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In the last couple of decades, mainly through software and services, more and more nudging of human behaviour took place. Contemplate for a moment what it really means that your messages or comments are being read before you send them – even if just by a machine – and then either deemed good or bad. Do you see the disrespect that this reveals towards your intelligence and dignity?
I was sitting with a group of businesspeople who didn’t understand why any sort of beauty would serve any kind of purpose in the world, or how it potentially could. These people think that if there isn’t a direct line from the work you do to money, the work must be worthless. So I wrote this polemic on the importance of beauty.
A logo is a visual element that has to work both on a creative (artistic/psychological) level and a technical one. I am of the opinion that once you learn about the technical part, the creative should be much easier to do. It is also more important to realise that there is a distinction to be made between creative and technical considerations in the first place.
The typographer Paul Renner once wrote that “The belief in counting and measuring leads to the grossest errors in all the arts”. That is an interesting observation from someone who became famous for creating a typeface (his 1927 Futura) that looks as if it were made exclusively with measuring instruments. Why what he wrote is true, and why he wasn’t contradicting himself by designing Futura in the…
I am absolutely convinced that the thing we call artificial intelligence (AI) today can never in a million years reach human-level intelligence. Not if it is based on the machine learning (ML) technologies we use right now. In this piece, I will try to argue why I think that.
I almost got run over by one of Zurich’s new trams a few weeks back, and the reason is bad industrial design. I was walking with a friend, and we were crossing the street at a zebra crossing that I use often. There’s a tram stop a few metres down from that zebra crossing. We looked left and right and saw no cars or other traffic, just the back of a tram that stood at the stop. No problem, we…
If you look at the world with the eye of a designer, you see countless examples of where man-made objects could be much better designed or – at the very least – markedly optimised. Unfortunately, the media and even most design blogs have a blind spot for these matters. To criticise the latest tech gadget is more interesting – and an easier sell to their audience – than trying to think about how to…
I got an interesting piece of feedback regarding part one of my article about buttons in user interfaces. A reader pointed out that while I mentioned that Apple uses a rather unsuitable typeface in their operating systems, I hadn’t elaborated on why I believed it to be so. Moreover, the reader wasn’t persuaded by the alternative I proposed, feeling it was neither better nor worse. It’s true: I…
When iPhone was introduced by Apple in 2007, it changed more things than many people realise. One of these was, that it started a trend for makers of all sorts of devices to try and replace physical buttons with either touchscreens or touch sensitive elements. This trend, which is ongoing, lead to thousands of products being made which are everything from simply unpleasant to use to outright…
In any design discipline there are always certain trends. One of these trends seems to be that buttons are now considered uncool. It doesn’t matter if they are buttons on physical objects or in graphical user interfaces.
If you live outside the United States, what I’m about to write will probably be very familiar to you: You use some product – mostly some software or an internet service – and it doesn’t work the way it should. Why? Because the people who made it are clueless about the specifics of the region you live in, the language you speak (or prefer to use), or some other cultural nuances.
I told myself I was going to be quiet when Apple revealed its new Mac Pro in 2019. The machine was overpriced and rather badly designed but those things didn’t really surprise me anymore. Then, a few days ago, Apple released a set of wheels as an accessory to attach to the Mac Pro. It can be yours for the small fortune of $700. You will understand how I couldn’t be quiet anymore.
There are quite a few tech journalists and bloggers who can’t stop arguing in favour of the iPad. I find that strange and it has been bugging me for some time now. The zeal with which these people write glowing reviews of the device itself, or pieces about how to best use it “in the real world”, never sat right with me. It always seemed, and continues to do so, artificial.
It’s not only Apple that seems to have forgotten its own roots in making good Human Interfaces, the rest of the software industry too seems strangely preoccupied with reinventing the wheel while making it worse with every iteration.
I’m genuinely interested in improving the state of things around me. And that’s something you simply cannot do if you’re not allowed to point out problems when you see them.
Many medium-sized companies are standing still – they have missed the boat on video and motion graphics.