When looking every year at each new wave of consumer electronics products I can’t help but wonder about the design process and the decisions behind each device, about the road it must have undertaken, from concept to final product. Is the final product I am looking at stylish? Does it follow the latest design trends, is it jumping to set a trend of its own, or is it dated? Is it desirable? Will it move people to buy it?
I chose the two examples pictured above to illustrate a particular trend I believe was born with the iPod and has since been a leading trend in some portable consumer electronics categories. This trend has since become a good starting point for well-received aesthetics in portable devices, and a good indicator as to the possible success as an appealing consumer electronics device. I am talking about symmetry.
My current job as a technology consultant has given me access to a great deal of gadgets and electronic devices. I couldn’t help myself and took a bunch of pictures of several of them, the original idea being to showcase those design features which I felt were worthy of praise. I guess not everyone is really interested in appreciating the work that has gone into each and every one of these devices, the amount of research and design that goes into even the lower-end ones.
The pictures I took intend to make apparent my appreciation for the design that goes into them. There are pictures of details, of reflections, of light playing over textures. Of everything that makes them attractive or desirable.
I have selected a few and uploaded them to a Flickr account, which I am linking here. I cropped the pictures to a 16:10 aspect ratio, originally intending them to be used as wallpaper. Flickr however has resized them to a maximum resolution of 1024 x 640, which defeats that original purpose.
Check out the album here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thenegret/
Filed under: Events
On March 29 I attended Webprendedor 08 (which can be translated as “Webentrepreneur”), a conference on the latest innovations, trends and business endeavours in the web. The conference covered the financial, legal, commercial and community driven aspects of web 2.0 projects, presentations on the latest local initiatives (which included Zimio.com, Tugar.cl and Needish.com), and the basics of entrepreneurship in the web. All in all, a very enlightening and inspiring event I’m looking forward to attending next year.
Filed under: Graphic
This is a quick piece I came up with for Puma’s “Puma Fridge” marketing campaign which is currently going on in South America. The idea was to create a refrigerator sticker. Two winners will be chosen from each participating country, these will be made into actual magnets and offered at Puma stores around the continent.
Since winners will be chosen by country and nationality seems to play a big part in this, I went for a design combining the following three concepts: Chile, Puma, and shield/emblem. I wanted something that would stand out and shout at you from the refrigerator door, so I went for the motorcycle emblem look, all bold and heavy. A shield-like chilean flag, a puma, wings and cheerful colors round out the design.
Filed under: Concepts, Consumer Electronics, Industrial, Products, Redesigns
For well over a year now I have been paying close attention to the Head Mounted Display market and what it offers to both consumers and industry. Back in 2006 I spent a year working on Augmented Reality, which required me to look closely unto this type of device. What I saw then, and the developments since, have been quite interesting.
Today, we have a growing niche within the HMD industry for products aimed as accesories to today’s portable media players. Before this, HMDs were reserved for virtual reality. Seeing this opportunity, several companies have jumped to fill this new niche. And yet, there isn’t one among them that can claim a resounding success.
Several generations of these mass-market HMDs have already come and gone, and each has made their contribution to the genre. However, even after years of evolution, all currently available HMDs seen to be missing the point entirely. I have yet to see an HMD that can be called stylish. I have yet to see one that can be called desirable. These seemingly simple concepts seem to escape HMD designers and as a result we keep getting products we do not want. Even the latest devices presented at CES 08′ at the beginning of the year fail to deliver in this regard, and while making their own advances and collaborations still leave us wanting.
Have you ever seen an HMD resembling the one rendered above? Regrettably, there are none, nor does it look like there will be any time soon.
Read on for an outlook on a market that doesn’t seem to grasp the wants and needs of its target audience…
Ha!
On Wednesday, Canadian tablet PC manufacturer Electrovaya issued a press release presenting their new tablet, the Scribbler 4000, which… looks just like the Mac tablet concept I created a while ago!
Of course I’d rather its sides and bottom were in aluminium instead of white plastic, and I would love the keyboard/screen cover I added… but anyway, it feels great to know you’re on the right track and to have one’s ideas and concepts corroborated.
Curiously AMtek, a Taiwanese tablet pc developer, announced on the same week a new tablet of their own, which looks suspiciously like the Scribbler. The only official page on it I could find can be found here.
The last few weeks I was involved in the construction of the prototype for an all electric motorcycle for the Chilean domestic market. These were weeks of all out soldering, sanding and hands-on modeling. Among the chores I took in the construction process I contributed to the general shape and lines of the bodywork, overall styling and branding.
Filed under: Graphic
A few days ago I participated in the creation of an information design piece, the objective of which was to explain the contents of a marketing course. The purpose of this assignment was to create a piece which could eventually be used by the course’s teacher to communicate to new students what to expect on the semester. All of the course’s contents had to be included, which was a lot, therefore as many as possible had to be converted into diagrams to ease things up. The amount of information ended up being huge, and the task of making sense of it all quite daunting. When distributed by themselves on a given space all these charts, text boxes and diagrams lacked any sense of intention, direction or hierarchy. To solve this, I suggested the structure you see above: To turn the marketing course into a board game. (more…)
Even though I am through and through a PC user, would I like to see a Mac Tablet? Definitely! And this is what I would like to see. Gizmodo posed the question last week, I was intrigued, and sent this mock-up in.
