What kind of sandwicher are you?

from @mattomic 

Packing tape art

I've always wanted an art installation at our Zingerman's Mail Order warehouse that reflected our work and materials. This would do nicely. A cocoon landscape of tape, from Paris.

Recent reading, design edition.

Explaining graphic design to four year olds.

A comparison of Lush and Body Shop's website. Hat tip to Joseph Richardson.

An incremental design improvement, made over a weekend kaizen event, and the result is a machine that has outlasted four "improvements". A great article on why the B-52 is still the main big plane for the U.S. armed forces. 

Tinned tuna Buddha

Hong Kong Airport, Terminal 1, Departures Hall, Non-restricted area, 10,000 tins of tuna—not Ortiz.

Nice facial hair infographic

From a Reddit user's analysis of this study by Dwight Robinson, hat tip to Vox. Mostly, thank you internet.

Nice coffee drink infographic

Filson catalog cover

Designing a warehouse event space out of pallets

Adam's pallet construction studio.

Adam Moskowitz owns the cheese importer/distributor/warehouser hub Larkin in Long Island City, Queens. (He's also the impresario behind the great Cheesemonger Invitational.) I visit his warehouse from time to time to taste incoming batches of Manchego for Essex St. Cheese.  For most of the last year he's been outfitting a room as a teaching space. I've seen it grow from a typical concrete-and-cinder block slab to a warm, fantastic space. It's called Barnyard and most of it is decorated with parts of pallets that come with the cheese imports. Pallets on the lights, pallets as tables, pallets as chairs. Awesome idea.

 

Sharing = creativity

A structural look at innovation. Hat tip to Nicole R.

Aaron Draplin designs a logo in fifteen minutes.

Aaron Draplin Takes On a Logo Design Challenge from lynda.com on Vimeo.

Hat tip to Joseph R.

Why aren't we as critical of design as we are of food?

"If you tasted some food that you didn’t think tasted right, you would assume that the food was wrong. But for some reason, it’s part of the human condition that if we struggle to use something, we assume that the problem resides with us.”

Jony Ive, Apple's chief designer
( iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iWatch)

 

A lesson in lean visual management from Michelangelo

The artist's visual grocery shopping list, circa 16th Century. Hat tip to Spike.

Visual recipe for pour over coffee

Bluebottle coffee.

And ours, not quite so visual:

 

Catalog design: Keep text and images close to each other

From time to time I'll describe some of the principles I use to design our catalogs.

Leonardo da Vinci had it right by me. Mix text and images wherever you can, embedding each within the other, so the text and images are close to each other. That way you don't have to search for the text that explains your image. You also don't have to move your eyes back and forth as far between the two—losing your place and tiring your eyes—in order to understand what you're seeing and reading.

This is how the principle looks applied to one of our bread pages, which have remained essentially unchanged for many years.

Compare this to a typical catalog that uses a block of text with numbers or letters to connect the images and copy. Reading while looking away to refer to the picture is a pain, which is probably one reason why most people rarely read catalogs these days.

Maximal information with minimal ink

One of Edward Tufte's design maxims is "the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space."  Practically speaking, that often means "remove as much garbage as you can" and it's a pretty good rule to design by. Here's a gif that shows how that can play out in an Excel chart.

 

Did they all call forget to each other before they came to work?

I'm sure loads of other people have probably noticed this before me. Microsoft, Google and eBay: their logos are all the same colors. If you didn't know they were different firms you'd almost think they were part of the same company. I guess the old Apple logo had the same thing going on and, for that matter, Apple's new iOS7 colors come garishly close.  

Ideas worth stealing: Chipotle's giveaway card

Chipotle continues to do great informational marketing, even when they're giving burritos away. Everyone in the company gets these to hand out at will. What doesn't come through in my scan is the heft and quality of the card. It's as thick as a refrigerator magnet and "bean genius" is printed in reflective foil. Why do such a high level print job on a giveaway? Exactly.

Recipes with pictures: visualize your mac and cheese

In the upcoming Fall Buyer's Guide I write about how recipes in cookbooks often fail. They could get better if they borrowed this idea from the back of a box of Annie's macaroni and cheese — visual instructions add a lot of clarity.

 

New calendar technology

A follow-up to yesterday's post about calendars. We've started testing a project timeline calendar that looks like a bit like a Gantt chart, which is a newfangled calendar technology (meaning it's a hundred years old, not several thousand—there's not a lot "new" in calendars this century). It has a special jagged red line "right now" feature you'll see below. They key thing is that, like a calendar, time starts on the left and moves to the right. Whenever you need to visually represent time progression that's the best way to go.

Here's an example of it (hat tip to J Atlee). It was used to plan and report on our progress as we performed a multi-day rearrangement of our warehouse floor. The red line, where we're currently at, moved every few hours. Here it shows where we were Day 1 at 1pm (ahead of schedule on the part of the red line that angles a "V" to the right, the rest on schedule):

At 4pm (behind schedule on the part that angles to the left, ahead on the angle to the right, the rest on schedule—also the line is drawn at the chart's 5pm, not 4pm, because they stopped an hour early):

Ancient calendar technology

I don't know when seven day week calendars began — they predate the Romans — but I don't think it's a stretch to call them ancient. Or maybe I should say heirloom. Whatever the word, calendars work crazy well. Everyone knows how to use them, the structure is the same worldwide so you don't need to understand a local language to read one, and they're super fast to scan and pick out the exact info you're looking for. When you want to tell people something specific to a day of the week there's nothing better. So I'm always surprised how many times people choose to ignore them and force customers to wander their word maze to find the information they're looking for. Like this restaurant:

Here's the same information written as a calendar: