Tag Design

Entries 6 Total

My one criticism of Inception: the architecture

Dec 27, ’10 4:38 PM

You’re a tal­en­ted archi­tect, one of the best. You’re in a deep dream (“Limbo”) where your mind can make drastic alter­a­tions of any kind. The only lim­it­a­tion is your ima­gin­a­tion. You’re effect­ively a god. And you choose to cre­ate a stark 20th cen­tury inspired sky­scraper world to live in?

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Apple’s attention to detail

Aug 26, ’10 7:13 PM

People often falsely assume I advoc­ate and use Apple products because I think they’re trendy or because I’m some kind of gad­get freak.

The truth is our world is awash with badly designed, badly craf­ted things. Apple is one of the few havens in a sea of people and organ­isa­tions that don’t give a fuck about the details. Atten­tion to detail is why I use Apple products:

In July 2002, Apple filed a pat­ent for a “Breath­ing Status LED Indic­ator” …They described it as a “blink­ing effect of the sleep-mode indic­ator in accord­ance with the present inven­tion mim­ics the rhythm of breath­ing which is psy­cho­lo­gic­ally appealing.”

The other day, I noticed that my friend’s Dell laptop had a sim­ilar fea­ture but with a shorter fade-in-fade-out period. Its rate was around 40 blinks per second, or the aver­age res­pir­at­ory rate for adults dur­ing strenu­ous exer­cise — not very indic­at­ive of some­thing in sleep-mode.

It’s inter­est­ing how a lot of com­pan­ies try to copy Apple but never seem to get it right. This is yet another example of Apple’s obsess­ive atten­tion to detail.

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A better UK power plug

Dec 6, ’09 3:45 PM

Stu­dent design for a fold­ing UK power plug. Clever.

Photo of Min-Kyu Choi's UK folding power plug

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Time lapse of building going up

Dec 5, ’09 2:21 PM

This is a time lapse I put together of a res­id­en­tial pro­ject I worked on in Lon­don. The pho­tos were taken over a period of two and half years with vari­ous cam­eras by a friend from his canal boat moored in the adja­cent basin. I cropped and straightened each photo manu­ally before stitch­ing them together to form the video.

Con­tinue read­ing for the video.

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Last Straw’s new design and a note to email subscribers

Nov 29, ’09 8:33 PM

As some of you may have noticed I’ve been hav­ing a bit of a tidy up around here recently. Last Straw now has a classy new grid-based design called Basic Maths by Khoi Vinh. I’ve also blown a few cob­webs out of the backend involving cat­egor­ies and what­not. All of which should make brows­ing my rants end­less pearls of wis­dom infin­itely more pleas­ur­able. Stay tuned in the com­ing weeks for a new photo/video gal­lery too.

As email sub­scribers will have already noticed I’ve also over­hauled the mail­ing list sys­tem, switch­ing to MailChimp. Note that this will now come as a weekly digest instead of indi­vidual emails.

While switch­ing I was reminded of how many friends and fam­ily I’ve sur­repti­tiously sub­scribed over the years. Not the most polite thing to do. Hon­estly, unless you really want to receive these emails, please unsub­scribe. There are other more mod­ern ways to fol­low a blog these days anyway.

In the mean time you might like to check out another web­site over­haul I’ve been work­ing on recently.

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Why so many things are badly designed

Jun 9, ’09 9:43 PM

Jason Snell of Mac­world on why Apple excels at product design:

Apple excels at cre­at­ing products that the gen­eral pub­lic likes because the com­pany is driven by design, not by engin­eer­ing. Most tech products — heck, most products in gen­eral — aren’t as good as they can be because they’re put together by the people with the tech­nical know­ledge required to build them. And so the tech­nical aspects of the product get pushed to the forefront.

Apple’s the kind of com­pany that makes decisions based on people, on users, and then chal­lenges its engin­eers to find ways to ful­fill those needs.

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