Every morning I check my e-mail and find several messages from Chinese companies that I either have never met, or have forgotten about meeting. Usually these e-mails consist of, “Thank you for opening my e-mail. Please look at our wide variety of hand woven baskets, I’m sure they will do well in your local market.” But this case was special. How could I not look into a product with a name like “Flying Jumper?” Hey, it even claims to make you smarter and cure hemroids. Not that AI could ever carry a product like this, liability insurance would be through the roof. But just in case this becomes the world wide hot new fashion trend that it’s manufacturers are predicting, please remember you saw it here first.

 

A new fashion will go hot all over the world!!!
Flying Jumper ’s features are:

You can take one step 2~3meters and also jump 1~2meters high when you use it. It will be one of hottest sports during this year! And it will be a windstorm in fashion, leisure and amusement throughout the world for people in different areas and different ages. Everyone can enjoy it

Introduction

As skateboarding and ice skate are still growing, a new item of more cool body building and leisure, you can’t seize the wind of fashion .Hop, bowling, net bar, skating and dancing blanket are popular in short time. People will ask what’s the fashion next? Can you cater for it? The answer is crystal clear……….

It suits everybody, no matter the age is which is embodied the attraction of sport. It’s also the special product of vigorous and amusement The dream of becoming YaoMing will come true, if you try it when you play basketball. You can show your cool dancing to people when you wear it to dance hip-top. You will share the happiness with the world if you walk with it.

Bring it to play sports with your children, not only you can be close to them, but also make your children increase themselves-confidence with the sense of pride for a healthy body.

This is not the new cosset of boys.

The girl who likes beautiful to own it, not only have pretty body, but also have the fiction of reduce weight;

Internet Explorer. It’s broken. It’s backwards. It’s not getting much better. IE’s dominance has stifled the Web. It’s lack of conformity to modern standards has crippled the Web experience. So long as people continue to use IE, websites will have to be designed to support it. That means the Web will never evolve past 1998. Any alternative is far superior. Let me introduce you to my favorite alternative: Opera.
Opera supports a slew of robust features that turn the Web from a passive experience to an interactive one. There are two things Opera does well: standards compliance and feature support. The W3C writes the standards for the Web. Their purpose is to create standards that increase the functionality of the Web such as ways to facilitate interactive applications, data exchange, and e-commerce. Standards ensure that a webpage both displays and functions correctly in a browser. Opera supports all modern standards. This guarantees Opera users the full breadth of Web functionality.

Opera’s features are too numerous to explain in detail. I will; however, list a few notable features that set Opera apart from other browsers:

• Window-like tabs. Tabs can be pulled out from the parent window and turned into independent windows.
• Pop-up blocking.
• Content blocking. Block ads, graphics, or anything you wish from particular websites.
• Magic Wand. Save passwords on your computer so you never have to type them in again. Save multiple passwords for the same page. They’re all encrypted so no one on your PC can steal your password.
• Site-specific preferences. Set permanent settings for individual sites so everything always displays the way you want.
• 100% customizable interface. Don’t like control buttons being at the top? Put them on the bottom. Want tabs on the left? Put them there. Even make your own buttons. Opera’s interface is completely customizable.
• Newsreader, chat, e-mail. Read your newsfeeds, chat to people on IRC, and check your e-mail.
• BitTorrent support. Support for the latest file transfer protocol which is designed to transfer large files very quickly and very cheaply.
• Robust transfer manager. Track downloads. Even resume and redownload them at a later time.
• XHTML+Voice. Speak commands to Opera and have Opera speak webpages back to you.
• Widgets. These are desktop Web applications. Get the latest news, weather, and even games right from the Web to your desktop.
• Identify as other browsers (for websites that only allow particular browsers to view the site)
• Thumbnail previews. Can’t remember what page had that cool video? Just hover the cursor over the tab to see a thumbnail of the page.
• Custom searches. Create your own searches. Search Google, eBay, Wikipedia, or anything you wish with a single keystroke.
• Bookmark manager. Manage and search your bookmark list quickly.

As you can see, Opera is unmatched in features. By using an alternative browser such as Opera, you allow yourself a richer and easier-to-use Web experience. You also allow developers to create newer and more interactive Web sites.
Do yourself the favor of trying out Opera. You’ll be allowing the Web to grow past the decade-long hindrance that has been Internet Explorer.

