paul schreiber

Scott Thomas, the design director for Obama for America (and the guy who kicked my butt every day for two months to make sure Vote for Change was as good as it could be) has put together Designing Obama.

This a fantastic book chronicling the art both from and inspired by the Obama campaign.

Here’s how Scott describes it:

The Obama presidential campaign was innovative. For the first time in American politics, a candidate used art and design to bring together the American people—capturing their voices in a visual way.

The Design Director of the Obama campaign, Scott Thomas, has collaborated with artists and designers to create Designing Obama, a chronicle of the art from the historic campaign. Get the inside story on how design was used by the campaign, and scope out the pieces, created unofficially, by grassroots supporters.

The 360-page book is full-color and hardbound, highly crafted with an embossed sleeve. Forewords written by Steven Heller and Michael Bierut.

Like the campaign, this book is relying on small contributions to fund it. It will only get made if enough preorders are in place by November 5, 2009.

Reserver your copy today.

Store hours? What store hours?

The Gap web site was clearly not designed by anyone who actually wanted to shop. It might have been designed by people who wanted to sell things, but that doesn’t help me.

So what’s wrong?

• Store hours are not listed. Anywhere! (I tried calling the Burlingame store, hoping to get voicemail, but instead got nothing.)
• Search is almost useless. I can search for jeans in my size, but I can’t restrict the search to items in a price range or search by colour.
• You cannot tell which Gap stores have which items in stock.
• The store locator is broken. When you search for stores in “San Francisco,” you get this error:
  

  We couldn’t find your exact address. Please choose a location from the list below or try another address.

  1. San Francisco, California
  United States
  Use this address

  2. San Francisco (county), California
  United States
  Use this address

  Next, you can search for all Gap-affiliated stores. You can also search for specific subbrands (GapKids, babyGap, GapBody, GapMaternity, GapOutlet). What you can’t do is search for Gap stores only, excluding the subbrands.

• Why isn’t “in-store pickup ($0)” one of the shipping options? It works really well for REI.
• Why are some sizes out of stock? I can understand that individual stores can’t stock every size-item-colour combination, but the web site (warehouse) has no excuse. If something isn’t in, at least let me order the backordered item.

People, if you want my money, don’t make it hard for me to give it to you.

Every wanted to find just the right ampersand? Or question mark? Checking it against every font in your system manually would be a pain. Font Book doesn’t have the font sampler feature you need to do this.

But the problem can be solved with … AppleScript:

tell application “TextEdit”
  make new document at the end of documents of it
end tell

set paraIndex to 1

tell application “Font Book”
  set allFaces to get every typeface
  repeat with t in allFaces
    set currentFace to PostScript name of t
    set currentName to displayed name of t
    tell the front document of application “TextEdit”
      set size to 18
      set paragraph paraIndex to “? (“ & currentName & “)” & return
      set font of character 1 of paragraph paraIndex to currentFace
      set paraIndex to paraIndex + 1
    end tell
  end repeat
end tell

If you tell it to, Friendster helpfully reminds you when your friends’ birthdays are coming up. This is handy for calling them, writing them, or leaving them happy birthday comments on their wall Friendster profile.

Look at the email itself:

What’s missing? The birthday itself. Instead of building trust with its members by providing them useful information, Friendster, too is nothing but a click whore.

“Design can be a form of social activism.”

Yes, it can be.

My favourite Canadian bank, PC Financial added a brilliantly designed feature to their ATMs:

No more addition mistakes. Enter checks one at a time, and let the ATM do the math. So smart! Why didn’t anyone think of that before?

Wells Fargo does this now, too — they scan the checks and read the amount in automatically. And they no longer require envelopes.

PC Financial’s relatively low-tech solution is something that can work with all existing ATMs, and doesn’t require new hardware or banking laws.

On the other hand, take a look at the work of a clueless Canada Post graphic designer:

Canada post’s ship-in-a-click, part 2

No wonder Canada Post is so slow at delivering things — all their mice are upside down.

So the idiots at Sprint send Joel Splosky an LG Fusic phone to review, thinking he will promote their service.

Phone companies, as Joel points out, have a history of bad decisions:

And it’s 2006, and I almost can’t believe I’m writing this, because way back in 2000 I wrote almost exactly the same thing about WAP, and how cell phone companies keep failing to insert themselves as toll collectors because they’re so darn clueless about how the Internet works, and about the value of many-to-many networks instead of broadcast networks.

Needless to say, the phone sucks, and Power Vision sucks too. Is Power Vision a 3G service? Why do phone companies have to brand everything in some incomprehensible way? mMode? MEdia Net? Vision? Power Vision? Vcast? Stop, my head hurts.

Now, on to the good part:

the LG Fusic user interface could basically serve as an almost complete textbook for a semester-long course in user interface design, teaching students of usability exactly what NOT to do.

And one more:

A little bit more exploring and I discovered that there’s another entirely separate MP3 player on this device. It’s hard to find. You have to go to Tools, then Memory Card, then to the Music folder, and another MP3 player starts up which you can use to listen to your MP3s. For this player, you don’t have to be on the network, so it works in the subway, but—get this—the minute you close the clamshell, the music stops! I am literally not making this up. There are two bad MP3 players on this device, neither one of which remembers where you’re up to, neither one of which can be used on the subway with the phone folded in my pocket, neither one of which has a fast-forward feature.

TED, the uber-cook, uber-exclusive Technology/Entertainment/Design conference, now has a blog.

looks like logoworks is borrowing rather heavily from others’ work.

Icon magazine covers the 21 most influential designers: everyone from ikea to creative commons.