Archive for June, 2011

A thorny design problem

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 30, 2011
in Good design
. 2 Comments

And now, a tip of the hat to a nifty solution to the oldest design problem of them all: how do you spread your genes?

I was taking a shortcut through an overgrown field and ended up with a load of seeds stuck to my socks and shoelaces. When I sat down to pluck them out, I found there were two models: the smaller (some 5 mm long) “fuzzy” seeds (right in the photo) actually had many tiny thorns that did the job; but the larger seeds (up to 9 mm in length) were really impressive, each sporting long, needle-sharp spines all over. I wish I had a good stereo microscope to give you better detail, but you can get the idea from the photos below.

Thorny Seeds

So what? So nothing, I guess, except that being an engineer I had to stop and admire the effectiveness of these designs.

And here is another look:

Thorny Seeds

Makes you feel kinda special, to think that these plants would go to all this trouble to evolve seeds that stick like leeches to your socks! 🙂

The abused art of form design

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 28, 2011
in Bad design
. 0 Comments

People who design forms never cease to amaze.

This was very obvious in the era of paper forms. You’d get forms with fields that are patently too small for their content; like this snippet from one I recently filled:

Name ______________________________ E-mail ___________

Cellular: _____________________________________________

What were they thinking?? Many email addresses won’t fit on that short line; and the next line is far too long for a phone number. Why not switch the slots?

This situation is very common, especially when it comes to addresses; you often end up overflowing the allotted space, which can result in barely legible data. Which is really weird, because with a five minute effort the form’s designer could have made things right for thousands of users later on. Don’t they see how ridiculous it all is?!

Another problem is forms that get photocopied and/or faxed so many times that they’re barely legible at all; strangely, bureaucrats seem not to mind getting back forms whose fixed portion is smudged and illegible. Evidently it’s the act of forcing us to submit a formal form that counts, not whether you can read it…

And now, we are paperless; you’d think all would be well with electronic forms… but no. Some organizations I deal with actually mail you a scan of a smudged photocopy of a paper form, and ask you to print it out, fill it with pen and fax it back, adding to the smudging. And even when they send an editable electronic version, they never use the features available in the  Word or PDF formats to steer the filling of the right fields. Instead, they just send around a plain document and expect you to type in the data; and since they use underlines to denote fields, we end up with forms like this:

First Name __________John Smith________________________

Address: ________100 Main street_______________________

and so on…

At least in this last case, you can put things right – put the word processor in Overwrite mode and replace the underlines with your text, or just delete the underlines, ending with:

First Name: John Smith

Address: 100 Main street

Then, if you import a scan of your signature in, you can send the filled form back as an attachment and be done with it!

A friendly sign

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 12, 2011
in Good design
. 1 Comment

We all know the usual “Private Parking” no-parking signs: stark red and white, with wording in fat letters forming threats of the sorry fate – towing, usually – awaiting violators. They’re designed to jar and scare the thoughtless driver. Nothing pretty about these signs, and usually that’s exactly the intent of their owners.

Friendly No Parking SignBut  here you see a sign I saw in Jerusalem on the wall of a house, next to its private parking area. It too says “Private parking – unauthorized vehicles will be towed”. But it does it in a much more friendly way… because of the little rose engraved between the lines. No idea who had this strange idea. Perhaps the owner likes flowers, as attested to by the bed of geraniums right under the sign? I can’t recall ever seeing  a sign forbidding anything that left me in a cheerful mood, but this one  certainly did.

Friendly No Parking Sign close up