Tag: design

Blands

On all the garbage direct to consumer startups.

All startups seek to disrupt and disintermediate a smug status quo, or originate and dominate an entirely new niche. But what makes a brand a bland is duality: claiming simultaneously to be unique in product, groundbreaking in purpose, and singular in delivery, while slavishly obeying an identikit formula of business model, look and feel, and tone of voice.

Despite hiding in plain sight (and plain recycled packaging), this “slight of bland” has won the wallets of a generation that considers itself above marketing, and created some of the buzziest companies of the age.

2023-04-01: It’s worse, average is everywhere

The interiors of our homes, coffee shops and restaurants all look the same. The buildings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we drive, their colors and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, identities and taglines all look the same.

But it doesn’t end there. In the age of average, homogeneity can be found in an almost indefinite number of domains.

The Instagram pictures we post, the tweets we read, the TV we watch, the app icons we click, the skylines we see, the websites we visit and the illustrations which adorn them all look the same. The list goes on, and on, and on.

There are many reasons why this might have happened.

Perhaps when times are turbulent, people seek the safety of the familiar. Perhaps it’s our obsession with quantification and optimization. Or maybe it’s the inevitable result of inspiration becoming globalized.

Regardless of the reasons, it seems that just as Komar and Melamid produced the “people’s choice” in art, contemporary companies produce the people’s choice in almost every category of creativity.

Drone Design Evolution

We’ve seen a sharp evolution in designs from Amazon. The most primitive was this testing drone we saw from them back in 2013:

To me, this is the most exciting design because it is both a sharp departure from what came before, yet still integrates elements of each previous iteration, showing that the designers/engineers are learning. The total number of rotors has again been changed, this time to 6, and the rear propeller has been nixed. The dual fixed wings have been replaced by a single wraparound wing that takes a hexagonal configuration. The drone takes off vertically, like a helicopter, but then pitches forward at an angle for straight-line flight, using the lift provided by the unusual wing design.

very impressive learning rate.

Proofing Fonts

The far more pernicious issue with pangrams, as a means for evaluating typefaces, is how poorly they portray what text actually looks like. Every language has a natural distribution of letters, from most to least common, English famously beginning with the E that accounts for 12% of what we read, and ending with the Z that appears just once every 1111 letters. Letter frequencies have been calculated since at least the 9th century, and crop up in the most unexpected places: Etaoin Shrdlu, the leftmost rows of the Linotype keyboard, merits an entry in the OED. These values were calculated by computer scientist Peter Norvig, whose 2012 analysis measured a massive corpus containing more than 3.5 trillion letters. Letter frequencies differ by language and by era — the J is 10x more popular in Dutch than English; biblical English unduly favors the H thanks to archaisms like thou and sayeth — but no language behaves the way pangrams do, with their forced distribution of exotics. 7 of the most visually awkward letters, the W, Y, V, K, X, J, and Z, are among the 9 rarest in English, but pangrams force them into every sentence, guaranteeing that every paragraph will be riddled with holes. A typeface designer certainly can’t avoid accounting for these unruly characters, but there’s no reason that they should be disproportionately represented when evaluating how a typeface will perform