There's a good chance that Marcus Engman is directly responsible for at least one piece of furniture in your house—and if you're a millennial, maybe all of it. As head of design for Ikea Sweden, Engman's job is to oversee the design of new furniture and housewares that then winds up in the hands of millions of customers each year. Here, Engman predicts everything from the future of flat-pack furniture to the weird-feeling fabrics people will want to start touching to offset a world full of glass screens.
Traditionally, when people thought of their houses, they thought of them almost mathematically. A sofa + a television = a living room. A bed + a set of drawers = a bedroom. But in a constantly urbanizing world, where more people are living in smaller spaces (by 2017, the World Health Organization predicts the majority of people will live in more tightly packed urban areas), what makes one room a living room and another room a bedroom is becoming a lot more fluid.
Furniture is going to have to evolve to keep pace. Take the sofa, Engman says. In the past, a sofa was the most important piece of furniture in the living room, and consequently the home. But that's already changing. The sofa isn't just for socializing anymore: people eat on their sofa, and in small apartments, they might even use it as their bed. As for pointing your sofa at a television, in a cord-cutting world, there's no need for that.
"We're already seeing a lot more people buying day beds instead of sofas," Engman says. "That's fluid home thinking." And Engman expects the trend to continue, predicting that the table—not the sofa—will soon become the most important piece of furniture in most people's homes: a multi-use piece of furniture you can work, eat, play, and socialize around.
In a rapidly urbanizing world, people will have to make do with smaller spaces, and less furniture overall. As a result, Engman says, the furniture in our homes is going to become more versatile. "It's possible that pretty soon, a stool might be one of the most important pieces of furniture in your house, because it can do just so many things besides be a stool," he says. "You can use it as a bedside table, a seat, an end table, or a step ladder, and you can easily design them to be nestable, so many stools can be stacked on top of each other when they're not in use."
The history of the home is synonymous with the history of storage. You've got chests of drawers, armoires, cabinets, rec centers, bookshelves, CD shelves, and more. But that's all changing. "There's so much less to store," Engman says. People don't have room for storage in an urbanizing world. And many of the things they used to store, like music, movies, and books, now live almost exclusively in the cloud. Our houses will be less cluttered with things, but the things we have, we'll want to display.
People will always want to collect physical objects, as a way of showing who they are, Engman says. "People want to show off their collections, not hide them away," he says, so storage methods will have to evolve to keep up. Like displays in the museum of your home, they need to be just as functional as they are exhibitionist. Think more open shelves and glass cabinets that allow you to show off your collection, instead of chests and drawers.
Earlier this month, Ikea announced a line of new lamps that could wirelessly charge your gadgets, provided they support the Qi wireless charging standard. That's just the first baby step of where Ikea sees furniture going. The Swedish furniture maker believes that furniture could one-day be as synonymous with silicon as home electronics are.
That's not to say Ikea wants to become a gadget maker. "Our mission isn't to sell electronics, but to figure out how to make life at home smarter and easier," Engman says. One day, people could be just as excited and curious to download an update that adds new features to their smart appliances as they are to download the latest version of iOS, he says. Ikea plans to show off a conceptual Ikea kitchen in Milan next month at the Salone del Mobile.
Self-Assembly Lab, MIT, Christopher Guberan, Product Designer, Erik Demaine, MIT CSAIL, Carbitex LLC, Autodesk Inc.
Ikea is synonymous with flat-pack furniture, but Engman says, "We're always on the lookout to pack things flatter. It just doesn't make sense to mail air all around the world, or even around the country. It's just not sustainable, and it makes furniture more expensive than it needs to be."
In the next five years, Engman expects that Ikea and its competitors will figure out ways to package furniture flatter than ever, which will in turn make it cheaper to buy because of reduced transportation costs. Asked if he has heard of MIT's project to create programmable 4-D materials that can bend into shape in response to heat or water—potentially allowing brands like Ikea to ship flat-pack furniture that doesn't need to be constructed—Engman wouldn't comment directly, but said the company is constantly "looking at new material innovations" for the future. However it's done, the furniture of the future is flatter.
Furniture is key to expressing personality. But one-off furniture is expensive and takes time to create. Engman says that the next big frontier in furniture design is to figure out personalization on a mass-industrialized scale. For example, when Ikea makes ceramic plates, around 20% are currently being discarded because of some small variation in the way air flows through the ovens as they bake. "So what if we took those 20%, and instead of saying they were mass-production failures, measured their success in their uniqueness?" Engman asks.
Engman admits that personalizing mass-produced home furnishings is a major challenge, and even five or 10 years won't be enough to fully figure it out. "But personally," he says," I think this is one of the most interesting and promising areas to explore." If Ikea succeeds, it means that cheap, custom furnishings will be available to everyone.
"People spend most of their time touching screens," Engman says. It's boring, and not what people want. According to Engman, the near future of the home is a tactile one, filled with weird fabrics and materials that have been custom-designed as a contrast to the smartphone and tablet screens we spend most of our days touching with our fingertips.
If #TheDress social media frenzy of earlier this month proved anything, it's that people perceive colors very differently. So this jigsaw puzzle which tasks people to fit together a gradient pattern is a nightmarish—but beautifully designed!—joke gift for someone. Since jigsaw puzzles are enough to task even the strongest relationships ("That's part of a leg, not part of a cheek, you idiot!"), we can only guess at the patience required for two people to put together this 500 piece puzzle.
Produced by Brooklyn-based Areaware and designed by Bryce Wilner, an employee in the Design, Publishing, and New Medium Department of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, the Gradient Puzzle comes in two color variations: red-yellow and green-blue. Unlike normal jigsaw puzzles, which feature a picture to make putting the puzzle together, you need to figure out where a certain piece falls upon the spectrum to solve the Gradient Puzzle. And, of course, if you're working on the puzzle with your partner, you also need to make sure that both of you actually see that color the same way.
Is the Gradient Puzzle a fun way to spend an evening-in at home, or a boxed retail torture device, available for just $18 from Areaware's online site? That's up to you to decide. The Gradient Puzzle, along with the rest of Areaware's spring collection, will be available to purchase on April 1.
Are the fortunes of design on the rise in Silicon Valley? A resounding yes, says John Maeda, design partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. During a presentation at South By Southwest 2015 on Sunday, Maeda argued that not only is Silicon Valley taking design more seriously; design is actually taking over. Here are four key reasons why the most successful tech companies of the future will really be design companies.
Starting with Flextronics' acquisition of the design consultancy Frog in 2004, the last 10 years have seen an increasing number of tech companies acquiring creative firms. For example, Google now owns industrial design firms, while Facebook owns software and digital design firms Sofa, Teehan+Lax, and Hot Studio. And this trend is starting to hit critical mass: 27 startups co-founded by designers have been acquired by big tech companies since 2010, while six venture capital firms have invited designers onto their teams for the first time in the past year.
