Ideas are at the heart of every creative process. However, coming up with them can be hard work. Mark Boulton arms us with tools to meet this challenge.

 

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

Typographic rugs from John Pour Home.
Awesome!

Typographic rugs from John Pour Home.
Awesome!

Laundry!

Ever designed or developed a beautiful interface only to find your hard work ruined months later by gaudy graphics or invalid markup? With proper documentation you'll have a better chance at seeing your interface stay beautiful. Jina Bolton guides us through the process of developing an interface style guide.

 

Hide Your Shame: The A List Apart Store and T-Shirt Emporium is back. Hot new designs! Old favorites remixed! S, M, L, XL. Come shop with us!

I've been kind of really into web apps, I sign up to almost every service I read something about and I always think they will be useful for me. Because of that this week I will list 3 really nice web services. Also I'll list the super cool new Boagworld site.

After the first post, last week, we have received some really good suggestions, so we will be listing every week 2 sites that you recommended. To do that just leave a comment with the url of the site you want to suggest, a little explanation about it telling why it's cool to be listed here.

I vote for art - www.ivoteforart.com

‘I vote for art’ is your favourite new place to buy art online. ‘I Vote for Art’ is a brand new place to buy great art at a reasonable price. Please have a look around ... If you like a piece, make sure you click on the thumb to vote for it. Or perhaps you could even buy it!

Boagworld - www.boagworld.com

Boagworld is the personal website of Paul (the Wurzel) Boag who lives in the heart of rural Dorset. He produces a weekly podcast along with Marcus (pop star) Lillington on all things relating to building and running websites.

Jungle - audiojungle.net

AudioJungle is a brand new audio community serving up thousands of stock music loops and audio effects by independent authors for use in your projects. Join us today, and together we’re going to rock the web!

Orgoo - http://www.orgoo.com

AudioJungle is a brand new audio community serving up thousands of stock music loops and audio effects by independent authors for use in your projects. Join us today, and together we’re going to rock the web!

READER SUGGESTION

Alfa Romeo 159 - www.ivoteforart.com

"Vivez l'expérience 159"

Diego Zambrano is a Brazilian designer who's been doing some great work. He's worked with big Brazilian companies, such as Skol, Claro, Sadia and Fiat.

It's just great to see some awesome designs such as these... and I wonder how many people have visited the sites he developed. Probably millions. That's freakin' awesome. Visit him at Work for Food.

Yesterday at MEX, one of the speakers showed an industrial and interaction conceptual design from many years ago that was remarkably similar to confidential work I’ve seen created during the same timeframe. Two different companies, two continents, similar results. The only reason the speaker was able to show the work was because the client finally agreed to submit the concept into competitions, but that’s only because a big part of their concept looks a lot like something that is in the marketplace: Apple’s Coverflow (album & image interface invented by Andrew Coulter Enright).

Consumer electronics (CE) companies are trying so hard to keep everything confidential and proprietary and yet I continue to see design concepts from the same point in time, emerging from different teams, working for different companies and sometimes even in different cultures. How is that possible? How can designers who’ve never met design a similar product? My colleague, Dan Saffer, pointed me to an article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker that speaks to this very thing. Ideas are “in the air. … The history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time.” 

From my perspective, I’ve seen that design teams, working in separate silos, look outward to color and form trends, natural behaviors, and historical and cultural context for inspiration (let alone consumer ethnographic research). Each team internalizes the information as inspiration to inform the product designs. Because the designs are influenced by outside forces of trends, culture and human need, they end up very similar across many separate teams. Essentially, if we are doing our jobs as designers, our work is going to be representative of our surroundings at a moment in time. This then begs the question: Why bother with the confidentiality agreements?

I’m so f*^#ing tired of not being able to share the work I’m most proud of with my peers. There are so many lessons to learn from past work and yet it’s all wasting away under piles of NDA’s. It’s even more frustrating when we extrapolate just how many other designers worldwide have concepts that will also never see the light of day.

What I find fascinating about this is CE companies think that somehow ideas can be contained within confidentiality agreements, but in actuality the ideas are coming from outside influences that reach beyond any contract. 

As design becomes a bigger part of product differentiation for CE companies, we designers, as the creators of these innovations, need to work harder to 1) keep ownership of our unused concepts and 2) to show the concepts to the design community in a timely manner. I believe that true design innovation will occur at a much faster pace if conceptual designs are shared. And if we’re designing products from a human-need perceptive, we can make improvements to the world at a faster pace too. Imagine that.

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The wallpaper of this week is an image I created for the Abduzeedo Icon Contest. It was my first experiment using Poser 7, a really nice software to design human forms in 3D. I highly recommend a visit to their site and download the demo, I'm sure it will be very useful for you.

Desktop Version

iPhone Version

Resolutions:

• 1900x1200px
• 1680x1050px
• 1440x900px
• 1280x1024px
• 1280x800px
• iPhone Version