This is true. America™ is a brand.
As George Carlin has said, this country was bought and sold a long time ago.

For people who think you do your best work when you’re in your 20’s (or 30’s …or 40’s), these cats prove that life can go well beyond any artificial cut-off marks.
My friends and I have a name for what AC/DC has – it’s called the Ten.
…The Tendency to Do It Up.
Do you have the nine, Ten?

“I think I’m getting the fear.”
– Dr. Gonzo, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I thought it was a false alarm at first, but yes, it’s real. I have the fear.
Adobe’s problems extend beyond my current complaints of bloat and feature creep.
Their individual products are now mutating, spawning strange offspring resembling their parents but also taking on strange new dimensions. Apparently it’s no longer sufficient to have one version of Photoshop, we now need to pick from three:

It reminds me of another product lineup I’ve thankfully never had to directly confront (or install):

On Newsvine, AP writer Ryan Nakashima asks us, ‘Can Blu-ray save Christmas for Hollywood?‘
Answer: No.
Blu-ray just isn’t relevant. This isn’t the switch from VHS to DVD we did about 10 years ago. This is a move from high quality digital to higher quality digital with higher capacity discs. For the average consumer this step up is not that important.
The DVD-to-Blu-ray upgrade is going to take a lot longer than the VHS-to-DVD one. It will be indirect upgrades, such as gamers who buy the PS3 for the games, not for the Blu-ray format.
The other big reasons for a slow adoption are convenience and portability brought to us with the advent of iTunes. Sure our downloaded music and movies aren’t nearly as high in bitrate and quality as our CDs and DVDs, but I can get them right when I want them. And when I’m traveling I don’t have to carry discs along with me for my laptop or as the case is now, my iPhone.
When you live in the world of iTunes, Youtube, Hulu, Amazon Unbox, Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’, Vimeo and Blip.tv adopting a new physical storage format seems silly.
If everything else in my life lives ‘in the cloud’ on servers, like my email, social network and my photos – why not my video entertainment? At least put it in a format I can carry on my computer without the need for discs.

I was talking with Victor and John the other day in our office at Roundarch about Adobe’s products and the problems we’ve been having with them as well as our ideas for what they could be.
Victor took it upon himself to crystallize the discussion very nicely:

Adobe’s software offering is growing so robust, and their control of the content creation pipeline so complete, that they need to look to another model for what the future will look like precisely because there no longer exists a sensible explanation for why Photoshop does not allow me to create a non-closed vector shape with a stroke – other than software bloat. Enter the case for an aggregated experience – with a twist.

and:

Imagine the Adobe footprint/OS as a (relatively) low cost software that bootstraps the ability to use other Adobe content creation modules at a metered rate – let’s say yearly for instance – with an integrated way to dynamically load modules from the cloud, as needed/wanted to your local machine through a subscription service.

Design is about choice.
What options do you give people to choose from?
If you give people too many choices, they won’t know what to choose (Barry Schwartz calls this the Paradox of Choice).
If you give people too little choices, they won’t know what to choose.
A great design finds the right balance of choices. It shows you the essential. The rest it hides – either by minimizing, breaking into smaller pieces/steps, or removes them entirely.
Today’s case study is Garmin and their Product Page for Automotive (props to dalematic for pointing this out to me):

By the way – this is just half the automotive product list page – I figured it was enough to get my point across.
As a car owner and someone who needs an onboard map/location device, this page has way to many options. Way too many. While I believe that Garmin makes a good product, I don’t believe that there’s any meaningful different between most these products. I’m willing to put money on it.
Just as Barry Schwartz describes, I have so many choices on this page:
a) I don’t know what to choose from
b) I don’t want to waste time reading through 30 product descriptions
A big part of a company’s job is not just to sell products, but to help people make informed decisions on which product(s) to buy.
Which brings us to the other end of the spectrum – Apple MacBooks.