This trend is only going to continue, Maeda said during his presentation, because "Moore's Law no longer cuts it as the key path to a happier customer" in Silicon Valley. For years, the solution to every problem in tech was to build a faster chip. Now, design—not silicon —is seen as the answer. For example, look at the new MacBook: from a pure silicon perspective, it's slower than the old MacBook and MacBook Air, but its industrial design pushes the envelope in other ways, from the simplicity of its ports to its effortless portability.
With design capturing more and more venture capital dollars, there's a shift occurring in tech. Before, tech companies saw design as something to spray on a product at the end—think of the generic beige case you might slap a desktop PC into, but increasingly, the companies that are making the biggest splash are integrating design into every product from the beginning, like the Nest smart thermostat.
The happy marriage of technology and design long predates Silicon Valley's rise. Consider, for example, Michael Thonet's No. 141 chair, also known as Vienna coffee house chair. Designed in 1859, the No. 141 was designed in such a way that exactly 36 chairs could be packed into a one-meter shipping container when disassembled. It's the original flat-pack furniture, and that design allowed Thonet chairs to be manufactured cheaply in Eastern Europe, then shipped to places as far away as New York while keeping the price low. Over 50 million No. 141 chairs have been sold since 1859, a feat that would be impossible if good design thinking hadn't informed every part of the manufacturing process.
"To achieve great design, you need great business thinking/doing—to effectively invest in design—and you need great engineering—to achieve unflagging performance," Maeda argues in his presentation. Letting design lead your business isn't something Apple came up with. It's something that the best businesses have always done. Tech is only really figuring out.
There was a time when tech companies didn't have to worry about design, because their audiences were techies, just like them. Not only is that no longer true, but the ubiquity of tech has made user interface and experience design more important than ever before. Back in the '80s and '90s, you might only interact with a bad user interface a couple of times a day—Maeda calls these "pain points"—but now that we check our smartphones hundreds of times a day, the number of possible "ouch points" that can alienate a user have increased tenfold. "User experience matters so much now, because we are experiencing so much," Maeda says in his presentation. "A pain point can become a 'pain plane' on mobile. That's a lot of ouch."
Designers are key to startups and established tech companies alike, Maeda argues. In startups, early hires heavily influence corporate culture, so bringing in designers on the ground floor is hugely important. That's a fact startups are surely starting to wake up to: designers are now hired at a rate of one to four compared to engineers at tech startups. According to KPCB's talent partner Jackie Xu, this ratio used to be closer to 1:15 or even 1:30.
That's how designers can help build a company from the ground up. But Maeda also sees a new trend starting to happen. More and more designers are being hired in upper management positions in tech companies, advocating for design from the top down. Take Nike, which has a designer as CEO.
There's a disconnect between what wearables can be and what they currently are, says Chris Ullrich, who heads up user experience at Immersion, a firm known for its haptic feedback innovations. Right now, even the most advanced smartwatch is really just a mirror of the smartwatch in your pocket. Your phone receives alerts from the world, and instead of pulling it out the screen in your pocket, you look down at the screen on your wrist.
This is absurd in Ullrich's eyes, because wearables could really be so much more: silent universal communicators snuggled up against your skin that can let you know everything from how fast your heart is beating to what's happening on Twitter.
This is why at last month's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Immersion introduced TouchSense Core platform hopes to fill that void.
The key behind TouchSense Core is to better utilize haptics as a communication tool; to create a design language for the vibrating motors inside smartwatches that would not only allow wearables to communicate with you invisibly, but just as importantly, be able to deliver nuanced information.
At the heart of TouchSense Core are five main categories of notifications, each of which has its own haptic syntax, established in software. The first two categories—Urgent, or Later—deal with immediacy. An incoming phone call, for example, is a more urgent notification than someone retweeting you on Twitter.
Two other categories—Foreground, and Background—relate to whether the notification you're receiving is in relation to what you're currently doing: if you're a runner, for example, your smartwatch would use one category of notifications to say you just ran 5k, and another to remind you it's time for your daily run.
And because your smartwatch should be able to raise its voice above all other notifications to let you know you're running low on battery, or to give feedback when you touch the touch screen, the last category of notifications has to do with system notifications. Each of these categories in TouchSense Core speaks its own haptic dialect, with distinct notification styles that a user can learn over time.
"When you look at something like Android Wear, it's really well thought out on almost every level," says Ullrich. "But Google's not giving any guidance to devs on how to create nuanced haptic sensations,"
That's the problem with wearables—and, indeed, most vibrating gadgets—as it stands right now: It's all binary. You either have an alert, or you don't. Your smartwatch might buzz at you, but all the buzzes feel mostly the same. "It makes it really hard to tell if your smartwatch is alerting you because your grandma just wished you a happy birthday, or because you just lost millions on the stock market," Ullrich says.
What TouchSense Core is attempting to offer developers is what Ullrich calls a "standardized iconography" of haptic effects. On the hardware side, this means that Immersion is working with wearable makers to make sure their devices support TouchSense Core, and that they feature vibrating motors that are dynamic enough to communicate a with a range of intensity. And on the app side, TouchSense Core has built out a design framework for devs to implement nuanced haptic notifications that users can actually understand.
But how different will these notifications really feel from one another? Aren't they all just simple buzzes? Ullrich says no.
"One of the biggest challenges we have is getting the public to understand that the breadth of haptic experience is just so much bigger than they've been exposed to," Ullrich says. For example, on Immersion's Google Play demo app, you can experience a phone call notification that actually feels like an old rotary phone ringing in your hand. The effect's so good, it's eerie, yet chances are, if you have your smartphone on vibrate, it does nothing more than buzz insistently.
To Ullrich, wearables represent an unparalleled opportunity to inform the public about the importance of great haptic design. Wearables are strapped against the skin, not separated from your body by a purse or a pocket like a smartphone. They're more intimate. Once customers learn to "hear" the silent language of haptics pulsing against their wrist, the hope is that they will demand a richer texture of haptic experience in other devices as well. Where as most people experience haptics in their smartphones and game controllers today as simple, repetitive notes, wearables could teach us to expect more from our devices: rich haptic melodies that track our physical and digital lives.
Although the haptic technology maker is not ready to announce when the first smartwatches with TouchSense Core integration will ship, or even who will make them, Immersion already works closely with companies like Samsung, LG, and Motorola. So chances are the first smartwatches to feature TouchSense Core could be just around the corner.
Either way, it's part of a larger trend to redefine the ways in which our gadgets and appliances talk to us. If the recent work of companies like Immersion and Method is anything to go on, the gadgets of the future will be able to talk to us in a lot richer ways than just blinking their screens at us.
Twitter is currently experimenting with a major design overhaul that could transform the login page of the popular microblogging site into a real-time portal of news stories and celebrity updates.
Over the past week, Co.Design has discovered two separate Twitter redesigns, currently in limited-scope testing.
