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As requested by Jon Hicks,
I present to you none other than one of my favourite gurus: Edward Tufte. From
his book Envisioning Information
to his latest essay on
Powerpoint, the man has changed my views on (information) design and has
been an inspiration ever since I made my first chart.

Through the magic of bits and bytes I have teleported a younger Edward Tufte
to the twenty-first century! As you can see he is giving a presentation on good
design. Somehow that particular slide looks familiar… Can it be that Tufte
has been notified of the latest
revolution in blogosphere? Has he come to realize that the new generation
is ready to take on the living legends?

So what guru shall I draw next? Mention your favourite in the comments.

Introduction

So, you would think Sweden is only known for producing extremely safe but dull
cars, such as Saab and Volvo. Now, think again. Christian von Koenigsegg grew
up with the dream of creating the perfect sportscar. After several years of
planning he launched the Koenigsegg project in 1993. Designer David Craaford
provided a design concept following Christian’s guidelines. The vikings
now have a car that is going to make some noise in the supercar scene: the Koenigsegg
CCR.

(more…)

• 
  Vote For Your Favorite Master of Design
  Fast Company
• 
  Usability Basics
  Henrik Olsen — GUUUI!
• 
  Why Study Rome When You Can Build It?
  Henry Jenkins — MIT Technology Review
• 
  Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research
  Andrew Hinton — Boxes and Arrows

As both an economist and designer I welcomed a report by Design
Council entitled “The
Impact of Design on Stock Market Performance”:

“Design is a critical component of business performance. We’ve
heard designers, commentators and companies say it. But, to date, the evidence
for the link between shareholder return and investment in design has been
scarce and anecdotal.”

While I strongly recommend this report to designers and managers alike I’m
afraid it is going to make more than one economist frown. Design is a critical
component of business performance, no doubt. That said, I have troubles linking
design directly to stock market prices, even after reading this report. Companies
are valued using financial metrics — factual and verifiable (behold the accountants
and controllers do their work correctly and honestly.)

More important than trying to link design to share
prices, is the relation between design and business in general (not specifically
stock market performance). In my opinion better design leads to better products,
and eventually improved business performance. My criticism is directed at their
methodology and the variables used to explain the relation. To use stock market
performance as the basis for business performance is dubious. Moreover, nowadays
share prices are predominantly determined by demand and supply. It is
naïve to assume that share prices actually reflect how a company
is really performing.

I would have preferred to see research based on the link between design and
internal business performance, such as sales, customer satisfaction and brand
experience (i.e. better design leads to % increase in sales.) In my opinion
share prices are too volatile and include too much noise to conclude to anything.
That said, the choice to use stock market performance as a metric is obvious and practical,
being freely and publicly accessible information.

Despite the somewhat flawed methodology, this report is an excellent read and,
in all honesty, I could not agree more with their findings. Design matters!
The general ideas elaborated throughout this report make sense and have been
researched extensively. Design is indeed a critical component of business performance
— I’m just not so sure about stock market performance as a good
and reliable metric.

I’ve recently rediscovered Cameron Moll’s excellent website, and through that have found a reason to start posting again [a mixture of cheers and groans can be heard in the distance].

Cameron poses this challenge: What was your first website?

Now, somewhere in the dusty cardboard boxes of my long-lost past, I have at least one set of files that make up the archive of what is, to my knowledge, my very first paid web site project (circa 1998). I’ve physically and digitally searched for about an hour tonight without finding it, so for the time being you will have to amuse yourself with another first of mine: my first (and one of only a few) foray into the world of Flash.

This was seriously my first attempt at doing anything in Flash, and the client asked for an entirely Flash-based site. I had only been learning about web design and HTML for a year or so when I took this job, and didn’t even own Flash, so of course I said “sure, I can do that!” — I promptly ran out and bought a copy of Flash 3, and set to work. I was proud of the work at the time, and even now, looking at it for the first time in years, I’m quite happy with it: it’s simple, easy to navigate (relatively speaking, especially for early 1999) and isn’t too ugly either.

Without further ado, I present: Greenfrog Advertising (version 1.0)

Warning: There may be some links that don’t work, or some pop-up windows, or other things that you may not take a liking to. I’m not going to do anything about it either. So there.

I’ll post my previously mentioned first web site project the very second I find it… in the meantime, post your comments hither!