Designers and CEOs

I had lunch with Laurent Bolli of Bread and Butter today, and he pointed to an article about Metadesign’s CEO talking about the complicated *g* relationship between design and business.

It is a short and interesting piece. Bill Hill is putting words on something most clients feel while working with designers and vice versa: the lack of a common language, of tangible things to articulate discussions around. This leads to blunt statements like “clients are stupid” or “designers don’t understand what a business is”. Being from both worlds, Hill’s view is both refreshing and interesting.

From inspiration to investment

Designers and their clients aren’t in the same room. Even if they were, it is highly unlikely that they would even be able to speak the same language. As long as designers speak the language of emotion while business leaders expect to hear metrics, there’s going to be a problem. CEOs want to hear about Return on Investment. Designers want to talk about Return on Inspiration.

Now replace the word designer with programmer and read the article again. It applies a little isn’t it?

Cool Hunting.ch

La première agence Suisse romande de cool hunting¹ vient d’apparaître à Lausanne. Un nom un peu bizarre, mais les collections ont l’air pas mal. myPlayground

¹ J’adore cette expression. Définition: trouver des choses à l’intersection du design, de la culture, et de la technologie, qui excitent l’imagination et inspirent la créativité. La reine du domaine est sans aucun doute Régine qui viendra d’ailleurs parler à LIFT06.

Cool Hunting.ch

The first swiss cool hunting agency (as far as I know…) just appeared in Lausanne. Weird name, but cool stuff: myPlayground

Hardware et interface utilisateur

The Register: Mobile war smoulders around internet UI

On analyse toujours la guerre Motorola contre Nokia du point de vue du design. Mais l’interface utilisateur devient désormais primordiale dans le choix des acheteurs.

C’est bien de voir que les consommateurs s’éduquent et ne se font plus avoir par de magnifiques coquilles vides. Les critères d’achat se sont complexifiés, chacun veut désormais un téléphone qui soit non seulement beau mais aussi facile à utiliser et à synchroniser.
L’importance de l’interface est enfin reconnue par tous!

Hardware vs User Interface

The Register: Mobile war smoulders around internet UI

Most of the analysis of the handset war between Nokia and Motorola centers on their device designs [...]. Just as important to the user’s choice, however, is the user interface

Consumers have definitely moved beyond hardware design as the only decision factor in their buying process. Usability and device synchronization are just as important from what I see around me. Good to see user interfaces finally getting the attention they deserve

BBB

Le salon Bread and Butter Barcelona n’est pas directement intéressant pour moi mais ça avait tout de même l’air hallucinant quand je vois les photos faites par les gens de TriBeCa (qu’il faudra que j’aille voir en passant à Paris).
Note pour mes b&b à moi: vous vous êtes fait piquer votre nom!

Unlearn best practices

Disclaimer: I did not do extensive research on this matter, I am not an expert in CSS/RSS and I do understand that RSS is a format that was not meant to contain style information. This article reflects the view of an editor facing a simple layout problem and trying to work around it. I’m sure you will still find some reasons for flaming me so don’t worry ;-)

I am trying to work around what was, until RSS feeds, the best practice for web sites design: a strict separation of content and presentation.

Problem: on this blog I use this really cool box around quotes to make them stand out.

The style is in a separate file at the root of the server. When posts appear in the context of the site everything is fine. But when the post is in the RSS feed the style information is lost and readers get very, very confused.

Solution: re-embed the style directly into the posts? Will it work this way? Go back to how I worked in 1994, unlearn some of what I thought was a definitive truth on web development. As Stefano once told me (I think he was quoting Alvin Toeffler):

Food for thought.

White fade technique

It seems the yellow fade technique promoted by the folks at 37 signals is inspiring designers. Check out the neat fade out at pub sub (click on the “Enter your keywords here” text area).

Why do this: designers teach us to show transitions to users between state changes. In real life nothing ever changes radically in a millisecond so interfaces should be the same. The visual buffer Matt Web is talking about.

What’s next: instead of designing web pages as “binary” things (this is on or off) we can now have in between states that can be displayed for a controlled amount of time.