Here’s Why Juicero’s Press is So Expensive

I missed this whole uproar about a $700 Internet juicer. Ben Einstein explains, Here’s Why Juicero’s Press is So Expensive

Last week Bloomberg published an article exposing how easy it is to ‘hack’ Juicero’s produce packs by squeezing them with your hands, deeming the $699 (now $399) WiFi-connected juice press completely unnecessary. Nearly overnight, Juicero has become the posterchild for Silicon Valley excess.

Juicero raised nearly $120M from well-known investors before shipping a single unit. The team spent over two years building an incredibly complex product and the ecosystem to support it. Aside from the flagship juice press, Juicero built relationships with farmers, co-packing/food-processing facilities, complex custom packaging, beautifully designed mobile/web applications, and a subscription delivery service. But they did all this work without the basic proof that this business made sense to consumers."

It's a fun and pretty breakdown of the product. For any company there's a balance of speed, price and quality. This is what happens when you ignore the second one.

UI design for Rogue One

Blind did the UI design for Rogue One. It seemed inscrutable to me but did match the Star Wars universe well. I wonder why it took so long to upload the Death Star plans because they’re all just 8-bit graphics.

(via Kottke)

Google Maps v Apple Maps

Justin O'Beirne begins a series with a very detailed Cartography Comparison: Google Maps & Apple Maps.

In general he finds:

• On average (different locations and zooms) Apple labels more cities
• On average they show the same number of roads, but Apple shows a few more in some cases and Google labels many more roads than Apple
• They label similar numbers of Points of Interest, but prioritize different kinds. Google shows transit while Apple shows more landmarks, restaurants and shops. Both have separate transit maps.

How Typography Can Save Your Life

Lena Groeger uses the National Weather Service's decision to change from ALL CAPS as starting point for an interesting article, How Typography Can Save Your Life.

How the super-secret Apple Industrial Design group works

Cult of Mac has a long, detailed and fascinating article How the super-secret Apple Industrial Design group works. It's based on Leander Kahney's book Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products.

New Font Lets Anyone Learn Japanese

This is very clever. Amazing it hadn’t been thought of before.

New font lets anyone learn Japanese “A U.K. company named Johnson Banks has come with an ingenious way to include English pronunciation in Japanese katakana characters. The company has dubbed this new font cleverly as ‘Phonetikana,’ where each katakana character featured a few English letters to help English speakers say the word properly.”

Note that Kanji is stolen from the Chinese and a glyph is basically a word. But Katakana is also commonly used in Japan and is an alphabet. Hiragana is another alphabet they use typically for foreign (non-Japanese) words. We English speakers have it easy with just one alphabet. I found once I saw Katakana I could better pronounce Japanese transliteration because I realized they have the five vowels and then all the other letters are a combination of a consonant and a vowel (e.g., ka, ki, ku, ke, ko). So when you have a word like Katakana it become obvious that it’s pronounced: ka-ta-ka-na or sumimasen is su-mi-ma-sen.

The Secret of the Apple’s New San Francisco Fonts

Akinori Machino describes The Secret of the Apple’s New San Francisco Fonts .

Fonts Using Ligatures for Code

Just heard about this and it seems kind of interesting. Most programming languages just use plain ascii characters, particularly for operators. As a result, sequences such as ->, =>, >=, /= are commonly used. If you want better typography, apparently some fonts now use ligatures to make them display better. The nice thing about using ligatures is that nothing changes but the display, the number of characters is the same (unlike if you used Unicode characters).

• Hasklig extends the font Source Code Pro with such ligatures.
• FiraCode extends the font Fira Mono

I haven't tried these yet, but apparently the emacs mac port I use now has a mode that supports them.

Logos

Google tweaked their logo. It's nice. But it's not just a logo it's a design system or something. Here's more than you ever wanted to know about it, Evolving the Google Identity.

If this fascinates you, then you might want to back this Kickstarter campaign to Reissue the 1975 NASA Graphics Standards Manual. $79 will get you a hardbound copy of the 200 page document that introduced the "worm" logo, ahem, design system.

Spatial Interfaces

Nice article on Spatial Interfaces. Lots of iOS examples showing how small animations, allow apps to imply functional relationships between interface elements.

Do You Code? You Should Try The New Font Monoid

CoDesign says Do You Code? You Should Try This Font "Monoid is a new programming typeface designed to be clean, uniform, and precise, just like good code."

"Programmers want a font that is clean, uniform, highly readable, and precise, just like good code. Monoid is a new font designed by Andreas Larsen that aims to do all the above, and more. An open-source font aimed at coders, Monoid has been designed, first and foremost, to be highly readable even when you're scanning through ten thousand of lines of C++, looking for that one bug-causing typo."

It's open source (so free) and you can download it here. At the bottom you can preview the font and choose from a few alternatives. I like the alternate 1 better. Note, the alternative preview doesn't work in Safari.

The Golden Ratio: Design's Biggest Myth

Co.Design on The Golden Ratio: Design's Biggest Myth "It's bullshit. The golden ratio's aesthetic bona fides are an urban legend, a myth, a design unicorn. Many designers don't use it, and if they do, they vastly discount its importance. There's also no science to really back it up. Those who believe the golden ratio is the hidden math behind beauty are falling for a 150-year-old scam."

"Devlin says the idea that the golden ratio has any relationship to aesthetics at all comes primarily from two people, one of whom was misquoted, and the other of whom was just making shit up."

Wheelchair stairs

These Wheelchair stairs are pretty awesome:

"These stairs/ramp are in Brussels. Apart from the visual appeal, I like this because it allows people in wheelchairs to navigate the stairs without segregating them from those on foot. Brilliant and beautiful!"

The Uncomfortable

Katerina Kamprani 's The Uncomfortable are "deliberately bad designs".

Bret Victor, beast of burden

I've looked for this a couple of times and can't find it on my blog. I thought I posted about it before. Apparently a lot of Bret Victor's ideas inspired some things in the new Swift's Sandbox used for OS X development. I've only looked a few of the videos, but pick anything out of the Recent Output section and it's bound to be interesting.

Fonts in 2001: A Space Odyssey

Typeset in the Future is a new blog looking at fonts in sci-fi, it's first post is about 2001: A Space Odyssey. Gotta say, it's a bit too detailed for me.

Santa brand book

This Santa brand book is pretty hilarious, particularly page 13.

Dear Ticketmaster, — This Could be Better

Dear Ticketmaster, — This Could be Better — Medium "After reading Boarding Pass/Fail and Boarding Pass Redesign, that talk about redesigning confusing airplane boarding passes, I decided to use the same idea and apply it to Ticketmaster for a much needed redesign." He then describes how he went from this:

to this business card sized ticket:

New York City's Website Gets A Hurricane-Proof Makeover

New York City's Website Gets A Hurricane-Proof Makeover | Co.Design | business + design "nyc.gov had grown stale since its last update in 2003. Here’s how designers updated the experience, focusing on usability, especially in the face of disaster."

A Visit to Disney’s Magic Kingdom

I remember seeing these color thumbnails a bit ago and thought they were cute but not all that interesting. This Wolfram Blog post by Theodore Gray makes me want to buy the $14 app. A Visit to Disney’s Magic Kingdom.