Recently in design Category

On Saturday and Sunday of the past weekend, I spent about ten hours at Pacific Raceways, enjoying the annual the Pacific Northwest Historic Vintage Races put on by the folks at SOVREN. This was my seventh or eighth time at this event, and though the rain made Saturday particularly soggy, the skies cleared on Sunday and my father and I were able to spend the better part of the day at the track.

As a certified car nut, I've gone to my fair share of events like this over the years, from Formula 1 races to the amazing racing and concours weekend on the Monterey Peninsula. Every time, I return with a bag full of the spoils of the trip. There's usually a t-shirt, a cap, a book, or some other paraphernalia. Like many folks, I mark an occasion by buying my memories, somehow thinking that the ownership of a commemorative pin or other knick knack will sear the event into my mind.

But not this time. As I walked the pit area at the track, strolling past vendors plying me with all manner of goods, I made a conscious decision to keep on walking. Every time I felt myself about to open my wallet to get that one really-cool-I-just-gotta-have-it item, I paused, thought of the 100 Things commitment I made to myself, and moved on. "What," I thought to myself staring down at my hands, "would I get rid of to add this thing to my selected 100?"

It was, in all honesty, a pretty uncomfortable experience. Over the years, I've honed my buying habits into a precision instrument and breaking the pattern didn't come naturally. Like a smoker chewing gum to quit, I forced myself to focus on my photography throughout the weekend instead. I always bring my camera, but this time, I deliberately decided that the one thing I would take home was a Compact Flash card full of photos. It would be free, add nothing to my 100 Things, and provide more memories than some souvenir ever would.

Truth be told, I did come home with a poster and two hats. They were part of the VIP package that Debra and I won at a charity auction earlier this year and which paid our entry to the event. I suppose I could have declined when presented with them, but at the time, it seemed like it would come across as rude and disrespectful. As a result, I have on my kitchen counter two hats that will soon be given to my father and father-in-law; I know they will enjoy them. The poster? Well, it ended up in the recycling bin when I returned home.

In retrospect, the 100 Things commitment turned the weekend into something entirely different for me. I came away having experienced the races instead of buying them. My father and I had some great conversations and explored the paddock to find some special cars tucked away in the back. I worried less about someone scoring that one last cool team jersey before I could whip out my credit card and more about the event itself. I followed who was racing and whether I could scope out a cool vantage point for some good photos. It was subtle, but Sunday evening, I realized that my role in the experience had changed: unlike so many events in the past, I left the races as a spectator, not a consumer.

The article in Time Magazine appeared a month ago, but like most things in Time, the real action started much earlier. Dave Bruno began this now-almost-famous 100 Things Challenge months ago, as a test to reduce his own consumer footprint on the world. It is, more than anything, a novel way to place our role as a consumer front and center in our consciousness and -- perhaps because of economic conditions -- it has resonated with so many people.

Including myself. I've decided to set a goal of having just 100 Things by the end of the year. I've started my list and have begun to appreciate just how challenging -- and fulfilling -- this could be.

I have a few motivations for this. One is my children. They need at least one role model of restraint to counter the hundreds of others that encourage them to long for, buy and acquire. Another is a desire for simplicity. "You don't own your possessions; they own you," goes the refrain, and I could not agree more. Finally, I am intrigued to discover just how few things I need. When I have sold, broken or lost something in the past, I am always at first sad, but then quickly notice that the remorse is replaced by an easing of a burden. One less thing, one less thing to worry about. Can I manufacture this sentiment?

So, first, a few ground rules:

1. The goal is to reduce my personal possessions to 100 things. Things I share with family are excluded. For now, at least; we'll see how this goes.
2. In most cases, everything will be counted individually. There are a few exceptions, however, in regard to things I think of as "systems" or "sets." My set of wrenches, for example, is one item, rather than 17 individual things. It's imprecise, but the rule of thumb here is that if I can pick it up as one thing, it will be treated as one thing (my wrenches come in a case). Sure, I could throw 50 things in a box and consider it one item on my list, but that is hardly consistent with the spirit of the challenge. Another example might be "socks."
3. Everything I decide to get rid of will be sold or given away if at all possible. The point here is not to generate more waste, after all.

In an upcoming post, I will share my current list. I'm still working on it.

One of my first discoveries is that inventorying all of your own personal possessions is an eye-opening experience. How in the world did I ever acquire so many backpacks and duffle bags? Why do I need so many screwdrivers? Why am I still keeping those ten Ethernet cables? How deep does the dust on an old pair of out-of-style shoes need to get before it's obvious they should be discarded? Stunning, really.

Absolutely stunning steel sculptures by Cal Lane as revealed in a New York Times article. The transformation of metal into gossamer is truly a sight to behold. More of her work here.

2007 will go down for me as the year in which two products I was eagerly anticipating completely and utterly blew past the high expectations I had of them.

The first of those products is, of course, the iPhone. Much has been written about the industry-shaking design of this device, and now, with the year rapidly coming to a close, it's popping up on more and more "Best of 2007" lists.

