London Underground Roundel

The London Underground Roundel is a marvelous, timeless logo. John Brownlee, in Fast Company's Co.Design, introduces a new book about it. 

The Amazing History Of London's Most Enduring Logo

FOR OVER A CENTURY, THE LONDON UNDERGROUND ROUNDEL HAS GOTTEN INTO THE DNA OF SOME OF THE WORLD'S TOP DESIGNERS. A NEW BOOK EXPLORES HOW.

It is hard to imagine a simpler symbol than the one that brands every London bus, subway, and station, the London Underground Roundel. Although little more than a dark blue bar placed across two red-rimmed semi-circles, the Roundel has evolved from humble signage meant to tell passengers where to get off the train to an emblem that represents not just a metropolis but its people as well. The Roundel's incredible journey is being freshly explored in Logo for London, a beautiful, lavishly illustrated new book. Published by Laurence King, Logo for London tracks the Roundel's cultural, artistic, and social importance over the last hundred years as it became the world's most well-known transportation symbol.

"Like many millions of other people commuting through London, I saw this symbol at every station countless times per day," says Logo for London author David Lawrence. A design historian stationed at the University at Kingston University, Lawrence began to wonder how such an abstract symbol as the London Underground Roundel became an important part of the life of the city. "I rather foolishly made myself the man responsible for trying to interpret it for as wide an audience as possible." After 15 years spent poring through city archives, papers, and ephemera for any mention of the Roundel, Lawrence's book is the definitive history of an important cultural icon.

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Generation Touch

"Generation Touch." This resonates -- "This generation has grown up differently than everyone who came before it (including me). They have grown up in a world of constant mobile connectedness. They are as different from prior generations as were Baby Boomers who grew up with the first televisions, and earlier generations who grew up with the very first cars or electricity. They have never really known a world without Internet, mobile devices or social media."

See this piece by Josh Elman in TechCrunch -- 

Generation Touch Will Redraw Consumer Tech

Ten years ago, young adults and those in their late teens were among the fastest and earliest adopters of new social networks — Friendster, Myspace, and ultimately Facebook — and many other products that define us today. So we should be looking to today’s generation, who people often refer to as Millennials, to predict how we will all live and connect 10+ years from now. This generation has grown up differently than everyone who came before it (including me). They have grown up in a world of constant mobile connectedness. They are as different from prior generations as were Baby Boomers who grew up with the first televisions, and earlier generations who grew up with the very first cars or electricity. They have never really known a world without Internet, mobile devices or social media.

In the past decade alone, many of the fundamentals of technology have changed, and as a result, so has this generation’s priorities:

• This generation owns and carries significantly more mobile phones than desktop or laptop computers.
• In a recent study, 65 percent of teens polled would rather go without a car than their mobile phone.
• Interfaces are radically different: no longer are terms such as "keyboard shortcuts," "save," or even "click" as relevant as terms such as "gestures," "share," and "tap." [I would add, "swipe."]
• As people are always connected (both to the Internet and to each other socially), there is less and less sense of privacy than ever before.

I like to call this group “Generation Touch” or GenT. 

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Google Design Guidelines

Fast Company's Co.Design presents Google's "visual assets guidelines." Be sure to follow the link in the excerpt below, and review the slides at the top of the full story in the Co.Design story itself (by Kyle Vanhemert). 

A Rare Peek At The Guidelines That Dictate Google's Graphic Design

A PAIR OF "VISUAL ASSETS GUIDELINES," POSTED BY ONE OF THE COMPANY’S SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNERS, OUTLINE PRECISELY HOW GOOGLE DESIGNERS ARE SUPPOSED TO SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF.

In April 2011, Larry Page took the reins as Google’s CEO. He didn’t waste any time getting down to business. On his very first day on the job, Page launched an incredibly ambitious effort to redesign the company’s main products, including search, maps, and mail. He wanted them to be beautiful--Google had never been known for its visual polish--but he also wanted them to be cohesive, more like a true software suite than a jumble of disparate digital tools. In the years since, Google’s products have improved leaps and bounds, aesthetically speaking, largely while working within the same shared design language. Here’s how they’re doing it.

