This calculator app from Berger & Föhr has been making waves in the blogosphere and I wanted to mention it not because it’s pretty and novel – which, it is, and that’s all fine and good – but because of what it represents.

When computers started they were a complete abstraction, lines of text that did things inside this box. Later the then-fledgling Apple added a GUI to give a better interaction between human and that mystery backend. They used metaphors in both interactions and terminology. The “desktop” held “folders” with “files” in them – none of these things exist, but it’s a good way to communicate it to the users, especially when all of this was starting and people were initially confused.

Since then, we’ve come a long way. That was 1983, just a hair short of thirty years ago. Ten years before I was born. We’ve brought up an entire new generation of people who have grown up and just accept these things; it’s not really that hard of an abstraction anymore. So it’s cool (for me, as part of that new generation) to see these things being streamlined and refined past the typical, and by that I mean, clunky and old school.

You pick up a physical calculator and you have buttons for operations because a) that’s how it’s always been and b) that’s really all you can do. You can rearrange them, sure, or maybe change how they work, but ultimately they have to be there in some capacity. Enter touchscreens. Not really new either, we’ve had iPhones for five years now, yet the calculator apps have always included the operator buttons as a direct analogue for the physical kind. They just remade it directly. Easy to understand? Sure. Familiar? Yeah. Efficient? Not really, no.

Again, and I said it a mere paragraph up, that’s so cool. We can make things better.

We’re at the point where we’re comfortable enough with the old abstractions to go past them and make new ones – more efficient ones. I think I’ve written about it before, but the ultimate UI is blank. At it’s ultimate, perfect state the program (whatever it is) should work in such a way that it always knows what you want to do. Since that’s an extraordinarily tall order, we do have to settle with buttons and elements as we do now. Gestures are good, but they don’t always work and they don’t always do what you want them to do, which goes against the above ideal. In this case the compromise is struck because it’s kept (in theory) simple and done in such a way that is easy to remember and use. Having never used it I can’t truly comment, but. With that said, if every app had it’s entirely own set of gestures (which is something we’re running into recently) it becomes even more convoluted and in the end less useful. It’s inefficient to always have to look up what the gestures to do an action is; this too goes against the ideal.

TL;DR We can make new abstractions because the UI is evolving and the new generation is used to it, which is both a power and a responsibility. And wherein I reveal my age.

Via

When I started Twitter a little over a year ago Max was one of the first people to interact with me and it’s been really cool to exchange opinions and comments on each other’s work since then.

So, Max, tell us a bit about yourself
Well, first of all my name’s Max Steenbergen. I’m a 27 year old Dutch guy, working as an in-house UI & graphic designer for a company developing dashboard software for yachts. I’ve studied English for a bit, but quickly dropped out and went on to study photography instead. I’ve got a full-time job but next to that I’ve gone back to school to finally get a proper bachelor’s degree. Two evenings a week I’m back in the school benches following a course called Communication & Multimedia Design. Most stuff of what is taught there I already knew or is horribly outdated, but every now and then I actually pick up something new. When I’m not at work or at college, I’m most likely sweating my ass off and falling to the ground in the most unelegant ways possible playing volleyball.

How did you first get into icon design?
About 10 to 12 years ago I wanted to produce my own wallpapers so I started fiddling with Terragen, a piece of software to render landscapes. I quickly installed Photoshop thereafter to enhance the results Terragen delivered. I was quite happy with what I did back then, but after a few years of browsing the web and seeing all kinds of awesome designs I grew tired of my own limited skill set. I was especially intrigued by icons, like the ones by Louie Mantia and Sebastiaan de With. In the meantime I was hired by a local company (where I still work to this day) as the in-house designer thanks to some web design skills I picked up along the way.
Once there I started making tiny icons for the software we produce, and little by little those icons grew more and more elaborate & detailed. At the same time I got intrigued by UI design and started learning that field at the office. I bought lots of books on the subject, and found some great & inspiring people. What I learned then greatly helped in my job, as I often have to think of different ways to visualize data. It was then that I went from sloppy work to pixel-precise fiddling.

Could you describe your approach and philosophy to design?
Practically everything is done in Photoshop. Every now and then I mock up a very rudimentary mesh in Cinema4D to get the perspective of the icon right, but after that I recreate those shapes with Photoshop. I try to use as much vector shapes as possible, but once I get into the itty bitty details I quickly grab my Wacom and brush it in.
For app icons I try to keep things as realistic as possible. That’s just a personal preference and my way of working towards my other goal of being able to digitally paint and not have it look like crap. For smaller icons though I have no real philosophy. I first figure out what the icon should symbolize before I get to what it should resemble (big difference there). Minding every pixel here is key.

