Pitching instead of prototyping

Big mistake says Guy Kawasaki. And Bob Glaubit is on it with his approach of template based design. The templates then are not found simply by transforming the printed version into its online counterpart, but by disrupting the old way of condition reporting with an entirely fresh experience that is fun and fast, and I trust to have come across an insanely great way of helping Ready Mades’ condition report evolve into a first to market mobile utility with a unique selling proposition (USP):

The new standard in art industry condition reporting:

Touch twice and be done

In many cases two touches are suffice for the registrar to furnish an industry standard condition report. Required typing input is reduced to these scenarios -correct me if I am wrong:

In most cases however the user will get to choose from ready made templates.

Up next are UI samples for the important tools and how user input will enhance and play an all important role in providing the best reporting capabilities on the market.

First Look blog.
Redesign of the New York Times.
Redesign of the New York Times at the expense of brand equity.

The Tesla Model S, at $70.000 an electric vehicle no one can afford…

…sold more than Mercedes, BMW and Audi in the first quarter of 2013

Roar responsibly – make no sound

Tesla Motors exposes if unintended a recent Jaguar car headline as distasteful and decadent mockery, considering the bleak outlook with no immediate interim solution for zero emission as Tesla Model S is offering.

No sound, no advertising, the product is its marketing and the biggest surprise may be, that the classic design and robust concept sets Tesla apart from the competition in first quarter sales:

The contemporarily designed product is the best advertisement

Order or reserve your Tesla. Requires $5,000 USD reservation payment. Model S Signature Series are sold out.

Tesla’s brand site is conservative as is the Model S design. Unlike the car design, the web design is not contemporary- sadly a relict from the Nineties.
Tesla sales beating Mercedes, BMW and Audi By Peter Valdes by Peter Valdes-Dapena.
The blog GreenCarReports.com first noted the comparison.

The internet being refurbished

Brand sites, sozial networks, news sites, what have you…
Spring cleaning for a more orderly appearance and user experience:

• Away with navbars and navigation as a whole
• Away with colour overload
• Away with cramping content into small containers
• Welcome to recollection of conventional typographic standards with aid of webfonts
• Refurbishing the internet aims at efficiency and elegance

Pinterest und Tumblr served as tipping points for this movement we all are profiting from. Pinterest with a simplified user interface and tumblr with a simplified user handling at the benefit of tumblr administrators.

Meanwhile the redesign of digg.com outshines that of stumbleupon visually speaking, and wordpress got left behind by Tumblr as for the handling of administrative chores.

Newswire Reuters with steady flow of unfolding news in real time demonstrates how the user profits from radical simplification

Visitor searching for financial and business news arrive in mysterious ways. They discover content in social media or by search queries and upon arrival on Reuters it feels as if they had landed on a homepage for relevant content, in midst a flowing stream of news items (experience it here).

Reuters showcases a launch culture

Cultivating an itterary launch culture allows for preferably seamless transformation from old to new, both for the prospective user and the inhouse team.

Get deeper insights from Justin Ellis.

Coffee first

My family always had a phone and I can’t report on how the telephone changed our behaviour. We also had the first television set and the first color tv long before everyone else in our Munich neighborhood of Harlaching and Solln.

A slow web offers plenty of time for efficiency and elegance, of which both make up the black hole of the German design nation.

Brand Thinking: Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Pink, and Other Mavens on How and Why We Define Ourselves Through Stuff by Maria Popova

German elections 2013: Come May 13, a German public tv station launches ZDFcheck.de. A reality check aiming at evaluatating and validating pre-election promises made by politicians

Good design dissolves into behavior says Naoto Fukasawa. If so, the intended behaviour can be manipulated.

Is it the ZDF tv station’s intend to encourage a man hunt or is it meant to provide an incentive for politicians to act responsibly?

At court, witnesses are required to respond with yes or no. A cause for direct questions on behalf of the public procecutor. #ZDFcheck taken literarily must demonstrate its moral standard with immediacy: The side-by-side confrontation of pre-election promises on one hand, and the chronologic listing of achieved facts on the other hand (see chart below).

ZDFcheck must remain available and kept relevant online for the time it takes to full-fill made promises.

Brooklyn diocese is glad to have found a neutral predicate for its welcome campaign

Learn details from Jo Piazza.

Horst Seehofer, Prime Minister of Bavaria claims Nr.1 pole position in the digital revolution and my socialist friends are joking that this is because Seehofer was given an e-mail account

Make no mistake – Germany in particular Bavaria is well equipped to succeed as late entry to the digital economies

True, much like the Irish are not known for their command of the English language, Bavarian politicians are having a hard time in Berlin and don’t speak proper German, yet Berlin is funded by Bavarian tax money. The city of Munich is surrounded by a ring of top notch high tech firms no other German city can show for. Network infrastructure is not based on olc fashioned copper wiring as is the case in the states but on fibre optics. Munich evolved from farmland with an inherent mindset of independent farmers used to rely on their craft naturally opposed to government and state. Think of Bavaria as of the dixie state.

successfully funded Munich projects

 

before

after

Regie: Richard Dadd und Dan Fryer
Hauptrolle: Joe Hogate
Musik: Owen Hewson
Website: The last bookshop

Short and succinct

The bread and butter income of a good bunch of ad agencies is often determined by sales of dynamic brand sites. In the Ninteties fidgety web sites with lots of animations were confused with being dynamic. Back then it was close to impossible to sell web design to brands without flash animation.

This may not come to you as a surprise

We are getting there, however to date it is common practice at many locations to sell customers dead websites as dynamic.

Ich find principles and reasons why, extremely helpful in getting to know people and companies, here Bud Cadell’s:

• You grow what you nurture.
• Empathy will get you further than expertise.
• No learning should go un-shared.
• Oxford commas are mandatory.
• Frustration is a powerful signal.
• Complexity that isn’t respected is fatal.
• Anger is expressed helplessness.
• Beauty is the shortest path to peace.
• “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

I’m cheap

Contradicting my usual recommendation, that of making use of widely spread off-the-shelf software and build websites with WordPress or the blogging software you favor, Cadell’s site is hand coded. That is because he can, he must be surrounded by talented friends and colleagues at Deutsch. Cadell’s knowledge transfer takes place exemplarily supported by WordPress 3.4.1, at “What consumes me“.

One page wonder