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Tiny Showcase usually showcases (and sells limited editions of) tiny works of art. However, recently “inspired by the posters on classroom walls, but free from any commitment to reality,” TS has a giant poster created by Ray Fenwick – Life of Mystery — An Illustrated Guide – on offer.

The thing about KEYS is that they’re incomplete…

Besides being pithy, mirthful and incredibly well typeset, has as its centerpiece a sort of “Life of Mystery” manifesto, which I’ll paraphrase for you now:

Life holds plenty of mystery, but it often seems like the wrong kind of mystery. Life’s mysteries are usually either depressing or bland. Fortunately, there’s another kind of mystery, the fun kind, the kind that “leaves you spun out in the most amazing ways.” This mystery is a feeling, a vague sense of mysteriousness. We can create a life of mysteriousness: We can feel like that forever!

I think this addresses something that designers often forget: Sometimes the best parts of our experience with stuff in the world is getting “spun out” in a cool way. Think about how cool early viral marketing could feel, or even think about the infamous ATHF incident in Boston, and then ask yourself, when you’re setting off to design something: Is there some way I can make this engage people in that fun kind of mystery?

It’s important! And we know it’s important, because it’s exactly why we’re designers. Designing stuff is a way of coming into work every day and addressing the fun kind of mysteries in life.

So here’s a mentality shift to ponder for your manifesto: Don’t even try to address the loose ends out of existence; design the loose ends!

I had another post all lined up for today and then my delicious feed alerted me to a recent presentation on surface by Michal Migurski: Greebles, Nurnies, Tiles, and Flair. I thought the last section was such a good read, I just had to share it and offer some comments.

Greebles are a great little design trope that is not widely known outside modeling circles. In my earlier 3D modeling days, I used to play with them quite a bit. Sci-fi aficionados will recognize greebles as the texture that covers the Death Star, Star Destroyer, and Borg Cube.

Migurski describes them thusly:

Greebles are the parts that “look cool, but don’t actually do anything”. There’s an entire discipline here composed of special effects artists and asset designers working to hide the plywood spaceships and simple game world polygons beneath an encrusted surface texture.

Migurski’s thesis is that while greebles themselves don’t do anything, they do serve a purpose. They are the “slight of hand” that suggests complexity and activity—which can be very important to an audience’s impressions of an experience. For example, the experience of social networking.

His presentation notes contain a number of insightful observations ((emphasis mine)):

Surface details … are a kind of social signal that the textured surface is real and cared-for….

Social sites are taken seriously when they have crowds of users, loads of data, and all the scaling problems that accompany success.

((Does this mean service outages and shortages are legitimizing agents? — probably so.))

Credibility comes from looking busy, and being continuous: having something on page two, page three, etc.

((Agreed.))

And the cream of the crop:

Compare and contrast the visual appearance of OpenStreetMap two years ago vs. now: it’s more credible and therefore more useful, because it’s beautiful.

Discussion

So texture is aesthetically-pleasing complexity, which serves as a cue that we should pay heed to something. I think this is a great abstraction for describing the aforementioned chicken and the egg question of social media: How does one obtain texture?

Assuming the technique works (which I think it does), is it ethical to deploy greebles, which are ostensibly generated noise? Or is texture best developed organically, through social use? Greebles are certainly easier, but are they healthier for the system? Something to ponder…

Regardless, Migurski is onto something: texture is an essential part of user experience. Without it the Death Star would just be a humble sphere, the Star Destroyer a wedge, and a Borg Cube would be…well… a cube.

As purveyors of simplicity, it’s interesting to consider those instances where complexity (of some kind) may be absolutely necessary.

A while back, we pitched an idea for a logo that was an optical illusion—the kind that looks like one thing or another depending on how you look at it. Things didn’t pan out, but due to our rigorous research for the project, we’ve developed quite a collection of good optical illusions.

I find such images appealing; lots of people do. I think the brain likes to be teased a bit. It’s fun.

For today’s post, I’m going to share some images of designs that make use of perspective-based illusions. These are interesting because they are spatial: a viewer stands in a particular spot and visual cues are exploited to form a 2D image.

On with the Show

This parking garage signage recently won a design award. The graphics are designed to be easily seen by approaching cars. Since they fill the driver’s viewshed – much larger than any sign could be in that space— I’d say they certainly fit the bill.

Human-scale typography is cool, but I think the effects in these interiors are even more impressive. Be sure to check out the rest of the images on this page.

They don’t have much purpose other than aesthetics, but they certainly liven up the space.

Earlier this year, Philadelphia used plastic decals of road obstacles in perspective to slow down drivers in lieu of speed bumps. The illusions proved quite effective—until drivers caught on.

