A serious profession

This has been blogged by most people already, but it deserves repeating. Braun/Vitsoe designer (and style icon) Dieter Rams speaking to Matt Warman at the Telegraph:

I am troubled by the devaluing of the word ‘design’. I find myself now being somewhat embarrassed to be called a designer. In fact I prefer the German term, Gestalt-Ingenieur. Apple and Vitsoe are relatively lone voices treating the discipline of design seriously in all corners of their businesses. They understand that design is not simply an adjective to place in front of a product’s name to somehow artificially enhance its value. Ever fewer people appear to understand that design is a serious profession; and for our future welfare we need more companies to take that profession seriously.

Well said. Beyond the companies, we need to individually take responsibility for how we represent and communicate who we are and what we do. Good design involves skill and intelligence and experience. More designing, less looking and feeling.

Sean Young's Blade Runner polaroids

Don't you just love coming back from a weekend without webbery to find something utterly smashing just sitting there in your RSS reader? Thank you io9 (and various other sites) for pointing me towards Sean Young's collection of polaroids from the set of Blade Runner. Pure geek gold. No doubt Ridley Scott will incorporate these shots into the Ultimate Redux Director's Definitive Cut of the film at some point. And I'm sure they'll come in handy when a certain bride-to-be is trying to figure out what to do with her hair …

F

I've been sitting on that image of a distraught knitwear model for years now, and then I got bored and put her next to a massive F. As you do. One day this might become something else. I reckon it'd come in useful should Saint Etienne ever decide to release a cassette-only album of Nine Inch Nails covers.

It could happen.

For now though, it's simply a doodle, an idea, a rectangle of JPG sitting on a website pretending to be a poster, looking distraught.

iPhone niggles and nitpicks

I love my little glass phone, I use it all the time. Seriously, all the time. Since getting one, I'm amazed at how much less I use my home iMac. And no, I have no reception issues. It's great. However, I have a few recurring niggles with my little monolith. I'd be interested to know if these bug anyone else, or if it's just me (or if I'm missing a glaringly obvious reason why things are the way they are).

Dictionary
Why isn't there a dictionary app? I use the dashboard dictionary/thesaurus on my iMac every day – given that the dock widgets are clearly the precursor of the whole app thing, I don't understand why they didn't just port over the best ones. I realise it'd be a big memory hog, but surely the bulk of it is already on there – the autocorrect is getting those words from somewhere, right?

Settings
Just some consistency would be nice. Some apps can be modified from different parts of the settings – the separation of notifications particularly bugs me – and some have settings in-app. Working out how to make a small change can take a bit of a quest.

White supremacy
This is a wider issue really, about the over-zealous autocorrect built into the iOS. Some words it really can't figure out, but the one that really bugs me is that it insists on capitalising "white". Also, given that I'm on the O2 network, it would be nice if it didn't always correct it to "U2". I really don't think Bono cares about my billing issues.

Twitter
It isn't going away. Acknowledge it. Integrate it.

Stocks
How many people actually use the Stocks app? Why is it hardwired in? It hardly seems like an essential function of the phone. I can't get rid of it, so I've just had to stick it in a folder of useless unwanted apps (alongside the shoddily misspelt Games Center).

Apple.com
Why doesn't it have a mobile version? It's undoubtedly a beautiful site, but really suffers on their own hardware. Odd.

Clock
I love that the Calendar app icon always has the correct date on it, so why doesn't the clock always tell the time? I know it's already up there at the top of the screen, but every now and then I get a bit confused that it's still 10:15. Maybe that's just me though …

The camera
Come on, Mr Jobs. Seriously.

Other
I realise there's a bunch of little bits and bobs on the iPhone that can't be categorised as music, photos or apps, but 2GB of it? What is it? WHY WON'T YOU TELL ME?

