Category: design

Those of you who have met me know that the first half of my career involved graphic design.

The tool of choice for graphic designers remains a Mac computer.

I recently made a life change that means my main daily tool is once again my beloved Mac. (Yay!)

As a designer, fonts are important.

One of the pain points of most of the applications on my Mac is the list of long fonts. For some of them, to choose an appropriate font means scrolling through a long list.

Font Book is a built-in Apple app that lets users manage their fonts. It allows you to disable some of the fonts. Then they won’t appear in your font list. But many global fonts and useless obscure-styled fonts are not removable.

Life is never perfect.

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Acura spent a lot of money on a print ad for their new TLX. And it was very poorly done.

The basic design is OK, but the details are super sloppy.

I was compelled to dissect the ad and reassemble it. If you look closely, you will see the differences. The original ad is at the top, and the fixed version is at the end of this post.

1. The worst design element is the poorly spaced TLX logo. There’s a typographic principle of visual spacing vs. linear spacing. The original ad has the same distance between the bottom line of each letter. I moved the letters where they are in good visual relationship to each other, instead.
2. Repeating “Type S” three times did nothing but make the page full to the brim with visual elements. White space is a design principle that when used correctly lets each element “breathe.” An analogy is sand on a beach vs. a grain of sand on a black countertop… you’ll never see an individual grain of sand on a beach.
3. The little arrow with Japanese characters? Meaningless. They add nothing.
4. The little arrow at the bottom of the page? Meaningless. It adds nothing.
5. The fine print at the bottom on the original makes the page unbalanced. I moved it over to the right to balance out “precision crafted performance.”

I wish the ad had been precision crafted.

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(By the way, sloppy IS OK when it’s it’s on purpose, like riding your mountain bike through the mud.)

When I was six years old, Red Ball Jets came out with the coolest sneakers ever. They were totally black except for the little red ball on the heel label.

I wanted some so bad that even though the store didn’t have my size, I was willing to get a pair that was way too big – just so that I could be cool.

That sense of cool was internal. I don’t remember any of my friends having a pair.

Many years later, I finally got my all-black sneakers.

This pair is even cooler. They are made from almost 100% recycled materials. It’s surprising how much they look like my childhood favorite shoes.

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Rewards (sometimes) come to those who wait.

Product designers forget their end users.

This tube of creme had a security seal that would only come off using a pair of vice grips. The manufacturer never tested that seal with human hands.

Poor design surrounds us.

Bathroom hand dryers… the popular Xlerator makes so much noise that hearing damage may result. Dyson’s Airblade dB pushes your hands toward the sides – thus negating some of the hygienic effects of touchless air drying.

And the list goes on.