Apple’s current lineup of laptops comes in 3 different models – the MacBook, the MacBook Air, and the MacBook Pro. For the 3 models, you can choose between 2 to 3 different configurations.
That’s it.
And if their simplified product lineup wasn’t simple enough, they’ve also provided a great comparison page to help you decide.

I’m surprised how many designers (web or otherwise) that don’t know the term vernacular design. Considering how much vernacular design is out there, I can guess a lot of people don’t know that they’re even engaging in it.
Vernacular design refers to a style, not to a methodology. A common example would be the vintage/retro style this site uses. I love old car manuals, diagrams and typographic styles from the 1950’s & 1960’s. I could use a similar style on any site if I chose to – what gives the style meaning is underlying metaphor from my studio – The Combustion Chamber, and the extension of this ‘brand’ into this blog, Daily Exhaust.
Many designers don’t reach out at all in order to marry a vernacular design style with a concept, they just do it because it looks good and many can make a good living designing by style and not by meaning derived from the content of the project. This doesn’t make it right.
Which brings me to a great example of vernacular design I found today – Field Notes.

This site is beautiful in and of itself (both the design and the HTML code).
…but once we dig deeper, we find a wonderful concept to support this stylistic approach:

INSPIRED BY the vanishing subgenre of agricultural memo books, ornate pocket ledgers and the simple, unassuming beauty of a well-crafted grocery list, the Draplin Design Company, Portland, Oregon in conjunction with Coudal Partners of Chicago, Illinois bring you “FIELD NOTES” in hopes of offering, “An honest memo book, worth fillin’ up with GOOD INFORMATION

Every project has a concept – find it and exploit it.
It’s only going to make your work stronger.

The CNN ‘Breaking Alerts’ are starting to read like Twitter messages:
CNN.com:

Twitter:

No context, no supporting link to more info.
No who, what, why, where or how.

Apple updated their homepage to reflect the new iPods they just released.
It looks beautiful as usual.
As an interactive designer, there is one (of many) detail that I love:

As if the page wasn’t sexy enough, some hotshot decided to throw in extra PNG-24 alpha sauce.
I love it.

So there’s been a lot of talk about the new Microsoft ad with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld. The responses have been positive, negative and confused.
I loath Microsoft software, but I still think the ad is funny. Only time will tell what Microsoft’s ad agency, Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, have planned for the remainder of the $300 million campaign.
…and whether that campaign will make any dent in altering the public perception of Microsoft.
One detail I found interesting is when the latino family is looking into the store and the mother asks, “Is that the Conquistador?”. We know from the context of the commercial that she’s referring to the shoe Bill is trying on.
Or is she referring to the other Conqueror?

I’m human, so I’m built to notice patterns.
Here’s one I’ve noticed on some products/technologies that either I or people I’m close to use and respect.
MySQL founder quits Sun (Sep 4 2008)
Stewart Butterfield’s bizarre resignation letter to Yahoo (Jun 17 2008)
Delicious founder leaves Yahoo (June 19, 2008)
Microsoft ‘Halo’ creators to be separate company (Oct 5, 2007)
It doesn’t necessarily mean these things are dead or have no future, but it doesn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy either.

Valleywag: NBC dumps Microsoft Silverlight after Olympics
Of course they did.
It sounds like like they they had some technical difficulties with the video feed through the Flash player, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have had the same problem with the Silverlight player.
Give it up Microsoft, with your Zunes, Vista, Silverlight and Windows Mobile.
You have DERAILED.

Today’s exhaust? All these multi-touch demos we’ve been seeing for the last few years that are comprised mainly of two things:
– Someone enlarging and shrinking images (iPhone styley)
– Someone using both hands to use what seems to be the version of PC Paint I used back in the early 90’s on my Windows 3.x machine
Can we please evolve these demos into something that comes closer to matching the sophistication and processing power we have in computers today? Last I checked this was the year 2008.
We’ve got massive multi-player video games, web applications, Flash, Flex, Air, AJAX, multi-core processing and an iPhone application that simulates beer being poured out of a glass.
Let’s step it up people.