Design Matters

Design Within Reach achieves the impossible: a good direct mail piece

This is the time of year that mailboxes start overflowing with catalogs celebrating the holidays and touting gifts ideas.In recent years, it's become a bit of a guessing game to see just how early the holiday catalogs start arriving. This year, it was the week before Halloween. Timing is an important element of making a message relevant.

Another element is understanding -- i.e. "I understand your reality." This has been a tough year for many and I suspect people are being more cautious with their money. With 10.2% unemployment and rising (some are now forecasting 11-13% unemployment), and credit card defaults, foreclosures and bankruptcies in the news, even people with jobs and money may still not feel like splurging this holiday season. 

The Design Within Reach (DWR) mailing I received today (first two pages reprinted below from DWR) is the first I've seen to do an effective job of communicating, "We get it."

 

The compact six-page footprint says, "we know you hate to waste paper - we do, too." The copy on page two (shown above) gently helps the reader to feel okay about wanting to give by noting:

For every person there is a gift, and not a gift for just one season, but one for all time. The secret these items share is smart design. Each one is unique in how it solves a problem or makes something more comfortable or easier to do. In this way, they are not just objects, but more like tools. Celebrate this season of giving by sharing tools for living.

Brilliant.

OLPC Logo is Elegant in its Simplicity

Our daily lives are so cluttered with hard-to-decipher icons and meaningless logos that when something simple shows up, it really stands out. Consider the logo for Nicholas Negroponte's OLPC project (reprinted without permission at right):

It it elegant in its simplicity. Even if you knew nothing about One Lapter Per Child, the visual identity is clear. The use of simple icons, colors and a type treatment to anchor the symbolism is very effective.

If you'd like to learn more about OLPC, visit laptop.org. And if you want to do something very cool, consider giving one to a child for $399 and get one for the child in your life.

Samsung's Culture of Design

From: Gizmodo : Samsung's Culture of Design:

There's a short but interesting interview in Business Week with Samsung's Chung Kook Hyun, who is in charge of the company's design center. Samsung has been sending its industrial designers to 'exchange programs' in other industries, like fashion or furniture, so that when they return they can approach the design on consumer electronics with a slightly different way of thinking. But it's more than just new visual techniques for Samsung's people—they are moving to incorporate their design teams into the entire manufacturing process, so the experience of product use extends all the way to feedback from the users themselves (information that often gets back to sales teams, but not product designers). It's an encouraging sign from a company already making lots of smart moves in its markets segments, especially since it seems that design is becoming one of the last ways to differentiate oneself from the hundreds of similar competitors.

Q&A With Samsung Design Boss Chung Kook Hyun [BusinessWeek]
Samsung Design [BusinessWeek]

Eurobad '74

From Yahoo! Daily Wire:

When it comes to fashion and design, no decade is both loved and loathed as much as the 1970s. Slide over to Eurobad '74 and take a tour of what is described as "Europe's worst interiors of 1974." There's a dual-function kitchen, a bathroom that would make M.C. Escher proud, and a living room certain to cause lower back injuries. Are these digs really eurotrash or actually super hip? We'll let you be the final judge.