Hello Again!

~ Michelle ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a long time since I’ve glanced at online design magazines and rejogged my memory of new design trends emerging from packaging, lighting, architecture and elsewhere. A lot has happened in the last 6 years. I moved back to Boston from the SF Bay Area. I found a new love, got engaged, then got married, then had a baby and then bought a house. It’s been nonstop for a little while. But I’d like to return to this old habit of perusing interesting design finds and gaining inspiration yet again from all corners of the world.

Today, I’d like to share some beautiful lighting made by a Danish company called Design By Us.

  1. The Shahin Wall lamp is amazing mix of materials – glass plus a transparent shade that provides a warm glow. It’s a bit unusual to see these two materials and styles together, which is why I find this piece particularly unique.

2. The Endless Wall is a wall lamp that has an inner light which reflects endlessly its reflective surface. It’s such a fun, intentional visual effect. We don’t see it enough it lighting designs. When it’s off, it’s very understated; a silver orb, hanging on the wall.

3. The New Wave Optic pendant immediately brings visions of an underground jazz club, dimly lit except for these soft glimmers of colors. The glass is beautiful and could easily be the focal point of a room.

Modern masks for crazy times

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This year, I have worn masks for pollution, smoke and COVID-19. Here are some modern masks if the average medical mask isn’t good enough for you.

purME: This mask is machine-washable, waterproof, durable and … comes with a clear option. “The mask’s filters trap all sorts of harmful particles such as PM2.5 and allergens, both as airborne or droplets, and you can even upgrade to P100 filters with a simple swap, allowing you to effectively filter out 99.8% particles.”

weetbe: transparent mask with fan and screen, which makes it anti-fogging. It protects you and other people.

Breeze: “Face cooling technology & optional magnetic eye shield. 2 designs: filters with valves or no-valves.” – This upside to this mask is that there’s no proprietary filters you need to replace.

SEEUS95: This is a self-attaching N95 mask that adheres to your skin. (Pretty sci-fi)

UVMask: It actively sterilizes the air – including the one you breathe out.

It seems like most of these masks have either N95 level filters or can filter out bacteria and viruses. It would be interesting to see how the mask design would be different if the main threat was wildfire smoke (which is the case on the west coast now). The transparent masks are nice if you need to use face-unlock, but they also look a bit alien to me. Maybe it’s because we don’t see many of them around.

I hope some of these make it past the Kickstarter/ Indiegogo phase and into real stores. They definitely cater to people who are high risk and have the ability to afford the price tag. And while these designs are super cool, I do hope though that we won’t have to use them next year. Until then, I appreciate that people are making an effort to solve important, everyday problems with their ingenuity.

The Dribbble of 2019

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Screen Shot 2019-11-03 at 11.47.10 AM.png

Dribbble is where designers post their work (also called a “shot”) to gain exposure, get feedback and potential nab a job.

I saw the founders of Dribbble talk about their platform several years ago. They talked about helping people get constructive criticism while deciding on which direction to take their work and emphasized the posts that were in the sketch-phase. That Dribbble is no longer in existence.

Today, it’s a place where designers post polished work that is often the end result of many hours of pixel pushing. This high fidelity work is beautiful, and the beauty of everyone’s work has ultimately transformed the platform into a fashion show that’s more eye candy than thoughtful user experiences.

Moreover, designers are starting to use Dribbble as a reference for an aesthetic that you should follow. Highly large radii on card layouts, parallax motion, spring interactions, rounded sans serifs, huge colored drop shadows high on blur, the same glowing chart that is measuring wealth? fitness? brightness? They are everywhere.

There’s many, many UIs that appear clean, because they only use icons. But on closer inspection, you realize that you don’t know what any of the icons do. There are endless onboarding tutorials that are beautifully laid out, except that nobody – I mean nobody – reads onboarding tutorials that are three screen long. There are gorgeous text fields where the outline and suggestion text is so faint it would never pass an accessibility test.  Design is more than pretty images. Design is about usability, function and intent.

As a designer, Dribbble is fantastic for getting visual inspiration for your next app design or ideas for micro-interactions that are fluid and unique. As an employer, it tells you how good someone is with a software program that they could have just learned a week ago and how well they can copy a style. If you want to look for real design, look to the real world – ask people what they are doing, how they do it and what their habits are to developing success in their field. I promise, there’s good stuff.

