Subsonicparticles http://holygekko.posterous.com bits n pieces posterous.com Tue, 20 Apr 2010 07:20:19 -0700 Webmonkey on Information Architecture http://holygekko.posterous.com/webmonkey-on-information-architecture http://holygekko.posterous.com/webmonkey-on-information-architecture Great article about Information Architecture from webmonkey. I think i came across this article for the first time around 2005. It appears it has been assimilated into the wired site.

Reading through it I came across the following interesting section:

"Metaphor Exploration
This next step, which is called “metaphor exploration,” can help refine your vision of the site’s structure, but it’s important to remember that this step is only an exercise. It will give you many good ideas, but they may be impractical, at best. Don’t let that discourage you, though - it can be a lot of fun.

It’s useful to explore various metaphors in trying to determine the site’s structure. A good metaphor can go a long way in helping users understand how to use and navigate the site. However, no metaphor is perfect, so don’t feel that you have to adhere rigidly to just one. You could take the best parts of several metaphors and roll them into one (or you might not find any useful metaphors at all).

Three types of metaphors are useful to site design:

Organizational metaphors

Organizational metaphors rely on the existing structure of a group, system, or organization. For example, if you are creating a site to sell groceries, your metaphor could be a supermarket, where products are grouped logically by type (canned vegetables, dairy products, cereal, snacks, household items, etc.). Beware that copying the organizational hierarchy of your client company is usually not a good idea - grocery customers couldn’t care less about a supermarket’s corporate structure.

Functional metaphors

Functional metaphors relate tasks you can do on the site with tasks you can do in another environment. Photoshop, a graphics program, relies on a lot of functional metaphors:You can figuratively “cut,” “copy,” and “paste” graphics on a computer - as though you were using real-world scissors and glue.

Visual metaphors

Visual metaphors are based on common graphic elements familiar to most people in our culture. If you are designing a music site that allows users to play songs, you might want to use the traditional “start,” “stop,” and “pause” icons found on CD players everywhere.

To begin exploring metaphors, gather your people and brainstorm ideas. Review and evaluate each metaphor. Try not to discourage any suggestions you do not like, at least not right away. A metaphor’s punch might not be obvious right away. Try to map out the major sections of the site by connecting elements from the content inventory to each metaphor.

After what was probably a lively and entertaining experience, you must choose a metaphor or a rationale for the site’s structure. Remember, no metaphor is perfect. The overall site might not be explainable as a metaphor, but perhaps the navigation system (or smaller subsets of the site) can be."

Hadn't thought about it like this before! :)

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Tue, 06 Apr 2010 06:53:52 -0700 Yahoo mail is utter crap http://holygekko.posterous.com/yahoo-mail-is-utter-crap http://holygekko.posterous.com/yahoo-mail-is-utter-crap
Pauldj_05

Quite a bold statement don't you think? Unfortunately it's true. There's a lot wrong with it (e.g. looking more like outlook/hotmail than gmail, always starting with the "what's new" tab, big annoying animated banners), but the absolute biggest failure is that it's not possible to send email in an easy straightforward way. Every other message I want to send I have to proof being a human being by solving an at some times very difficult to read CAPTCHA image.

I appreciate them trying to weed out spammers, but this is ludicrous! What use is a mail program if it isn't easy to send an email? To make matters worse you won't have this problem by using the iphone mail client. So that's the route I'd choose if I was a spammer :' )

One last thing, there's no way to give feedback to the development team. So that's why this is here. Anybody want to comment on this?

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Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:59:46 -0800 99% Behance Conference and Threadless http://holygekko.posterous.com/99-behance-conference-and-threadless http://holygekko.posterous.com/99-behance-conference-and-threadless

"Jeffrey Kalmikoff and Jake Nickell, the masterminds behind the hugely successful, crowd-sourced t-shirt design website Threadless, chart their changing working styles and mindsets throughout eight years of partnership. Their "Do-First Work Ethic" encompasses virtues like: staying scrappy, being 100% reactive to your community, embracing a DIY approach, learning from failure, and always (always) taking the first step."

Great video of my favorite t-shirt company :D

See here for more video's of this amazing conference!

