I’ve not seen one in the flesh; that wouldn’t been possible, but the brand new Macbook and Macbook pro lines are mouth-watering. The hardware upgrades, the change in look, the improved graphics; that’s all nice, but really peripheral to the one ‘feature’ I find intriguing. This ‘unibody’ idea is beautiful.

Anyone who has worked milled aluminium knows how gorgeous the stuff feels, both before and after it becomes a product. Working it down from a solid chunk into a final form is infinitely more satisfying than working with any other material in my opinion. Milling can be frustratingly slow, and if you get it wrong, it’s impossible to make a seamless fix. With CNC you cut that out, but you swap that for a level of precision that is hard to rival even in the most highly-skilled handmade version - the result is a million miles away from a sheet or cast metal construction. It genuinely feels more organic, sharp, natural and real - a single body is infinitely more sophisticated than something that feels like it has been bolted together, no matter how well that has been done.

And that’s why I’m dying to pick one up and hold it. I’m not actually that fussed about forking out to own it - my current model still does more than well enough for my needs (though it’s not like I would turn one down if anyone is offering) I just don’t need an upgrade. But the fact is that you can plainly see from the photos, the videos (especially the manufacturing one) that this a beautifully engineered and solid piece of construction. This technique is to be rolled into their two new notebook products, and that means that even by Apple’s previously high standards, this casing is going to bring the feel of this laptop into a league of it’s own, because as far as I am aware no other company has done this in mainstream laptopware before.

Admittedly, the Macbook Air has used a similar technique for a while (again a stunning product to hold), but I think this technique will lend itself even better to the thicker design of these new products. It’s a bit unusual to be more excited by the manufacturing method than the complete product, but I am.

There is one caveat though. I can think of a number of reasons why other manufacturers might not have gone down this route in the past, and although I can banish most of my qualms about it, there are couple I still don’t have an answer for.

This process is more complicated and initially more expensive to setup due to the hardware involved, but over time it’ll pay for itself and any machinery can be re-tasked for future models. The complexity of the assembly is going to be considerably reduced at the pre-digital component stage.  The thing that gets me is the waste and energy required to produce it this way.

My gut feeling would be that in waste terms, the system is actually going to be pretty efficient - Apple wouldn’t want to be squandering all that expensive material it’s paid for. Although you might be essentially removing a large percentage of the mass as milled-out swarf, that can be melted down and reused, and I would imagine that is what Apple will be doing. The gold and silver trade became incredibly efficient at this a very long time ago. But even if that is the case, the big drawback of this is that you constantly have to keep re-melting down the material, as opposed to the current method of applying a smaller amount of heat for a shorter period of time just enough to form a shape. And that’s expensive. The closest thing to an analogy I can think of is boiling a kettle of six cups for every time you want to make one just for yourself.

For all their talk of green, I do wonder whether this will erode at their other credentials? I mean keeping metal molten for long periods (whether its in their own factories or further up the food chain) is not that efficient. I just imagine it can’t be particularly energy efficient even if their other production processes are. I’d love to know, but I don’t believe tours of the Apple factories are that easy to come by.

Comments (0)

It’s been a while since I last was in Cheltenham, but (not much) earlier this week Flash asked me to do a presentation on logo design to some of the fifth form at his school, and as that sort of thing is good fun and pretty interesting, I agreed and spent yesterday evening helping out in a bit of a workshop session.

Thankfully the good weather once again this week made it an enjoyable drive, and the school itself is really nice (well it would be, it’s Cheltenham don’t you know).

One thing I had forgotten about for two years was the smell of DT workshops, and it call came flooding back (that mixture of sawdust and carcinogenics). I was also treated to a specially put on meal for this week’s winning team of Flash’s ‘Apprentice’ competition (wine and all).

All in all, yet another slightly out-of-the-ordinary event for this week. Good stuff.

Comments (0)

Once in a while I see some truly ingenious thinking, and it’s rare to see a product that is so functionally trend-defying, especially when often concept cars are beautiful, but little else.

The Gina prototypes with fabric ‘skin’ is a really good demonstration of how approaching a problem from a different angle can reap big rewards. I can remember as a kid watching Thunder in Paradise (yes, a truly masterful programme) where Hulk Hogan’s boat could morph shape. Incredibly futuristic, but now here is a real and simple alternative to produce lightweight, flexible, form-altering products.

Of course spaceframe technology has meant this has been possible for years, but I’ve never seen it put into practice. There are inevitably ‘issues’ too - how many times would you return to your posh looking cloth convertible to find someone had slashed it - but it’s not like a new paint job or sidepanel doesn’t cost a lot of money anyway.

Unfortunately, I don’t ever really expect to see a car like this in production, at least not in such a stark and complete form. Clearly cutting down weight and simplifying panel creation would be very desirable for manufacturers (each being expensive in their own way), but metal isn’t likely to be thrown out for fabric in the foreseeable future. However I do think it gives a good platform for moving car design forward and hopefully will stimulate truly beautiful, lightweight solutions to problems that are currently overlooked because their remedies appear ‘essential’.

