The challenges of design

Bad design costs the same as good design, so why oh why do so many people insist on the bad type??  In fact if anything bad design costs more because of the number of revisions often involved in getting from the good type to the horribly compromised approved version.

Many many years ago I took a cheap £3 standard two armed corkscrew and £27 Alessi "Anna" corkscrew to a product development meeting to try and ram into the heads of the dullard American design team I was working with the difference. The material product and tooling cost was slightly greater for the latter of course,  but the retail selling price differential and the product margin was far greater.

I so often see the same issues repeating themselves, people lacking vision, or understanding of design principles, or even just the importance of taking time to get the brief right in the beginning.  Fail to achieve that and you end up with a design dogs dinner or a user experience that sends people clicking elsewhere faster than you can say bad navigation.  Not to mention the designer wanting to shoot themselves over scope creep and client meddling.

All of which was prompted by my friend Fran sending me this link to The Oatmeal (click here to read the entire cartoon story, it'll only take a tick and if you work in anything remotely creative you'll smile and nod knowingly).

Design Icons:the Tube Map

The first diagrammatic map of the Underground was designed by Harry Beck in 1931. It has become a design classic. Clear, easy to understand. Iconic. Which is perhaps why there are so many variations on it. I recently wrote about a mash-up that put pubs in relation to tube stations. Very handy.

Well, I've just come across this version which Vodcaster created based on the 250 best movies, as voted by IMDb.com users on the 19th of June 2009.

Design Evolution

I'm a huge fan of design, iconography, architecture and the visual arts. So this article in the Guardian with it's very now "Google Squared" approach to showing design evolution caught my attention this morning. Thanks to Mark over at creative freelancing for sharing.