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Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:53:00 -0800 Google Goggles alternative AR? http://holygekko.posterous.com/google-goggles-alternative-ar http://holygekko.posterous.com/google-goggles-alternative-ar

65300253_3238bffe37

via TechCrunchimage

Today, at their Search Event in Mountain View, Google demoed a brand new product set to launch in Google Labs:Google Goggles. Humorous name aside, the product looks to be a huge leap forward in the field of visual search — by which I mean, you point a camera at something and Google figures out what it is.

The example that Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotrashowed on stage involved taking a picture of a particular bottle of wine. When he ran it through Google Goggles, the result showed that the particular bottle has a hint of apricots. You also be able to use Goggles to look up things such as CD covers and bar codes (this is likely similar to the popular Android app ShopSavvy). For text, Google Goggles uses optical character recognition (OCR) to try and read things like logos and labels to aid the search.

It seems as if this new functionality, which should be live in Google Labs soon, will be destined for Android phones at least at first.

In his keynote speech today at the Mobile Web Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Google CEO Eric Schmidt showed off what could end up being a crucial tool for anyone trying to figure out a menu in a different language or a street sign in a foreign country.Google Goggles, which creates search queries based on images instead of typed-in keywords, will soon start to be able to translate from foreign languages usingGoogle Translate. It will do this using optical character recognition to first convert the images of letters into words it can understand, and then put those through Google translate.

I wonder if this could be called an alternative form of Augmented Reality? 

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Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:20:00 -0800 Combining sleep cyle and ipod or how I tricked my iphone into multitasking http://holygekko.posterous.com/combining-sleep-cyle-and-ipod-or-how-i-tricke http://holygekko.posterous.com/combining-sleep-cyle-and-ipod-or-how-i-tricke

Photo

Sleep cylce is an iphone app that's topping the charts in itunes at the moment. I heard al lot about it from my friends so I decided to give it a try! I didn't realize however that I have a bit of a ritual when i fall asleep. That is I usually listen to music or an audiobook when I fall asleep. Currently that's not a feature Sleep cycle supports and given that I rather listen to the ipod app than have insight in my sleeping patterns I havn't used sleep cycle once..

Today I decided to have a look at the sleep cycle site to see if I could post a feature request. To my delight the faq already stated they are working on it: "Planned in future versions: Listen to music or audio books when going to sleep". So that's great, but then I suddenly realized that it's already possible to trick the iphone and sleep cylce into this! :D

  1. enable ipod controls (settings > general > home > ipod controls > on)
  2. go to the clock app, set a timer and use it to "Sleep iPod" when it elapses (you don't wan't to have yourself brainwashed all night ;)
  3. start your ipod music or audio book
  4. start sleep cycle and WHILE it's booting double tap the home button!  <-- this is the trick part
  5. a window with ipod controls pops up now, wait for the app to completely boot up and stop the music
  6. now you can click the play icon in the pop up window, the music starts playing. Close the pop up and use sleep cylce!

It's great to outsmart your iphone ;)

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Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:41:00 -0700 User experience strategy http://holygekko.posterous.com/user-experience-strategy http://holygekko.posterous.com/user-experience-strategy

This is a topic I'm researching a lot lately :) 

Today I was reminded about an article I found some time ago: "Why Microsoft had to destory Word" by Peter Merholz. His article is about the design process of the Microsoft Office Ribbon interface. They used what he calls Experience Principles:

Harris and his team realized that they had to essentially burn down the interface and rebuild it. After conducting deep research on how people actually use the tool, they came up with a set of what they called "Design Tenets" that guided the decision-making for the new Office UI:
A person's focus should be on their content, not on the UI. Help people work without interference.
  • Reduce the number of choices presented at any given time.
  • Increase efficiency.
  • Embrace consistency, but not homogeneity.
  • Give features a permanent home. Prefer consistent-location UI over "smart" UI.
  • Straightforward is better than clever.
These tenets were the new religion of Office 2007. Any suggested UI functionality was mapped against these tenets, and if any were violated, that function wouldn't make it in. So, a tool like Clippy, which tries to figure out what you're doing and offer suggestions, gets removed because "straightforward is better than clever."
 This is also something that is a part of the process they use at Miskeeto:

How we do it
To develop your user experience strategy, we do the following:
  • Evaluate the usability of your site/product and any competing sites/products
  • Interview stakeholders (we travel to your offices)
  • Define business and project goals
  • Evaluate technical and business constraints
  • Define success metrics
  • Establish the guiding tenets for your “experience vision”
  • Establish design criteria for all designs
  • Create sketches, wireframes, and prototypes (when needed)
  • Work with your team on implementation considerations
  • Communicate the experience vision to the team via training and presentation
  • Create documents to help you communicate the vision and our findings throughout your organization
  • Communicate and collaborate with you throughout the process
For more background information read "Developing a user ecperience strategy" by Robert Hoekman Jr. Very interesting!