Comments (0)

If you haven’t already seen the new coinage, you are in for a treat.

Matthew Dent, a graphic designer who won the competition to do the first major redesign of the full collection of UK coins since decimalisation in 1971, has come up with a delicious and contemporary new look.

There is something very solid about the coin, and this is a rare opportunity to make a very significant impact with design. I would describe British currency as a design classic in itself (not discounting some of the other great coins I’ve seen around the globe), and would place it in a similar camp to stamps in terms of distribution and gravitas. It’s funny to reflect on this, but I suspect if you ask many people what makes them British or gives them British identity, apart from drizzle, tea and Nectar points, the queen’s head on our coins would probably surface more than a handful of times.

That’s why this redesign was very important, and I’m pleased to see something that really can be commended on all fronts.

The outlines and weights have been retained, a sensible idea. The reduction in the size and weight of the 10 pence, 5 pence and 50 pence pieces in the past 15 years have made our coinage fairly manageable, and when making such a dramatic change to the faces, it seems only suitable to retain this major identifier.

Secondly and most importantly for me, the cut of the design is beautiful. Even someone who shifts pixels for a career, I can only begin to imagine how much agony went into getting the design and typography ‘just’. I’m so pleased they have spaced the design out as much as they have, it defies the obvious wonderfully.

The subject matter (the royal heraldic shield) cleverly ties up the problem of finding a separate identifier for each coin. In a time when there is so much debate about what truly justifies itself as being british or inclusive or whatever, it seems far better to use a symbol that is both recognised and less contentious than some other icons. I’m not saying there aren’t connotations, but I think this is a good way to go, and assuming we don’t become a republic in the next 40 years they should last too…

I’m interested to know what will be printed on the circumferences, but really I’m keen just to see them minted. Stacking coins will never be so boring again.

One slight question that still remains is whether completely removing the numerical value from the coin face will work. I’ve been to many places and it’s usually been the one sure-fire constant. On the other hand, maybe it couldn’t be a stronger representation of the British need to assert ourselves by requiring the user to understand English in order to purchase even the cheapest items…

Comments (2)

There has been plenty going on with me in the past few days. What with the completion and delivery of a piece important print work this week (with a Sunday to-press deadline) it wasn’t much of a weekend.

I’ve finally encountered the swathe of completions and launches for projects that have been ongoing (there are one or two anomalies that are yet to be mopped up, but on the whole things are wrapping up nicely).

Monday was no let up, heading to London for a meeting in South Kensington and an introduction to yet another exciting project. After all the formalities of work, I managed to track down probably my longest-term associate and friend (it’s hard to know someone longer than a person who you first encountered on the day you were both born - a day neither of us can truthfully say we remember) and we went for a couple of drinks to catch up on two years of life. Andy (we share the same name too) is an accomplished jazz musician, while I am a web type, but we’ve both ended up following the self-employed path. The number of coincidences between us including others probably are matched by an equal number of unrelated events, but I find it amusing how around 15 years ago (after a period of time when our two families had lost touch with each other), I was helping Dad cut down a hedge in the back garden of our new house, and we were all a little more than surprised to find that we’d moved in next door to each other. Despite all the odd gaps, the geographical differences and the rest, we always seem to manage to start conversations where we left off. It’s the only time I ever wonder whether your date of birth actually does have any possible influence on the way things pan out, and I’m certainly not one for believing those types of things.

Also today, quite surprisingly I came to learn that Dan had managed to inadvertently stumble across the co-founder of Tangerine design agency while organising some rental transport for him. Dan recognised the name of the complex where his customer worked, and mentioned he had previously collaborated with a design agency in the same estate. It turns out Dan’s customer was now working for the very same company, but had previously been attached to a rather more well known ID outfit.

Dan didn’t recognise the name of the agency ‘Tangerine’ (I could have told him who they were straight away), but the customer soon enlightened him that he had co-founded it few years ago with a bloke called Jonathan Ive. Had I been in the car I think I’d have a few more question. This opportunity was probably as close as you could get to achieving any kind of insight into the notoriously elusive designer’s method. Either way, I still find it highly amusing that Dan managed to get into a conversation with his ex-business and design partner, especially whilst doing something completely unrelated to design.

Comments (0)

Only every twelve months do I upgrade my phone, so it is truly a ‘special’ delivery when the postman arrives with a little white note and a pen asking for my autograph.

This is the first time I haven’t really thought long and hard about which phone came next, I’d resigned to the fact that Sony Ericsson tend to make fantastic mobiles, and so plumped for the highest spec one they do in what I call the ‘work’, and they call the ‘K’ series. I don’t know what the K stands for, but much like CYMK, it doesn’t really matter as long as you know it’s important (the K in CMYK stands for Key actually).

I approached my contract renewal with the sole aim to keep my bill down yet gain as many minutes as possible. I have therefore, ended up on an 18 month contract for the first time. No iPhone for me anytime soon I predict.

