Another toilet picture, dedicated to Gene, who I influenced with my healthy interest in toilet interactions.

From my hotel room in Paris last month. How do you flush this one? Turns out that it’s the middle silver panel. Although there’s little visual indication, the panel is hinged behind just enough that it can be pushed along the bottom. There are almost-invisible letters on the bottom right corner. The left and right panels do nothing, by the way.

At first I thought that circle-in-a-square was some flush button, but it’s a deodorant puck.

Previously here and here.

I thought I knew a thing or two about type and stuff but before Saturday I'd not come across the term "CamelCase" before. Sure, I've unknowingly used CamelCase but until I stumbled across the short article in October's CamelCase headed NewScientist, attracted, predictably, to a photo of a case of metal type used to illustrate the piece, I didn't know the technique of bunching up words together without spaces and distinguishing each word by its capitalisation actually had a name. Well it has, infact it has several: medial capitals, BiCapitalisation, CapWords and InterCaps, as well as the afore mentioned which is derived from the way the capitals create "humps" in the composite.

Of course, as the article illustrates, it's very popular nowadays: BlackBerry, MySpace, YouTube etc but has, surprisingly, been around for ages with examples stretching back the the fifties (CinemaScope).

Coincidentally, I'd used the technique only the day before. Software engineers use it loads apparently, and it is they that have defined two versions: UpperCamelCase and lowerCamelCase (like "iMac").

A quick Googling of the phrase reveals it to be a reasonably well known idiom.

Well no one told me!

Update: More InterCapping from Jonathan Hoefler. Thanks Jonathan!

I’ve said before that Brand is Bland, and ‘Blanding’ is not something that any organisation would really want to be getting in to. In terms of the four C’s, we’ve also established a preference for brand work to enable creativity rather than enforce control (Problem Solved, M Johnson, noting Channel 2 idents) and enable coherance in communication, rather than dogmatic consistency (John Grant). At the Intersections Conference this week, part of the DOTT07 festival, there have arisen some handy new slogans, with possible offbrand implications. Frans Johansson implored us to recognise that “diversity drives innovation” which is perhaps stating the obvious but important nevertheless. The interesting thing is that Brand doesn’t (usually) drive diversity, it drives conformity of thought or action, whether that be through visual identity, tone of voice, or ‘on-message’ thinking and doing by employees, so if these things hold water, a strong brand could be said to be counter-innovative. The next important question is what value you place on innovation. Tim Brown from IDEO made an interesting point about encouraging a company or organisation to have a portfolio of innovation, some very gradual and incremental, other modes cautiously experimental, and finally some radical and unabaited. A common sense approach that neatly eschews the idea that you are either innovative or not. Off or on.

The visual identity for WORLD DESIGN CAPITAL - TORINO 2008 looks like an interesting scheme and crosses some off-brand territory, based on freedom and flexibility - we’ll keep an eye out for design outcomes and try to keep you posted. Some bits may have been lost in translation, but you get the gist.

Does 'the city that never sleeps' actually get a wink or two? Getting up at 4 am is a good way to figure that out. I awoke at this time to conduct an interview with Steve Heller during the week...

Apple's recently released Mac OS X Leopard (a.k.a. Mac OS X 10.5) has a lot of new and improved features that many find exciting. It's encouraging to note that many of the new features are not just visual bells and whistles, but are there to improve accessibility.

There is a page on Apple's website that describes the 300+ New Features in Leopard. Some of the features listed in the Universal Access section are:

• A new voice called Alex
• Built-in support for Braille displays
• A virtual Braille display
• You can now control VoiceOver using only the numeric keypad
• Improved navigation of long documents and web pages by listing and jumping to headings, tables, links, and text attributes
• Hot spots lets you monitor up to ten different screen areas and be alerted when they change
• Drag-and-drop actions can be used by keyboard only in accessible applications
• Positional audio effects provide an improved sense of location
• Improved accessibility of bundled applications and utilities

I haven't been able to get hold of a copy of Leopard yet, but the improved accessibility features are among the first things I will take a closer look at when I do (which is hopefully within the next couple of days).

The features mentioned above are from the list of features that are specifically added or improved for accessibility. However, as Ricky Buchanan at ATMac mentions in Leopard: 17 Universal Access Features or more, features like performance increases, Finder improvements, and a grammar checker are also likely to improve accessibility for some people with disabilities.

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Posted in Accessibility, Apple, Mac.

If you follow the news related to logo and identity design, there’s a good chance you’ve seen this logo around in the last month or so. It’s the 2007 Eulda, The European Logo Design Annual, winner. What makes it even better, is that it was designed by a fellow Serbian, so my instant reaction was to get in touch with the designer and do a short case study showing a part of the design process. The fact that this article is live over a month after the winners were announced, is really my fault.

Consumer Society and Citizen Networks is from Ukraine. Its purpose is the consumer protection and the task was to create a visual identity which would be applied to all their initiatives.

“We came up with the visual equation, Consumerism + Protection = X and did research on the symbolism for both. The bar code and the umbrella came up as a result which is when we started working on the visuals.”

At an early stage they reduced the number of lines in the bar code in order to make it legible in reduced size.

What followed was research on various umbrella icons used on boxes and packaging which led them to the final design, which very cleverly combines the two elements and uses the negative space to form the top of the umbrella. One of the ideas of the design team was that the stand alone logo mark, could also be used as a certificate of quality on packaging.

Credits,

Jovan Rocanov for Kaffeine Communications.

Throughout 2007, Jesse and I have been giving what we call The Stump Speech. In it, we put forth the importance of taking an experienced-based approach to product strategy, with examples including the original Kodak camera, Nintendo Wii, Palm Pilot, Google Calendar, and, of course, iPod. Readers of this blog will be familiar with elements of it already, particularly in the essay written Core77.

I gave the stump speech at d.construct last September, and it went quite well. They’ve made the audio available, so I decided to sync it with the presentation and create a slidecast, embedded below. Just hit the play button, and it’s like I’m there, inside your computer, talking at you and advancing slides. Spooky!

(You’ll note they call it “Experience Strategies,” which was the original title, but was changed for the talk. Also, some of the end slides don’t quite sync up right — I had to recreate the deck after a hard drive crash.)

Some of the images have a fair bit of detail, so you might want to watch it full screen.

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