately useful and usable, can be as exciting and rewarding as the act of creating something totally new.

 

Google+ Innovative (and Fun) Feedback Feature

 

Click Highlight. Select all the page zones on which you want to report an issue (the word 'Public' in my example above).

Click Black out. Select all the elements you don't want Google to see. They're covered with black blocks.

Describe the problem. Preview. Submit!

Ticketless

My first steps with easyJet.

"a ticketless airline"... That sounds pretty cool and smart. Yes, after all, why would we need a ticket, in 2011, when the airline already has everything they need to let you board?

I've boarded many times with a so-called "electronic ticket" that I never had with me, and that was never an issue. When everything is in the system already, having an electronic ticket or having no ticket at all sounds like the same thing to me. Or am I missing anything?

But I never realised that saying "We are a ticketless airline" would make it sound cooler.

Too many artificial concepts in this world, maybe. Don't bother people with 'implementation details' when they don't need to know details.