thingsofnote
A weblog by Alex Jarvis, full of fun and interesting stuff. I'm a Designer at BERG, and an also a mentor and Associate Lecturer on the FdA Design course at the LCC in London.
You can find my main website here - this is just a regular update of things I find interesting.
Search
Additional pages
I'm also on
“I use Pandora on my iPhone to listen to music, but I am not convinced by today’s many iPhone docks – none of them say “music player” in the iconic way that radio-cassette players and boom boxes did back in their heyday.”
and then later in the comments, the author says
“Everything we design is a form of communication, and sometimes it is most effective to use a language we all understand. I referenced decades old technology not for nostalgia, but for its communicative aspect: they are icons of their functionality, well known to everybody.”
Are they well known to everybody? Does everyone understand and remember cathode ray TV’s? How long will we keep this nostalgia up? It’s funny, we’re all in love with retro - instamatic, hipstamatic, digital Robert’s radios - but this is a shared memory for people of a certain age. I wonder what people will reminisce about in 20 years time?
What will be ‘retro’ for the next batch of product designers - at the moment, they’ll be harking back to our false memories, because we’re not giving them anything of their own.
That said, they’re nice objects.
The sun cutter project explores the potential of harnessing sunlight directly to produce objects.
Decent write up on the N9
Having worked on the N9 during the early stages, it’s interesting reading the reactions.
Beyonce performing ‘Run the World’
Terrible, terrible track, but otherwise a really nice live visual display, a mix of projected visuals and live dancing. Super well done.
Epic weeknotes from our fearless leader
Worth a read.
Captcha - How Google digitises books with brains
Inventive barcode design
Nice post from Core77 on inventive use of barcodes. Same function, same recognisable design, just with a fancy casing inline with the product at hand. Amazon do this superbly with the packaging for the Kindle, which ties in nicely with the out of the box experience.
