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First of all, thanks to the people out there who’ve said nice things about this blog. It’s good to have friends with a decent sense of humor. For those who couldn’t finish War and Peace but still like to know things, then this blog is for you! Grammar, idioms, parsing, making sense…that’s all for real writers! That’s why blogging is so fun for us —we’ve relaxed the rules. I’ve always enjoyed writing, so I won’t let something like proper English keep me from tapping away. Who wins? We all do!
Some simple rules to blogging: Sentences relate to other sentences (paragraphs too), don’t be redundant, keep it short, edit many many times…as many times as you please, and lastly develop a personality. See how easy this is?
So, how is this blog funny and where’s the design? Well, funny is debatable and true I haven’t shown any pictures. Understand though that design is not as subjective as you might think. Design isn’t about pretty pictures on a poster. Design is about understanding your environment then communicating unambiguous information. IDEO designer Tim Brown, says, “Design is the interface between the user and the innovation.” One might go on to say that good design is responsible for the success of every cultural artifact ever invented.
Some examples of why design is important.
There are visual principles to making sure we get it right. Information must be displayed properly. Maps, signs, charts, instructions, buildings, dishwashers, bridges, books, magazines, computers, databases, websites, cinema, products… All continue through space and time because of good design. Simply put, users need to know how to use things.
In her work, Inventing the Medium, Janet Murray, suggests that there are four affordances to describing the design space in a digital age. Encyclopedic, spatial, procedural, and participatory. This is the context for all of our design choices today. “Thinking of the potential for any project to more fully exploit each of the four properties can help us to discover new directions that we may have previously overlooked.” These four affordances, can help us better understand agency and communicate the objects for which we are designing.
Encyclopedic: Understand that the computer has become its own medium through the convergence of media. Cinema, photography, text, image have made the designer’s job significantly more complex by the sheer amount of information available.
Spatial: An evolution in information organization has caused us to rethink our ideas of real-world spaces. For example, graphical user interface (GUI) has taken our real-world ideas to one that occupies a world not just printed but also include computer bytes, phones and websites.
Procedural: Procedural design is what makes up the rules of behavior. The media represents a procedural property and its ability is to represent and execute conditional behaviors. An application of this would be; how we represent complexity through abstractions.
Participatory: What is the relationship between the participator and the artifact? This can be a complex factor. The designer must script the action of the user and the artifact so that both are meaningful to each other. Is the user experience frustrating, or is it pleasant?
Good design integrates the aesthetic elements that support the artifact while not-so-good design takes away from the desired interaction. Bad design can interfere with agency and cause the artifact to exist no longer.
In the next post we’ll wrap this up with an awesome idea of how to create good design through coherent spaces.
Its late and this post is about branding. I’m here to congratulate Taco Bell (RIP Taco Bell Dog). A few years ago, they (TB) had a public relations nightmare on their hands with a report that their ground beef was at the lowest quality scale allowable for human consumption (on this planet).Ground beef at TB was considered one grade above dog food at Grade D. Ad campaigns were in the gutter and the TB brand was in the toilet. In 2011, the chain had just come off its third year of flat sales with a 1.4% decline. 🙁
However, they’ve turned it around! With over $1billion in sales and year over income growth up a whopping 73%. What saved the chain’s image? Better food quality? Nope. Healthier food options? NO! Surprise! it was saved by the Doritos Locos Tacos. Next up? the Cool Ranch Dorito Loco Taco El Diablo! Surprise again, its the same old shmeat except now on a Dorito.
Normally, I tend to see the lighter side of serious issues. It’s a curse really. In the case of TB, I was poking fun at the food. But, in studying the TB Dorito Locos Tacos campaign… makes me ask “why don’t more brands live mas, and ramp up the branding?”
What happens when you allow your product to become synonymous with dog food? The brand declines. What happens when you don’t allow your brand to stay current? The image suffers. What happens when you ignore social media? Nobody knows who you are (mental availability is crucial to live mas). But what happens when you merge one cool logo with another and sound the victory bell? 78% growth, (200 calories, 390 mg of sodium, and a cure for the common hangover) is what happens baby.
So tonight, i’m celebrating a branding success story (Two-hearted ale in hand). The moral is no matter what you sell, you can still turn it around. Want to be successful? Create a cool logo, gain traction, and merge it with another cool logo. People see what they want to see. Often they see what you want them to see… A spatula of hot steamy cheesy brown-something, served into a delicious logo, all wrapped up in another logo. YUM! So, yeah, for ____’s sakes don’t ____ up the logo! That’s your most important branding tool.
Don’t dwell on what was. Kick your brand into high gear, and for goodness sake, get on board with New Media—because hello! That’s where your consumers hang out. 🙂
Mathematicians, scholars, artists have been fascinated by it for millennia. Leonardo da Vinci used it to study human proportions. It’s how snails design their homes, it’s found in carnivorous plants, tropical cyclones and the spiraling arms of distant galaxies. It is nature’s golden ratio, the mathematic formula for near-perfect proportion.