Both imagine the future of the Twitter homepage as a sort of social media news portal, in which tweets are grouped according to categories sorted by subject (Business News, Space News, Video Games, and so on) or author (Celebrity Chefs,Country Artists, and more). Users click a small banner to drill down to see tweets that fall within those categories.
The main difference between the two is layout. The more polished first design, spotted last week by Fast Company developer Yongzhi Huang, features a 3x3 grid of cards and a more densely packed, two-column design. The second was spotted by Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan. Sullivan's Twitter homepage features a 2x2 grid of tweet categories and sparser, three-column design.
In truth, short of the obvious—that Twitter wants to emphasize discoverability—the new homepage designs brings up more questions than answers. For example, how would the new categories work? Would they be human-curated, driven by hashtags, sorted by algorithm, or some combination of the three? Or would you be able to subscribe to Twitter categories?
It's worth noting that Twitter, like many tech companies, periodically A/B tests multiple versions of new designs with a random, limited assortment of users. That doesn't mean either of the new designs is definitely coming, but rather is just a direction the company is considering.
Even so, the new designs could solve a couple of concrete design problems for Twitter. For one, the current Twitter homepage is totally devoid of content if you don't have an account (or aren't logged in). This design entices new users to sign up by luring them in with content. As a side bonus, it's a heck of a lot less boring than the current homepage design.
Twitter has yet to respond to two separate requests for comment, but we'll be sure to update if we hear back.
Like a T-1000 Terminator rising out of a pool of blood-red liquid metal, Carbon3D is a radical new printing technology that can actually pull a model out of a bed of resin, up to 100 times faster than traditional 3-D printers. The technology could take 3-D printing mainstream while streamlining the design process for untold numbers of designers.
Here's how Carbon3D works. Traditional 3-D printing is really just 2-D printing in disguise. 3-D printers melt down filament, and then dollop it out a drop at a time in a bed, where the filament re-hardens. By doing hundreds or even thousands of passes, a 3-D printer can slowly construct a model over time. But time is the operative word: because of the way standard 3-D printing technology works, it takes a long time to 3-D print even simple shapes.
What makes Carbon3D so revolutionary is that it eliminates layering. Carbon3D calls its technology continuous liquid interface production, or CLIP. Clip works by shooting beams of light and streams of oxygen through a bed of light-curable resin. The light hardens certain areas of the resin, while the oxygen prevents other areas from curing. By carefully controlling the oxygen that is allowed into the resin pool, the Carbon3D printer can print objects anywhere between 25 to 100 times faster than traditional 3-D printers, the makers claim.
That speed increase could be a significant step forward for 3-D printers. The allure of 3-D printing has always been that maybe, just maybe, it'll one day be fast and cheap enough to be the 21st-century's equivalent of the Star Trek replicators. 3-D printers have gotten cheaper, but they're still slow. A 100-fold speed increase over current technology is maybe enough to take 3-D printing into the mainstream. And for designers, faster 3-D printers mean faster prototypes, a quicker production pipeline, and the potential for more sales.
The big question, though, is price. Carbon3D isn't a real product yet, so no one knows what the price-to-performance ratio will be. The technology is promising, but whether it becomes a consumer-facing product is another story entirely. Some big names in venture capital think Carbon3D is going to make it big: Sequoia Capital and Silver Lake Kraftwerk have helped Carbon3D raise $41 million in funding.
Although Carbon3D has been developing its new technology for the past two years, the company only came out of stealth mode this week, simultaneously presenting its approach to 3-D printing at a TED talk and through a paper in Science.
If you're a seasoned traveler who is convinced that a hard-shelled carry-on is the only one worth considering, Nendo wants to change your mind, at least partially. The Japanese design house has teamed up with Fabbrica Pelletterie Milano to create a hybrid suitcase with a hard-shelled body and a unique soft-shelled lid which gives it unprecedented versatility.
Called the Kame, Nendo's carry-on opens in two configurations. When the Kame is being packed, it folds back and keeps out of the way, almost like a backpacker's sleeping mat. When the Kame is upright, though, the lid can also be unzipped from the top, allowing you to quickly dig out your passport while you're in line for customs, for example.
The Kame has a few other cute additions that make it worth your attention. A built-in, TSA-approved cable lock, for example, allows you to secure the bag's zipper pulls while also keeping prying, non-TSA-approved fingers away from your stuff. It also allows you to lock your bag up if you need to leave it unattended for a moment: never again will you have to try to hold your suitcase above your head while using a cramped airport restroom stall.
The road warriors out there will sacrifice a little durability by moving to a soft-shelled top, but the versatility gained is well worth it, at least to me. I also just dig the aesthetic: from the front, the Kame looks like a Japanese bath lid, which is also what inspired the design of the iPad Smart Cover.
The Kame is already available for sale from Fabbrica Pelletterie Milano, and costs around $190 in shiro white, sun orange, eclipse blue, and wasabi green.
Algorithmically, my inner nostril is sexier than my balls.
That's what I learned from Sext Machine, a game in which a robot rates the sexiness—or should that be sextiness?—of blurry globules of flesh. This is sort of terrifying, when you think about it. In the post-singularity, I might never sneeze right again.
Designed by technologist Mike Walker, Sext Machine describes itself as "an SMS-based game exploring the frailty of algorithms and human sexuality." In plainer speak, the goal is to actually trick the bot into thinking that the picture you just sexted is somehow pornographic. You 'win' when you convince the Sext Machine that some non-descript fold of flesh on, say, your inner arm is a honeypot of sexual delight; or that the out-of-focus knob of your big toe is actually a big rubbery one.
Putting Sext Machine to the test, I started the game by sending a sly winky face text to (669) 333-SEXT. Moments later, the bot texted me back with a "how u doin bae? ;)" For all its sexual prowess, the Sext Machine was apparently an idiot.
For my first sext, I decided to calibrate Sext Machine by sending it a picture of the least sexy thing I could think of: a photograph of my aged mother looking confused while holding a one-eyed, anthropomorphic coconut.
"Not hot at all X.X," Sext Machine wrote back. Clearly, the algorithm was working.
Then I tested Sext Machine with a blurry iPhone picture of my thumb. This got Sext Machine decidedly more turgid than my addled, coconut-bearing mother had: it declared that this blurry thumb was 54% on the sliding scale of human-robot sexuality. I soon learned, though, that the Sext Machine algorithm practically defaulted to being 54% turned on. It seemed to exist in the sad, perpetual limbo of the semi-boner: a butt-like photo of my inner elbow, and a close-up selfie of the puckered orifice of my fist also garnered a 54% rating.
Could the Sext Machine be some sort of fetishist? To test, I sent Sext Machine a picture of my parakeet, Humbert Humbird, staring at an iPhone, which in turn was displaying a photo of an enormously endowed individual in cut-off jean shorts holding his foot up to the camera. If it had a taste for the strange at all, I figured this image would be enough to melt several of Sext Machine's servos. Instead, the bot was dismissive. "...seriously? lame," it texted.
