Rich Mintz  

I was rummaging through the used-book sale tables on the Broadway sidewalk just above 72nd Street (for the record, one of the best places for serendipitous book browsing anywhere) and I unearthed a copy of Designing for People, the popular book about industrial design by celebrity designer Henry Dreyfuss. I got it for 8 bucks, talked down from ten, and if I hadn’t been wearing a very nice suit (if I do say so myself), I bet it would have been cheaper.

Dreyfuss was one of a generation of industrial designers in the first half of the 20th century that embraced simple, functional design (leavened with a healthy serving of ergonomics) in response to the intricacy and complication that captivated their parents’ generation. He designed more than a dozen iconic objects of the period whose significance has endured, including the Trimline and Princess phones, the locomotive of the Twentieth Century Limited, the Polaroid SX-70, the Westclox “Big Ben” clock, and the John Deere Model A Tractor.

The book, which is very much an artifact of its moment (the mid-1950s), with its stick figures and line drawings in the margin, reads as a bit self-congratulatory, but some of that may just be the style of the period, and let’s face it — the guy was a celebrity. Dreyfuss really did help change the way people (at least people in product development and manufacturing) thought about design, to a degree that still endures today. Michael Graves‘  household products at Target (and, for that matter, Martha Stewart’s at Kmart) wouldn’t have been possible without Dreyfuss.

I took a few photos of Publix grocery labels. See below — my detail pics, along with a shelf photo taken from Fast Company.

They’re not the best grocery store in America (that’s probably Fairway), but they’re a very good one — a step up from Kroger in terms of quality, accessible and friendly and easy to navigate, and attuned to all aspects of the customer experience, including design. Their private-label products are gorgeous. The labels I shot are mostly from the most recent rebranding, although the brand standards seem a little loose (there’s variation in type in how the product names are rendered).

Last week Dave Dawson pointed me to this article from WeightShift, about the convergence of graphic, print, and “new media” design. I couldn’t agree more; anyone who doesn’t see these three converging isn’t paying attention. And in my professional life — in which I spend a large share of my time helping complex, siloed organizations reshape themselves to be more effective communicators — it’s usually the case that the organizations that are hardest to work with are those that see different communications “channels” as being completely separate.

If your email calendar is shaped separately from your direct mail calendar, you’re at a disadvantage, but it’s somewhat mitigated as long as the people who perform those functions do some after-the-fact synchronizing and collaborating. But if the people who write your annual report and the people who write your newsletter and the people who write your emails are in completely separate siloes, or (worse) if they don’t even know each other, things are tougher. I won’t say “hopeless” — I’m not that kind of guy — but you really need to work to pull people together if you want to raise the kind of money and build the kind of constituency you’re aiming for.

But I’d go further. It’s not just that the various sorts of design are converging; it’s that a working knowledge of a lot of design-adjacent skills is necessary in order to design effectively in this sort of environment. I’m talking about user experience knowledge, a working understanding of HTML5 and Javascript, a clear conceptual model for how content management works, some degree of familiarity with analytics and with the economics of fundraising- and advertising-driven online programs. Without being well situated in the world, understanding how your design output impacts and is impacted by all these considerations, a significant percentage of your brilliant design work will radiate away without having the desired impact, like the waste heat given off by an incandescent light bulb.

Given how often I get asked about mobile website design, I should call your attention to this excellent article by Simon Meek on Elated.com. He lays out, in a step-by-step fashion that’s easy to follow and understand, how to go about the process of taking a website that looks good in a great big browser window, and making it functional and attractive on a tiny screen.

One of the things I took away from it is that what you do before you start redesigning your site — namely, ruthlessly prioritizing among the possible features and functions to include, so that you can fit the things that are really important in the limited screen space available — is as important as the design itself.

When I started working with cultural institutions, it became clear that a lot of institutions were obsessed with the idea of “a cool new app.” Being able to buy tickets from the space shuttle via microwave hookup would be great, but start with the basics: can someone sitting in a taxi at 7:30 in the pouring rain, fumbling with their phone, easily find your address and phone number on your site? Can they easily figure out what’s on tonight, and what time the show starts? Can they tell whether tickets are available? Deal with those things first, via a streamlined mobile-friendly version. Then, if you have time and money and energy left over, go for the app.

Some of my favorite mobile websites — airlines come to mind, along with the New York Times — are my favorites because they’re ruthlessly functional. They let me do the things I most want to do — find out if the flight is late, or browse the current stories in a simple interface — without picking through a bunch of clutter relating to things I don’t. That’s the approach to start with.

…you’ve probably sat in David Rowland’s 40/4 Chair, so named because 40 of them can be stacked in a space 4 feet high. (And if you’ve ever set up for youth services or an oneg Shabbat, or broken down afterwards, you’ve probably stacked or unstacked 40 or 400 of them at a time — and, chances are, smashed a finger or two between the frames as you figure out how to get them to stack properly on the dolly. But I digress.)

David Rowland created the 40/4 Chair in his apartment in Upper Manhattan in the 1950s; he died this month in Virginia.

In honor of this iconic designed object of the 20th Century, which has brought functional elegance to the most mundane of public occasions across America and around the world for more than half a century, let us have a moment of silence.

(pause)

And now will everyone please join me in the social hall for the kiddush, supplied this week by Mary and Marv Sheinblatt in honor of their late mother Myrtle, aleha ha-shalom…

Lay down a Google map, take out all the streets, and what do you have? Well, my neighborhood looks something like this:

See for yourself. Via Information Aesthetics, via Chris Lysy.