Smart Vintage Product Design

Every time I go antiquing, I come across clever product design and wonder why certain conveniences never went mainstream. Why don’t all our pans have printed cup measure indicators inside?

This is especially true of women’s clothing. Vintage dresses have little snaps in the shoulders to hold bra straps in place, and the backless shoe pictured above has a strap of elastic in the instep to help keep the shoe closer to your heel. So much more comfortable to walk in.

I started a Flickr group for Cool Vintage Product Design. It’s filled with a bunch of little conveniences I’ve noticed over the years, so add your own if you have them.

Can you think of anything that falls into this category? What makes you think, “they don’t make them like that anymore?”

A Project

So, Internet! Things are not going well.

Divorce aside, the last few weeks have been crisis heavy. So much Big Bad stuff has been piling up that I’ve become slightly embarrassed to be around people. They ask you how you are, and you have to answer without hyperventilating. They ask what’s been going on and you have to come up with a response that doesn’t involve too many hospitals. They stand near you and heavy things fall on their heads.

I should note here that Hank is doing well. He’s a bright spot through all of this. Also, I’m reasonably healthy, which is excellent. (Do you hear me, universe? Super grateful for the kid and the health. Thumbs up! Please hold your lightening bolts.)

My instinct is to plan my way through difficult times, so here’s the plan. I’m going to start doing something fun every day. I just watched this brief TED talk by Matt Cutts on 30 day projects:

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

So for the next thirty days, I’m going to make time for something fun every day. I started Saturday, and I hope you’ll join me.

Have you done anything fun today?

Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott

The best parts of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life:

“You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards.” -James Thurber

There is a door we all want to walk through, and writing can help you find it and open it. Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up.

E. L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.

The first time you read through your galleys is heaven. The second time through, all you see are the typos no one caught. It looks like the typesetter typed it with frostbitten feet, drunk. And the typos are important ones. They make you look ignorant; they make you look like an ignorant racist.

Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. So I keep trying gently to bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen, maybe to be seen and noted with a kind of reverence. Because if I don’t learn to do this, I think I’ll keep getting things wrong.

Annie Dillard has said that day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects.

15 Influential Design Blogs

Someone on Quora asked about the most influential design blogs, and many of the responses had to do with professional web and product design. I have a much more colloquial view of what it means to be a design blogger, so almost none of the blogs I consider influential were on the list. I added these with a notation that I wasn’t including fashion or wedding sites, which have some overlap in the community, especially because personal sites can be so tough to classify.

I’m defining “influential” as folks with large audiences (upwards of 10,000 visitors a day or so) with dedicated readers who really care about the information presented there.

Who am I forgetting?

DesignSponge founded by Grace Bonney
Home, DIY, entertaining, products

Design Milk founded by Jaime Derringer
Design magazine on art, architecture, home, fashion, tech

Swiss-Miss by Tina Roth Eisenberg
Professional designer and aesthete

Apartment Therapy founded by Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan
Home design/products with sister sites for tech, green and kids as well

NOTCOT founded by Jean Aw
Products, fashion, tech lifestyle, with sister sites

Poppytalk by Jan and Earl (Husband/Wife)
DIY, Home, Handmade

Decor8 by Holly Becker
Home

Oh Joy founded by Joy Deangdeelert Cho
Products, fashion, interiors, inspiration

SF Girl by Bay by Victoria Smith
Photography, interior design, product

Design for Mankind by Erin Loechner
Art, fashion, home

Not Martha by Megan Reardon
A one-woman consumer reports on a range of products

Oh Happy Day by Jordan Ferney
Entertaining, diy, stationery

Making it Lovely by Nicole Balch
Home, DIY

Design Mom by Gabrielle Blair
Designer who focuses on good design for parents and kids

A Cup of Jo by Joanna Goddard
Style, products, fashionable parenting

What design sites do you love that don’t seem to have large readerships yet? There’s so much professional-level content out there right now, it’s tough to keep up.

How do you call your loverboy?

This weekend, I saw the last show of Brett Dennen’s tour. Man, I could do that every Saturday night all summer long.

His tone is unique, kind of a Tom-Petty-meets-Bob-Dylan thing. If you have a chance to see him live, do that. Until then, here are the two excellent reasons to buy his latest album Loverboy:

Here’s a free download of “Surprise, Surprise” off the same album (which you can buy here). I’ve also linked before to “San Francisco,” which is a sentimental favorite.

Hooray for smart people making things that make us happy.