This 2-Part series explains how savvy marketers will use it to mend the lost art of merchandising.
Because, proportion is what makes things look beautiful. Proportion allows us to cognitively organize what we see into comprehensible chunks or groups. For example, we consider people with well-proportioned faces as beautiful, and shy away from those with poorer proportions. According to Wikipedia, Facial beauty “evokes a widely distributed neural network involving perceptual, decision-making and reward circuits.”… [Facial attraction is] “a quick and low-effort means by which parents and infants form an internal representation, reducing the likelihood that the parent will abandon his/her offspring because of recognition failure.”
Gestalt psychology supports proportion, beauty and recognition theories by stating, “The brain is holistic…with self-organizing tendencies. The human eye sees objects in their entirety before perceiving their individual parts… Gestalt psychology tries to understand the laws of our ability to acquire and maintain stable percepts in a noisy world.” Consumers protect themselves from being bombarded with stimuli by simply “tuning out” or blocking such stimuli from conscious awareness. And they do so out of self-protection.
Merchandising today is a reflection of an unkempt and noisy world. If we want consumers attention, then we need to change our merchandising strategy to reflect natural beauty–not a littered ocean. I propose we throw out the eye chart and other gimmicks and create shelving, displays and products to reflect the golden ratio. There is something in our minds that registers the golden ratio as beautiful. It is the primal language of imagery.
The golden ratio is a fascinating irrational number discovered by the Greeks (or aliens) around the sixth century. Mathematician Euclid often wrote about it in the third century BC. As I stated earlier, the golden ratio is considered near perfect proportion. However we don’t know why it occurs naturally and we don’t know why we can apply it numerically to natural events.
Before we get to Part II, I’d like to first explain the math behind the golden ratio, because it is flat-out-fascinating and irrational. You’ll love how this plays out, I promise! Otherwise, do NOT miss the photos at the end of this post.
The golden ratio expressed algebraically like this (denoted by the Greek lowercase phi ø):
As a line graph, it looks like this:
Using the line graph as a baseline, turn the blue line into a square, then draw a vertical line down the middle of the box, then use that line to draw a green line diagonally to the upper right corner of the box, then use the bottom of that (green) line as an axis point to draw an arch back down to the baseline. You draw the red rectangle next to the blue box. The blue and red combined forms a new overall rectangle — the golden ratio, found everywhere in nature:
The golden ratio rectangle has the proportions of 1:1.618 or 61.8 percent. The red box area of the rectangle has the exact same proportions as the overall rectangle, at 61.8 percent.
You can continue to break up the new part of the rectangle by 61.8 percent, and you can subdivide and rotate this into boxes ad infinitum. Ta-da! This is what makes the golden ratio so fascinating:
But wait! Here’s where it gets fun.
There is another formula called the Fibonacci sequence; which is a series of integers in which each subsequent number is the sum of the two previous numbers, like this: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55…
By dividing a number early in the sequence by it’s following number it produces a percentage of 2/3 (66 percent); later on in the sequence dividing 34/55=61.8 percent!
The Fibonacci sequence overlaid onto the golden ratio produces logarithmic spirals that are indiscernible from one another. Graphically the spirals look like this (each 90 degree turn is about 61.8 percent):
Wonder who this snail’s architect might be?
Near perfect proportion from galaxies to microorganisms, weather events, and even population migration patterns:
Don’t miss Part II. Proportion is not a gimmick. Proportion at retail isn’t an arbitrary add-on. It’s a need to have. For traditional brick and mortar to keep up, then it will need to behave more like the Internet.
The Net doesn’t sit still…every minute of every hour, it is becoming more like brick and mortar. We tend to the network and in turn the network learns about us. Shouldn’t we do the same with retail?
-RKM
Hi friends, recently I wrote an item about how easy it is to blog. “I’ve always enjoyed writing, so I won’t let something like proper English keep me from tapping away” I wrote. Well, apparently there are rules. Like…don’t write too many words… and make a point! Right? And don’t go on forever rambling without structure.
I could just tap away aimlessly all day (and I have) or I could make a point. I choose the latter. The following post will tell you what my blog is about. Bonus! You can apply it to your own writings.
How did I do it? By sitting down to write Editorial Guidelines. This will save us so much trouble and keep us on-point.
1. Write an introduction. Sum up the problem/solution. Personalize the article for yourself. You write for you and your readers. For example:
A few years ago, my employer sent me to New York to attend a design thinking conference… After a week of listening, learning, and participating, I came back to Chicago fully energized. Unfortunately several years later, design thinking still remains a mystery to many of my friends. Why? Obviously I’m not doing something…
Make a mission statement, the following editorial guidelines will serve as…
2. Content Goal
Leaning upon my New Media Studies graduate studies for content and organization of ideas, the main goal is to structure an argument by providing information for design thinking and design concepts. In a thoughtful and creative manner, I will…
I’d like to reader to take away a sense of… (be brutally honest and upfront in how you want the reader to feel).