What’s the hardest thing about what you do?
Getting the lighting and shadows right is crucial when trying to achieve realism. Unfortunately enough, those two things are what I find hardest to do. You can’t just randomly add highlights or shadows wherever you like, you really have to stop and think just how that shadow or highlight would be shaped in real life (if there would be one at all). I recently made a jacuzzi illustration and had to add a shadow from the pool’s edge in the water. After adding it, it just didn’t look right but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. Two days later I finally saw why: the shadow I added was convex when it should’ve been concave.

What’s the part that you love the most?
That’s right at the moment I reach for my Wacom pen to start adding in all the little details (though not every detail is brushed). I’ve learned not to be easily satisfied with my own work after seeing some of the icons I made when I first started doing it “professionally”. With my Guinness illustration I spent ages adding every little drop of condensation on the glass individually. It was a painstakingly tedious process, but the result was worth it.

Do you ever freelance?
I’m not a real freelancer – I’ve got a full-time job – however, every now and then I offer my services (or they are requested) to a client. Working on those projects is done on the evenings and weekends, and are —at the moment— merely for the fun of it. Whatever I earn with it are neat little extra’s that I save up to treat myself (like buying an iPad 3).

I hear rumours of a Dribbble app, care to share?
As I mentioned, I’ve gone back to school. For the semester I’m currently in, we have to design and develop a mobile app using web technologies (meaning HTML5, CSS3 and JS). The premise of the app was free to choose. I’ve always figured Dribbble clients lack 1 specific feature, so I figured I’d write it myself this semester. The app is called Longshot, and is a iPhone 4(s) specific web-app (I might target other devices later, but for now I’m focusing on my own phone). It’s actually nearing completion as far as functionality is concerned, but I still have to spend quite some time to the design. It’s up and running over here and requires to be installed to the homescreen as it needs the space Safari’s toolbars occupy. Still some work to be done, but quite useable already as it is.

What attracts you most to Dribbble in the first place, anyway?
Two things, really. Primarily to look at other people’s work, be in awe of and inspired by it, followed by being bummed at not being at that level. Secondly to post my own work looking for feedback.
Dribbble is a great community with a lot of talented members, and personally I’m always looking for their feedback. As every community it has its share of “elitism” and groupie behavior, but I’m not too sure if that can ever be eradicated. Longshot though is my attempt of giving everyone a fair chance of exposure.

If you had any advice for young designers, what would it be?
My twitter buddy Michiel de Graaf —himself an awesome designer— recently tweeted something that I feel nails it: “As a designer you should be proud of your final result but never satisfied.”

If you could instantly change anything about our society, what would you change?
Ads. Begone with them. I understand why they exist, and don’t mind if there are some ads but literally everything has become infested with ads. Please let me pay for your service if it means I can use it without ads. Also quite related to ads these days is online privacy. I’ve grown quite skeptical when it comes to companies —especially social networks— treating personal data, especially after reading up on some of Facebook’s practices.

Describe your favorite colour using only nouns.
Spring. Sci-fi. Cold. Minimalism. Calm. Peace. Sky. Space. Dabadee Dabada.

Thank you very much,

The pleasure is mine.

A tweet the other day from @eris reads:

I’d pick a villain as my project manager any day. Heroes are too reactionary. Villains can scope a Death Star and ship it. Twice.

It may be playful, but it’s entirely true. Good designers ship. Ideas are worth very little; execution is everything. These are mottos repeated endlessly by the startup industry and contribute to the very small rudder steering the very large ship slowly but surely. These are things worth listening to.

I wouldn’t even call the market equivalent ‘heroes’ – they are the lazy and unimaginative, the safe and the apathetic. They see a trend years past it’s prime and try to bank on it. That’s not really helpful to the people to whom the trend applies because they are exactly the demographic who has already ridden over that wave. Is your business plan to cater to late adopters? Not in writing, but all too often happens in practice. Being small is especially wonderful to take advantage of that agility and human nature; you’re allowed to make moves that the slow and ugly simply cannot make. These are the hard decisions and what used to be niche markets becoming larger and larger every day. These are the people you should be selling to: those who used to be bleeding edge but are now broadening into the general 10-40% of everymen. The people who follow these trends because it’s deeply ingrained to who they are in the marketplace but don’t feel pressed to buy the obscure things just for some marginal difference. They’re smart enough to realize a good, innovative idea and they’re a generally willing to take the gambles that the older types won’t. They’ll be your smoke when your product is on fire. You need that word of mouth to drive your small, agile company and they’re happy to provide it given they feel at home and believe in your product. There’s a transparency about companies like yours that they can appreciate and get behind. Personable.

