“I don’t really think it’s much of a secret,” he told CNN. “I think it comes down to two basic things: one is that we’re run by artists. … John Lasseter is a film director, as opposed to being from a business school or whatever. He has that side of him as well, but he’s always approaching these things as the same way we are.

And:

Second, we have some pretty great people that they’ve managed to collect here. This is our 10th film, and every film has just gotten better and better, whether that be in animation or special effects or lighting. And it just all comes together to make for some really fantastic stuff.

We’re also unabashed fans and consumers of Apple products (I’m also a small shareholder in AAPL). A big part of this enthusiasm for Apple products stems from the fact that they successfully integrate all aspects of design into their products – visual design, hardware design, software design, GUI design & iconography, environmental design, user experience design.

But back to presentation. It’s all about presentation. Until now, most companies have been unable to match Apple’s holistic approach to Design and how they apply it to all aspects of their business. Given the fact that no company has been able to make products that can compete with the iMac, iPhone or iPod in all aspects of design, at the very least – make your stuff look good.

Which leads me to the worldwide launch of Nokia’s Ovi Store. What struct me about their website was that it looks strikingly similar to Apple’s website and aesthetic, but also it’s lack of energy and excitement:

Ovi by Nokia

Apple – iPhone

I don’t know anything about the quality of the products Nokia is offering on Ovi. What I do know is that at this point in the mobile application game, if you want to be a serious contender, it’s not enough to to hit the ground running at 5 miles-an-hour, when Apple is going 85. This applies to your visual design as much as it applies to the quality of the software and hardware you’re selling.

Ovi might very well be an amazing store (I won’t be able to tell since it’s not compatible with Macs), but right now all I see is what appears to be a watered-down site that’s leeching off of the visual style of Apple.com.

Presentation is everything. Never take it lightly. Heed to it.

There was a bit of a buzz earlier this year on crowdsourcing and its power within innovation, business and design.

Garrick Schmitt over at Razorfish asks us if Creativity Can Be Outsourced.

Can it?

No, it can’t.

The reason design, creativity and innovation cannot be outsourced comes down to one thing – leadership. Without strong leadership and a clear vision the crowd becomes meaningless. Google is the ultimate source for exploiting the power of crowds, but without precise queries, Google is useless. Ever heard of that expression, ‘garbage in, garbage out’? Yeah, that’s what it comes down to with crowdsourcing.

In Schmitt’s article he’s gives FFFFOUND! (F!) as an example of crowdsourcing inspiration. Are there many editors contributing to the content of site? Absolutely. Could we consider the richness and strength of F! coming from the power of crowdsourcing? NO. We need to credit the richness and power of F! to the creators of said site.

When I discovered F! over 2 years ago I fell in love with it. It became one of the places I got my ‘design/photography fix’ and one of the first things I tried to do was sign up for an account, but what I found and what is still the case now, is that registration is by invitation only.

F! is a gated community. Apparently there is discretion when inviting people to become editors & curators. Interesting. It seems as though the power of the site comes from high standards, strict control and good taste. I would be willing to bet Schmitt’s job that the popularity and quality of F! would immediately drop if registration were open to all.

This is exactly the case one of Schmitt’s other examples – CrowdSpring. CrowdSpring represents the crowd minus the leader. Actually, there are leaders for each project listed on the site, but the level of excellence required varies from project to project, and from vender to vendor.

Creativity.
Design.
Innovation.

These things cannot be crowdsourced.

They must come from a leader who is creative, innovative and has high standards for design. Period.

In many cases, currency is the first impression people will make of your country.

The Daily Blend have taken it upon themselves to start the Dollar Redesign Project (found via Ministry of Type):

The American Dollar has not truly been redesigned since about the 1930s. The Dollar ReDe$ign Project is your opportunity to theoretically ‘change’ that. Yes, technically there are many limitations and complications when it comes to bank note design, but if the Swiss can do it on a regular basis, why can’t we North Americans too.

This is a great initiative and reminds me of one of my favorite projects as a graphic design student at Rutgers Newark – redesign the currency of the country of our choice. Because my classmates were all from different countries, we had currency redesigns for around 10 different countries. Being born and raised in New Jersey, USA, I was all about taking a crack at the horribly out-of-date US dollar bills. I decided to represent architecture, music and art that was distinctly American.

On the one dollar bill I represented American architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York City. On the five dollar bill I represented American music with jazz legend John Coltrane. And on the twenty dollar bill I represented American art with Jasper John’s 3 Flags:

No, Watson, this was not done by accident, but by design.

- Sherlock Holmes

The premise of the article is that by their very nature the David’s of the world have to play by their own rules in order to succeed. Gladwell admits that this rule-changing mentality isn’t the exclusive domain of underdogs. Anyone can adopt an unexpected and unconventional strategy to win.

What makes this article relevant to us here at Heed is that great Design always uses unconventional strategies to create groundbreaking products and services. The result of great design thinking always seems obvious in heinsight. “I’m surprised no one thought of this before”, is a common reaction to a great product.