Nearly 12 months ago, I sat there at the Moscone Center, slack-jawed, as Steve Jobs revealed a phone unlike any other. Six month later, holding my brand new iPhone in my hand, I couldn't help but marvel at the realization that, not only was it as good as the demos I'd seen months before, it was better. Much better. And while the hype around this thing was truly epic, it was completely deserved.

Today, I am finding myself again with the gleeful realization that yet another product I'd been watching closely may just be better than I ever thought it could be. This time, it's a car, namely, the new Nissan GT-R. 

Three years ago, Nissan rolled out the GT-R concept at the Tokyo Motor Show. It was a strange-looking beast and I quickly forgot about it. The GT-R name is legendary in car aficionado circles as one of the most capable cars ever produced. It sold only in Japan, however, and never offered a partcularly fetching design, to say the least, and the new GT-R didn't seem to be heading down a different path at all. I filed it away in that portion of my brain devoted to useless automotive trivia and moved on.

Since then, Nissan announced that the GT-R would for the first time be available in the United States. And, with much credit to their marketing department, they began to trot out semi-disguised "prototypes" at tracks like the Nurburgring and events like the Goodwood Festival of Speed. While most manufacturers shroud their cars in black vinyl and try to dodge the lenses of the automotive "spy photographers," Nissan seemed to revel in using them to get some web time for their car. By the time it was officially released in Tokyo this fall, the GT-R was a well-known commodity.

My interest grew over this time, too. As the spy photos were revealing more of the final design, I was drawn to its simple, angular forms. And when the performance specifications were finally shared, the technology was more than impressive. A twin-turbo V6, driving 473hp and 478 lb-ft. of torque through a paddle-shifting 6-speed to all four wheels. Advanced suspension, traction control, braking and steering. A unique LCD in the dash with a customizable interface designed by the computer game designers at XXXX. And on and on and on. Now Nissan had my attention.

But I also had my doubts. Too often, cars that look great on paper turn out to bring with them serious compromises. The Porsche 911 offers stellar performance and luxury, but the price of admission is north of $85,000. The Dodge Viper and Corvette Z06 outperform cars three times their price, but poor build quality and materials (not to mention the "gold chain factor") make them a risky proposition. The latest Evolution from Mitsubishi looks less like a boy racer, but is now porkier and slower than its predecessor and is likely to be a $40,000 car when properly optioned. And Subaru's new Impreza STi has been hit so hard with the ugly stick inside and out that even if it halted global warming and cost $1.99, I'm not sure I could bring myself to buy it.

And so, with my high expectations in tow, today along comes Edmunds' Inside Line with the first test figures for the GT-R: 0-60 in 3.3 seconds. 11.6 seconds and 120mph in the quarter mile. 72.9mph in the slalom, besting the $130,000 Porsche 911 Turbo and Corvette Z06. Base price? $70,000. Again, I am slack-jawed.

Might it just be that this iPhone of the automotive world, widely anticipated and hyped beyond all reason, is better than most thought it would be? Than it could be? It just might be so. Said Edmunds:

Perhaps more impressive than the Nissan GT-R's brain-cell-punishing acceleration or its stellar handling is its price. At just under $70,000 it's within reach of the upper middle-class enthusiast who insists on spending disproportionate amounts of his income on a car.

Plus, it will take an average driver and hurdle them into a realm of speed they couldn't buy with a 911 Turbo. It's world-class fast and relatively cheap. And that's a hard combination to beat.

The cynic in me just doesn't know what to do with these kinds of experiences. Years and years of unmet expectations, inflated promises and marketing spin have left me guarded and wary. When someone finally rises above the challenges of cost and design and corporate politics to produce something so fundamentally 'right,' I feel almost obligated to offer my support. I own an iPhone, of course. Now I need a piggy bank to start saving for my GT-R.

I know the dialogue from this film by heart, but it's nice to see a fresh interpretation.

Monospaced fonts usually look like ass. Courier, anyone?

Today, Raph Levien released his gorgeous new font, Inconsolata. It's crisp and light and won't make you want to poke your eyes out with a pair of toenail clippers when you are reading those terrible "plain text" emails.

Okay, admittedly, it is $2.4 million, but I still welcome that the designers of the awkwardly-named XSMG XSR48 Superboat made a deliberate departure from the teak-and-brass of traditional nautical design. Too many personal boats today channel the spirit of builders of Spanish galleons. The bright, simple and monochromatic pallete for the cabin of the XSR48 is particularly captivating.

(Click for more photos).

Back in the early 'aughts', I was a member of the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft (a.k.a. the "MacBU," pronounced "mac-boo"). In my nearly three years there, I lead the Product Planning efforts for Mac Office 2004, the version currently on the market. As you can imagine, I'm very excited to see the MacBU's progress on the next release highlighted in today's post on the BU's Mac Mojo blog.