So if the ‘heroes’ are the Walmarts out there villainy looks pretty appealing. You get to play by your own rules and do things however you want which usually means efficient and cunning. You survive by innovating circles around them and have schemes and plans for everything you see. You watch people and cater to what they want instead of waiting around for trouble to happen and trying to give them what they already have. That’s what heroes do. They react. They don’t sit in lairs inventing life rays. They wait until the villain invents a death ray and then stops it. If we put aside the metaphor for a moment, that isn’t actually helping anybody. Sit in your lair and make an awesome ray.

One more thing: villains don’t sit around reading blogs. They’re busy taking over the world. What are you busy doing?

I don’t want to say if it’s ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ but it’s interesting to look at the old architecture design / civil design and notice how entranced they were with geometry. Such precise, precise relationships between form and space and perfect shapes. I was looking at utopian cities earlier but it’s just as prevalent in mainstream city design – it doesn’t exist to the same degree because the utopian cities were smaller and usually self funded, where the large, pre-existing cities really didn’t have that agility.

The word that comes associated to this is ‘motif’ and it’s a word that I’m personally against, but I do like how they used it. All throughout architecture and design we find these examples of people who want things to look like other things. “This building is going to have a circle motif, and everything about it will be circular” or “This chair will be angular; a stealth motif” (I say this because I am not exempt. In my defense, it was required for the class project and I fought bitterly against it.) and, perhaps most offensive because of it’s common usage is “I bought this really nice painting / vase / brightly coloured mixer / decoration, let’s design a whole room around it.”

Design, in it’s purity, does not and should not seek to use other things to create itself. It is merely a solution for an existing problem, and given that each problem is unique, so too should the outcomes. But, this is an ideal. Will we still have hotdog shaped cars even though that’s probably the worst solution to the driving problem? Yes. Unfortunately. But, that might be the best solution to the branding / awareness problem. The design is that way because it has a purpose to be that way.

Motif tends to becomes a dangerous thing when it intentionally seeks to ruin the best solution by adding constraints that aren’t essential. More often than not, this constraint is also visually loud, because the design is trying to draw attention to the usage of said motifs. Would a circular house be an inherently bad thing? No, there are lots and there are fantastic, legitimate advantages to that shape. But there’s a point where the whole matching aspect breaks down the design integrity of other objects: should you have a cylindrical fridge? Probably not, since the usable volume ratio is less desirable than a rectangular one. But it fits in the motif! But, it’s poor design.

The interior design example is more a personal peeve relating to the invisibility of things. The idea that visually loud things should exist and are used specifically because they are visually loud is unwarranted. Good design is invisible – Dieter Rams. People say that’s boring, but if it were truly invisible, it couldn’t be boring at all. So, if it’s boring, it’s poorly designed. Lamps shaped liked specific things are literally designed for you to look at them, which is poor. Ideally, they wouldn’t exist at all – why would you intentionally invite even more attention to them? Now, there’s a slight hypocracy to these words because the logical illicit minor ad absurdum would say that everything should be either invisible (but still entirely usable) or, failing that, entirely plain and white. Since I am not an architect, I should say this is entirely not the case. Remember, the goal is solve the problem(s), and the solution might be bright fire engine red; that’s not an issue. The issue is when the answer to why it should be that way is: “I dunno, because I wanted it to be?” or worse yet “That’s what everything in the magazines are.”

So.

Don’t use motifs for motif’s sake. Look at the problem and use the best solution. The design should be that way because of real reasons for why it should be that way.

Photos via

I saw in the news the other day that Apple’s own Jony Ive had been knighted and wanted to extend a firm congrats to him; he definitely deserves it.

Then I thought: Steve won’t be able to see it or celebrate with him.

And that made me sort of sad.

But it also spawned this long rabbit trail of other thoughts that I wanted to record here and hopefully they make sense and possibly even inspire. Conviction, as a general word, is a firmly held belief. In design, that might mean a particular idea or methodology and there creates this table of positions:

I use the word ‘spine’ perhaps crudely. I mean, the willpower or drive to make things happen or assert oneself. So you can be assertive with no clear goal or reason and that makes you a jerk, or if you have no purpose and no willpower you’re really not doing much of anything at all. If you’re filled with conviction as to what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ but don’t bother making things better (I fall into this trap) you’re just a critic (read: outspoken slob). But, there’s this epitome on the upper right. I’ve made the boxes all the same size but realistically, this corner would be the tiny peak on the large mountain of people out there. This is the box I would put the legends into. The people like Jobs and Ive and Eames and Rams and Corbu and even people like Newton and Galileo. These are people with the drive and gumption to  make things work, building on their held beliefs and convictions until they succeed or are thrown in jail (radicals ideas are rarely easily accepted).