The following are 3 examples of underdog products and services that have won (or are currently winning) because of smart Design (read: unconventional strategy):

Twitter

They’re the talk of the town. Millions of people are signing up for accounts and simultaneously questioning the relevance of said service, “They let you post 140-characters at a time, how can you call that real business?” The CEO of Twitter is Evan Williams. You might remember him as the guy who invented the term ‘blogging’ and sold his service, Blogger, to Google in 2003. Back in 2003 the idea of blogging was about as absurd as ‘tweeting’ is now.

If you’re unconvinced how disruptive Twitter has been to the tech industry, you need look no further than the March 2009 redesign of Facebook. The redesign places status updates front and center on users’ homepages. Facebook is not limiting updates to 140 characters, but they’ve definitely shifted their strategy.

And Twitter is the underdog to Facebook not only in the number of registered users each has (over 200 million for FB, around 20 million for Twitter), but also in the scale and range of content you can post to each. Facebook lets its users upload photos, video, text, import blogs via RSS feeds, create events, calendars, groups and interactive games. Twitter lets users post 140-character entries (you can post images via third-party services like TwitPic).

What is also admirable about Williams, is his vision to build Twitter into a strong, profitable company – on his own terms.

From an article Williams wrote for the NYTimes in March of 2009:

When people ask me when Twitter will make money, I tell them, “In due time.” They forget that we’re only 30 employees who have just gotten started. Right now, anything we would do to make money would take our time away from acquiring more users. We have patient investors.

It’s easy for Davids to take the road towards acquisition when their Goliath realizes they can’t can’t go toe-to-toe with their little competitor. According to reports, Twitter seems uninterested in taking that route.

Flip video cameras

When the iPod debuted in 2001, it just played music. It was met with a lot of harsh criticism on everything it couldn’t do and didn’t have. Now it’s the most popular portable media player in the world. Pure Digital is charting a similar course with its simple-to-use Flip video cameras. While the iPod was expensive when it launched, Flip cameras do differ in that they’re super simple to use and inexpensive.

Pure Digital could have chosen to launch high-end camcorders and compete with companies like Canon, Nikon and Sony, but they decided to change the rules and create just the opposite. It seems to be working, having sold more that 2 million units since 2007.

Unlike Twitter, Pure Digital did succumb to the forces of acquisition by Cisco. Let’s hope they continue to create great products.

iPhone

When Apple created the iPhone and iPhone OS, they didn’t have a legacy to work with. They didn’t have to hit reset like they did with the transition from OS 9 to OS X and shake up their user base. They could do whatever they wanted. They could establish a new paradigm that made sense with the lifestyles of the digitially connected.

Granted Apple is a large corporation, but they were less than an underdog in the mobile sector in January 2007. The iPhone was deemed so insignificant when it debuted that only now, 2 years later, are some companies being to play catch-up – altering traditional and antiquated strategies, but for the most part, they’re just weakly copying the iPhone and still not ‘getting it’.

An under-discussed dynamic with the iPhone has been the impact to carrier subsidy budgets for non-iPhone handsets. In our conversations with handset OEM and carrier executives, we hear that subsidy budgets for those carriers carrying the iPhone are now disproportionately allocated to the iPhone. Furthermore, OEMs continue to face the hurdle and opportunity to match the experience and capabilities of the iPhone. As a result, as stated to us by a North American industry executive recently, “OEMs are being asked to do a lot more with a lot less.” An executive in Europe, where subsidies are less widely used, similarly stated, “a battlefront for OEMs is where carriers are going to place their subsidy budgets, after the iPhone.”

This quote was pulled from a GigaOm post, titled, Another Way the iPhone Is Hurting Rival Phone Makers.

It seems that the iPhone, far from hurting rival phone makers, is making them improve their product offerings. Yes, when someone is doing better quality work than you, it can sting a little. In the case of the mobile phone industry, most manufacturers are experiencing this frustration and envy and are taking the easy road by simply copying (albeit poorly) the aesthetic and superficial characteristics of the iPhone.

Then there are others, like Palm, who look to be creating a truly great product. It’s no question that if it weren’t for release of the iPhone in 2007, Palm would still be sitting on its ass, milking the antiquated Palm OS and Treo for quite a while longer. Palm and others who are rising to the challenge of designing a better phone experience are no doubt realizing how hard it is – how holistic the scope has to be.

While the exclusive partnership between AT&T and Apple is not an ideal one for consumers, it represents a huge step forward in giving control of the hardware back to those who make it. It also begins to treat phone companies as what they are, which is simply a communication pipeline. AT&T is not a Blackberry, an iPhone or a Samsung BlackJack.

The days of sleek RAZR’s selling like hotcakes are over. If OEMs want to stay relevent (read: keep making money) they’ll need to treat hardware design as just one aspect of many when they create new devices. It sucks having shitty product offerings, but all those competing against Apple should keep in mind this quote by Thomas Edison, “Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.”