At the end of Peter Merholz's article he thanks his colleague at Adaptive Path,Brandon Schauer, who turns out has also   got some great insights into this subject matter :)

I havn't read much yet of his blog, but some things I like to reference:

4 Experience hacks

I’ve been looking at my own practices and thinking through the case studies of others to identify relatively low-cost and low-effort activities that can up your slugging percentage. While none of these are panaceas, I hope they can really help improve the chances of success. I’m still working on the exact language, but here’s where I stand today:

  1. Get customer empathy into your business — see a handful of customers face-to-face, finding patterns of insights that tell you how to meet your business objectives. I think this can become almost recipe-like given the right picture of integrating business objectives and customer insights.
  2. Define the experience you want customers to have — this is an obvious step that’s too often skipped. Beyond being freaking “friendly” and undoubtedly “easy to use”, what should the experience be like? Create some experience principles to guide every design decision.
  3. Customer experience ideas are cheap. Have lots of them, but only execute the best handful. — Avoid the decision-making bias of primacy. Your first idea is rarely the best idea. Don’t waste development cycles and customer attention to find that out. Instead, have many ideas and use your insights and experience principle to vet them and find the best bets.
  4. Return to the customer context. Often. — Working on a fast-paced design project we realized that we had become so engrossed in our own understanding of the business requirements that we lost the perspective of the customer. We didn’t have budget for usability testing, so we instead conducted a “dry-run-of-one.” We found a single representative customer, halted the design process for an afternoon, and walked the customer through our best paper-based simulation of the current design. We learned tons. It was such a good use of valuable time that we stopped and conducted other dry-runs-of-one at other points in the design process. It’s may not be as rigorous as full usability testing, but it was a great ROI.

to be continued.. :)

 

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Wed, 21 Oct 2009 04:22:00 -0700 Optimal width for 1024px resolution? http://holygekko.posterous.com/optimal-width-for-1024px-resolution http://holygekko.posterous.com/optimal-width-for-1024px-resolution
I’ve been using 960 for some time now, as it’s slightly smaller than full width, and it’s divisible by 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, and 16 (imagine the grid possibilities). I’d love to hear what all of you are wrestling with.

I was wondering why 960 was the magical number for a 1024 resolution screen when I found the above. Also see http://960.gs/ for more on grid systems!

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Wed, 07 Oct 2009 07:35:40 -0700 Google wave in 135 seconds http://holygekko.posterous.com/google-wave-in-135-seconds http://holygekko.posterous.com/google-wave-in-135-seconds

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Wed, 07 Oct 2009 05:30:59 -0700 Games are the next best thing for the music industry! http://holygekko.posterous.com/games-are-the-next-best-thing-for-the-music-i http://holygekko.posterous.com/games-are-the-next-best-thing-for-the-music-i Tap tap revenge 3 has just been launched for the iPhone. Check their site, or this review.

I think this is a great example of a way find new revenue for the music industry. No doubt that they have taken a heavy hit with illegal downloads on the rise.

The idea with tap tap is that you can buy this game for (almost) free. Only one problem, it hardly has any content (songs). This is not really a problem, because you can download a song for free a week. Because waiting a whole week for a new random song is probably too much for most users, they offer various bundles of songs you can buy for the game!

This is such a great idea: to control the player (the game in this instance) instead of the distribution of music. On top of that you have the possibility to sell the same song mulltiple times (in different games) to the same user.

So f*ck the illegal downloads, let them make your songs populair. Make money by being inventive!

Just found this Wired article about Guitar Hero which is has the same model of course. Instead of embracing this concept the music industry is still complaining:

"The success of these games is good news for the music biz. They're breathing new life into old bands (Weezer, anyone?) and helping popularize new ones. They're even becoming a significant distribution outlet for new releases. So the record labels ought to be ecstatic, right? Nope. They're whining over licensing fees.

"The amount being paid to the music industry, even though [these] games are entirely dependent on the content we own and control, is far too small," Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman told analysts last summer. The money Warner receives for the use of its songs is "paltry," he said, and if the gamemakers don't pony up more cash, "we will not license to those games." In response, Rock Band publisher MTV Games is now boycotting Warner artists, according to a source close to the negotiations."

