Designers Sang Min Yu and Wong Sang Lee have an interesting proposal for your dental life. Their SavePaste design is meant to (a) eliminate the "dead space" in standard toothpaste tube design, minimizing toothpaste residue left inside the container; and (b) move from the the two-packages-one-recyclabe approach to a one-package-one-recyclabe one. Pretty neat!

Via

The ability of some objects to be highly designed without signaling the fact of their design is their allure, their interest, and their beauty.

Harpman and Specht have been collecting since 1984 and have the largest collection of independently-patented drink-through plastic cup lids in the United States. They note that the collection "..has no monetary value, but rather operates as some modest form of intellectual capital." It is certainly interesting to think about the countless hours that packaging designers have put into these lids, and the fact that many of the designs may have even been considered quite novel at least to a specialist (though when presented all in a row, I can't help but think how much we like to overdesign things).

A fascinating write-up of the lid collection lives at Cabinet.

Read More...

This is a clever idea, pulled off well.

Via Dieline.

1. Packaging Design at Its Worst

Treehugger has a gallery of packaging designs that are wasteful and, in one case, downright dangerous.

2. What Street Vendors Can Teach Businesses About Twitter

One of the better articles I've read on making effective use of Twitter. I appreciate the fact that the authors use real tweets as examples instead of simply making broad, unsupported generalizations.

3. Want more sign-ups? Don't lead with "Free" offers

In user testing, 37signals found that a call-to-action button with the copy "See Plans and Pricing" resulted in a 200% increase in sign-ups over variations on "Sign-up for a Free Trial".

It seems that people are weary of "free" things online as they are often a gateway to unwanted subscriptions and opt-out schemes.

4. How to Monetize a Free Service

Okay, that title's a bit misleading.

But we could learn something from the actions of Pandora CEO Tim Founder on how to make the move from free to freemium. Founder broke the news to his customers in a sensitive and well-reasoned letter that's worth reading.

Make a great service and treat your customers like intelligent people. That's something we can all subscribe to.

1. Two Twitter case studies (that have nothing to do with Iran)

If I only had a nickel for every time someone asked me what a person can do with Twitter…

Well, here are two good examples:

Tim O'Reilly spoke recently about how he uses Twitter as a publisher to build a community. Not to amplify his own status, but to support things and people that he wants to see more of in the world. "Create more value than you capture", he says. It's the same philosophy that made his media company successful and it continues to work for him on Twitter.

Not to be outdone, Amanda Palmer of the Dresdon Dolls used Twitter to make $19,000 in 10 hours using auctions and by organizing impromptu donation-funded gigs.

2. Design Tips for Crowdsourcing Applications

There's a nice piece from Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab about how the UK's Guardian newspaper used crowdsourcing to quickly catch up to a rival newspaper's scoop, creating a website where readers helped filter through thousands of pages of government expense reports in a matter of hours.

A few quick UI tips I gathered from the article:

1. Keep the choices limited. The Guardian didn't ask people to write a report or notes for the pages, just click one of four buttons to rate it. This made it accessible to more people and helped them move through many pages quickly.
2. Make it a video game. Graphing progress and posting it on leaderboards helped motivate readers with a sense of accomplishment and competition. (similar to my.barackobama.com)
3. Pretty bird. Analytics showed people looked through more pages when they were accompanied by a picture of the person in the report. In their words, it turned a boring .pdf into a detective story.

3. FTC to Patrol Blog Swag

Aside from the occasional lawsuit, product reviews on blogs are unregulated. The Federal Trade Commission plans to change that soon.

It seems many companies gift bloggers with money or free product for a review and many writers do not disclose this in their articles. Although the companies don't tell the bloggers what to write, it's certainly a conflict of interest. So marketers and bloggers beware: if you don't follow ethical practices, the FTC may come knocking.

4. How do you design a package for a product that (technically) doesn't exist?

The Book Design Review asks an interesting question: who makes those fake book covers for books that aren't released yet?

Danger Mouse had a similar problem with his new album Dark Night of the Soul, when his record label refused to release it due to contract disputes. Unable to legally sell his music, instead he sold an "album" containing a custom-printed blank CD-R , encouraging his fans to download a leaked copy and burn it themselves.

It's an interesting design type to consider in this age of digital downloads. Without a physical package, what does the "cover" or "box" look like for a bunch of bits? Maybe that's an emerging design specialization....

This is Origami is a project by designer Magdalena Czarnecki. It consists of a series of empty paper bags, printed on which are step-by-step instructions on how to fold the bag into an origami animal.

Her idea is that the profits from these could be directed to the WWF to help save the endangered animal that each bag depicts/is.

Neat.