I would slow down for a speed bump, but I would probably slam on my breaks if I thought I saw spikes coming out of the road. I wonder if they caused any accidents?

Lastly, this video of an iPhone application shows how, with a little perspective math, a 2D screen could be made to look like a 3D “hologram”.

The demo turned out to be a fake (the accelerometer is not actually that sensitive), but in principle, it should work. Figuring out the viewer’s angle would be very tricky, though.

DLB firmly believes that when it comes to designing vegetables, less is almost certainly always better. This series of ads (courtesy of the very cool Behance Network site) promoting the Greenpeace Genetic Engineering Campaign gets the DLB seal of approval for using less graphic design to promote less genetic engineering.

This ad cleverly warns us against the dangers of genetically-modified food on behalf of Greenpeace. Meanwhile, the minimal type design doesn’t dilute the clever message that the carrot-scorpion conveys.

Paul Arden taught us that one of the most effective tactics in advertising is to think the opposite. Unfortunately, he didn’t talk much about what takes to pull it off successfully.

In this respect, I find the lessons of comedy instructive. Comedy is built upon a foundation of doing the opposite of what people expect.

This is not to suggest that Steve Martin’s humor is cheap. He’s pictured here to illustrate what it would look like having an arrow in your head.

Stick an arrow in your head. Right away, you probably look foolish. People will laugh. The joke is on you, but at least you’ve got their attention. This kind of humor is cheap, but it works. All it takes is a little bit of courage.

Then there’s another kind of humor. Humor that is not merely absurd, but actually changes one’s perspective. It’s risky, but if it is successful, the comedian causes the audience to join him in thinking the opposite.

A recent example of this is Norm MacDonald’s set at the Comedy Central Roast of Bob Saget:

Click on the picture to be taken to a page with the full video. I can’t embed the clip for some reason and this is the only version online that has the full, uncut set.

In this clip, MacDonald invokes the opposite of roast: being deliberately un-funny and G-rated. It’s awful, but he endures. As a result, he ends up having the best routine of the night.

Some people don’t quite get it. The jokes aren’t the point; the whole routine is the joke. In a delightfully subversive (practically meta) twist, MacDonald is roasting the roast.

Channeling Arden:

Do the opposite. Keep doing it. Do it for a long time. People will still laugh at you, but then they will get uncomfortable. The joke is on them. Eventually, people will stop laughing and start moving in your direction. This takes a heroic level of courage.

I read a nice article today over at the Customer Experience Design blog, which traced over a fairly well-drawn distinction between two schools of customer experience.

The two schools, given by example in this case are:

The “Ritz-Carlton Customer Experience Philosophy” [which] creates remarkable customer experiences through extraordinary benefits at extraordinary prices.

and

The “IKEA Customer Experience Philosophy” [which] creates remarkable customer experiences by reducing the sacrifice and costs that customers incur to experience a company’s products and services.

Thinking about this, I started to wonder: How can you be the IKEA of web design firms? Working strictly from the definitions, it’s easy: The IKEA of web design firms is your client’s web-designing nephew. He’s cheap, the benefits are basic, and his relatively uneducated customer’s percieved value is high.

But, of course, that’s not the whole story, because IKEA stuff is well-designed, it’s broadly applicable, and (most importantly to the failure of my analogy) it’s contemporary. IKEA is, at least to some degree, premised on the fact that its customers have some aesthetic taste.

Wait a second. My client’s web-design nephew couldn’t have come up with this.

Taking a look, it should become instantly clear that if you want to be IKEA, having IKEA’s customer experience philosophy doesn’t cut it. You also have to be a good designer. And this is a problem, as most designers recoil at the de facto idea for a web design IKEA analog, a template-driven web design business.

Here’s what that tells me: templates are not the web design analog of what IKEA does. IKEA is based on customers combining cheap, well-designed elements to their own satisfaction. Which means there’s still potentially a good web analog out there to be found.

And you can be sure that when the IKEA-of-web-design-firms-to-come comes, there’s going to be a huge market right there waiting for them.

Illustrator and author Cristoph Niemann, in his New York Times blog on Thursday, unveiled his incredible journey through pixelated modern art, in his attempt to — get ready — tile his bathroom. We strongly encourage you to read the entire process.

For my part, I must say, I think I might have chosen Hockney’s Pool with Two Figures for the shower:

Portrait of an Artist: Pool with two figures by David Hockney, as rendered in pixels by Cristoph Niemann

That said, I unequivocally applaud his shower choice, which he brilliantly reappropriates from one of my all-time favorite artists, Joseph Beuys:

Fettecke by Joseph Beuys, as rendered in pixels by Cristoph Niemann.

I see your clever juicebox, Paul, and I raise you a cheeky juicebox.

Via