This is where my bunny trail breaks down. A quote: “Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.” which is attributed to a bunch of different people, all of which to whom I apologize for it’s use here. The point is, I see a lot of designers with talent that hide their convictions and their ideas because of this false paranoia they surround themselves with. A truly great person, a true design hero just goes out and does it. Protect yourself legally, sure, but I want to encourage you to go out and be awesome instead of cowering in the corner (both physically and in my above table).

I realize, I’m just as guilty as anyone and these are things I write because I’m struggling through them as well. This blog is not a letter from the wise grandfather recalling what he did wrong – this blog is the friend who’s mistakes guide everyone around him.

I want to leave you with a poster made by Joey Roth, who is a young designer I deeply admire for his seemingly effortless ease in just going out and doing awesome work without hesitation:

So here’s to the crazy ones.

Tomorrow is my last day of semester 3 which is relieving and sort of disappointing; I feel like I’m just now getting warmed up and into the swing of things.

But, it means that Christmas break is just a handful of exams away and that means it’s time for some web redesign. Specifically, my portfolio and this blog.

So, I turn to you, dear readers, to ask a few questions.

How often (if ever) do you:

1. Use the ‘Archives’ list in the right sidebar
2. Use the ‘Search’ function
3. Use the ‘Categories’
4. Read / follow my posts on Google+
5. Read / follow my Twitter feed
6. Read / follow the Acrylo Inspiration Tumblr
7. Feel the want / need to comment but can’t

And in general, what sorts of posts do you like / dislike? If you could suggest another topic you’d like me to explore…? If you could take out a topic entirely…?

Readability: I’ve always felt the black on grey was a little hard but black on white slightly blinding. Thoughts?

Feel free to email me directly or send me messages on the above mentioned social networks.

As always,

Kiitos. Danke. Thank you.

Some teasing renders I just finished. The bracket is the semester 3 finale project and is a BB30 spec bicycle bottom bracket. The cranks weren’t part of the project so they’re just placeholder designs and the sprocket part has been omitted in these renders. Also you’ll notice the shaft is in fact hollow, which is for lightweighting. My design is made of 1045 CD steel and holds up even the most beastly-thighed rider with a safety factor of ~12.

Just one of many projects all due in the next couple of days.

Solidworks + Keyshot 2.1

Same deal as last time: super comfortable American Apparel shirts, with print, sold at prices actually cheaper than buying them retail. Sweet deal!

Comes in eight snazzy colours, two genders and five sizes.

Check them out.

As soon as mine ships I’ll definitely take better photos of it – these are terrible, I know.

To keep my minimalist dymaxion map company, a new print!

Surreal robot-legged fruit are the new wolf sweaters, so tell all your hipsters friends that it’s stupid and then they’ll wear it because it becomes ironic and artsy.

The stretched canvases from Society6 are a wee bit expensive, in my opinion, but the shirts are really reasonable. Printed on ever-comfortable American Apparel shirts (seriously, I own a bunch of them – best T shirts in my closet) they’re actually cheaper than buying a straight up, plain shirt from AA directly. Not sure how that works, but who cares! You’re getting the savings passed on to you. And, a super sweet surrealist printed shirt to boot. Awesome.

Check it out and maybe buy one? You do want to be the envy of all your friends, don’t you?

Of course you do.

There’s a topic that’s been coming up in our classes that doesn’t really have a name, but it’s drawing a subtle line in the sand between classmates and colleagues as of late; I’m going to relate it to contextualism, as found in architectural theory.

It’s the defining of what is ‘right’ in design. How things should be. The problem (if you can call it that) could be phrased as “To what extent do we overrule a product’s contextual style with a personal or philosophical style.”

Let me explain:

I’ve mentioned Karim Rashid before, and he has a deeply engrained personal style which has become universally recognized. Our question could be brought up here as: “should he maintain his personal style if he were contracted to, say, the military?” Should the military accept his design if it were bulbous and pink as Karim would no doubt come up with? To what extent should things designed for the military be done in the existing military style?

So that’s a pretty polarized example. Obviously they come from very different ends of the spectrum.

It’s interesting for us as young, budding designers who are already finding themselves into neatly defined styles, to ask ourselves these questions. Do we put down our preference in favor of some external style? Or do we have faith in ourselves and try to break the mold not for the sake of mold breaking (see my thoughts on originality) but for the sake of solving the design problem in a better way. See Apple’s original ipod redesigning the MP3 player or Ford not giving people a faster horse, but the car. These are things that bucked the standard because they replaced it with something better and set the bar higher.

And I think the true result, the true outcome of contextualism is the wisdom to know the difference, see the outcomes and act on them for the best outcome.