Tips for Student Designers and the Small Businesses Who Love Them: OrangeSlyce Life

Are we appy with our apps? Since the development of the iphone and the Android, apps are becoming increasingly popular. But what is it we love about these devices?

Applications, more commonly known as apps – are downloadable pieces of software, which are designed to be easier to use and more user friendly. They vary from social networking to being able to check your online shopping or phone balance. Apps are constantly being released everyday with every random idea you can imagine. There is an app for everything, even a pint of beer which disappears as you pretend to drink it.

Some networks such as www.o2.co.uk provide their own app allowing you to check their website or browse your account. Providers occasionally offer free downloads, such as music tracks, or games to your phone, depending on your contract and network.

The most popular applications at the moment seem to be Facebook, national news bulletins and the very popular game Angry Birds. With an application such as BBC news, everything is designed for easy reading and searching. Similarly, the Facebook mobile app is much more accessible compared to browsing on the official website. Your notifications appear directly at the top, followed by birthdays and under that, your most current news feed. Angry birds on the other hand is simply a fun and interactive game.

Once you have downloaded an app, it appears like an icon on your home screen. It is normally a large and colourful symbol which represents the function of the application. Facebook for example is a blue square with a large white F. This has now become universally recognised as the Facebook sign. We often see it appear on various websites, where you can link your account to what you are browsing. The social network Twitter, has tried to market their symbol in a similar way by using a dark blue square with a white bird. Twitter allows you to ‘tweet’ a status, which explains the bird. However, it has not been anywhere near as popular as Facebook.

Some apps are free to download, such as basic games or social networks. The average cost of an advanced app starts from sixty pence, up to around £50. The expensive downloads are usually things like a GPS or a full console version of a game. Some applications allow you to share with other users; the iphone for example allows you to battle against your friends in a game of Rock Band or table football. You simply connect the phones and you’re ready to play.

New apps are released everyday, so whenever you are bored, there certainly won’t be a shortage of new things to download.

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Graphic designers and web designers know that one secret to producing great work is through the use of vectors. We touched on it before when we showed how to make great business cards. But you shouldn’t stop at just business cards. Vectors can be used to make great logos, brochures and letterhead. And in Windows 7, developers and designers should carry this over to their application icons.

Much like zooming in on a webpage, Windows 7 allows you to increase the size of all the items on your desktop. Some developers have noticed, while others haven’t. While this is a small detail (and Google does offer a great product in Chrome), it’s these little details that make you notice that a developer cares about their application.

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Your first design will be ugly

All too often I find internet startups delay launching their site to “tweak the design” and improve the aesthetics. Your first design will be ugly. Several months down the road, you will be embarrassed that you even considered launching with the horrendous UI and color scheme. However, your first design shouldn’t matter. You should be solving such a huge need that users and customers will do anything to use your product to solve their needs. When your hair is on fire, the look of the firehouse doesn’t really matter. If poor usability or bland visual effects push away early adopters, then you haven’t actually solved an important problem (at which time you pivot). Early adopters will figure out your application. They will hack their way to using your service if need be. This isn’t to say to create unnecessary obstacles in your service, but delaying launching for design is never worth it.

Eat, sleep and breath your product launch

I find that most startup advice generally targets companies that have already launched but doesn’t really address entrepreneurs just trying to get an idea into fruition. If you are still at the idea-stage, everything you do should be focused around launching. I don’t have concrete data, but in my experience I see that most startups fail before they even start. Non-technical founders never find developers to build their product, and technical founders get caught up in features and miss the market opportunity after several years of development. As a pre-launch startup, you should eat, sleep and breath getting your product out. At this stage, there is no room in the company for anyone who doesn’t contribute to launching the product. Your business development person better close Excel and start testing, sketching mockups, and writing web copy. Simply launching a web product is a very difficult feat, and the whole team needs to be aligned to this single goal.

Stalk Your Customers

Rule #1 of any startup is to build a product that solves your own needs. The most successful consumer web startups are founded by people who personally experienced the problems they are trying to solve. 37Signals, Twitter, and even Facebook are a few examples of companies that developed a product that solved their own problems. Basecamp and Twitter actually started as internal company applications to solve contextual challenges. The 2 startups eventually realized that they could offer their solutions to the world. However, startups need to take this a step further because eventually you will probably evolve from being your own target customer. As a startup, you need to stalk your customers. You need to know what their passions are, what they do for fun, typical hangout places, their sleep schedules… You need to know your customers better than you know yourselves so you can always answer the question: What Would Customer Do?

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I’m a huge geography nerd, so when I came across these maps made out of type, I had to share. Enjoy!

