First off, Design Milk has a nice review of the best of architecture in 2011.

Then, enjoy this write-up of the Plumen light bulb by designer Samuel Wilkinson and product design firm Hulger. The Plumen was named the Design Museum's Brit Insurance Design of the Year.

Also from the Design Museum, the winner of the Brit Insurance Graphics Award for 2011 is BlogLESS favorite Homemade is Best, by Swedish Interactive graphics agency Forsman & Bodenfors.

And, finally, the interesting A Year in Web Design: How the Experts Saw 2011 from Web Design Tuts is worth a look.

Happy new year to each of you very fine BlogLESS readers.

Will Jessop talks about how he created the video, which was edited down from a version released last year, on their blog. I like the seeing subtle and not-so-subtle changes and decisions:

Nice learning tool. I'd like to have similar videos or animations to replay decisions I've made in my own work.

1. Nevolution: This is a mental public health issue

Image credit: Daniel Neville

Daniel Neville has penned a thoughtful piece about the ethical implications of video games that manipulate us and how these mechanics are holding back the artistic potential of the medium.

...[G]ame designers are using evolutionary needs for rewards and goals to cheapen the game playing experience. If there were no golden coins to collect, or princesses to solve, would the game still be playable? [Braid designer Jonathan Blow] made a big point about comparing the simple and addictive (yet ultimately empty) rewards based system of World of Warcraft to gorging on fast food...Blow questions if game designers have been designing games to exploit the need for fitness indicators and affordances. Rewards can be like food (naturally beneficial) or like drugs (artificial stimuli and the illusion of fitness indicators), games over use the drugs because they don't understand how to make a food.

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A recent post on 24 ways by Simon Collison provides a nice chance for reflection on the state of affairs in web design here at the beginning of 2011. A lot of is pretty vague (frankly I'm not completely sure I understand what Collison is suggesting), but let me quote a bit to you that I found suggestive:

Taking stock: Where we're at is good. Finding clarity through web standards, we've ended up quite modernist in our approach, pursuing function, elegance and reduction. However, we're not great at articulating our own design processes and principles to outsiders. Equally, we rely heavily on our instincts when deciding if something is or isn't good. That's fine, but we can better understand why things are the way they are by looking a little deeper, thereby helping us articulate what goes on in our design brains to our peers, our clients and to normal humans.

That seems true to me, and worth thinking about. If we can't explain what we're doing in clear and understandable language to "normal humans" (in another discipline of my interest, these are sometimes also called "the folk"), then we don't know what we're doing.

Try it yourself. Look at your last web design and ask yourself, frankly, if you can explain every decision you made. If your elderly parent asked you, "Why did you do n in thus and such a way?", what would you say? You might all be surprised at how tough answering a question like that is.

Maybe a New Year's Resolution?: This year, I resolve to make the reasons for my design decisions explicit.

Quoting him at length:

Digital media expands. It's not like paper, it can get bigger.

As digital marketers seek to increase profits, they almost always make the same mistake. They continue to add more clutter, messaging and offers, because, hey, it's free.

One more link, one more banner, one more side deal on the Groupon page.

Economics tells us that the right thing to do is run the factory until the last item produced is being sold at marginal cost. In other words, keep adding until it doesn't work any more.

In fact, human behavior tells us that this is a more permanent effect than we realize. Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention. More clutter isn't free. In fact, more clutter is a permanent shift, a desensitization to all the information, not just the last bit.

And it's hard to go backward.

More is not always better. In fact, more is almost never better.

1. How Steve Jobs beats presentation panic

Image from Penny Arcade

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1. How BP is fighting back

Interesting story on Grist about the many ways BP is attempting to control more than the oil spill. It's reaching out to tame lawsuits, legislators, and even Google.

2. Lessons learned from 13 failed software products

Failure is the best teacher, as they say. I found a lot of this advice useful.

3. The State of Web Fonts, June 2010

A List Apart has a great comprehensive review of Web Fonts -- browsers, tools, and other information. If you're interested in learning more or possibly taking the plunge, this is a helpful resource.

4. Design Fiction

Bruce Sterling finally organized his sprawling Wired blog. Of interest to BlogLESS readers: the new Design Fiction tag. It's like science fiction for the creative set. A speculative glimpse of our design future punctuated by Sterling's entertaining rants and snark.

Paddy Donnelly has a nice write up about the lingering dogma of the fold. His point, with enough room left in 120 characters for a shortened URL, is this: The virtues of keeping relevant content above the fold are no longer.

This is probably something we've all realized, but it's nice to have a clear write-up that details just why this is the case. It's also something worth keeping at hand to try and reason with client-cum-designers, as Paddy recognizes. Here he is:

We all know, people have learned to scroll. They did a long time ago, but still the 'everything needs to be above the fold' concept lingers on.

Many web designers, after presenting a site design, hear the client worriedly ask 'But, where is the fold?!' Your first response is usually to switch on the guides in Photoshop to show and they then nervously say 'Hmm, yeah, we're going to need those articles, and those links, and those 6 images all above the fold.'

And there goes any sense of white space, readability and story telling you had planned for their site.

(On a personal note, this is also good news for us, since by the time you're reading this, it's almost certainly below the fold.)