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How The New York Times covered LeBron James's decision to return to the Cleveland Cavaliers on the front page of the sports section. I love this. (via Khoi Vinh)

Nice experiments in reducing and minimizing product packaging. Went a bit too far in some instances, but cool project!

Part 1 and Part 2

(via Kottke)

"We were hiding the game under all these layers," Vollmer said. At one point veteran game designer Zach Gage sent them a "sobering" e-mail that said the art wasn’t working, and this acted as a wake-up call. What if the game didn't need anything else?

"It looks like the entire time we were striving for simplicity and minimalism, and that’s not true at all," Wohlwend said. "That’s just where we ended up going. The game resisted complexity because it was such a small game, it was four by four grid, and numbers, and just the four directions. It always wanted to be simple."

Threes is a fantastic new iOS game. It reminds me in some ways of my favorite iOS puzzle game of all time, Drop7. It makes you feel like a smarty-pants if you are able to forecast several moves in advance.

Also, their tagline is perfect: a tiny puzzle that grows on you.

Over the last decade, my rule as a creator — be it as a programmer, writer, designer or photographer — has been to use the simplest possible tool for the job. Use the simplest tool until you breach its potential. If you think you’re using the simplest tool and find one simpler yet, switch to that.

Craig Mod, in another excellent piece, this time about photography in a smartphone world.

Earlier this week, we launched a brand new redesign of the Glif. It represents over a year in development, and I'm really proud of how it turned out.

When we designed the original Glif, we wanted it to be as dead simple and easy to manufacture as possible, so one of the design decisions we made was to have it only fit a naked iPhone 4. This allowed for the Glif to be a single piece of molded plastic with no moving parts. This was crucial, as it was our first time to ever manufacture something, and any added complexity would have surely tripped as up.

As we've grown and learned new things over the past 3 years, we wanted to tackle the idea of making an adjustable Glif, without losing the simplicity and ease of use of the original. I'll leave that to you to judge if we achieved that, but I'm happy with the result.

You can check out the new Glif here.

#design #Studio Neat #glif

Jack [Dorsey] is very much into how can you take something and simplify it down to its essence.

I've used Square Cash a few times since it's launched; it really is incredibly simple.

I liked this one.

I've said this before, but simplicity is, well, it goes back to …you're trying to define the essence of something and come up with a solution that seems utterly inevitable and obvious. I think a lot of people see simplicity as the lack of clutter. And that's not the case at all. True simplicity is, well, you just keep on going and going until you get to the point where you go, 'Yeah, well, of course.' Where there's no rational alternative.

Jony Ive

#Jony Ive #apple #design #simplicity

Neat Ice Kit

Tom and I are pretty pumped to announce our new Kickstarter project today for the Neat Ice Kit. What is the Neat Ice Kit, you ask? Well, it's a set of tools for creating beautifully clear ice for a variety of cocktails, right at home. The included tools allow you to create three distinct types of ice, which will cover the gamut of different cocktails.

The Kickstarter project page and video should help explain everything!

We've been working on this project for over 9 months. It started as a vague notion of a direction we wanted to dabble in, and after countless iterations, we arrived at the Neat Ice Kit. Obviously this is a new direction for Studio Neat, but we are excited to see where this takes us.

As always, your support is very much appreciated. And, if you have a friend or family member who you think this project is perfect for, please pass along the link to our Kickstarter page!

#kickstarter #Studio Neat #neat ice kit #cocktails

Affordances are the baby to skeuomorphism’s bathwater.

Dan Wineman

#affordance #design #iOS7

I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity, in clarity, in efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation, it's about bringing order to complexity.

Jony Ive

#tech #apple #iPhone #iOS #design #design and technology

People who use software fall into two camps: those who appreciate simplicity, and those who don’t yet realize they appreciate simplicity.

Daniel Jalkut

#software

Complexity is the coward's way out. But there is nothing simple about simplicity, and achieving it requires following three major principles: empathizing (by perceiving others' needs and expectations), distilling (by reducing to its essence the substance of one's offer) and clarifying (by making the offering easier to understand or use).

Worth a read.

