Design Loves a Depression is a great read from last Sunday’s New York Times.  Michael Cannel, a former Times editor, predicts an era of well-deserved recompense for the design community, one that will atone for the frivolity it has enjoyed over the past decade.  Design won’t go away, he says, but it will have a new master: utility.

From his perspective, this is a good thing.  Utility is, after all, what led to the design-for the masses Modernist movement in the 1940’s that gave us classics from designers like Charles and Ray Eames.  His twenty-first century version of utilitarianism has some benefits I can get behind: a focus on quality at low prices (“it will be the designer’s job to discourage consumers from regarding that $30 Ikea side table as a throwaway item”), open-source design and “cradle-to-cradle” design, a “concept…that calls for cars, packaging and other everyday objects to be designed specifically for recycling so that their parts and materials are used and reused without waste.”

This all sounds very appealing and I can empathize with that kind of call to arms.  On the other hand, I think that Mr. Cannell’s perspective that “the design world could stand to come down a notch or two” needs to be understood within the context of his corner of the design world.  I hate to say that he’s out of touch, but most of us didn’t have his “front row seats” to Marcel Wanders “thumping” parties and of the three celebrity designers he ascribes to having achieved the one-name recognition enjoyed by Bono, Rem, Philippe and Zaha, I only recognize two.  My wife: zero.

From my perspective, design never stopped being utilitarian.  If we’ve learned one thing during this era or renewed design relevance, it’s that designers “are good at coming up with new ways of looking at complex problems” (his words, not mine).  That evolved concept of design, that it’s about solving problems and creating order, is the the thing that has made these “giddy years,” not the indie-cool thick frame glasses or the self-conscious furniture.  And isn’t problem solving the essence of utility?  On the other hand, if a recession helps us see through the cliches and focus on substance, then maybe it’s just what design needs!

Our man Gary Hustwit (producer of the typography-for-the-every-man documentary Helvetica) released the trailer for his new documentary Objectified. I really loved Helvetica and I’m just as excited about this one.  It appears to be his take on industrial design, the design of the physical objects that (more and more) fill up our lives.

I get pretty laser focused on UI design and graphic design, but it only takes one trip to Target, Ikea or the Apple Store to realize that industrial design is the epicenter of this design revolution that’s taking place.  This should be a great film!

I came across this tonight.  What a great read!  It documents a pathology that they call Crash Blindness in which their subject was neurologically predisposed to ignore crashes on his Mac and find them (even invent them) on his PC, presumably because of his fondness for OSX and aversion to Windows.

This was supposed to be backup for a point I’m trying to make in the Design for Devs (real name pending) book/talk: namely, that good design increase the perception of quality.  In some cases, apparently, it can even be a stand-in for actual quality.

Unfortunately for me, there’s a great big “please don’t quote” right under the title which is keeping it out of my book.  At least for now.  I may soon find myself with a neurological pathology, however, which leaves me predisposed to ignore “please don’t quote” reminders, presumably because of my fondness for awesome (albeit made up) research papers.

(By the way, the paper is a joke.  Thanks to the couple of you who sent email to make sure I knew.  It’s pretty clear once you get to the picture of the apple shaped lesion in the right frontal cortex!)

…and so far the voting results are kind of dismal.  Hmmm.  Maybe not everybody appreciates the chance to digitally apply a sweet ’stache to the richest man alive.  Or maybe the retro thing doesn’t work for everyone.  Or maybe it’s just kind of confusing. In the end I had to cut a bunch of features and, frankly, this Moustachr is a shell of the app it used to be.  So sad.  The fight from 17K to 10K was hard on both of us. 

At any rate, it was a lot of fun to build and I love this contest.  I already have an idea for next year.  That’s right MIX 10K.  You haven’t beat me yet.  I’ll be back!  (And now I know just how little 10,000 characters of code really is.)

This is the most excited I’ve been about presenting at MIX in the three (nearly four) years I’ve done it.  Don’t get me wrong, MIX is a blast and, in spite of the long nights preceding, I’ve really loved presenting every year.

This year, though, I’m doing something a little different.  I’m helping out with the pre-conference workshops (the "pre-cons" if you’re old school).  I’m signed up to do two.

Design Fundamentals for Developers

The first is Design Fundamentals for Developers.  You, like me, have probably noticed a really intense interesting in design from the WPF/Silverlgiht (can we just say XAML?) community. At this point, we pretty much all agree that design matters, right?  I think we’ve made it through that one.  Now we need to start the meaningful discussions about how design works.  So, you should come to this workshop if any of these apply:

1. You’re interested in design but haven’t had any formal exposure to it.
2. You would like a framework for evaluating and discussing design.
3. You secretly want to be a designer but don’t know where to start.
4. You secretly want to a date a designer but don’t know where to start.

I’m very excited about this session.  It’s the convergence of my passions (nerd+art).  I’m so excited, in fact, that in conjunction with the session I’m writing a book for Sam’s publishing about the same topic (more on that later, it deserves its own post). 

Hiking Mt. Avalon

The other session, Hiking Mt. Avalon, is with Jaime Rodriguez.   Frankly, it can be hard to get started with a new technology of any kind.  Usually your first couple of projects are spent making and recovering from mistakes.  Nothing can truly replace that process.  It’s the inevitable way to build your confidence with a technology.  That said, our hope here is to speed it up, share whatever we can after having gone through much of that ourselves.  This will be the "no right answers" session, just a lot of friendly advice and good ideas.  Our hope, by the way, is to involve a handful of other old school WPF/Silverlight folks so that we get a diversity of opinions and a lot of cumulative hours of experience.

