Apple’s Design Philosophy

Originally, I was reading an interaction design blog when I came across a quote of a quote from the article, The Secret of Apple Design by Don Norman.

“The hardest part of design, especially consumer electronics,” says Norman, “is keeping features out.” Simplicity, he says, is in itself a product differentiator, and pursuing it can lead to innovation.

Every Industrial Designer, Interaction Designer, and Human Factors guru would agree (I hope). To me, that sums what product design should be quite nicely. But, I wonder if the innovation that Don Norman is talking about is for the designers own satisfaction, or for the consumers satisfaction. Consumers, though they might want feature upon feature in a new device, what they need in the end is to be able to use the device effectively – does that mean the device has to be innovative? No, might be as simple and conforming as the next product on the shelf. I think, for Apple, the innovation came when they decided to focus more on basic design (aesthetics) as well as the Interaction Design early on in their products development.

If you read the article that Don Norman is quoted from, then  you will get an excellent idea of Apple’s design philosophy – not how they design, or their process, but their philosophy based on people who have crossed paths with them. Apple supposedly doesn’t like talking to the press, so the article uses people twice removed. Still, a good read.

Another memorable quote from the article:

“Jobs is a dictator, but with good taste,” says Norman. “He is good and driven to the perfect experience. He doesn’t want good design; he wants great design.” Brunner similarly lauds Jobs’s “driven, singular focus.” And Rolston says, in what is perhaps the best explanation of Apple’s design ascendancy, “It’s a happy coincidence at Apple that the designer in chief is the CEO. He has a fantastic sense of what people want. And after all, that is design.”

(Robert Brunner was Apple’s director of industrial design from 1989 to early 1996 and Mark Rolston is senior vice president of creative at Frog Design, a product-design and strategic-branding firm that worked closely with Apple from 1982 to 1988.)

Typeface vs. Font

This is something that puzzles me still to do this day. A lot of people use these two words, font and typface interchangeably, most likely to the point that Grammar Girl will have to comment on it soon. I was taught there is a difference and since have forgotten it, but perhaps if I write about it, the truth will stick eventually.

Typeface – A set of fonts in the same style. Or, in other words, a font family. Ex: Times New Roman, Helvetica, or Arial.

Font – A single kind of typeface. Ex: Times New Roman in 10 point size is a font, and Times New Roman in 14 point size is also a font. Times New Roman in Bold is also a font. (Basically designating a specific type inside of a typeface is a font.)

So that clears the air a bit. So, if you are looking at typography in a magazine, or during a presentation and happen to like it, you could ask “what font is that sentance set to?”, or if you think the whole page of differing point sizes is in the same family, “What typeface are you using for this presentation?”. It seems instead of using font and typeface interchangeably and being wrong, you might be able to use the phrase font-family and the word typeface interchangeably.

The Run Away Alarm Clock

Clocky is an alarm clock designed to run away from you as soon as its alarm goes off. So, if your one of those people who tends to hit the snooze button 3 or 4 times in the morning, this might be a good option for you.

The creator of this wonderful product is a store called Nanda, owner Gauri Nanda, who not surprisingly was a graduate student of the MIT Media Lab. Now, I know I am not supposed to throw praises at MIT since I am an RIT native, but when one of its students creates a product like Clocky and gets tons of recognition (New York Times ‘Year In Ideas’ magazine, ID, inc, Lucky, Jay Leno, The Today Show) – she is quite worthy of an applause.

Nanda products are available in a quite a few locations, check it out.

(The picture is Clocky in action – compliments of Nanda).

Actions & Automate Batch

I had recorded a new Action in the “Actions Palette” when I discovered something very frustrating. Even though my original files were BMP’s and the ending file was supposed to be a BMP, the BMP options dialogue box would open at the end of every action, prompting me to hit OK. This is not convenient because it made me babysit the batch processing…which means that it wasn’t really a batch process.

What I did not realize was, in the course of creating my new Action, I should have gone through the “Save As” as my last step. It took me quite some time to figure out what was wrong, and this helpful Adobe Forum thread pointed me in the right direction: http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.3bc401c5/21

“A ’save as’ command must be recorded at the end of the action. This results in the JPEG options box settings being written to the action. I could not get this to work with “save for web”, but it seems to me no flexibility is lost anyway. If I’m correct, you get all the same JPEG options.” – pdlr

I’ll break down the steps I used in totallity – from beginning to end, just so there is no confusion.

-Open Actions Palette
-Create New Action
(As soon as you name the new action, PS starts to record your steps, so make sure you have the file opened and ready that you want to record the actions on.)
-The last step in your new actions should be going through the File > Save As process to completion.
-Close file
-Stop the recording of actions in the Actions Palette

Then

- File > Automate > Batch
- Choose your source, and all the options you want. The most important part in this options dialogue box being the choice “Save and Close” and check marking the “Override Save As Options”

If you have a folder of hundreds of images, a good idea would be to try out the Action and Automate Batch on a folder containing 3 of the hundreds of images – just to make sure everything is turning out right. I made the mistake of not doing that once, and 3 hours later… well, it was not good.

Happy Batching!

Test

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