I walked past these two interiors last night.

Similarities:
They are both customer service / retail spaces.
They belong to two large corporations – Telstra (a telco) and MBF (a health insurer).
Their design employed more or less the same materials (stone, glass, wood).
They used the same lighting was (metal halides).
My guess is they probably cost more or less the same to fit out, excluding the cost of the …

When you have no real differentiation, and you are selling a commodity product, and you don’t really give a damn about doing any better; you resort to gimmickry.

I had a case of deodorant can failure this morning. I pressed down on the trigger of a new can and no freshness came out. I looked closer at the can and saw this:

WTF?!! Someone invested effort, brain …

This post is an extended response to my comment on David Hill’s post: The Art of Thin.

In our marketing/advertising/image obsessed world, it is often easy to mistake initial visual “wow” appeal for good design. We as consumers have been, and are continued to be trained to think of good design as just looking funky or looking different for its own sake.

Take this funky piece of design …

Everyone would have heard of the MacBook Air by now right? It is a stunning piece of product design. There’ve been loads of “oohs” and “aahs” over how thin it is.

The designers have used a proven technique to make the unit look thinner than what is actually possible with engineering alone.

In everyday circumstances, we almost never perceive a product from an orthogonal viewpoint – ie perfectly …

When you design small and just scale up to a larger size, it can look weird. What looks great at the size of a brick can look disturbing enlarged to the size of a car.

The photo above show two HP printers. You can see they share the same design language*.

The one on the left IS the size of a car! That is a normal-sized …

Here is a palette of colours inspired by Stilgherrian’s photo of Victoria in drought:

These are a few slides from a talk I gave to a group of high school students on the media messages and their impact on our lives/body image last year, as part of the Eating Disorders Foundation of NSW’s annual Youth Forum.

Fashion designers work to a fantasy of what the human body looks like. They are taught how to draw human figures in …

If you have bought a boxed copy of Windows Vista lately, you may have needed the official Microsoft help page for opening the box.

Yet another example of looks taking priority over usability. Duh!

(Spotted on Front to Back)

Software registration keys are a necessary evil these days for everyone who buys legitimate software (while the pirates continue to merrily steal their copies).

This post on Coding Horror provides some solid lessons on how a bit of sensible design can really make users lives easier.

Using letters and numbers that look similar, such as O and 0 or …

I got this nice collapsible crate not to use as a crate, but rather as a laptop tray.

I recently added more RAM to an older laptop, so I can use it for in-bed reading. The problem was, with the added RAM, the bottom of the laptop became scorchingly hot. I needed to put it on something.

Enter the nice collapsible crate. It was the right size. It was …