I didn't know what this meant. Was I being rejected for sending an openly sexual photograph to Sext Machine, or rejected because the algorithm didn't think there was anything sexual happening in that picture, which there totally was? So I decided to test it out. I sent Sext Machine an undershot of an erection I found on Wikicommons. A few minutes later, that indisputable cock garnered an 86% sexiness rating. For good measure, I then sent Sext Machine a picture of a flaccid micropenis, also from Wikicommons. (Editor's Note: Suuuuure.)
Surprisingly, Sext Machine liked that too: "that pic makes me like 65% turned on rn :)" It appears that robots like penises in all shapes and sizes.
I ended my relationship with Sext Machine with two last sexts. The first was a photograph of my hairy inner nostril that I thought was ambigious enough that Sext Machine might jump at the chance to carnally plunder it. BINGO. Sext Machine gave my glistening nasal cavity its highest sex ranking yet, an astonishing 93%. Which raised an obvious question: how did that sex ranking compare to my genitals? And since I'm a journalist—hellooooo, Pulitzer—I then texted a random robot programmed by a dude I don't know a picture of my junk.
How'd it rank? A ghastly 38%. According to Sext Machine, I can't even give this away.
For the record, mailing photos of your naked body to Sext Machine probably isn't a good idea. In an interview with Boing Boing's Leigh Alexander, Walker says that it's actually best if you don't send Sext Machine pictures of your naked body. The bot integrates with Twilio, an SMS and MMS service which automatically stores everything. "I definitely do not intend to share the photos with anyone, but if people want to experiment with actual nudity it's probably sensible to avoid anything identifiable," he says.
Sage advice. Once Sext Machine and Twilio hook up with Skynet, you might find some sort of Sexterminator on your doorstep, brandishing a titanium hard-on for that 99% sexy inner armpit it scoped so many years ago. When that happens, anonymity might be the only defense you have.
You can play Sext Machine by texting ';); to (669) 333-SEXT.
The login form doesn't immediately come to mind as something that needs better design standards. Once you think about it, though, it's obvious: How many times has a login screen coughed up a nondescript error, then refused to tell you if you got your password or your username wrong? Or how many times have you entered your login details, hit enter, then sat there for a minute, only to discover that you had to click the "submit" button instead?
Over on its blog, analytics company GoSquared has posted an enlightening rundown of how it designed a sleek and frictionless login screen. Here are a few of the GoSquared team's takeaways:
This almost goes without saying, but a login screen is just something people want to get past as quickly as possible. "The form itself is purely a means to an end," GoSquared writes. "For that reason it should be as effortless as possible." Yet with the login getting more and more complicated, thanks to two-factor authentication, designing an effortless login is easier said than done. In GoSquared's case, the designers hid a lot of the spaghetti of the login process behind the scenes, and used fluid animations and a single-page login design to feel speedy and frictionless: for example, by whisking away fields when needed, or by pulling up a user's Gravatar—a universal profile picture, used on many sites after a user has entered his email address, to personalize the experience.
These days, it's common for sites to allow you to login just by hitting "return" after entering your password. But in GoSquared's testing, designers found that a lot of people actually prefer to click a button to submit a form. So do both: a "return" key input for the power users, a physical login button for everyone else.
Nothing's more frustrating than getting a login error because of a stupid typo. For its login screen, GoSquared partnered with Mailcheck, a service that can find and correct typos in email addresses. That won't catch everything, but it will eliminate the pain point of buttery fingers accidentally typing in "gkail.con."
A lot of modern sites these days put the labels on a login form within the field itself. In other words, before you start typing your email address into a field, the field will just read "email address," then that text goes away. But in GoSquared's testing, as much as users liked the look of placeholder labels, they also liked the assurance of being able to review the form afterward to make sure they'd entered everything correctly. GoSquared's solution was to whisk the placeholder label to the side of the field once someone starts entering text. Not only does it generate a slick, satisfying animation, but it allows users to assure themselves before they click "submit" that they haven't done anything as stupid as, say, put their email address in the password field.
GoSquared's login page might be unique, but the techniques the designers used to build it are neither complicated, nor patented. Anyone can copy this technique. No matter how small your site, or how dusty the corner of the web it presides in, you should be putting just as much design focus into your login page as you do the rest of your site or service. After all, a well-designed login is the difference between a user and a passer-by.
So this appears to be a thing now. Just last week, Google's Cultural Institute released a Chrome extension that hangs famous works of artists from the likes of Van Gogh, Degas, and Claude Monet in empty browser tabs. The developers at Yahoo! apparently then saw that, and decided to fart out a similar Chrome extension of their own, this time using Flickr as a source.
Functionally, the Flickr Tab extension is almost identical to the Google Art Project extension. Install the Flickr extension with just a single click, then load up a new tab, and it'll be filled with a bright, vibrant, high-resolution image randomly plucked from the Flickr archives.
It's pretty innocuous, but I'm torn on it. If you're going to blast pretty pictures into an empty browser tab, whether you prefer Google Art Project or Flickr Tab is pretty much a toss-up, at least content-wise. What would you rather do several times a day? Educate yourself about the work of long-dead masters, or engage with a vibrant, contemporary community of photographers, each showing you how the world looks through their eyes?
Personally, I'd rather do the latter. But what makes Flickr Tab slightly more worrisome, in my mind, is the way it subtly inflicts its brand upon the one safe haven in every browser. Install Flickr Tab, and even your empty tabs will now promote Internet companies! At least Google had the good grace to not slap its logo on top of the Mona Lisa in its extension.
Look, I know I'm overthinking it. Just ignore me. Flickr's great, and you have to navel-gaze pretty hard to see anything insidious about letting Yahoo hang some pretty pictures in your empty browser tabs.
If you're so inclined, you can download the extension here.
Design is always changing, and with tech and design increasingly aligning, we're arguably headed to the most radical period of change in design history. How radical will the design landscape of 2020 be, then?
To find out, we asked five elite studios—each and every one a member of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies list—to give us their predictions for the near-future of design. Designers from Ammunition, Herman Miller, Code and Theory, and more gave us their thoughts on everything from the future of the office as cathedral, to the rise of the designer CEO.
