Annoying Design » design

Youth Today: refugees of a failed system

ross — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:14:43 +0000

Michael Wesch, a professor of cultural Anthropology at Kansas State U, caught a lot of people’s attention with a YouTube video that summarized the essence of Web 2.0. Recently he helped 200 of his students at KSU collaboratively surveyed their own media habits to really question traditional education — which is obsolete at best. These [...]

What Is The Future Of Design? (Hint: it’s not the web)

ross — Fri, 23 May 2008 16:06:43 +0000

What’s the future of design you ask? Taking game design concepts and ideas, and applying it to all other areas of design, from products to websites, to make experiences more engaging, addictive, and visceral. This week USA Today’s Mike Snider wrote an article: “Social sites help casual games reach the next level” where he talked [...]

Towards the Customer-Centric Organization

ross — Tue, 06 May 2008 05:38:05 +0000

There’s exciting thought brewing right now about how user-centered design and customer experience thinking can impacting, not product or website design, but the very building blocks of business, like org charts, process flows, even manufacturing. As companies realize they need open up their marketing mentality, so are a handful applying that thought to other areas [...]

Forrester’s Gen Y design principals

ross — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:17:42 +0000

Young consumers. Generation Yers. “Those crazy Kids!” You want to reach them online with a website or a Facebook app? You need a specific design framework that takes into account their very unique needs an desires. Forrester research guru, Bruce Temkin, and myself outlined four Gen Y design principals: immediacy, Gen Y literacy, individualism, and [...]

why us kidz love 80s retro

ross — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:43:51 +0000

There’s a reason why my 18 year-old kid brother Jake loves watching VH1′s I love the 80s. Even though he was born in 1990. The kitschy, fashion-insane era of the 80s captures his interests much more than the 70s or 90s. There’s just something about big hair and tight gold pants that makes ya [...]

lowercase letters and the new myspace aesthetic…

ross — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:59:11 +0000

lowercaseletters just look better. But customizing Myspace profiles with a template or silly color scheme does not. And lots of young people are catching on to that. Young people are more design-savvy and creative than ever before. They know good design when they see it. And they realize MySpace is over — it has become [...]

ETC Lessons: Themed Entertainment Principals

ross — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 22:32:59 +0000

Rummaging through old course notes I took during grad school at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, I came across this simple list of “themed entertainment principals.” Whether its a video game, or virtual world you’re building, these three design principals are ones to follow: Know your story. From the dramatic arc you create, to the [...]