Uba Kontrovasie

3 Pretty cool examples of product design

What a hatchback! This Alpha Brera hands-down beats any of it’s equivalents in the market. Whilst people are oogling over the Audi A5, this older (2006) Alpha still beats it in the aesthetics dept.

Arcoroc Pint Glasses, found these in the office. French made, such attention to detail and even the typeface used for the etching looks good.

IWC Schaffhausen Steel Dress Watch, I saw a Longines that looked like this today, immediately reminded me of the IWC. Simpler the better!

Tags: Design, product design, vehicle design, watch design

Zazzling Zoom

I was surfing the web for t-shirts today, just looking and not buying. I want to print my own, there are so many Banksy tee’s available but no Binoy Varghese tee’s or any of the artists that I like.

Anyway I stumbled upon Zazzle.Com, which at first looked like any other t-shirt website, however, after some exploring I discovered the neat product zoom feature on their home page.

I haven’t seen it anywhere before, but I think it’s pretty dang cool because it eliminates the need to leave the product gallery in order to zoom in on products. I didn’t delve into how they’ve done it, probably some ajaxery at play.

Tags: ajax, art, Design, e-shop, ecommerce, fashion, online shop, tee shirts, usability, web design

Geometry, circles and things

Kapitza have just released a book of geometric art, I’m a big fan geometric/linear art and geometry because It takes me back to my childhood. When we were kids my Mum use to teach us how to draw all kinds of shapes and patterns using compasses, I know, I know most kids just used to settle for Crayola’s and sugar paper but we got compasses.

Those early influences are probably what got me interested in art and graphics as a kid, they’re also the main reason as to why I’m not an Accountant, Pharmacist or an Investment Banker like the rest of my cousins and local friends.

Thanks Mum

Tags: Design, geometry, graphic design, kapitza, linear, linear art

Cool Soap

I’m really liking the Malin+Goetz product packaging. It’s been around for quite some time, however, I like the way the type descends, gets smaller (in size and weight) and fades in colour.

I’ve been a bit cheeky and copied this style for a few powerpoint presentations. It’s quite a cool way of showing how drawn out some tech/marketing definitions look. I briefly show the slide with the definition and then flip over to the next slide, which contains a single easy to digest sentence interpreting the word/technology/theory I’m trying to explain.

The M+G website is also quite minimalist in it’s appearance and this ties in nicely with their packaging design.

An overall excellent use of the iconic Helvetica font in both package and web design.

Tags: Design, helvetica, minimalism, minimalist, package design, product design, Typography

Gmail goes arty

So I pressed refresh on my gmail browser tab the other day and up popped a notification for a new feature, themes!

I had a browse and then selected the space theme, or something of that nature. The theme I had selected was quite cheesy and it reminded of me using Encarta 96 (There’s a blast from the past!).

What annoyed me slightly was the fact that it was hard to navigate my way around the menu and change the theme back to something that I liked. It’s quite easy to change themes once you locate where the theme settings are (on the settings page, themes tab), however, this isn’t very clear initially.

Gmail is quite Ajax heavy therefore an extra dialogue above the inbox to confirm theme selection would be ideal and it would improve over all usability.

I found the themes themselves to be quite mediocre, may be Google should open up theme development to the open source community like firefox/mozilla have.

Tags: ajax, Design, gmail, google mail, menus, navigation, themes, usability, User Experience (UE)

Where to find inspiration

If you’re ever looking for creative inspiration or just “cool stuff” on the web, take a look at the explore page on tumblr.

Honestly it’s brilliant, tumblr seems to be the blogging platform of choice for so many photobloggers (phloggers, I just made that up), designers and creative types, you’re sure to find some gems on the explore page.

Go on browse through the tumblverse, there’s even a neat little Google Maps mash-up that shows posts in real time.

Tags: creativity, Design, inspiration, mash up, tumblr