When you squint your eyes and tilt your head, don’t a lot of these products look awfully, well, similar? Don’t they look pretty but, at times, a little dull?

When it becomes necessary for virtually every business to signal they value design by adopting an up-to-date style, it becomes a commodity, a box to be ticked. That fresh look quickly becomes a cliché. This descent towards aesthetic monoculture was helped by the ease with which this particular style can be cheaply imitated: stick a blurred photo in the background, lay some centered Helvetica Neue on top and you’re already halfway there!

What other opportunities might we be missing out on? The internet and its surrounding technologies are the driving cultural forces of our generation. Taken individually all of these designs are quite beautiful. But who wants to live in a world with only one type of beauty?

—Has Visual Design Fallen Flat?, Emmet Connolly

Great points all around in this piece.

What is the solution?

We could argue platforms like Squarespace have contributed to this homogonization and commodification of design, but at the same time, they’re enabled people and small businesses to create nice looking sites with an extremely easy-to-use content management system. In an alternate universe where Squarespace didn’t exist these would likely be horrendous HTML sites built in Dreamweaver or mobile-incompatible Flash sites from 2005.

The sad truth for a lot of designers (I’ve had a career as a designer for 15 years) is that many clients don’t need a custom-made website. An off-the-shelf solution from Squarespace, Virb, Weebly or Wix is more than adequate for many people. A custom website will not impact most businesses more than a one made with one of the previously mentioned services. This fact might hurt some egos, but the sooner designers come to terms with this, the better off they’ll be.

An even scarier and sadder truth is one people in the creative field like to think doesn’t apply to them: that robots and artificial intelligence will never replace them. Spoiler: this is already happening. My only advice is the words of Charles Darwin, and my daily mantra: “It is not the strongest nor the most intelligent species that survives, but the one most adaptable to change.”

Your value as a designer is in your ability to solve problems for clients. Most of the time this manifests itself in visual solutions, but as designers we have to learn that we can and should be able add value in other ways (again, follow the above mantra).

CUPERTINO, SILICON VALLEY — APRIL 24, 2020: Thousands assembled in Cupertino today to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the single most important event in tech history — the release of the Apple Watch.

“I remember a time when people were skeptical of the Apple Watch,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a speech at the newly constructed Nikola Tesla Stadium. “They said it was dumb. They said it was completely unnecessary. They said it was a huge waste of money. Well, those people were wrong and gross and stupid.”

The ceremony included a presentation explaining that few people of the year 2015 understood just how revolutionary the little device would be. From eradicating Super Measles to helping establish the first prison on Mars, it seems there’s nothing the Apple Watch hasn’t done to make our lives better.

—Happy 5th Birthday, Apple Watch!, Paleofuture

Insane

Over at Bloomberg, Joshua Topolsky reviews the Apple Watch:

I’m in a meeting with 14 people, in mid-sentence, when I feel a tap-tap-tap on my wrist. I stop talking, tilt my head, and whip my arm aggressively into view to see the source of the agitation. A second later, the small screen on my new Apple Watch beams to life with a very important message for me: Twitter has suggestions for people I should follow. A version of this happens dozens of times throughout the day–for messages, e-mails, activity achievements, tweets, and so much more. Wait a second. Isn’t the promise of the Apple Watch to help me stay in the moment, focused on the people around me and undisturbed by the mesmerizing void of my iPhone? So why do I suddenly feel so distracted?

To be clear, we are in charge of our gadgets, not the other way around. I have turned off most notifications on my iPhone, so that the only time I get vibration alerts is for phone calls. My iPhone—the way I have configured it—is not distracting.

The same way a car you buy off the dealer lot will require configuring to fit you (literally), I anticipate I’ll have to tweak the Apple Watch settings before it behaves the way I want it to.

In the end though, Topolsky digs it:

The watch is not life-changing. It is, however, excellent. Apple will sell millions of these devices, and many people will love and obsess over them. It is a wonderful component of a big ecosystem that the company has carefully built over many years. It is more seamless and simple than any of its counterparts in the marketplace. It is, without question, the best smartwatch in the world.

I’m looking forward to getting one. To Topolsky’s point, I’m not in a hurry to get one because it’s a want, not a need and right now I need to to replace my iPhone 4.

WHATEVER happened to the laptop computer? Two years ago, on my flight to Las Vegas for Comdex, the annual microcomputer trade show, every second or third passenger pulled out a portable, ostensibly to work, but more likely to demonstrate an ability to keep up with the latest fad. Last year, only a couple of these computers could be seen on the fold-down trays. This year, every one of them had been replaced by the more traditional mixed drink or beer.

Was the laptop dream an illusion, then? Or was the problem merely that the right combination of features for such lightweight computers had not yet materialized? The answer probably is a combination of both views. For the most part, the portable computer is a dream machine for the few.

—The New York Times panning the laptop computer in 1985

via BoingBoing

Hank Green has some interesting ideas on rethinking the cost-per-impression ad model:

Imagine that you would like to consume a piece of content, but in between you and that content is a paywall. They’re asking $15 for one person to view the content one time. While a YouTube video might net you $2 per thousand viewers, this fantasy world I’ve just described will net you $15,000 per thousand impressions…A $15,000 CPM!

With a $15,000 CPM, every two thousand views is a full-time, living-wage human per year!

Of course, this model would never work…except that it works every day at every movie theater in America.

As he admits, some of the numbers sound crazy, but if you read the whole post and actually sit with his ideas, it’s not crazy at all.

via Cameron Moll

Horace Dediu tries to figure out how we’ll figure out if the Apple Watch is a success:

1. Language. Measure whether “Watch” will come to mean “Apple Watch”. “Phone” has come to mean not only “smartphone” but also all mobile/cellular phones and not just things used for calling but things used for all manner of information. This is a great test because the theft of semantics can only be accomplished through a degree of ubiquity of influential mindshare. Incidentally, the brand may well have been designed to do just that.
2. A measurable and significant reduction in the use of the iPhone. The Watch peels off uses from the iPhone and therefore the more it peels off, the less remains. However, that which remains will be more uniquely valuable to the incumbent. This is the process of carving and erosion that the PC experienced vs. mobile devices in general.

“The theft of semantics.” I love that phrase.

via Lifehacker

Taken from the National Archives

via Twitter

Illustrator Jon Contino was interviewed by The Great Discontent:

I started freelancing immediately after college. When you leave school, you’re conceited. I saw other people who were making money and I thought, “I’m better than those guys and I’ll make twice as much as them.” I tried the freelance thing, but I couldn’t get it together–I had no clients and no money. I ended up taking a job at a local agency that served only financial advisors and every client wanted the same thing done in the same way. It was very limiting and I was out of there after two months. The next job I took was for a print broker that did design on the side. Everyone who worked there was a designer, but the majority of their money was made from designing and printing club fliers, so it wasn’t the exact position I was looking for. I also took on some pet projects and got a taste of doing some cool stuff and actually making money. About a year after that, I decided to open up my own studio and try my hand at it because I was done working for someone else.

I love origin stories.

Contino is one of my favorite illustrators, but even guys at the top of their game like him had to start somewhere.

via Laughtard

via Sad and Useless

Chart via NetMarketShare via CNet