Safari
I understand why they limit it to eight bowser windows, but I really wish it'd warn me when instead of opening a ninth window, it's going to simply replace one of the others – and I can never remember what it was! It's like when Homer learns a new fact and it replaces an old one in his head.

Syncing
"Syncing. You may disconnect your iPhone on Wednesday."

Websites
When saving websites to your home screen, it'd be nice if they all had icons, rather than some of them having teeny-tiny ugly screenshots. This is probably the fault of web designers, not Apple, but it'd be nice if there was a standard.

Search
It'd be nice (although I imagine quite troublesome) if the search integrated other searches from within apps, not just Safari and Wikipedia. A few of the biggies would be useful – Amazon, eBay, IMDb.

Effektiveness
Rather than the horrid "oh dear lord water has got under the screen somehow!" wallpaper, or the "MEANWHILE, ON EARTH" one, all iOS devices should come with Effektive's beautiful grid wallpaper as standard. Either that or some nice Danish knitwear.

Movember spawned a monster

I just realised it's almost six months since I started growing a moustache for global fund-raising crusade Movember. It's had a few trims since then, but it's still alive and well on my face. It has, quite literally, and in a very real sense, grown on me. In terms of classification, it's probably best described as a Lesser Melchett. It serves numerous purposes – absorbing milk, keeping my top lip warm, offering something to twirl when deep in thought – but most important of all, it still raises money for the Prostate Cancer Charity.

Rather amazingly, funds from Movember have enabled scientists to construct a complete genetic map of prostate cancer, which greatly expands the understanding of how this disease works and will eventually lead to better, more personalised treatment. Good work, boffins.

So, if any of you have any spare cash floating about, please consider donating what you can to Movember. Using the magic of the Internet, you can donate as much or as little as you want. Even a quid, a single nugget, from each of you fine people would very quickly pile up to an amazing amount that would i) help fight a horrible disease, and ii) make my be-twirled facehair incredibly proud. Just smack your mousey arrow here.

(And thank you to those of you who have already donated – you're lovely and handsome.)

Desaturating Private Ryan

Jeremy Davies as Corporal Upham

After reading about Steven Soderbergh's multiple viewings of Raiders of the Lost Ark in black and white (mentioned in this post), last weekend I turned the colour down on my telly and watched a couple of films. As a designer, I'm forever challenging to presumption that more colour equals more quality, so I'm curious to see how adjusting this variable might effect my enjoyment of films. (And yes, I know the sun was shining and I should've been outside playing, but I have a wide-eyed, pale, geekulous complexion to maintain, okay?)

First up was Saving Private Ryan. I maintain that pretty much any Spielberg film would suit the black and white treatment, but was surprised at just how effective it was in this case. The cinematography is incredibly desaturated anyway, but dialling it right down gives the film a more authentic feel. I say authentic – I realise WWII wasn't actually fought in black and white, but the majority of photography and footage from that period is, so that distancing layer is already part of how history has been recorded. Watching Saving Private Ryan in this way was like delving deeper into a clip from The World at War.

Robert Capa's stunning D-Day photography

More specifically, it brought the action a lot closer to the Robert Capa photographs of D-Day that clearly influenced the film's look. Spielberg was trying to drop the audience into the middle of the action of the various battle scenes (all of which are amazing, but often get overshadowed by the opening one), but our usual accepted experience of war is through documentary. The visual language of reportage is the reality of war to us, so replicating this era-specific look makes the story and the characters just that little bit more believable.

After that, I watched David Fincher's Zodiac. That film gets better with every viewing – I'm tempted to say it's even better than Seven – but for some reason I can't quite put my finger on, the black and white approach didn't work as well as I'd expected. Fincher puts a lot of effort into colour correcting his films, and I think robbing Zodiac of its nocturnal, seedy yellowness took away far too much.

Still, I'm going to persevere with this experiment. I'm thinking that perhaps an earlier Fincher picture Alien ³ – would work quite well. Any suggestions for other films that would benefit from this approach?