Understanding art

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Do you scratch your head whenever you look at abstract art? I know I do sometimes. Perhaps it’s easier to understand when you break it down as a transition from realism, which humans have struggled to depict for centuries, to styles that more fully express the artist’s point of view about the scene or feeling in front of them.

For example, one of Monet’s earliest paintings looks like this:

Image result for early monet painting

He studied art classically for years before experimenting with looser brushstrokes and more vivid colors while working with other great artists of his era.

Art becomes interesting when it’s not just a mirror of real life, but an interpretation of real life. Once people were fully able to paint the world accurately, they began to seek other ways of expressing the atmosphere. Impressionism, seeing below (another by Monet), is an example of a scene that has been abstracted to some degree.

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Another example is Picasso. His early work looks like this:

Image result for picasso's early work

It’s incredibly realistic with rich details and classical lighting. He learned formal drawing techniques from his father before he ever dabbled with cubism. It was only later that he developed his own personal style, seen below.

Image result for picasso cubism

Picasso developed cubism as a way to challenge the idea that art should be an exact copy of nature. Rather than continue painting with perspective and foreshortening, he introduce the idea that you can paint one subject from many different angles and perspective. This is what makes his work famous.

Mark Rothko’s early work looks like this:

Mark Rothko, Untitled, late 1920slate 1920s

It’s a traditional watercolor landscape. His later work, on the other hand, looked like this:

Mark Rothko, Sea Fantasy, 19461946

and then even later like this:

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 19531953

These are large paintings that required your participation. He’s implying, by hanging the paintings close to where observers would stand, that the painting is an alternative to real life. There’s a different reality altogether and that it is expressed in the work.

In order to understand abstract art, it’s important to think about these aspects of art – that we started from first being able to full capture a scene realistically with painting to experimenting how the painting could enhance the real world or create a different world. Not many people dare to do this, which is why those artists are famous.

That’s all for now. Until next time, happy museuming.

 

Product Picks for July

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Smart Planter

Lua Planter

This amazing planter, Lua, gives your plant emotions! It uses sensors to measure the soil’s moisture, temperature and light exposure. It also measure your movement, so it peers at you when you walk by. The emotions help you know when it’s thirsty, sick, too hot, etc.

I’m always a sucker for sustainable houseware and packaging of any kind. Gaurav Wali uses pine needles here to create holders and organizers. He uses natural binders and waxes to make this a completely bio-degradable product. The material can also be colored with natural dyes made from vegetables and spices. What a cool way to use something that’s all around us!

lekue_twin_one_1

I would use this Twin Utensil Set daily. When you switch from chopsticks back to western utensils, there’s even an interlock between the fork and knife so that they become one interlock.

 

Product design picks for June

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A bell for runners so you can tell people when you’re coming up behind them – similar to a bell on a bicycle. I think this is pretty genius. This could also just be an app, but I suspect the ring reverberates better if it’s a physical one.

Designer: Kevin John Nadolny

runbell_2

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An LED that helps you communicate with other drivers. You can view it up to 50 feet away. There are shortcuts to the most used messages, and the controller has large buttons.

Designers: John Stanley, Nina Stanley, Harsha Venna & Harshit Aggarwal

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A clock that shows you the time in a new way. Because I work as a UX designer, I’m always looking for new interaction patterns and new interfaces – both digital and physical. This one is simply and unique.

Designer: Mattis Boets

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March picks: thoughtful UX moments

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In Singapore, senior citizens can tap their identity card on the sensor at the pedestrian crossing so that they can have 3-13 more seconds depending on the size of the crossing. This takes into consideration everyone’s mobility levels.

This hotel has fire escape plans at ground level, because chances are if it’s smokey you’ll be low to the ground.

Parking lines that go up the wall so you can actually see if you’re parking in the right position. All garages should have this.

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Idea for expanding creativity

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closeup photo of yellow lemon

Creativity is originality and fluency of ideas. It’s something designers ought to be good at. But every now and then, we get stuck too. There are so many constraints. How do we make all of the stakeholders happy? What about that deadline?

Let’s go back to a space where we can play, because, as I learned at a UX conference two years ago, when people view an activity as play, they come up with twice as many ideas as people who view the activity as work. 

Here’s a practice for getting back to idea generation: Give yourself a plain object with no instructions. How can uses can you find for it?