As leaders and organizations increasingly understand the ability of designers to use their talents and perspective to expose opportunities and understand and solve complex problems, designers will officially be called on to move outside the traditional boundaries of what a design effort is, into the true definition of businesses, and be responsible for exposing and building new markets. This happens today—we do this [at Ammunition]—but what will be new is that we will have tacit permission to play. — Robert Brunner, Founder, Ammunition Group
As everything becomes a connected device over the next five years, you'll see a crumbling of the wall between graphic designers, technologists, interfaces designers, and so on. To design the cross-platform experiences of the future, everyone's brains will meld together. I see Jony Ive taking over software design at Apple as the way things will continue to happen in the future; the distinction between industrial design, digital design, and system design will continue to blur. — Mike Treff, Managing Partner, Product Design Group at Code and Theory
The Internet of Things usually refers to technologies like Nest and Fitbit, but one does not make something "smarter" simply by placing a circuit board in it and connecting it to a network. There will also be vast ramifications for the way we design products and spaces. The converging requirements of aging baby boomers and technology-embracing millennials will lead designers to focus on where product design and architecture intersect and inform one another to create better outcomes. — James R. Wisniewski, Senior Associate - Architecture, Michael Graves Architecture & Design
Self-learning options for designers in tech will outpace offerings from universities and colleges. Because the knowledge required to design in the medium of technology continues to expand and evolve, real-time learning will be more important than what a college course can teach in a perfected, hermetically sealed form within the span of a semester or quarter. Options to keep with the pace of learning will expand through Starter League, Codecademy, and General Assembly. — John Maeda, Design Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
More and more, individuals trained in design will hold leadership positions. But not all will be qualified. It will always take a broad understanding of a business and the vision and strength to take it somewhere. But strong business skills combined with design training and talent will become a potent combination. Not all will be successful, but a few will kick ass. — Robert Brunner, Founder, Ammunition Group
Traditionally, houses have been designed for young, able-bodied adults, but not so well for people who are disabled, chronically ill, or simply aging. As baby boomers age and care for their parents, they and their children are recognizing the need for homes that are designed to support all stages of an individual's life. In the next five years, designers will use design as a tool to destigmatize aging. — Patrick Burke, Principal - Architecture, Michael Graves Architecture & Design
If our thermostats are talking to us and learning from us, why not our chairs or conference rooms? Increasingly ubiquitous sensing technology, coupled with mechanical automation and high-tech materials, will allow furniture and environments to effortlessly respond to and support the people using them. Your lounge chair will know how soft or firm you like your pillows, and automatically readjust for your partner. The conference room could tell you you're having a bad meeting, and give you tips for turning it around. — Ben Watson, Executive Creative Director, Herman Miller
Google's already been pursuing this with Chrome OS, but in the future, I think you'll see browsers than can do a lot more than we're currently used to. There will stop being such a distinction between in-browser design and native design. Not only will most of our apps live in the cloud, but they won't feel any different than the ones that live on your hard drive. Mike Treff, Managing Partner, Product Design Group at Code and Theory
There will be a rise in large tech companies taking a greater point of view with respect to design. This is not dissimilar to what occurred in the automobile industry as it began to mature—the famous point when Henry Ford refused to sell variations in the only color that mattered, compared with GM, which diversified its designs to appeal to larger populations. We can see it already with Google's efforts around Android's enhanced "Material" visual language led by Matias Duarte, eBay's design leadership efforts that I supported last year (just Google "design playbook") led by John Donahoe, and IBM's resurgence in the design space with their new center in Austin led by Phil Gilbert. — John Maeda, Design Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
The object will be less important than ever. As products become increasingly more complex and in many ways act as portals to much broader functionality or capability, the object that delivers this will become even more important, especially as a means to attract and drive participation in an ecosystem. But the object being well designed will not alone be enough for success. The entire ecosystem and all its interaction points must be as well designed as the object itself in order for sustained adoption to occur. — Robert Brunner, Founder, Ammunition Group
Work has become like singing, you can do it anywhere now. That's why offices will need to become more like cathedrals and recording studios. Cathedrals because singing in that setting (atmosphere, reverb, etc.) alters the character of even a single human voice and inspires a greater performance. Recording studios because they are specifically designed to help create and capture the highest-quality experience of singing—capture that and reproduce it. When we can work anywhere, people should want to come to an office because it gives them a heightened experience of work that can be had nowhere else. — Ben Watson, Executive Creative Director, Herman Miller
A deeper understanding of how people experience a space or product will become more important. With an aging population, people may need an item to help them, but not necessarily want it . . . for example, an alert bracelet, or something that protects their safety. No one wants to be reminded they are aging, and the design of both products and buildings must respect the emotions of this audience, as well as meet their needs. — Donald Strum, Principal - Product Design, Michael Graves Architecture & Design
Right now, a lot of companies design their product two years out, then go all the way to the factory before they even start thinking about advertising and marketing. That's not going to be successful in the future: For products to succeed in the future, everything will need to be super consistent. Design will stop happening in a vacuum, and advertising and marketing will become increasingly linked to the design process. — Mike Treff, Managing Partner, Product Design Group at Code and Theory
Over the next decade—and beyond—human-centered design will take on increasingly complex meaning. Through initiatives like the Human Genome Project, or the more recently announced BRAIN Initiative, scientists are rapidly discovering the realities behind how human beings really work. For 200,000 years we've been running our human operating system, and only now are we beginning to truly understand the circuitry and software! By harnessing this revolutionary new understanding of people, we will increasingly be able to create designs—from cities to chairs—that stimulate or provoke knowable outcomes like greater creativity, a stronger sense of belonging, the elimination of distractions, deeper relaxation, and so on. — Ben Watson, Executive Creative Director, Herman Miller
There will be an increase in the number of designers in tech that emerge from engineering majors. Back in the '90s, as an MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science grad, I always knew that designers with engineering backgrounds were rare because I was the odd duck. At the close of this decade, we will be seeing more designers with an engineering background like Peter Cho of Inkling, Deena Rosen of Opower, Marcos Weskamp of Flipboard. — John Maeda, Design Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
An organization's ability to understand and utilize good design practices will become a key part of valuing a company. We are seeing this today in that our simple participation with an early-stage company increases their valuation. This idea will grow as a general measure of competency in the same way that a company's operational infrastructure drives value. We will see design competency as an official aspect of how much a company is worth. — Robert Brunner, Founder, Ammunition Group
This is more a branding thing, but people today don't experience the Internet in a linear form. They don't watch just one video, or read one blog post about a product. Brands will need to stop trying to tell their stories linearly, and instead break them apart and tell them across a system. Marketing campaigns will start to look like subway roadmaps, and become more granular and complex. — Steve Bear, Managing Partner, Brand Design Group at Code and Theory
Owing mostly to the sheer number of devices that require management and interaction, consumers are surrounded by objects that have resulted in new complexities. The future is going to consist of more automated objects, and designers will need to take a deep dive into the workings of the human mind using psychographic, ethnographic, and sociocultural research to develop products that provide meaningful engagement that will simplify our lives. — Vijay Chakravarthy, Senior Product Designer, Michael Graves Architecture & Design
