My Favorite Flavor

Over this past Labor-Daybor, my fianc√© and I were traveling about between towns, here in the sprawling American Midwest, and against my better judgement she persuaded me to pull aside into a very sad-looking outlet mall. You all know the Outlet Malls, right? The leftovers and castaways of society’s worst chain-retailers set out for your perusement, ever hopeful they’d merit a purchase for an inordinately miniscule amount. In this very sad mall we found a bookstore readying to close its doors forever. I know what you’re thinking. Outlet mall + store closing = junk on massive sale.

I found three books and purchased two, got out of there for $6. The first was the saddest design-annual ever made: The 2000 Point-of-Purchase Design Annual. That means everything in this book was produced in late ‘98 and ‘99, and every terrible design clich√© from Y2K (remember that?) was not only featured, but celebrated. The next was a book filled from cover to cover with surfboard designs. The third I almost passed up due to the worst-looking dust jacket I have ever seen. it was called The Product Book.

Now, this thing was ugly. Not the new-hotness coined-phrase “ugly pretty” I mean “ugly ugly.” In fact, this oversized tome’s lack of design sensibility carries through to its interior pages where long lines of giant type stretch clear from one end of the page to the other. Not an easy read, but one where I soon found myself compelled to do so.

I confess now that I do not read most design publications; I look at the pretty pictures. It is my secret shame that I have only recently begun to correct. The Blogs? Sure. But tell me that Poynor wrote something amazing for CA and I tune out like a 14-year old watching The History Channel.

The book begins with six pages, oversized, of Jonathan Ive describing in great detail the journey that began the age of design in modern computing. The book was published in 1999, one year after the iMac was launched. Snippets:

“Initially I believed that Apple offered and environment in which I could focus solely on design. Unfortunately I was horribly wrong. It was not until Steve Jobs returned to the company that I found myself in a precious and privileged situation; being part of a design team encouraged and supported in the pursuit of nothing other than good design.

“Value can be significant even if its measures are neither empirical nor easy to articulate. So often as designers we deny this by our preoccupation with justification. The obsession in the computer industry with microprocessor speed or hard drive capacity has reduced the conversation to the proposition of five being greater than two. Countless industries bear witness to this creative bankruptcy as attributes that are more difficult to comprehend and certainly more difficult to quantify are ordinarily ignored.

“One minute it’s a writing machine, next a video editing machine. This describes a fundamental and almost unique capability. While elsewhere great energy is being spent creating singular function appliances we wanted to celebrate this spectacular ability of the object to transform. The properties of translucent material, shifting the emphasis from surface to light helped define a fluid object.”

Before the iMac changed the rules of product design in computing, we lived in a beige-boxed world of ugly. The iMac helped us realize we do not need to be confronted by ugly every day. It has been with a large degree of disappointment that in the ensuing week since I purchased this book I have witnessed few remaining artifacts from this recently bygone era. The machines themselves have become rapidly outdated and the design was so successful it spawned a plethora of gaudy, me-too designed products in the same colors. I find it very sad that we look back on this era with disdain due largely to the candy-colored tomfoolery that followed the release of the iMac. These products changed the way the world looked at computers. Hell, they actually made people look at computers.

They were called flavors back then. Jeff Goldblum told us about them. And if they were released today I would grab one quicker than you could say “tangerine.” It’s funny even now to see Apple, who introduced us to color, stick so guardedly to white and black. The me-too product designs have been in even greater supply since the advent of the iPod. But what I wouldn’t give for a little color back in this world. Oh, they might’ve been underpowered for design work, and the keyboards lacked a full set of keys (including a forward delete key. I mean come on), but these things still stand up as a great piece of design and I refuse to wait until some arbitrary “10 year anniversary” to celebrate them.

If you have a Tangerine iMac circa 1999 that sits collecting dust in a closet or storage area, send me an email. I am interested.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 9:05 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.