Very weird if you ask me..

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Tue, 29 Sep 2009 01:59:56 -0700 Top 10 UX Myths http://holygekko.posterous.com/top-10-ux-myths-3 http://holygekko.posterous.com/top-10-ux-myths-3
"Al Gore invented the Internet. Drinking alcohol keeps your body warm. You won’t get pregnant if you stand on your head after … well, you get the idea. Myths are those hard-and-fast rules that often start as a plausible idea or once-off observation that grow and distill into ‘common knowledge’ as they virtually spread. I know I’ve believed a few of these. I’ve also asked my UX expert Twitter friends for their UX Myths – and they have many!
So, let me entertain you with a list I compiled of my favorite ‘User Experience myths’. Then perhaps you, like many UX folks, will have some myths of your own to share …"

Short summary via guuui.com:

- If the Design is a Good One, You Don't Need to Test It
- People Don't Change
- Design to Avoid Clicks
- UX Design Stops at the Edges of the Product
- If you Have Great Search, You Don't Need Great Information Architecture
- Can't Decide? Make it a Preference
- Design Always with Implementation in Mind
- People Know What They Like
- People Read
- The Design Has to be Original

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Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:16:33 -0700 Crisis antidote? http://holygekko.posterous.com/crisis-antidote http://holygekko.posterous.com/crisis-antidote
Calm-vs-exited

Keep calm or get exited? :)

"
Nowadays, of course, it would be farmed out to an expensive communications agency. Back in the spring of 1939, it was an anonymous civil servant who was entrusted with finding the slogan for a propaganda poster intended to comfort and inspire the populace should, heaven forbid, the massed armies of Nazi Germany ever cross the Channel.

This was the third in a series. The first, designed to stiffen public resolve ahead of likely gas attacks and bombing raids, was printed in a run of more than a million and read: Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory. The second, identically styled, stated: Freedom Is In Peril.

From August 1939, both posters began appearing all over the country, on billboards, in shops, on railway platforms. The third, though, was held back. This one was for the real crisis: invasion. A few may have made their way on to select officials' walls, but the vast majority of the British public never got to see it. This poster enjoined: Keep Calm And Carry On."

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Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:19:00 -0700 Nokia Maemo 5 promotion video http://holygekko.posterous.com/nokia-meamo-5-promotion-video http://holygekko.posterous.com/nokia-meamo-5-promotion-video

Vond dit demo filmpje errug gaaf! Ff kijken met geluid vol aan. Dit is het nieuwe mobile os van nokia. Moet het s60 platform gaan vervangen geloof ik?

Animatie is erg lekker gedaan, voelt allemaal super futuristisch.

Wat je kan zien in dit filmpje van het os zelf vind ik er ook goed uit zien. Goed gebruik van de beschikbare ruimte en veel gestures om makkelijk te navigeren.

Wat ik enorm komisch vind is dat je de indruk krijgt dat de hand heel hard 'klikt' iedere keer. De grap is dat dit niet voor de duidelijkheid is, maar ook echt moet omdat het een resistive scherm is (werkt met druk ipv geleiding zoals de iphone) waardoor je dus echt je best moet doen om iets aan te klikken :' )

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Mon, 21 Sep 2009 04:00:00 -0700 The Glass Wall: the bbc.co.uk redesign 2002 http://holygekko.posterous.com/the-glass-wall-the-bbccouk-redesign-2002 http://holygekko.posterous.com/the-glass-wall-the-bbccouk-redesign-2002

glasswall.pdf Download this file

Very interesting report about the approach to the 2002 redesign of the BBC website.

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Fri, 31 Jul 2009 02:05:00 -0700 Imageability: a dialogue between the person and the environment http://holygekko.posterous.com/imageability-a-dialogue-between-the-person-an http://holygekko.posterous.com/imageability-a-dialogue-between-the-person-an
In The Image of the City, on how people understand and wayfind in cities, Kevin Lynch introduces the concept of imageability (how easy it is for a dialogue between the person and the environment to build into a good mental image) [notes], and five basic elements of these images: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks [notes]. The book is brilliant; Lynch introduces a whole vocabulary for those emergent properties of human wiring and social habitation, then applies and explains. It's going to be enormously useful in thinking about how people learn to find their way around websites (and semantic spaces of all kinds), how we relate to space in general, and, more, how that space is collaboratively created and moulded. This is a modest book, self assured but not declarative or over-confident, quiet. A joy to read. (I also have notes on the book design.)