The rare glimpse into the company’s design process comes in the form of two documents--"Visual Assets guidelines"--freshly shared on Behance. Compiled over the last 18 months by senior graphic designer Roger Oddone and art director Christopher Bettig, along with designers Alex Griendling, Jefferson Cheng, Yan Yan, and Zachary Gibson, the guidelines focus on iconography, covering both broader principles and pixel-level details as they relate to both app icons and UI elements. The aim, an introductory blurb notes, is to set down the "solid, yet flexible, set of guidelines that have been helping Google’s designers and vendors to produce high-quality work that helps strengthen Google’s identity." 

... 

Checkout the guides in full here and here.

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Zen and Design

By Matthew May in Fast Company's Co.DESIGN, a piece that offers some "Zen design principles." 

7 Design Principles, Inspired By Zen Wisdom 

WANT TO BECOME THE NEXT STEVE JOBS--OR JUST UNDERSTAND HIS NEAR-SPIRITUAL DEVOTION TO SIMPLICITY? THIS PRIMER, OUTLINING THE MAIN TENETS OF ZEN DESIGN, WILL HELP. 

One of the best-known photographs of the late Steve Jobs pictures him sitting in the middle of the living room of his Los Altos house, circa 1982. There isn’t much in the room, save an audio system and a Tiffany lamp. Jobs is sipping tea, sitting yoga-style on a mat, with but a few books around him. The picture speaks volumes about the less-is-more motive behind every Apple product designed under his command.

As Warren Berger wrote on Co.Design, Jobs’s love for elegantly simple, intuitive design is widely attributed to his appreciation of Zen philosophy (Jobs was a practicing Buddhist). But while many people might be familiar with Zen as a broad concept, far fewer are knowledgeable of the key aesthetic principles that collectively comprise the "Zen of design." 

To understand the Zen principles, a good starting point is shibumi. It is an overarching concept, an ideal. It has no precise definition in Japanese, but its meaning is reserved for objects and experiences that exhibit in paradox and all at once the very best of everything and nothing: Elegant simplicity. Effortless effectiveness. Understated excellence. Beautiful imperfection. 

James Michener referred to shibumi in his 1968 novel Iberia, writing that it can’t be translated and has no explanation. In his 1972 book, The Unknown Craftsman, Soetsu Yanagi talked about shibumi in the context of art, writing that a true work of art is one with intentionally imperfect beauty that makes an artist of the viewer. In the 1979 best-selling spy novel Shibumi, the author Trevanian (the nom de plume of Dr. Rodney William Whitaker) wrote, "Shibumi has to do with great refinement underlying commonplace appearances." 

Shibumi was first introduced to the West by House Beautiful in 1960. Nearly 40 years later, architect Sarah Susanka reintroduced shibumi in her 1998 book The Not So Big House: "The quality of shibumi evolves out of a process of complexity, though none of this complexity shows in the result. It often seems to arise when an architect is striving to meet a particular design challenge. When something has been designed really well, it has an understated, effortless beauty, and it really works. That’s shibumi." 

The process may be complex, but these seven Zen principles can help you approach shibumi in your own designs: 

The seven principles are 

1. Austerity 
2. Simplicity 
3. Naturalness 
4. Subtlety 
5. Imperfection; asymmetry 
6. Break from routine 
7. Stillness; tranquility 

Apple User Interface Changes

Via Malcolm Brown -- "iTunes 11 Interface Innovations: Good and Bad, but Not Ugly," by Adam C. Engst in TidBITS ("Apple news for the rest of us"). 

What I’m finding the most interesting about iTunes 11 is not its features, which are almost entirely the same as in previous versions, but the way that it thinks about interface in a rather different way from the previous versions. iTunes is sufficiently central to the user experience of most Apple users that its interface changes could give a sense of where Apple might take OS X’s interface. That may be good or bad, depending on your perspective, but it’s certainly something you should keep an eye on.

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