We received the authors’ copies of Deconstructing Product Design recently, and the books’ contributors should have their copies as well. It’s good to see it bound and printed, and we’re quite happy with the final product. Rockport did an excellent job with the book’s production and printing.

Amazon reports that the book will be available on October 16. The “Look Inside” feature is now enabled, too, so you can get a preview of the contents.

Find Deconstructing Product Design on Amazon…

I’ve posted several new items in the portfolio pages, including a CMS theme design for a grassroots political organization, promotional banners for e-commerce and very fresh (hot out of the oven!) examples in e-learning.

That last item (pictured, in part, at right) was something of a retro treat — a project to create content for a learning platform that I designed and helped to develop several years ago. At the time, I handed off the completed system to the production teams and never personally generated much actual course content for it. While I did create concept demos and some initial coursework to shake out the platform and the production process, I never had a chance to personally do full-bore, real-life content development with material that could show off its stuff in the way I originally envisioned. Now, years later, I had my chance.

The platform was intended to be something of a blank slate, capable of handling any type of content, from text layouts to video, animation and interactive pieces. It’s most common usage, though, was indicated by its name — “Magazine.” The intent was to create pages that mixed the layout conventions of that print medium, leveraging its rich and widely-understood information architecture, with the interactivity and dynamic nature of the web.

The result, as sampled here, is a grid-based layout carried throughout the magazine-style course. It features typographically varied headlines, integrated interactivity that provides content depth and supplementary breadth, and a dynamic on-screen build that both reinforces the information hierarchy and demonstrates the usage of certain features such as the tabs that segregate optional information off-screen.

The ability to take pictures and then quickly see the results increased the informality around photography that we take for granted with digital cameras and camera phones today.  Rather than waiting days or weeks to finish the film roll, drop it off for processing and then await the opening of the photos (incidentally, a suspenseful ritual that has been lost), Polaroid photographers could share photos instantly (more or less)… 

I remember well the magical effect of the Polaroid. The little white pictures would be passed from hand to hand, so carefully, as each person in turn cooed and often giggled with delight at the developing image. The sharing meme was clearly there, magnified by both the immediacy and the precious scarcity of the item — shots were limited by the film’s expense and the individual images were one-of-a-kind, difficult to copy.

Now that technology has erased the latter limitations — effectively an infinite number of shots can be taken, duplicated losslessly and passed with little effort to an ever-larger circle of friends and family on the social networks —  the value added by scarcity and novelty has clearly diminished. Yet the enormous volume of photos on sharing sites like Flickr and Facebook attest to the continuing, unquenched desire to share, to pass on the little rectangles that affirm our experience… 

Good night!

The Video Monolith is one of the more unusual projects I’ve worked on, far from the usual two-dimensional confines of the digital medium. The goal was to develop a portable and inexpensive freestanding display to present video, audio and animation to special event visitors. The content included life-sized projection of a host presenting program information and other client messaging. My role was to develop the design of the physical Monolith display, integrating it with the site and its intended usage.

The final result demonstrated the dramatic effect of seeing video outside of its normal screen confines. With a more anthropomorphic, human-scaled screen and aspect ratio, the video of the speaking host was a much more compelling presence. The target audience, like most of us, has long since learned to filter out the video messaging that pervades public and private spaces. But watching a full-sized person standing and talking — in a form very different from the typical video shrunk to fit on a horizontal display — is not subject to the same automatic dismissal. It demanded at least a moment of passer-by’s cognitive processing, and often prompted longer pauses — whether for curiosity about the medium or interest in the message itself.

View this gallery for more images of the Video Monolith installation.

Then comes the question of how high to aim. The portfolio surely must be perfect. Or, the opposite argument, the portfolio must be a transparent platform on which the work can speak for itself. I vacillated in building this site, from one extreme to the other. If you’ve come here via the portfolio pages, you’ve already seen which path I chose, the decision simplified by the inevitable paralysis of the avenue leading toward perfection.

I will continue to add pieces here, for a few interesting favorites still clamor to be added. Take a look around and let me know what you think.