Heb het gevoel dat die vijf elementen ook voor interaction design goed zouden kunnen werken. Hier nog even iets uitgebreider wat de elementen zijn:

Paths are the channels along which the observer customarily, occasionally, or potentially moves.

Edges are the linear elements not used or considered as paths by the observer. They are the boundaries between two phases, linear breaks in continuity: shores, railroad cuts, edges of development, walls.

Districts are the medium-to-large sections of the city, conceived of as having two-dimensional extent, which the observer mentally enters "inside of," and which are recognizable as having some common, identifying character.

Nodes are points, the strategic spots in a city into which an observer can enter, and which are the intensive foci to and from which he is traveling.

Landmarks are another type of point-reference, but in this case the observer does not enter within them, they are external.

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Fri, 17 Jul 2009 05:11:00 -0700 A phone is not just a phone http://holygekko.posterous.com/a-phone-is-not-just-a-phone http://holygekko.posterous.com/a-phone-is-not-just-a-phone

Smartphones are changing the way we interact with the world and people around us. With the internet access in a device that you carry around with you anywhere you go the possibilities go further than just being able to have a phonecall on the way. This is slowly but surly starting to create all kinds of new uses. Especially in third world countries. See the following links:

Student projects explore innovative cellphone uses in developing world
A cellphone is not just for calling, texting and taking pictures anymore. Several startup business ventures spawned by MIT students, sometimes as class projects and sometimes as independent work, are exploring new ways to harness the increasingly ubiquitous devices. They are using phones to help people, especially in developing nations, to raise their incomes, learn to read, get where they're going and even diagnose their ailments.
...
NextLab is based on trying to answer the question "can you make a cellphone change the world?" says its instructor Jhonatan Rotberg, director of the Media Lab's Next Billion Network - a group, of which NextLab is a part, formed to examine potential applications for the next one billion people expected to become cellphone users over the next three years. With cellphones now in the hands of four billion people worldwide, he says, "we're at the threshold of something important in history."

"Future Perfect is about the collision of people, society and technology, drawing on issues related to the design research that I conduct in part, on behalf of my employer - Nokia."

"A lot of rich qualitative user research loses its soul by the time it's been squeezed into conference and journal submission formats and in addition, with the exception of published patents work involving concept generation tends to remain confidential. So what you see here scratches the surface, nothing more. Media/interviews here."

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Wed, 08 Jul 2009 02:32:00 -0700 advanced windows mobile user http://holygekko.posterous.com/advanced-windows-mobile-user http://holygekko.posterous.com/advanced-windows-mobile-user

Hans_met_vorkje

Samsung thought they would sell more phones if they looked more like an iphone. "That means no stylus!" they said. Unfortunately it did mean windows mobile.

Thank god at least users are creative :' )

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Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:26:25 -0700 First Person UIs http://holygekko.posterous.com/first-person-uis http://holygekko.posterous.com/first-person-uis
Image_8

Luke Wroblewski writes:

In my iPhone with a Compass = First Person UIs article, I discussed how location and orientation awareness in mobile devices opens up a set of new interface possibilities that are designed from the user’s current perspective. In other words, first person user interfaces that are built knowing where you are and where you are facing.

Recently I found three such applications have made their way to Google's Android Market. Though in their early stages, these apps demonstrate the potential of creating user interfaces from a natural, first person perspective: how we actually see the world. 

Very interesting!

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Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:54:00 -0700 Wabi-sabi as a user-experience design approach for Web2.0 http://holygekko.posterous.com/wabi-sabi-as-a-user-experience-design-approac-0 http://holygekko.posterous.com/wabi-sabi-as-a-user-experience-design-approac-0

Wabi-sabi-as-ux-design-approac

 

other interesting links: 


Wabi-Sabi’s simplicity Wabi-sabi is the Japanese philosophy that embraces a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. “Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry. Keep things clean and unencumbered but don’t sterilize,” ... Other tenets of Wabi-Sabi that resonate: The emphasis on subtle details, even if noticed only by vigilant viewers. The importance of looking closely. The effectiveness of small doses. Having quiet authority without having to be the center of attention. Simplicity. Working with a limited palette and keeping features to a minimum. Realizing something’s “interestingness” has nothing to do with how complex it is.