The new Elements Gallery looks to be an excellent adaptation of principles from the Office 2007 Ribbon user interface, but with a unique Mac twist. The real-time previews are there, together with a tabbed interface that makes browsing through available options more discoverable. But there's also no mistaking this as anything other than a Mac OS X application.

Now, I like the Gallery, but I'm guessing that the embedded toolbar is actually going to be the most striking change Mac Office users will notice. Whereas previous versions of Mac Office applications displayed a single set of toolbars that was shared across all of the open document windows, the MacBU is now following the Apple Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) for Mac OS X and providing a separate toolbar inside of each document window.

Interestingly, this is something we considered doing for Office 2004 as long ago as 2001.

Fig. 1: PowerPoint 2004's Floating Toolbar

The arguments for and against the use of embedded toolbars are pretty straightforward. A single set of toolbars has the advantage of taking up a set amount of screen real estate, regardless of how many documents the user has open (see Fig. 1). This is especially important when screen resolution is low and every pixel is precious.

In addition, the consistent placement of the toolbars on the screen allows users to develop "muscle memory" for toolbar button location, regardless of where the document window is placed. It's not quite a perfect application of Fitt's Law (à la Mac OS X's screen corners for Expose), but the concept is similar. By comparison, with a toolbar in each window, button targets move depending on the window coordinates and its dimensions. There is additional cognition needed to find and then hit these moving buttons.

Simply put, this slows things down and mouse-driven tasks can take longer to complete. We're talking about a few seconds -- or even fractions of a second -- here, but the effect in the end is that people get frustrated from having to constantly look for the application controls and may break their train of thought (an important consideration when your application is used for the creation of content).

Fig. 2: PowerPoint 2008's Embedded Toolbar

During the planning phases for Office 2004 back in 2001-2, we debated this issue for some time. On top of the design argument outlined above, we had development costs to contend with, as well. Time invested in changing the UI would take away from other feature work we might want to do. We had to be sure that the payoff would justify cutting other features to fit it into the schedule. To help us figure this out, we built mock-ups of Office using an embedded toolbar even back then, just to see what it might look like.

In the end, the argument for floating toolbars won out and Office 2004 continued with the toolbar architecture customers had seen in Office for over a decade. The critical factor then was screen real estate.

Remember, this was a time when Apple's newest iBooks shipped with screens capable of only 800 x 600, a 17" Studio Display was $1,000 and most Macs capable of running OS X were sporting resolutions of 1024 x 768 or less. Deduct 100 - 200 vertical pixels for the menu bar, window borders and Mac OS X's plump, new dock and it's clear to see that an embedded toolbar could squeeze the available document workspace to a thin, narrow slit. Hardly ideal conditions for document authoring and editing.

Fast-forward to 2007. New MacBooks ship with a native resolution of 1280 x 800, a 33% increase in the vertical dimension. Most new iMacs ship with twice the number of pixels of those early G3 iBooks and external flat-panels with 1200 vertical pixels and 20" of viewing space cost less than $400. Hardware advances clearly have made embedded toolbars more viable.

But something else changed over the past six years, too: Mac applications. Mac OS X apps in 2001 were all over the map in their look and feel. Many were simply ports of Mac OS 8/9 apps with their user interfaces rebuilt using Aqua controls. Very few had yet adopted Apple's Mac OS X HIG and even fewer new-from-the-ground-up apps were in the market. Worse yet, the HIG was evolving like any new technology, with developers and designers still figuring out the best bits to use as well as the ones to ignore (drawers, anyone?).

The Mac OS X application landscape today is much more stable than it was in those early days. The clunkiness of ported Classic apps has given way to a wide variety of elegant and beautiful products. Apple's own UI tools and APIs have improved, as well, allowing an even larger percentage of developers to create functional products that look and work well, too.

Red Sweater Software's MarsEdit blog editor	HandBrake DVD Ripping App	MetaQuark's AppFresh software updater

Better tools and shared learning across the Mac developer community for what works and what doesn't has driven greater consistency in application design over the past six years, too. Products as varied in their function as MarsEdit, HandBrake and AppFresh all sport similar and now-familiar UI elements. Whereas an Office 2004 with embedded toolbars would have been among the first applications at the time incorporating that design, Office 2008 without them would be equally out of place.

I was among those in the MacBU who hoped we could adopt embedded toolbars for Office 2004. But it was clear in those early years of Mac OS X that it was simply too soon to change the way the product millions of people used everyday looked and worked.

Not only has the hardware, the platform and the Mac applications ecosystem evolved to make this more viable now, it's clear from Nadyne's post that the MacBU has put the time to good use. They appear to have been able to take a much more holistic approach to the entire issue, blending the goodness of the Office 2007 Ribbon with Apple's HIG and some of MacBU's own user interface innovation. They've done more than simply duct tape the current toolbars to the top border of the doc windows.

The proof will be in the actual use of Office, and I'll hold my final judgement until I get a chance to play with it myself. But I like the design direction the 2008 version is taking and now, it finally seems right for this extensive update.