There will be a well-defined divide between designers in tech for the bespoke economy (i.e., at the scale of tens of users) versus designers in tech for the global economy (i.e., at the scale of millions of users). Designers for "fewer people" will deftly leverage technology that enables short-run advances like 3-D printing, as well as the many e-commerce front-end technologies that are now available. Designers for a "gazillion people" will deftly leverage technologies for evaluating their solutions at scale to test and retest their assumptions in large sample populations. They are at the bleeding edge where social science meets big data meets leading hundreds of designers, researchers, and engineers — John Maeda, Design Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Responsible companies and designers will set higher goals for their environmental efforts. With our Earthright initiative, over the next 10 years, Herman Miller is committed to achieve zero waste from our facilities, consume 50% less water, reduce our energy intensity by 50%, and take 125,000 tons out of our annual production of products. We're also committed to creating better products and design processes to protect our health and well-being, restore the ecosystem, and give back more than we extract. — Ben Watson, Executive Creative Director, Herman Miller
Livable design will become increasingly important, driven by the expectations and sheer volume of the baby boomer generation. While universal design embodies the critical aspects of safety and functionality, it does not cover everything. What about comfort, familiarity, and dignity? What about self-identity? We will see architecture and product design working together in order to strike a more meaningful balance for people. We will see an evolved blend between universal design and livable design that will meet people's functional and emotional needs. We are already working with several clients to develop designs that are usable and livable. In five years, we expect to see this richer approach being applied to our aging population, health care, and more! — Robert Van Varick, Principal - Product Design, Michael Graves Architecture & Design
There will be new kinds of design tools to help designers in tech craft effective experiences for consumers that go beyond "beautiful" pixels. Most of the tools we use today are rooted in conventional two-dimensional, static media, as they all grew up during the "desktop publishing" revolution of the '80s and '90s. We will see more "hybrid" tools that cross code with design, like Koen Bok's Framer.js, Ben Fry and Casey Reas's Processing, and Evelyn Eastmond's DesignBlocks. — John Maeda, Design Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
As we build more connected smart things that observe and measure us and our world, the relationship that design, functionality, and experience have with real-time data analytics will grow. So designers will need to know how to play with data scientists, and work together to build new definitions of everyday objects as we make them smarter and more effective. — Robert Brunner, Founder, Ammunition Group
The companies that succeed in the future will be the ones that can responsively react to what's happening. In the future, it'll be more important to design long-term systems that can pivot to change, optimize, and reinvent their products, without having to start from zero each and every time. Companies will have to become as responsive as their websites to meet the challenges of the future, in a literal sense: The way they are designed will have to respond in real time to culture, not just predict it all out. — Steve Bear, Managing Partner, Brand Design Group at Code and Theory
As everything becomes available everywhere—in the physical and virtual world—more and more people will respond to designs that offer a mutable framework for personalization, individual expression, and adaptability. In other words, design will increasingly become less about what you take out of the box, and more about what that design offers over time as you live with it. — Ben Watson, Executive Creative Director, Herman Miller
If you thought Medium was the most beautiful way to write on the web, boy, catch a load of the Atavist redesign.
Launching today, the National Magazine Award-winning digital magazine turned publishing platform has revamped almost every aspect of its system to make it near-painless to create and sell beautifully designed long-form content across multiple platforms.
The software has been supercharged, and it's totally free to use. Think of it as half magical word processor, half marketplace for beautiful stories. We're talking "Snow Fall"-caliber content here, without a programmer in sight. The secret? Blocks.
While the old platform worked more like a writer-friendly WordPress, using the new Atavist software is like playing with atomlike blocks, each containing a single fluid design element. It's easy to drop a block into your text and tweak it to help tell your story. For example, want a cool New York Times-style "Snow Fall" parallax effect for your story? Just drop in a parallax image block and tweak it with a slider. Need an interactive chart, a pull quote, or a SoundCloud bite? Same. Blocks are easy to drag around and trivial to customize, and you can even preview how it will look on mobile devices from the web app.
Atavist, founded in 2011, was ahead of the curve when it started publishing long-form on the web. A hybrid publication/platform—Atavist cofounder Evan Ratliff will audibly gag if you use the portmanteau "platisher" to describe what his company does—The Atavist produces one long-form story a month of between 5,000 and 30,000 words that it sells to subscribers as either a one-off digital single (readable on the platform of your choice, including Kindle, mobile, and desktop) or as part of a monthly subscription service.
What has always set Atavist apart from other online publishers, though, is the singular care with which that story was being presented, regardless of the platform on which it was being experienced. "When we started The Atavist, there was no one thinking about how to design and tell a story online," explains Ratliff. "Even if you had a great idea about how to tell a story through design, you needed a developer to execute it. So we tried to build the platform to let nondevelopers make beautiful stories without programming the software themselves."
That was the magic of the Atavist platform, which made it easy for writers to not just compose their stories, but design them as a proper multimedia, multidevice experience. So when The Atavist became a hit—it has been nominated for eight National Magazine Awards, winning this year for Feature Writing, and 11 of its stories have been optioned for big-screen treatment by Hollywood—Ratliff and his colleagues decided to spin the platform out as its own product, the Creativist, which anyone could use to tell beautiful stories and then publish on the web or through the Creativist app. And now, in turn, the Creativist is rolling itself back into Atavist as a single cohesive platform.
But why use Atavist over a bigger platform like Medium? First, in my experience playing with the beta, it's easily a better interface. Atavist's approach to creating a UI for writers to design beautiful stories makes the Medium inteface look convoluted, but also less featured. Perhaps more importantly, on Medium, you're ultimately generating content for a network that isn't going to reward you with anything besides exposure—maybe. On The Atavist, you get to sell what you write.
Which is ultimately what the relaunch gets right: It's turning its platform into a sort of cross-platform app store for beautiful stories. Using the Atavist platform, anyone can monetize their work, at extremely attractive rates, and sell it through The Atavist, which serves up content through the web, as a Kindle e-book, or on a smartphone or tablet through the Atavist app. And the rates are attractive. Ratliff tells me that the most The Atavist will collect from a writer is 20%, while subscribers of the Atavist platform's paid tiers could pay only pennies on every digital single sold.
Looking at the bigger picture, Ratliff says the goal of Atavist isn't to become a publishing juggernaut to rival Medium, but to empower writers, one story at a time. "We're just trying to enable people like us to create beautiful stories," he says.
The Atavist may not have Medium's reach, or its seemingly endless supply of venture capital. Heck, it probably never will. But for my money, it's still the most beautiful way to write.
With its vaguely Caribbean aesthetic and ovum-like design, the Durotaxis Chair looks from a distance more like an alien egg than something you sit on. Look closer, though, and the Durotaxis becomes even more exotic, because for all of the weird mathematical fluidity of its form, it's not made of one solid material. Instead, it's an infinitely complicated lattice that scales in size, scale, density, color, and rigidity.
And if you're not impressed yet? What if I told you the Durotaxis was 3-D printed? What if I mentioned the design wouldn't be possible without a 3-D printer?
The chair, designed by Alvin Huang and his team at Synthesis Design + Architecture, was the result of a challenge from 3-D printer manufacturer Stratasys to create a piece that would be ridiculously cost-prohibitive to manufacture without using 3-D printing. Synthesis decided to do one better: They'd specifically design a chair that would be impossible without Stratasys's latest printer, the Objet500 Connex3, which allows designers to apply gradients to practically every aspect of an object as it is being printed.