Less as a competitive advantage: My 10 minutes at Web 2.0 I want to talk about the concept of less. And more specifically the idea of using less as a competitive advantage. ... There’s already too much “more” — what we need are simple solutions to simple, common problems, not huger solutions to huger problems. ... I want to discuss five things you need less of that you’re likely to think you need more of. ... 6. More Constraints I said I’d discuss five things you need less of, but there is one thing you need more of: Constraints. All this less is really about more constraints. That’s where you’re forced to be creative. That’s where you’re squeezed to make better use of your money, your people, your time. And out of this squeeze will come better software, more satisfying software, and simpler solutions. The truth is this: There are a million simple problems that need to be solved before you should even consider trying to solve the complex ones. Less software solves simpler problems. Let your competitors kill themselves trying to solve the big complex problems. Solving those problems are really hard, really expensive, and riddled with bad odds. Stay simple, build simple, and solve simple.

Getting Real > the 16 chapters and 91 essays that make up the book

 

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Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:04:12 -0700 top 10 bedrijven lijstjes http://holygekko.posterous.com/top-10-bedrijven-lijstjes http://holygekko.posterous.com/top-10-bedrijven-lijstjes via http://www.emerce.nl/artikel_index.jsp?rubriek=404797

Voor het geval je wilt weten wat de rest van de wereld (in nederland) doet ;)

Top-5 Mediabureaus

  1. Mediaedge:cia
  2. MediaCom
  3. Starcom Nederland
  4. SVBmedia (v/h Schreiner & Van Bokkel)
  5. Initiative

Top-5 Full-service internetbureaus

  1. Strawberries
  2. Info.nl
  3. Eden
  4. Lectric
  5. Fabrique

Top-5 ICT Consultancy & Services

  1. HP
  2. e-Office
  3. Info Support
  4. Atos Origin
  5. Capgemini

Top-5 Online campagnebureaus

  1. .bone
  2. Tribal DDB
  3. MediaMonks
  4. Media Republic
  5. Yourzine

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Tue, 23 Jun 2009 07:52:26 -0700 Good design volgens Dieter Rams http://holygekko.posterous.com/good-design-volgens-dieter-rams http://holygekko.posterous.com/good-design-volgens-dieter-rams

Jaren lang 'de' vormgever bij Braun. Hij had 10 regels voor z'n ontwerpen.
 
Good design is innovative
It does not copy existing product forms, nor does it produce any kind of novelty for the sake of it. The essence of innovation must be clearly seen in all functions of a product. The possibilities in this respect are by no means exhausted. Technological development keeps offering new chances for innovative solutions.

Good design makes a product useful
A product is bought in order to be used. It must serve a defined purpose – in both primary and additional functions. The most important task of design is to optimise the utility of a product.
 
Good design is aesthetic
The aesthetic quality of a product – and the fascination it inspires – is an integral part of its utility. Without doubt, it is uncomfortable and tiring to have to put up with products that are confusing, that get on your nerves, that you are unable to relate to. However, it has always been a hard task to argue about aesthetic quality, for two reasons.
 
Firstly, it is difficult to talk about anything visual, since words have a different meaning for different people.
 
Secondly, aesthetic quality deals with details, subtle shades, harmony and the equilibrium of a whole variety of visual elements. A good eye is required, schooled by years and years of experience, in order to be able to draw the right conclusion.
 
Good design helps a product to be understood
It clarifies the structure of the product. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory and saves you the long, tedious perusal of the operating manual.

Good design is unobtrusive
Products that satisfy this criterion are tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained leaving room for the user’s self-expression.
 
Good design is honest
An honestly-designed product must not claim features – more innovative, more efficient, of higher value – it does not have. It must not influence or manipulate buyers and user
 
Good design is durable
It is nothing trendy that might be out-of-date tomorrow. This is one of the major differences between well-designed products and trivial objects for a waste-producing society. Waste must no longer be tolerated.

Good design is thorough to the last detail
Thoroughness and accuracy of design are synonymous with the product and its functions, as seen through the eyes of the user.
 
Good design is concerned with the environment
Design must contribute towards a stable environment and a sensible use of raw materials. This means considering not only actual pollution, but also the visual pollution and destruction of our environment.
 
Good design is as little design as possible
Back to purity, back to simplicity.

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