From Ork Posters:

From axis maps:

From typomaps.net:

From deviantART user ~vladstudio:

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There is an old saying that “form follows function”. The basic principle arises out of industrial design and architecture from the 20th century and states that the shape of a building or object should be primarily based upon its intended function or purpose. As we no longer live in that century, or millenium for that matter, this should now be open to greater debate. Which is more important? Does the function of an object overrule all matters in shape? Or can we now take objects, regardless of their functions, and reshape them into inspiring works of art? And will that sell?

Lets take a history lesson. We give credit to our earliest ancestors for their use of stone tools to beginning our evolutionary leap. Simple stone tools like the scientifically named “sharp rock”, were form and function wrapped into one. They needed tools that pounded, sliced and scraped. I doubt much thought went into shaping the tools at first. More likely it was a search for the right rock, a rock with just the right form to get the job done.

Ancient Swiss Army Knife

But as time goes on, form and function begin to deviate. Take a simple object like a chair. It provides for only one function-toilets being the exception. However, for having only one function, Google struggles to give me only one type of chair. In fact, there are thousands of chairs out there.

But which one is the right one?

It turns out, for some objects form and function just don’t agree with each other. There must be some inside joke in the interior design industry that all chairs ever made are terrible and that work must carry on to get it right.

George Clooney explains another great object whose form contrasts from its function.

There are also objects whose entire purpose is to have its function and form completely separate. Pinhole cameras in jackets are meant to be concealed. Safes that look like coffee or soda cans are meant to blend in without drawing attention. Camouflage like this is everywhere in nature, and when we see it in man-made objects, we are for some reason astonished or impressed.

Most of us work in an economy of ideas now. This brings our design principle into scary new territory now. What should a weapon of mass communication look like? What should an employment database look like? What should a music player look like? I hold it to be true that any object manufactured from now on could have an MP3 player slapped in it. These would be objects where the form did not matter at all.

Yes I CAN play MP3's! But I can do other stuff as well.

If a Martian, or a time traveler, or a time travelling Martian saw a spoon he might be able to figure out what it does just by looking at it. Give him an iPad and he’d be clueless. I’m guessing Martians would also easily confuse gym equipment for elaborate sex contraptions.

Form and function have dueled for thousands of years. Neither has really emerged victorious. Vegas doesn’t offer a bet either way. One thing I’m sure you can bet on is that finding the right form and function ratio is tricky business.

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Stay relevant

Design is a curious profession with naturally curious practitioners. I think it has something to do with the elusive leprechuan called “inspiration,” or maybe just the pressing need to be relevant, or maybe a simple desire to posses a large experiential palette from which to draw creativity but..

Advertising is an area every designer should study. Especially clever advertising which rolls all three of the above purposes of curiosity into a single swallow.

Plenty of Beers Want Your Love and Undivided Attention

Corona just wants a little “like.”

This should appeal to even the slightest kernel of vanity: towering over New York’s iconic Time Square, your face. Usually an expensive/difficult/need to be a model kind of endeavor, the reward of visual domination has been made a little more accessible by the U.S.’s numero uno import beer brand: Corona.

Corona really just wants you to like 'em

The popular Mexican beer jumped on the social media band wagon being hauled by Facebook by creating an app for the blue behemoth to make Corona Light The Most Liked Beer in America.

Bottom Up

The campaign is simple:

“Like” the Corona Light Facebook page, gain access to the Time Square app.

Upload your photo and you’re in the lotto to be run on the company’s billboard from November 8 to December 6.

The Unmistakable Color

Corona’s billboard will become one of the most visually accessible advertisements in the world. Ideally, that aforementioned vanity will cause each featured Facebook user to spread their brief advert debut  to all their friends, along with the associated Corona ad.

And I have a feeling the people who end up on this rotating billboard will be much akin to your buddy who went to Europe once, for a week and won’t shut up about what an “experience” it was. Every time they get drunk, they’ll tell the same story for a year or two. Or five.

That’s a raving fan.

Most importantly though, every “like” will grant Corona access to a Facebook user’s news feed making for beaucoup free advertising.

That’s a raving robot.

Vacation in a Bottle

Considering Corona’s intelligent shift to a younger audience, the brand is playing a smart card here and will probably edge out an incredibly strong market share among light beers.

Besides keeping up to date on ad trends, a designer should take the strongest lesson advertising can give away: differentiation. You’ve got to be more than just clever and clear in communicating a message. Your message has to be different; a tailored signal to your audience amongst an ocean of media noise.

Carve out a slyce and plug it in there. It really does complement the flavor. Almost mandatory if you ask me.

P.S. I have to give most of the credit on this post to our own social media gal, Victoria. As always, much thanks.