Sign up Now

So here’s the thing about the workshops: they’re an add-on.  You have to opt-in to that extra day of conference.  For me this is a no-brainer.  It’s probably an easier decision for me since I’ll be presenting (very awkward if I don’t show up), but it definitely makes sense for anyone.  You’ve already paid to get there, convinced your boss to give you the time off, etc.  The extra day is the most "hands on" of all of them.  It may be the day where you’ll get the most practical (as in "use it right now") content of the whole conference.  Plus, getting there a day before everyone else makes you cool: you’ll already know where the snacks are while everyone else is figuring out where to register.  Sweet!

Seriously, Sign up Now

Here’s the reason that you should really sign up now as in right now: For a limited time (not sure how limited, but probably not past January 15th since that’s when the general price goes up) you get 40% off!  The coupon code is on the site, but here it is just in case: MIXspecial1.

This should be a great event.  One more thing: if you’re coming to my design session, stay tuned because there will be a contest leading up to it that you’ll want to hear about!

This is a really great interview with Sol Sender of the eponymous Chicago-based design firm who was responsible for the Obama08 logo.  This was a very design-focused campaign and I think that it had clarifying effect on a lot of the messaging in the campaign.  Some great insights here about how that came together.  Note that this is a two-parter.  Via ISO50.

Update: Make sure to note that there are all sorts of different licenses here and you’ll need to verify that these really are free for distribution before including them in your app.  I guess I wasn’t clear about that earlier.  Sorry if anyone has been mislead.  That said, there are a number of fonts here that are truly free for use in your projects.  Thanks to the couple of you who sent email or comments reminding me to clarify this.  Okay, back to the post…

In spite of my humbug perspective on text rendering from the other day, I’m a huge advocate for using type creatively in your project and WPF and Silverlight both make that easier by giving you the ability to embed fonts right in there with the code.  The catch: you need a license to redistribute the font.  That can be pretty tricky with professional fonts.  Generally the licenses limit you to rights for production, not redistribution.

Your best bet in WPF and Silverlight, then, are free fonts.  Even these don’t necessarily grant you a right to redistribute, but you’ve got a much better chance.

In addition to the Ascender fonts which shipped in the WPF SDK, and sites like dafont.com or urbanfonts.com (where you get some good and some bad), Smashing magazine proves again and again to be a great source of really beautiful typefaces at the low, low price of free!

The great thing about these is that they tend to be freebies offered directly from foundries who would otherwise be selling them.  The result is really high quality type.  Usually that means multiple weights, great scalability even at small sizes, etc.  There are of course hits and misses, but definitely more hits.

Unfortunately, there’s not a central repository.  Instead the fonts leak out in posts.  Sorry, that means lots of links.  Here are the ones that I’ve collected so far:

• 15 High Quality Beatiful Free Fonts
• 40 Excellent Free fonts for Profressional Design
• Five More Free Fonts
• Free Brilliant High Quality Fonts
• Free Fonts You Shouldn’t Have Missed
• 17 More Free Quality Fonts
• Free Fresh Fonts
• Free Font of the Week

Do you have favorite places to get typefaces for WPF and Silverlight? Any favorites?

That’s how artist and designer Andreas Nicolas Fischer describes his medium.  He’s taken data visualization to a new level, producing (in some cases) physical objects to represent the data set.  The image above is a mapping of GDP around the world, carved into Beech wood!  There are some really neat ideas here and some great applications of 3D to data viz if you’re looking for inspiration.

(Update with an example.)

I was excited to see this post from Sriram about DirectWrite today.  I’m also glad to see that he’ll be PM’ing the DirectWrite effort.  He’s a former WPF guy, now on the Windows 7 team—a good guy to make sure that DirectWrite (a Windows7 API) gets well represented in WPF and (please!) Silverlight.

At this point, I think I would take better text support over any other feature in Silverlight or WPF.  Yup.  You guys can have blend modes, effects, 3D, and everything else I have asked for (or even hinted about) if it means I get awesome text.

The problem is that I start my designs in Photoshop and, frankly, Photoshop has a great text engine.  By the time I get to production, I’m just about always disappointed.  To my eye, WPF text rendering doesn’t even come close and Silverlight is losing its socks.  Sorry xaml-based technologies.  You know we’re still friends, right?  I’m just trying to help you grow.

By now, I (probably like you) have learned which are the “safe” fonts and the safe sizes in WPF, and I stick with them.  By doing that I can get some okay looking text that works with most of my apps (incidentally the Ascender fonts that shipped with the SDK are great!).  But, frankly, the importance of text in a UI can probably not be overstated and I’m tired of feeling like I’m settling.  In Silverlight, I rarely even use the text engine.  In most of the projects I’ve done, I’ve pre-rendered the text into images!  That’s a sad state of affairs.

So, here’s my wishlist:

1. Awesome type that looks great at any size and any weight with any well-constructed font (if the font is bad then we both agree that you can only do what you can do)
2. More developer control over the qualities of the rendering (let me control just how much sub-pixel rendering and how you do it—let me call the shots about perf and readability)
3. A WPF story (I think Scott Guthrie said something about this at PDC, right?)
4. A Silverlight story (ideally we’d get the same engine or at least some of the awesomeness even if we don’t get the tweaks)
5. A downward compat story (it would be a real bummer if this only showed up in Windows7—it means it’s not something that I can rely on and I end up back with my safe fonts.  Or, worse, I end up with a smaller set of safe fonts that work in both rendering environments—in that event, things got worse and not better).

I’ve written about Scott before.  He’s possibly my favorite working graphic designer today.  Check out this very positive review of Vista from him? 

That’s right I just said “favorite designer” and “positive review of Vista” in the same sentence (well, two sentences).  Nice work Scott!  Way to buck the hype and stand up for what you believe in.  Also, nice work Microsoft.  Looks like your future with the designerati is more secure than we knew!