Sitting in my office working on one of the few sunny Saturdays we’ve had so far, I can’t help but get a little distracted. Here’s a quick design critique of my office’s climate control system, so I can feel productive in my procrastination.

The main thing I want to bring attention to is the “Too Warm” and “Too Cool” buttons. Someone at Mistubishi Electric was getting a little too clever here. Buttons should almost always be labelled with what they do. A simple “warmer” or “cooler” probably would have made more sense.

Interface design is about reducing the friction in the interaction as much as possible.

“Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling—the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user.” — Niklaus Wirth

From the Programming Quotes Archive

I dropped-by my local pharmacy to buy a new pillow, but was rather flabbergasted to find every single one in a big sturdy box, with no demo models to be seen. As someone who has to be careful about my back, I found this made buying the proper pillow nearly impossible.

The simple fix would be to package them in thick plastic, so the customers can at least get a sense for them. A pillow is a piece of equipment I’ll use more than anything I own. It has to be perfect.

Far too many things are over-packaged—most of the time I want to be able to pick them up, feel them in my hand, and get a sense for how they’re made. I’m no longer satisfied with a photo of the product on the box—photography and Photoshop can make anything look good.

“With type, as with philosophy, music and food, it is better to have a little of the best than to be swamped with the derivative, the careless, the routine.”

- Robert Bringhurst in the Elements of Typographic Style.

A good lesson for everyone, and one that we can extend to many facets in life.

I’ve been working on developing the habit of never buying things on price alone. My goal is to de-commoditize my consumerism as much as possible, to work towards having less stuff, but of a higher quality.

Luxury goods are needlessly expensive. By needlessly, I mean that the price is not related to performance. The price is related to scarcity, brand and storytelling. Luxury goods are organized waste. They say, “I can afford to spend money without regard for intrinsic value.”

Premium goods, on the other hand, are expensive variants of commodity goods. Pay more, get more.

I’m not always a fan of Seth Godin, but he nails it here.

A histogram is a graph that shows how colour or brightness is represented in an image. It should be familiar with anyone who has opened up Photoshop’s “levels” window.

Histoface is a typeface of sorts, which creates an image with a hidden message in the histogram.

Here is an image created with HistoFace. As an image it looks just like a white to black gradient:

But open up the histogram in photoshop, and you get:

Taking this a little further, I created three separate images, and put them into the red, green, and blue channels of an image. This created this image, which has “red”, “green”, and “blue” as hidden messages in each respective colour channel. You’ll have to check for yourself though.

You can make your own on the HistoFace page.

(Thanks Jay!)

Here’s a fantastic set of re-imagined movie novelizations. Every single one is great.

See also: Elephants and Dinosaurs, by the same artist

(Thanks Vinnie!)

It’s amazing how well his work has aged. It still looks great.

Read Good Design in 10 Commandments for a small sample of his design philosophy.

My favourite:

Good design is as little design as possible

I’m helping conduct a workshop this week at local non-profit Apathy is Boring along with Montréal-based community builder Michael Lenczner. Come by if you’re interested in learning how to leverage social networking and web-based tools to support your art, non-profit, or business.

The info:

Some of you who know me in person know that I’ve recently gone through a rather large career shift. After years of computer-related technical work—designing and writing about design as a sideline—I’ve recently launched a full-time freelance design business.

I make websites for creative people and small businesses at reasonable rates. I make record covers, posters and business cards.

I’ve just launched a somewhat experimental portfolio page, which shows a selection of my work:

Visit my portfolio

Please, let me know what you think.