James Dyson was not happy with his vacuum cleaner. It wasn’t powerful enough, and he determined that the problem was the bag. The bag’s purpose was to catch the dirt, but as it filled up, it quickly compromised the suction. So he set out to create a bagless vacuum cleaner, and through much trial and…
This is intended to be the first of seven (possibly more) posts on game-changing business ideas. It’s often difficult to recognize when something changes the game. A few months or years down the road, you can usually trace a trail of copycats and wannabes back to the original idea, but even then, sometimes it’s not…
It would probably be better not to say anything. Advertisers won’t like it, and publishers who depend on ad revenue will like it even less. If this sort of thing catches on, there are only two possible endings, and they’re both bad. I’m talking about two services that rescue online content from the twisted carnival…
One of the things that stood out for me amongst all the hype around the Motorola Droid before the device hit the market was the screen resolution: a whopping 480 x 854 pixels. At first I thought it was a misprint. Once I verified the specs, I started making my design templates for the Droid…
So I don’t have a Kindle, and I don’t want one. For some reason I’m predisposed to dislike it. When I try to articulate my reasons, though, they feel as irrational as any other prejudice, so I won’t embarrass myself by trying to share them. The Kindle has virtues for sure. It seems like a…
Remember CD-ROMs? Remember how cool they were and how for a brief moment in the early 90s it seemed every possible thing was being CD-ROMified – from children’s books to topo maps to baseball cards? CD-ROMs were briefly so cool that people would pay $200 a pop for the latest and greatest titles. Then they…
The purpose of the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines (requires login) is to help developers create well-designed experiences for the iPhone that also measure up to Apple’s reputation and high standards. The guidelines drive toward a consistency, and to this end they encourage developers to take advantage of a sizeable library of existing components. Somewhat understandably,…
Edward Tufte famously declared that PowerPoint is evil, and in my life as a consultant, I’ve witnessed quite a bit of love and hate directed at the ol’ ppt. OK, maybe not love per se, but you’d think so from the application’s sheer ubiquity in all manner of pitches, strategies and summaries. It’s a sign…
I might expand this into a larger article at some point, but for now it’s just something I decided to cobble together for a quick post. Thinking about data visualization was a big part of my job at Scout Labs, and this represents my palette for expressing data in picture form. Since color consists of…
Please indulge a moment of self-pity… I know a designer’s job isn’t rocket science, but that doesn’t mean everyone is qualified to make design decisions. Unfortunately for me, that doesn’t ever seem to stop people.