The fact is, I only really buy phones for two reasons (excluding phone calls, obviously). The first is the camera. I could have gone for the N95 with all it’s bells and whistles, but even the owners who really should love the thing can’t say much nice about it. Much like Cameron Diaz in a chastity belt; everything you could ever desire is inside, but it’s just so damn hard to get at.

At the moment, 5 megapixels is king (that is unless you want to spend the GDP of a small African nation on a handset). As a person who in 2003 used to parade around with a 5MP camera as the greatest thing I ever bought whilst most people were still asking what ‘digital’ was, I feel slightly wary of my newest purchase. After all, it’s only 3.3 megapixels less than my DSLR, and in the 12 months since I bought my last phone we’ve gained 1.8MP on the previous version.

Anyway, I digress. Five million dots was the lowest I was going to settle for, so if it was going to be a Sony, it had to be this model.

The second major feature I need is synchronicity. My Mac’s, my phone - they both have to mirror all of my contact details for reasons including theft, loss and the knowledge that everyone I know is contactable no matter how drunk I am or what time it is.

Well all modern phones have that feature these days (Bluetooth), but the calendar and contact updating always impressed me on my W800i and K800i previously, so no reason to change what works.

So, I made a blind purchase. The guy on the phone offered me a deal I couldn’t refuse and although I’d never seen anything but a photo of the thing, I knew it was the handset for me.

Well, I may have been a little naive in not having a proper play beforehand. Although on the whole it is a very nice Sony Ericsson from the same mould as it’s two predecessors, it does lack a little in joined-up thinking. It’s not the software which has been improved upon - very well in most cases. It’s not the battery, SIM and memory stick access - a brilliant improvement. It’s not the display - brighter, more clear and sharper than ever. The main issue I have is with the keypad.

It maybe a ‘getting used to it’ thing, but my major bug bear is that although the keypad buttons are beautifully spaced, they are just about the same height as the amount of flesh required to squash-in when you try to press them. Hence, much like a overweight cat sitting on a remote control, the buttons are completely covered, but don’t actually press in.

My solution to this would be my nail (thankfully since I stopped biting them in India, I now have some), but the convex shape of the buttons means all but the most concave of fingernails can press them. This means that my rather ‘pointy’ and ‘nail-like’ nails slide around as though they’re competing in the Winter Olympics.

I do seem to be getting the grip of it, but it has taken a day or so. It will get easier with time, but after just picking up and playing with my old K800i again for five minutes, I think I will miss the big, hit-them-with-a-baseball-bat style buttons.

The other major button errors are the navigation keys. For the K850i, the joystick has become a thing of the past which is unfortunate if you like amusing yourself with Java games, because it’s not so easy anymore. However I’m not overly enamored by games, so I’m just trying to get used to the Big Blue Thing that replaces the joystick and loops around the 2 and 5 keys. It isn’t really bad, but still, bring the stick back - we’re in the middle of a 1980’s revival, we should be embracing these types of old-skool technologies.

The four (or two) silver navigation keys (depending on how you look at it) really are too small considering this a phone and accepting calls/hanging up are pretty important in my old fashioned view of things. However the biggest departure in navigation is the touch-sensitive (light-sensitive) menu buttons at the base of the screen.

Initially I didn’t enjoy them, but I’m pretty fond of them and their animations now. With no tactile response, it seems odd that you’d implement just three buttons using this technology. Then again, they didn’t use much logic in designing the rest of the keypad, so why start using those brains now.

Otherwise, they’ve taken a big step in the right direction. The camera is a real camera. It has ISO selection, metering, a proper mode switch, shutter release and on/off button on the side. The lens is now sensibly protected by a clear cover rather than the fantastically effective crumb and dust pit that previous models came with. It also lights up like Kit from Knightrider, which means if the spinning light ever dies on your Sky+ box you can just sellotape your K850i to the front of it with the shutter open and party on down.

Ok, so it’s missing optical zoom, and WiFi. It’s not really a cutting edge departure in design, and it’s sort of ‘gone a bit Britney Spears’ on the keypad layout. But hey, it’s new, it’s shiny, it’s a SonyEricsson and I’ve got so many more minutes now that I’m going to have to start making new friends just to mop up the call allowance.

Comments (1)

The Multipack site has been in need of some attention for a while, and although we often discuss it at meetings, not much ever seems to change – we’re all too busy to do anything about it.

It took most of Saturday, a pub lunch, plenty of peanuts, quavers, beer and diet coke, but we’ve made some in roads into the code side of things. Tasked with design, Gaz, Owen and myself got the basics nailed down pretty quickly, but the final design was a little less forthcoming.

Despite having the whole day to take photos, I totally forgot, so you’ll have to rely on everyone else. We were based up in the Custard Factory at the new offices of One Black Bear and spent a lot of time swimming in mac paraphernalia – there isn’t much else in there.

Anyway, there is progress, as yet not that tangible, but it’s a good start.

With regard to the rest of the weekend – I went for a drink with Jon and Rosie on Friday in a pub I didn’t know existed, then on Saturday bumped into another John back from university while getting onto the train.

I got asked to be in a TV documentary this week, but have turned it down. Such are the pressures of life on the famous and well-loved.

Comments (0)