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infectious!

Kudos to Tim Roberts on launching Infectious, his new company which brings easy-to-apply car art to the masses. They've got simple icons, accent kits, hood pieces, door kits, side kits and full car customization kits -- all installable by normal humans.

Tim first told me about the idea for this company a few years ago (before he was at Odeo, I think?) and I'm really excited to see it come to life. Their site is super fun to explore, and I can imagine all sorts of interesting ways they could drive more artwork into their catalog. Their blog is great, and Michael Arrington had a post a couple of weeks ago with some video of just how easy it is to install the stickers on your car.

Now, to figure out just the right way to spice up the boring gray hybrid...

upside down and backwards

A hallway at the San Francisco Tennis Club has a bunch of early photographs of San Francisco, including this one (snapped with my iPhone; apologies for the perspective and quality) of the west side of The Embarcadero in 1913.

What I love about this photo (and it's probably hard to see here) is the billboard for Owl Cigars, with the reversed mirror image type. When you quickly walk by the photo of the billboard you do a double take, and I spent a few minutes confirming that this wasn't some weird artifact of the photo itself. (The photo didn't appear to be doctored at all.) The effect of this as a massive billboard must have been something. I'm no student of outdoor advertising, but while I can definitely remember plenty of instances of seeing trompe-l'oeil effects in billboards, I don't think I've seen something as "simply stunning" in a long time.

My colleague Sean Williford pointed out that The Standard Hotels does something related with their logo, turning their simple typeface upside down.

I love both of these -- simple twists that force the casual observer to stop, spend a bit more time processing what they're seeing and become memorable because of their simplicity. That said, if everyone started flipping their type around, everyday life would be more than a bit annoying.

Who else has done this kind of thing well?

designers accord

Business Week's Jessie Scanlon covers The Designers Accord, "a call to arms for designers to engage in the environmental movement with optimism and creativity." The core of The Designers Accord is a set of principles around bringing sustainability principles and practices to the product design process. From Scanlon's piece:

For clients this is significant because it means that sustainability is going to be part of the conversation regardless of what studio they're talking to. Core77's Chochinov draws a comparison to LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design), the rating system introduced by the U.S. Green Building Council in 2000. "Today, you can't have a conversation with an architect without the question of LEED coming up," he says.

LEED obviously has a head start, with its well-defined set of ratings and processes for project certification and professional accreditation. It will be interesting to follow Designers Accord to see if there is a similar path to follow w/r/t product and packaging design...

yes, i'm obsessed with bags

Yesterday American Public Media's Marketplace ran a segment on the death of the plastic shopping bag and the rise of the reusable. Here in San Francisco plastic shopping bags have been banned, and when you're around town you see more and more folks trucking around their consumables in their own bags.

The Marketplace story featured Vincent Cobb, president of the ecommerce site Reusablebags.com, which sells, obviously, a wide variety of reusable shopping bags -- from ultracompact to thermal to heavy duty. They're also venturing into the "Fashionable" category, with about 15 SKUs that are a little less utilitarian and a little more "high design." The entire category of reusable shopping bag is relatively new; though Reusablebags.com was started in 2003, searches for similar product on eBags.com, the gorilla in the bags space, came up empty.

Which brings me to the opportunity: designer and custom-printed reusable shopping bags. The trend setters in the major cities (where banning or reducing the use of plastic shopping bags is likely to happen) are going to look at the shopping bag as another outlet for self-expression. In the near term, look for boutiques in these cities to start carrying limited run high-design reusable shopping bags.

And then, look for the shopping bag to jump to the mass-customization and community-designed segments. How long until Zazzle or Qoop offers custom printed shopping bags? Wouldn't you just love to guilt your friends and family into adopting a reusable bag with a bag that features pictures of their kids? ("Do it for the children...") Or how about skinnycorp spinning out a threadless or Naked and Angry tailored for shopping bags? The clever illustration opportunities are endless...

karl long on virgin america

Karl Long gushes about the experience of flying Virgin America. I don't really care about linux-powered seat back terminals that let you chat with the person three seats over (though the drink ordering feature sounds pretty nice), but this bit was refreshing...