#wsj #business

Read "It Will Be Exhilarating" Online

Last year Tom and I wrote a book, entitled It Will Be Exhilarating, about our experiences making products and forming a company. We wrote it to offer guidance and inspiration for those charting a similar path to us, and it covers topics such as running a small business, creating hardware products independently, launching a Kickstarter project, and tips for promoting your products. We've received some great feedback–it truly seems to be helping and motivating people with their own projects.

We have decided now to make this book free to read online. You can check it out at http://exhilarating.studioneat.com/. The page is responsive and retina ready so it should look nice on any size screen. Bookmark the page to the home screen of your iOS device for a chrome-free reading experience. And, if you'd like to read on your ereader of choice, the ebook is still available for $5.

Please let us know what you think!

#book #It Will Be Exhilarating #responsive #indie capitalism

WWDC Ticket Distribution

This year, Apple's developer conference, WWDC, sold out in less than two minutes. Many developers were unable to acquire a ticket, and thus a discussion has erupted about how to "fix" WWDC. The knee-jerk response is to significantly expand the conference, but Jeff Lamarche gives some good reasons why this would fundamentally change the tone and vibe in a negative way. A SXSW-ification, if you will. Daniel Jalkut suggests a more extreme route, getting rid of WWDC all together. My general impression is that people are happy with WWDC in terms of its size; it's clear the main problem is the demand for tickets far exceeds the supply.

To me, this becomes a fascinating design problem. Let's say, in this exercise, that Apple wants to keep WWDC as is, in terms of the number of attendees, location, and number of Apple engineers on site. We can then focus on a single problem: how to best distribute the 5,500 (or so) tickets.

John Siracusa suggests a lottery. I think he's half right.

My proposal is for Apple to take some cues from the New York City Marathon. The marathon, like WWDC, is an event where the demand far outstrips the supply. They break applicants into two categories:

Guaranteed Entrants

Non-guaranteed Applicants

The non-guaranteed applicant is entered into a lottery. The coveted guaranteed entry, however, is achieved in a few ways:

Seniority: Finish at least 15 previous New York Marathons.

Sympathy: Lose the lottery for 3 consecutive years.

Elite: Post a qualifying time in an approved marathon.

Legwork: Run at least 9 New York road races throughout the year, and volunteer at an additional one.

Charity: Join an approved charity organization and raise a certain amount of money.

I think a model like this could work for WWDC. For example:

Seniority: Attend at least 10 past WWDCs.

Sympathy: Lose the lottery for 3 consecutive years.

Elite: Win an Apple Design award the previous year. Or perhaps have an app in the overall top 10 within the past year?

Legwork: Not sure about this one. Maybe volunteering to distribute badges before the conference? This could also be where "Student Scholarship" fits in.

Charity: Join an approved charity organization and raise a certain amount of money.

Any tickets not given to guaranteed entrants would be put in the lottery. I think something like this is a bit more equitable than a straight up lottery, and certainly more so than this year's rolling of the browser refresh dice.

One last note. I'm surprised the aspect of badge sharing hasn't been mentioned more. Two or three people can get a ton out of WWDC, even if only one body is allowed in Moscone West at a time. I'm sure badge sharing already happens unofficially, but if Apple were to officially endorse the idea, it would effectively double the number of people who get to participate in the conference, while still keeping the numbers where Apple wants them within the facility.

#Apple #WWDC #tickets

We don't really think it's about reducing complexity. We think it's about concealing complexity.

Dom Hofmann, co-founder of Vine. (via The Verge)

#Vine #iPhone #app #video

iPhone Stamp for UI Sketching

Recently I've been sketching some UI concepts for an iPhone app in my Field Notes notebook. I typically start by drawing a rectangle that crudely approximates the real life size of an iPhone screen, but I figured there might be a better solution that keeps the spirit of the quick and dirty UI sketch, while making sure the screen is the correct size and proportion. I decided to have a custom rubber stamp made.

It works pretty well! I added little tick marks around the border of the screen so I know where the status bar, nav bar, and tab bar in both portrait and landscape should be placed. If you'd like to make a stamp of your own, you can download the file here. Most cities should have a custom rubber stamp shop, I got mine made at Capitol Rubber Stamp in Austin. The stamp ended up being about $35, and the large ink pad was $15.

#iPhone #stamp #UI #sketch #design

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