Armin Vit on Reebok’s new logo:

It’s probably not fair to keep comparing Reebok to Nike or Adidas but since no one ever said design blogging had to be fair I shall continue: I don’t think the previous Reebok logo ever achieved the same ubiquity or memorability as the Nike Swoosh or Adidas’ stripes. Before writing this post, if you had asked me to draw the Reebok icon from scratch I wouldn’t even have known where to start.
I’m with Armin, I couldn’t draw the Reebok logo before I read his blog post. For some reason, I think of Asics when I think of Reebok.
Maybe because they’re both forgettable brands.

Bitcoin continues to sound fucking awesome:

A bitcoin bank has been forced to close after hackers stole 896 bitcoin, worth £365,000, in an attack on Sunday.

The company shut its website and posted a statement on Tuesday morning detailing the loss.
Sure, greedy banks that default and get bailed out with taxpayer money suck balls, but I’m not converting my money to Bitcoin any time soon. This is a shit show.

Jesse James Garrett:

The interesting thing about galactic collisions is that because galaxies contain so much room between the stars, there’s very little actual colliding going on. The galaxies just sort of flow into one another, individual stars finding new places in the larger system developing around them in a process unfolding over billions of years. From the vantage point of someone living in one of these galaxies, even if you lived long enough to see the constellations shift and change around you, you still might not be aware of exactly what was going on.
A great metaphor for what’s happening with customer experience, service design and user experience design.

It wasn’t enough that Apple ‘virtually’ imitated rich Corinthian leather in iOS 6.
Samsung had to go a step further and do it in the physical world.
Notes app, iOS 6 (2012):

Samsung’s new Chromebook (2014):

Stay classy, Samsung.

—Shunryu Suzuki

Benedict Evans (via DF):

This brings us back to the mouse and keyboard that you ‘need for real work’, as the phrase goes. Yes, you really do need them to make a financial model. And you need them to make an operating metrics summary — in Excel and Powerpoint. But is that, really, what you need to be doing to achieve the underlying business purpose? Very few people’s job is literally ‘make Excel files’. And what if you spend the other 90% of your time on the road meeting clients and replying to emails? Do you need a laptop, or a tablet? Do you need a tablet as well as a smartphone? Or a laptop, or phablet? Or both?
This is what Microsoft is trying to convince people with their Surface tablets—that you can’t do ‘real work’ on a ‘regular tablet’ (read: iPad), yet you can.
Ironically, consumer-focused Apple is dominating mobile device sales in the enterprise market.

The source of yesterday’s post.

—Saul Bass
via Bombtune and Geisha

I’m not surprised, but Samsung is integrating a fingerprint scanner (via The Loop) into their new phones—just like Touch ID Apple introduced last year in the iPhone 5s.
I lump Samsung in the same category as all the tacky, unoriginal people putting Flappy Bird clone apps in the app store and the vendors on Canal Street in Manhattan selling ripoff Louis Vuitton purses.
To be clear, the copying isn’t what bothers me. All artists copy. It’s the fact that they didn’t improve on what Apple introduced. Judging from the video, they actually made it worse.
It’s the difference between a talentless hack singing Stevie Wonder’s Higher Ground at a karaoke bar and then hearing The Red Hot Chili Peppers do it. The former is copy, the latter a reinterpretation of the original.

Probability and chance often appear to be counterintuitive…Consider the following scenario:

John initially took a degree in mathematics, and followed it with a PhD in astrophysics. After that, he worked in the physics department of a university for a while but then found a job in the back room of an algorithmic trading company, developing highly sophisticated statistical models for predicting movements of the financial markets. In his spare time he attends science fiction conventions.

Now, which of the following do you think has the higher probability?

A. John is married with two children.
B. John is married with two children, and likes to spend his evenings tackling mathematical puzzles and playing computer games.

Many people answer B. In fact, the set of people described by the characteristics in B is a subset of those described by the characteristics in A: for John to have the characteristics of B, he has those of A and more. It follows that the probability that John is described by B cannot be larger than the probability that he’s described by A.

…This failure of intuition is often called the conjunction fallacy.

From The Improbability Principle by David J. Hand.
It’s a fascinating look into just how poor we human beings are at predicting outcomes. My favorite bits of the book are when Mr. Hand savages Carl Jung for casting a broad net over his personal coincidences as evidence for synchronicity. Sure, that’s low-hanging fruit these days, but still makes for good reading.

BGR: WhatsApp exists thanks to Twitter and Facebook’s ignorance
Wow. Talk about a flamebait headline and a load of bullshit.
The fact that Twitter and Facebook turned down WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton in 2009 has nothing to do with ignorance. Careers are not just about talent (although talent helps). Careers are also about timing and persistence (see also: grit.
It’s also important to point out the same person can achieve—or not archieve—very different things at different companies.
Case in point: Jony Ive. He was languishing at Apple and on the verge of quitting when Steve Jobs came back and made him his right hand man in 1997 so he could help develop little dinky products like the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad.
What did Ive make at pre-Jobs Apple? The 20th Anniversary Mac. A thoughtful product for sure, but not quit in the same league as those other “i” products, is it?

Brandon Velestuk:

The first implementation of our internal Show & Tell reminds me of Dribbble. For that matter, it reminds me of a good portion of online communities. They require little to no thoughtful input. It’s more common than not that a single click or tap is all you need to do to show your support for a photo, status update, or design snippet, even though what’s really behind that interaction is, and should be far more complicated.
Dribbble absolutely favors presentation over critical thought and in that way it works more like pornography than graphic design. An image of slider controls or buttons without context is like picture of a set of tits (or a dick, hey, I’m equal opportunity)—in both cases context doesn’t matter. What matters is only how good they look.

Image taken from Michal Parulski
My favorite error I see made over and over again on Dribbble (and many portfolios) is when people skew their mobile app designs away from the viewer (see above). Now the actual user interface doesn’t even matter, the pixel porno designer wants you to appreciate how well he/she designed a composiiton of an interface.
Update: I should note, I’m not against porn. Porn is awesome and if you want some great graphic design porn, I suggest FFFFOUND.

Sam Byford at The Verge:

Mt. Gox, once the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world, is operated from an unmarked Tokyo office block that offers no indication of its major, controversial influence on the digital currency’s health. No indication, that is, unless you’ve walked past the headquarters in the past week, where protesters are attempting to draw unwelcome attention to the company’s existence. “Mt. Gox: Where is our Money,” reads one sign. “Mt. Gox: Are you solvent?” reads another. What’s going on?
If you’re using Bitcoin as a legitamate currency, you’re an idiot.
There’s way too many unknowns surrounding it, so if you’re using it, you’re just rolling the dice.