Even more extraordinary, the person sitting in the seat in front of me and my buddy was a one of Virgin America’s pilots. We had a very good chat with him, talking about the planes and the business, and asked some questions about the reward program. I asked about signing up for the rewards program after the fact and how to get credit for this trip and he said we could just use our boarding cards, then he gave us his business card with his email “in case we had any problems”, wow.

for friends only

Can't a glass wall just be a glass wall?  Penelope Green trots out Sherry Turkle in her Times piece on peekabo architecture.

“There is real confusion about intimacy and solitude,” said Professor Turkle, who for more than two decades has been studying computers and the people who love them. “Are we alone in these buildings, facing the anonymity of the city, or are we connected to the city? What do we show and what do we hide?

“That mirrors what happens when we’re on the computer, on our networks in Facebook. We are no longer able to distinguish when we are together and nurtured and when we are alone and isolated. I can be in intimate contact with 300 people on e-mail, but when I look up from my computer I feel bereft. I haven’t heard a voice, touched a hand, for hours or days. I think people are no longer certain where the self resides.”

conventions are good

It made me smile to launch the new presentation builder at Google Docs and see the all-too-familiar instruction Click to add title.

i'm flattered

Andre Torrez has done a brilliant job of adapting the (un)filtered design to notes.torrez.org. Excellent!

can i go back and do it again?

File under [this is good]: Nathan Shedroff is leading the new MBA in Design Strategy program at the California College of the Arts.

nicely done, firefox

As has been covered here before, as a rule, I hate application chrome.  I especially hate browser chrome, since the browser isn't supposed to be about excessive toolbars and tabs and menus -- the browser is supposed to be about the site you're visiting.  And yes, I'm this crotchety about most things.

So a couple of days ago I'm tweaking Firefox to kill as much of the chrome as I can, leaving a single row of buttons, an address bar and a set of menus.  In doing so, I removed the little search box, just to get more pixels for other things.  Now, if you're not only a no-chrome-allowed minimalist but also a mousing-is-for-the-weak keyboard shortcut junkie like I am, you build muscle habits quickly...habits that are hard to undo.  My two particular Firefox keyboard habits are CTRL+L, which puts your cursor in the address bar,  and CTRL+K, which puts your cursor in that little Google search box in the upper right.  CTRL+L is for going somewhere, CTRL+K is for searching for something.

But here's where things get fun.[1]  Let's say you remove that search box from your browser's toolbar.  What happens then?  Not to worry -- Firefox does the right thing and instantly navigates you to http://www.google.com/firefox and drops your cursor in the search box.  This absolutely surprised and delighted me the first time it happened, so much so that I had to interrupt several of my colleagues who were busy with actual work and demonstrate this remarkable behavior to them.  (To a soul they each nodded their head in that slow kind of way that indicates that they're merely humoring you.)

Now there are plenty of other things that drive me nuts about the Firefox UI.  But this little detail made my day.  Since Firefox is open source, I could go figure out just how large the codepath is to enable that surprising and delightful behavior, but I'm guessing it was small.  But there was a conscious decision made at some point, by someone, to just do the right thing and respect the intent of the keyboard shortcut ("I need to go search for something") even if the search box wasn't visible to the user.

And since I know this will come up somewhere, somehow, I can't figure out if IE7 even allows you to remove the search box in the upper right.   I don't think you can.  But I'll give them this -- IE7 did a much better job at conserving vertical pixels, creating a larger default canvas for browsing.  This has probably come at the expense of usability for normal humans (I can't count the number of times I've watched people hunt for the home button, or worse yet, the file menu), not to mention a pretty big design inconsistency when you compare IE7 to Office 2007.  But I digress.

Nicely done, Firefox.  May minimalist-browser-loving keyboard shortcut fanatics everywhere unite in song, singing praise of your CTRL+K goodness.

[1] If you define fun the way I define fun, in which case we really should hang out more often.  Seriously, what have you been up to?  Let's have lunch.