The ovoid shape of the chair allows it to have two equally viable positions. Upright, it's closer to a traditional rocking chair; supine, it's more of a lounge chair. According to Stratasys, it's an extension of its ongoing research into the reciprocal relationship between form and performance.
"The chair provides an opportunity to explore a design and fabrication process that articulates both visually and materially what the chair is doing structurally and ergonomically," the designers say. "The chair is thicker and more rigid where it needs it, and also thinner and softer where it has to be."
Obviously, the Durotaxis would be possible without a 3-D printer: It's feasible to imagine some infinitely patient craftsman carving the Durotaxis's elaborate lattice structure out of a big block of foam rubber by hand. But other aspects of the design, like the way the material seamlessly shifts from hard to soft in areas, would be practically impossible without the 3-D printer.
And that's what makes the Durotaxis more interesting than just being a weird chair that matches the decor of only some extraterrestrial space cult. A lot of times, 3-D printed designs are subpar recreations of objects originally designed with another medium in mind, but the Durotaxis reminds us that there's a brave new world of 3-D design coming, with products that wouldn't be viable in any other medium. And that's plenty exciting.
Your days of sitting alone in your dorm room weeping quietly to The Moon & Antarctica may be over, but that doesn't mean Modest Mouse doesn't have anything to offer. The rock band, founded in Issaquah, Washington, in 1993, has released a weird new web app to promote the release of its middling comeback album, Strangers to Ourselves.
Modest Mouse calls its app the "Strangers Linguistic Remix Generator." Upon loading up the website, the generator asks you to input a phrase of up to 96 characters, then dynamically converts it into a remix based on samples from Modest Mouse's new record, complete with a seemingly random music video broken up into kaleidoscopic patterns.
"The algorithm compares common letter frequency data, and generates stems and patterns to match," explain Modest Mouse (or, more likely, the band's for-hire developers at The Uprising Creative), for the more technically minded. "It also analyzes the sentiment of the text to determine the final BPM of the remix. Depending on the input, a remix can consist of up to three phrases; or, more commonly put, a verse, a chorus, and a bridge. Each remix then generates a visualizer inspired by the album artwork."
It's a fun app to play around with, even if the results sound more like the Residents on bath salts than Modest Mouse. The full experience reminds me of the video loop that is playing behind the Rastafarian DJ during the Derelicte show in 2001's Zoolander. You may take from that description what you will.
Check out the Strangers Linguistic Remix Generator here. Suggestion: "Butthead" is a pretty good place to start.
Instagram has just released Layout, a new single-serving app, à la Hyperlapse, that satisfies itself with doing just one thing well: mashing up as many as nine photographs into a single Instagram or Facebook image. It's now available for iPhone, and is easy to use and easy on the eyes, but it begs the question: Why is this a separate app at all?
Here's how Layout for Instagram works. Upon loading up the app, you start by tapping up to nine images. You can choose photos to collage from your Photo Library, from the most recent photos you've taken, or—cleverly—from a pool of photos that contain people's faces. As you tap on the photos you want to collage, Layout will start suggesting possible framing patterns at the top of the screen, depending on the number of photos you have selected. Tap the one you want, and the next screen will allow you to zoom in, flip, mirror, and size individual frames. From there, you can save the image to your camera roll, open it in Instagram or Facebook, or push it to another app.
The thing about truly simple design is once you see it put into action, you sort of marvel trying to imagine how it could have ever been any other way. Layout makes you feel like that. It takes a genre of utility app that seems like it couldn't possibly be any simpler—photo collagers—and streamlines the entire process. Trying to use any other app that mashes photos together, like Diptic, now feels antediluvian.
The big thing about Layout that's different from other apps is it makes you choose the photos you want to collage first, instead of having you choose the layout. This seems like such an obvious way to go about things, yet every single photo collage app has always asked you to choose a layout before you decide what photos to fill it with. When you think about it, no one buys a frame before they decide what picture they want to hang on their wall, after all. It's ass-backward, and yet I never once noticed it until I used Layout. That's just great design thinking.
This simplicity comes at a price, though. Compared to other photo collage apps, Layout has fewer options. It doesn't let you apply individual filters to every photo, for example, or overlay it with text, or insert stickers and word balloons, or frame your collage in a Lisa Frank-style pattern. Those are things I've seen similar apps do. But unless you're a preteen, my guess is you wouldn't notice. Layout contents itself with arranging multiple images in a single square photo as simply and beautifully as possible, and letting the photos speak for themselves.
This was also true of Hyperlapse, an app people used for all of a week before Apple baked the same time-lapsing, video-smoothing functionality right into iOS 8's default camera app. Hopefully, Layout's staying power will be a little longer, but why are these separate apps at all? Why not bake them right into the core app where people can actually discover them?
A possible answer is that they're trying to avoid creating an unwieldy experience by shoehorning three somewhat different experiences into a single UI; but, without being integrated into the Instagram experience, both Layout and Hyperlapse have the burden of trying to get people to remember them. And that seems like a shame, given the fact that both are, in many ways, better designed than the social network that spawned them.
Comedian Phil Hartman might be best known for his many, many iconic roles: Troy McClure on The Simpsons, Frozen Caveman Lawyer on Saturday Night Live, the original Genie on Pee-Wee's Playhouse, and golden-voiced Bill McNeal on Newsradio. But he was a relatively late starter, career-wise, only reaching the height of his fame in his forties, shortly before his tragic death in 1998.
Before his comic career took off, Phil Hartman was a working graphic designer. In fact, graphic design was Hartman's first calling: He managed to get a degree in graphic arts at Cal State Northridge in 1974. In the decade that followed, Hartman designed over 40 record covers for bands such as America, Poco, Steely Dan, and the Firesign Theatre comedy group. He even designed the crazy Celtic-style logo for Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
Looking over Hartman's record covers, there's nothing that truly stands out as exceptional, although it's all solid work. The covers for Poco's Legend and Steely Dan's Aja look like they could be classic album covers, in a world where the albums they were associated with were a lot better. Intriguingly, though, short of his cover for the Firesign Theatre's Fighting Clowns—which features a crowd of gun-toting circus clowns storming Washington—none of his work particularly draws upon the sense of humor that would one day make Hartman so famous.
That's okay, though. I think we can all agree that Hartman was ultimately a better comic than he was a designer.
Not entirely sure how the Apple Watch would look on your wrist? A new augmented-reality app called ARWatch allows you to put a virtual version of the smartwatch on your wrist and play around with it. Not only is it pretty cool, it's also a great example of how brands are overlooking some of the most exciting opportunities of augmented reality.
Developed by Belgian app developers Underside, the app works by having you print out a flat paper replica of Apple's 38-millimeter-sized smartwatch. You place it on your wrist and then load up the Underside app to admire your new, virtual Apple Watch, thanks to the magic of augmented reality.
