Premios .Net 2007

La revista Net ha dado a conocer los vencedores de los Premios Net 2007:

Estudio de diseño del año:
1. Preloaded
2. Fortune Cookie
3. Wefail
4. Less Rain
5. Hi-RES!

Rediseño del año:
1. Apple
2. Manchester United
3. NY Times
4. Waterstones
5. Guardian Unlimited

Campaña de marketing viral del año:
1. Will it Blend?
2. Simpsons Movie
3. Get the Glass
4. Cadbury
5. X Factor

Mención especial al peor diseño (y con razón): MySpace.com

Diseño y Usabilidad en Suunto

Suunto

La reconocida marca finlandesa de instrumentos electrónicos de precisión Suunto tiene una graciosa y curiosa manera de explicar la historia del equipo de diseño y usabilidad de Suunto en su web:

Design & Usability

If you put together a group of professional designers, one psychologist and a cognitive scientist with various sports backgrounds including orienteering, free diving, surfing, sailing, triathlon, swimming, cycling, snowboarding and boxing you end up with the Suunto design group. I do not think there is (or even could be) a more versatile team at Suunto than the design group.

The design group was formed when two designers working at Suunto R&D hammered through the importance of the team in so many meetings, that nobody in the company could deny it anymore. Now the group holds an important role inside Suunto, bringing together the R&D, marketing, sales and production departments. And most importantly by taking care of the “look and feel” design of all Suunto products.

The group is full of creative guys. This is probably not the easiest team to work with though, being a little bit on the artistic side.

For the wrists of our loyal users, we at Suunto are constantly exchanging ideas and suggestions. This in fact brings up the point of usability, the inherent design principle of the whole group. Every single design decision is and will be, in one way or another, based on usability and our end users needs. All in all, the design group’s core competence is an ability to combine design, usability and concept research into the package of a small wrist top computer.

La parte dedicada al departamento de Ingeniería y I+D de Suunto tampoco tiene desperdicio; unas notas:

“They call me a sports nerd – but that´s ok… I work at Suunto R&D with a bunch of other similar minded YUP´s, Young Useful Propeller heads… Besides being a technology freak – which I am proud of – I also have a softer side: I understand that aesthetics is important in product design”

Definitivamente, me gusta la marca Suunto, son simpáticos y me caen bien, y además comparto sus valores referidos a la importancia del diseño y la usabilidad. Me han causado una muy buena impresión. Cuando me tenga que comprar un reloj será Suunto. ¡Eso sí que es una web comercial!

¿Actualizar a Adobe CS3?

Flash – You can now natively import PSD files and Flash will “automagically” preserve your Photoshop layer structure and turn all elements of that layer into MovieClips.

Dreamweaver – I no longer have to start from scratch to create my table-less CSS designs anymore… Dreamweaver looks to have 30 or 40 different CSS templates that you can chose to start from, and you can check for valid code right while you are still developing in Dreamweaver.

Photoshop – The feature that I think is a great add-on is the ability to place flat image textures onto 3D objects. For simple 3D images, I no longer have to work in Swift3D or other 3D application.