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We spent some time last week hyping our new feature but we’d be remiss if we didn’t let you know that the feature has officially launched.  We seriously could not be happier about how the student portfolio feature turned out.  Actually that’s a lie–we’d be even happier about it if you logged into your profile and gave the new feature a spin. If there’s anything you hate about it, please tell us–we want to make sure this feature gives designers everything they want in a personal site!

Shameless self-promotion aside, we can’t stress enough the need for young designers to develop their own websites to display their creative talents. If you don’t like ours for some reason, you’d do well for yourself to make sure that you can be found somewhere on the internet. If not, you’re living in the past. And, in spite of what that 34 year old guy who hangs out in the middle school parking lot tells you, that’s a terrible place to be.

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Not in any literal sense unfortunately, but in the simple consideration that all those who devote their lives to the charitable enlightenment of mankind are my friend.

I’m not smart enough to pretend to understand fractals in any technical detail, but I have a strong sense of their implications, such as:

Which is to say:

Complex..

A Space Odyssey

Mandelbrot wrote Fractals: Form, Chance, and Dimension (later expanded into the more common The Fractal Nature of Geometry) in 1977 and joined the ranks of Descartes with what will be an inestimable influence. Mandelbrot’s iterative solution to spatial visualization, self-similarity, was, like all true challenges to rooted paradigms, decried in its infancy, but undeniable in its implementation.

How do you create a snowflake?

Iteratively.

How do you raise a mountain?

One step at a time.

I know there are very few of us out there who drool over mathematics, but I think it is a language all its own (literally, not metaphorically) and possesses its own kind of poetry. So when I come across a true artist, like Mandelbrot, who has found a new way to bridge the gaps between mediums, I am impressed.

When the fortitude of those bridges can bear the weight of many thousand travelers to many thousand lands, I idolize.

Beyond the infinite

Experimenting in Purity

It is very interesting that Mandelbrot arrived at his conclusions using experimentation and observation. When he worked at IBM, rather than attacking mathematics in pure form, Mandelbrot used very early computers to generate images and find his brilliancy within them.

Mandelbrot was humble enough to attribute his discovery as one he only expressed, one he, “made gradually, very slowly by looking again at the painters of the past.” One of the most clear examples of fractals in art is from Hokusai:

The Great Wave off Kanagawa

The self-similarity within the print grants beautiful layers of depth and detail giving it a breathtaking impression of realism, especially considering the strength of its lines. I find it inspiring that Mandelbrot looked to art as a caretaker of secrets.

Benoit Mandelbrot, “a Greek among Romans,” died on October 14th, 2010. His passing, as with all friends, renders a time of grief.

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Big News! We’re going to be unveiling a new feature next week: free porfolios for all of our wonderful designers.  The rest of this post deals with the “why” and “how” but we wanted to make sure those of you too busy to read more than two sentences still knew.

We love young designers. We want to see talented young designers find work, we want to see talented young designers succeed, and we want to see talented young designers become part of the design community. So, when there’s something that makes it hard for designers to do these things, it’s sort of our job to help out.

Like how this cat is helping you remember dead memes.

Which brings us to the subject of personal websites. If you’re looking to do anything in design, you should have one.  We could write an entire post on the “why” of that, but here’s a basic rundown: you need a place where you can display your work to the world, and it would also be nice if other people could check that work out and give you feedback and maybe even contact you if they like what they see.

The problem is that setting up a good, attractive website is hard.  There are some popular sites, but these sites, unfortunately, use Flash.  Flash, as you might have heard, doesn’t work on iPhones.  Or iPads.  So if you set your site up to display your portfolio using flash, a good chunk of the people who you tell to check it out are going to see a big ol’ blank page.  Because of this, Flash is also a dying technology; and building your site around it would only be slightly more cutting-edge than loading your page with flying toaster gifs.

"Have you seen my Flash website? I linked it on my Friendster page"

The solution would be to set up your site using HTML, but–unless you’re both a good designer and a l33t programmer–this isn’t really practical. And even if you do have the programming skills, coding your own personal site would take a lot of time that you shouldn’t have to waste. Creative design talent should spend their time creating great designs, not coding.

Fortunately, you can trust us to handle all the boring nerd work.  On Monday, October 25h (that’s a week from today) we will be launching a new feature on our website: free personal web pages. These pages will combine the aesthetic strengths of some of those Flash sites while still using HTML.  In about two minutes, you’ll be able to do what would normally take a skilled programmer hours to accomplish: setting up an elegant portfolio site that lets you display your work, receive feedback, and connect with other designers without relying on an outdated technology.

Please feel free to share any criticisms, praise, hopes or fears about this roll-out in the comments.  We love you all; keep being the creative geniuses we know you are!

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