Saturday, 8 March 2008 - 3:30PM
Abstract:
The core dilemma for talented designers in any field is this: If you strive for greatness in your design, you will meet resistance; if you strive to avoid resistance, you can’t do great design. Different is scary. Great design has to fight with the idea that many see “better” as meaning “more of the same”. The better your work and the higher your standards, the more you’ll have to fight against the urge to stay within the warm, safe confines of mediocrity.John Gruber - Raconteur, Daring Fireball
Michael Lopp - Apple, Inc.
They are talking about Mentos and Scott is going nuts. He even used Scott’s Mentos pic from Wikipedia.
Needed: A process to keep designers from killing engineers.
Design is a present: it is an unintentional discovery.
Packaging porn - Apple makes products who like to wait to iPod until Xmas.
WWDC keynotes are a storytime about what you are going to get for Xmas.
How does Apple do that?
A: They screw up a lot.
And they do it in the face of Fear of design feedback, fear of blue (subjective color demands), fear of critical feedback, fear of ponies - “I want a pony” comes from multiple places/people that are your higherups and represent the amorphous mandate.
Where to sweat:
- pixel-perfect mockups - this removes ambiguity
- 10 ot 3 to 1 - 10 mockups for every feature, get to three from iteration and then to 1 again
- Paired design meetings - brainstorm meetings in one meeting and then pair this with the production meeting. pair these togther eery week
- The Pony meeting - Pony people do not actually want a pont - they want their opinion to be heard.
Design is a Present - an unexpected discovery that you have
Gruber:
- It is incorrect to think that the better the design work the les resistance it will meet. example: the Beatle white album
- It is only in hindsight that this is true about this album”Better neccesarily implies Different”, but, “Different = Scary”
- What we get to stay comfortable is “Exactly the same, but dibetter which does not make sense “Exactly the same, but different.
- The Plea Bargain - basically the prisoner’s dilemna - the lesser route is statistically safer.
- “Don’t try to be orginal, just try to be good.” - Paul Rand
- “A logo derives it’s meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolizes, not the other way around.” Rand
- “It reminds me of the Georgia chain gang.” - said about the IBM logo.
- One problem that designers face is that ehy are expected to be clever (example: Apple’s logo)
- Design is making decisions and packaging them as a whole. Hitchcock got final cutby meticulously planning his movies through the use of storboarding so that there was only one way to put the movie together.
- Ford: If i had asked people what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse.
- Are you willing to be called an asshole?