Here's a video of ARWatch in action:
But while it's an impressive proof of concept, it's hardly what I'd consider fully featured. For one, short of tapping the screen to change the color of the wristband, you can't interact with your Apple Watch at all. But the full potential of what this simple demo offers is apparent.
Imagine if, when you loaded up the app, you could fully explore the Apple Watch's interface just by tapping on your iPhone's touchscreen, or see a notification pushed from your iPhone to your virtual Apple Watch in real-time, or see how the Apple Watch interprets your iPhone's health tracking data. Imagine if Apple had released a more fully baked version of this as a way to convince naysayers that there was a place for the Apple Watch on their wrist? An AR app that allowed people to fully emulate the Apple Watch experience, right down to seeing it on their wrist, before the device was even released?
This would probably be one of the most practical uses for augmented reality. The technology has so much potential when it comes to allowing brands to pitch their products to people, especially in nascent categories like wearables where consumers can't draw from past experiences to inform their decisions. It's an opportunity to digitize a physical experience, to convince people they want a product by putting a virtual simulacrum of it right in their lives. And it doesn't depend upon the mass adoption of virtual-reality rigs, or some far-flung future technology. It's all possible right now, today, with the iPhone you already have.
Apple didn't release this app, but hopefully they're kicking themselves now, because they should have.
In "The Reinvention of Normal," a mini-documentary by director Liam Saint-Pierre, Wilcox gives a behind-the-scenes look at his home life and his workshop, and gives a bit of insight into what makes his off-the-wall brain tick.
Although he might seem like a man with no shortage of inspiration, in the mini-doc, Wilcox characterizes himself as exactly the opposite: He says he's so desperate for inspiration, he'll pursue any idea, no matter how mad. These ideas can be anything. In the documentary, he shows off a pair of toothbrush maracas, headphones that reverse the sounds coming in from his right ear and his left ear ("If I wore this more regularly than I do, would my brain fix it?" he wonders aloud), a teacup cooling fan, and my personal favorite: an empty soccer ball you fill with fruit and yogurt, then kick around to make a smoothie.
All of these ideas are inherently silly and surreal. Other designers might reject them even at the concept stage, but Wilcox ultimately sees chasing off-the-wall designs through a philosophical lens. "I've always had this feeling that time's running out," he says. "We only get a certain amount of time on the Earth, and you've got to contribute something." What Wilcox feels like he contributes is the ridiculous, and he thinks that's a noble pursuit. "Let's do the ridiculous, and who knows, by doing it, something else might come of it."
Since 2009, the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter has nurtured great ideas. But once a project reaches its funding goal, it can get lost in the mix, and its Kickstarter page becomes a shell of its former self. Spotlight, launching today, is Kickstarter's attempt to extend the life of a project beyond the funding stage. It gives the creators of successful projects a way to shape their story and image the way any company might market an important new product.
Kickstarter Spotlight is a special page design that kicks in only after a project is funded. Unlike in-progress Kickstarter projects, which don't allow for a lot of design customization (something Kickstarter's lead product designer Zack Sears tells me is to help encourage a level playing field), Spotlight allows creators to customize their Kickstarter pages with different text and background colors, insert full-bleed images, add a short text description of where the product has headed since it received funding, and more.
The goal, Sears says, is to do a better job communicating that not only is there life after Kickstarter, but that life after Kickstarter is the point.
"After funding was over, Kickstarter pages used to just be these dead old relics," Sears says in a phone interview. "We wanted to turn every successfully funded Kickstarter project page into a living, breathing place."
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From the perspective of creators, it used to be that a successfully funded product could launch its own site, only for the old Kickstarter page to get the best SEO. Now, creators can transform their old Kickstarter projects into landing pages for their brand, which redirect users to another site (or, as Sears puts it, the "next part of the story") with a big, customizable button that replaces the "Back this Project" button. They can also add custom text at the top of the page, allowing creators to easily summarize what is going on with the product now.
But how do average users benefit from Spotlight? Like it or lump it, every successful Kickstarter is a moving target: A successful project might have to change its goals and timeline even after being funded. Before, Sears admits, Kickstarter didn't really do a good job of making it easy for users to see how a Kickstarter was unfolding past the funding stage. Any course changes for the project were buried under an "Updates" tab. Spotlight visualizes this tab as a swank chronological timeline that is front and center of every successful Kickstarter, allowing users to more easily grasp what has changed with the project since they funded it, as well as clarify what was originally promised.
"Before, if you landed on a successful Kickstarter project page, it was really hard to understand what was going on, even as a backer," Sears says. "Now, with Spotlight, you can see right away what was promised, what has changed, and where to go next."
What does Kickstarter get out of it? Sears says that Kickstarter's mission isn't just to fund products; it's to build tools for creators. He also admits that Spotlight is a potential differentiator from competing crowdfunding sites like Indiegogo and GoFundMe.
When I asked if Kickstarter might take Spotlight to the next level and actually start hosting the websites of successful Kickstarter projects, Sears didn't say yes—but he also didn't say no. "Spotlight is about more than funding," he says. "it's about creating a nice little home for your products, and could even serve as your product's web page," he says. "It removes the immediate need for creators to design their own website."
Where Spotlight evolves from there is still to be determined, Sears says. But from where we're standing, it's possible that Spotlight is a small step toward a future when Kickstarter is as synonymous with a successfully launched product's present and future as it is with its past.
Sleeping Beauty's castle, tiered like a wedding cake, illuminated with the long, parabolic arc of a fairy streaking across the sky. That has been the logo for Walt Disney Pictures since 1985, and although it's not nearly as old as some other studio logos, it is universally beloved by children and adults alike all over the world.
What you might not know is that the logo has gone through an astonishing number of changes over the past 30 years, as this megacut compiled by YouTuber Ethan Jones shows. It cycles through all the custom Walt Disney Pictures logos from 1985 to 2015. In fact, Disney seems to openly encourage filmmakers to tool around with it.
It wasn't always this way. The Walt Disney Pictures logo remained static for a decade from its first iteration in 1985's The Black Cauldron. But Pixar's 1995 classic Toy Story changed all the rules in animation. That went for the Walt Disney logo, too, which Pixar animated for the first time in CGI. Gone was the flattened, two-dimensional look of the Disney castle, and in its place was a lavish 3-D spectacle filled with tiny, whimsical details like banners fluttering on every turret and a wide sweep of shadows as the iconic bow of fairy light shot across the sky.
After Toy Story, every major Walt Disney Picture got its own custom logo, tweaked to match the feel of the movie that followed. And that has continued, even after Disney introduced a fancy, hyper-realistic CGI version in 2006. Since then, Sleeping Beauty's castle has been imagined as everything from an electronic city of light for 2010's Tron: Legacy to a Frankenstein's Bavarian castle for 2012's Frankenweenie to the cliffside castle for 2014's Maleficent.
Which I think just serves as proof of how good the Walt Disney Pictures logo really is: You can totally change its most signature element, the castle, and it's still iconic.