3. Content Objective
I’d like to reader to act this way… (be brutally honest and upfront in what you want the reader to do).
4. Audience. Who are they?
When explaining design to business people, you often feel the urge to start from the very beginning. However, the best way to talk to my audience is …
Businesspeople. Marketers, Salespeople, Financers, Designers, Colleagues, Friends, and Future Associates, will be my readers.
Identify the types of readers… Because the audience is so broad… Practically every design presentation I’ve ever listened to, seems afraid of humor… if the content is available within the posts, then people will agree with the message. As Marshall McLuhan, would say, “the content of any medium is always another medium” – so, the content in this blog is actually about another medium!
People who don’t think they are designers… wait everyone is creative! …any subject that can be satirized; politics, religion, world events —we can also have fun through design… design is everyday and encompasses everyday…
5. Linking
For goodness sakes, cite references. Everyone knows that knowledge comes from information. It’s how you put it together that is unique. Utilize hyper text; How many Links (two)? Photo’s, articles, video’s etc. But don’t use any of these if not authorized. Pay attention to formatting and style sheets.
Be sure to find out how much your audience will read. Example; keep word count to 500 words. People on the Internet prefer much shorter stories.
6. Persona
Create your own voice… a good way to do this is by creating 3-4 personas of the people you think will read your article. Not only is this recommended, but it is one thing that you absolutely should do. Draw up a one page sheet of who the reader might be. For example:
___________________________________
Reader #1 (photo included)
Who: (have them write one paragraph about themself)
Demographics:
Typical web tasks:
What do you think?
Are you like me, that you think asking a question at the end of a blog is annoying as hell?
Sorry if you were expecting a fashion post, but i’ve moved on…you should too. In the meantime we have more important matters… On a recent afternoon walk, my son Alex and I were discussing architecture and economics, when the conversation turned darker.
It was a simple enough question… “Why is cursing bad” he asked. “hell if I know” I replied. Kidding aside, the reason cursing is wrong is it makes people uncomfortable! I don’t do it in front of my children (much), don’t do it at the office (much), or with friends. But I do use many fun words on Twitter! Granted I only follow three people, but they’re the funniest bunch of _____s I’ve ever seen.
Recently, I’ve been reading a book for my masters program at DePaul University. It’s called “Alone Together” by Sherry Turkle, 2011. This book wonders why we expect more from technology and less from each other. The following paragraphs are a culmination of her thoughtful insights and reviewed from my perspective.
Cursing leads us to my personality dis-order. Online I post family stuff, pictures, ice-cream, trumpet practice, and occasional selfies. On Twitter, I curse like a sailor and re-tweet NFL vulgarities. On Linked-In I’m passive-aggressive professional. At home, I’m comfortable relaxed and wise. Then at work I’m passive-aggressive professional again—WHY? How will I keep all these personalities apart? What if I forget and tweet images of Cap’n Crunch to my boss? “Oh bother” —swears Pooh; lets dig deeper.
Before social media, your image consisted of “please don’t ask me what I do on weekends.” Image was genuinely inescapable and steadfast protected. Face to face conversations are what mattered most. When you meet someone and look them in the eye–you realize that life is real. But on the internet, image is crafted. When we text, skype, post, and email, we communicate with robots. Essentially we’re multi-tasking and we’re taking care of the network, in return the network learns about us…
On the net we create avatars to project a certain type of image. We set a stage to gain audience then perform with our pre-determined, and carefully crafted up-to-date personality. On the net we can have talented children, we can look younger or older, we’re smarter, faster, more powerful — bionic! We are traveller’s, we’re too busy to eat, we eat, we’re sexy, mysterious, we’re adventurous and socially adept. The net is a tool for the constant and methodical melioration of our image… One day I aspire to become my avatar!
Look at my handsome profile..that is me…right? It’s a slightly blurry version (from a distance), but only because that’s me in action!
We love social media. But only because our lives are so darn busy! Net conversations are efficient and easy! Texts are pre-thought up with perfectly crafted responses. People pause an instant to respond with just the perfect reply. Texting is way easier than an actual conversation. Real interactions are difficult and require too much of a commitment. Telephones are the new paperweight. During the course of a day I get a hundred emails, a dozen texts, and 2 phone calls.
We go to airports and sit in a lobby with hundreds of people – only so we can be alone with our I-phones. In meetings we type emails to people sitting next to us. Public venues were made so that people could connect socially, but our insecurities nudge us to tend to the more powerful and confident internet-self. We might even not take chances with the real world. Sometimes that’s a good thing…if you’ve ever been approached by a creepy dude at a bus-station. – yeah, me neither.
Actually meeting someone somewhere? That takes work. Think of the time and commitment to actually go somewhere, sit down alone with someone…damn… Alone Together… Better bring my I-phone just in case…
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