The evolution of packaging can be a long journey. To go from concept to reality takes time and myriad edits. Graphics can take weeks to months to finalize depending on how well the design team agrees on an idea and finally if the client likes it.

First one has to decide what is the packaging trying to convey? There is a lot of information that NEEDS to be on the packaging in addition to graphics: bullet points, instructions, barcode. This can be hard the smaller the packaging is. Next, who is the target audience? You have to understand that a brightly colored mod-type design might not work for a fishing product. Finally, where is the product being sold? Items in Walmart are going to look much different then those in Lord & Taylor. All of these factors play in important role when designing packaging.

According to Craig Sawicki in the white paper, Good Packaging Combines Provocative and Pragmatic, “The average package has 8/10ths of a second to gain a customer’s attention in a retail setting,” That’s not a lot of time, so every angle and application must be considered to the nth degree.

The next thing to understand is one doesn’t just create graphics for the packaging but the logo needs to be created as well. If you are thinking of branding it has to be something unique to the product. This takes time because you have to consider font, size and color. A logo idea can be easily tested 15 or so times just in the beginning. Even once a font and color scheme is decided upon; there will still be another 5-10 variances of just that one font.

Once graphics are finalized, logo in check and all of the proper information is set to be placed on the packaging, how is it actually going to be packaged? Is it a simple box, thermoform case or a clamshell? Maybe there’s no packaging at all but a booklet attached to the product or a simple sticker. In the case of the MiniBeam flashlight we had not only the product packaging to design, but a carton to house the packaging. The packaging itself started out as a basic cardboard box. After spending time on drafting a box layout and applying graphics to it, it was later decided that clamshell packaging better suited the MiniBeam flashlight. So it went from placing graphics on a 6-sided-box, to transferring the information to a two-sided card.

Then came the carton design. What dimensions were necessary to hold 24 MiniBeam packages? In the first carton design, we took everything from the packaging and used it on the headboard. In the end it made for a much cluttered look. So we took out some of the items, such as the warning label and distributed them to other parts of the carton. We also added a price star which eventually became a price circle. We reversed the color scheme, eliminated some items and streamlined the text. The sides of the carton were redesigned all together.

As of this moment, while we are close to something we agree on, we still haven’t signed off on a design. There will be more tests, more design meetings, and more edits to reach. And even after we get the first run in stores, we might discover that something isn’t working and have to return to the drawing board.

Above, is an example of how many different changes one package can go through.

The wonderful thing about marketing is that the product is always out in the open, available for free, ready to be analyzed and debated.  You can learn what not to do by analyzing bad marketing product, and what to do by analyzing good marketing product.

That being said, this television commercial is amazing.  Not because of the production value, nor even the subject matter, but because the commercial achieves so well what a good advertisement should be:  A clear conveyance of the good you want people to see in your product.  Much like the earlier discussed i-pod packaging, this advertisement doesn’t need to overtly announce the benefits and features of the product, or even show the product.  Instead it uses the cultural knowledge inherent in its audience to associate a clear brand message with the product, thus implying the benefit of owning the product.

If it has a fault, it’s in not making it more clear at the end that they are in fact selling a shoe.  And that’s the danger in subtlety, assume too much about the clarity of your message and you risk entertaining without educating.  In this case the message assumes that you know Michael Jordan is promoting a Nike Shoe.  Not a bad assumption in most cases, but at the same time the message could be completely lost on someone who isn’t familiar with the Air Jordan line.

Of course at this level, the people making the commercial are competing with other firms on artistry, as much as Nike is trying to sell shoes.  This can be the downside to expensive advertising firms.  If you’re not careful, they may end up producing something that wins awards, but doesn’t sell your product.  It works well in this case, especially because the people watching the commercial will understand it, but this kind of branding strategy doesn’t work if the product or advertiser is even a bit more obscure than Michael Jordan or Nike.

Without a doubt military hardware not consumer goods, represents the cutting edge of ergonomics research in this country. For the soldier in the field, a slight increase in usability of a common object can mean the difference between life and death. And in many cases the equipment, such as a helicopter gunship, is so complex that intensive consideration of the limitations of the humans behind the controls is an absolute must. Of course prototyping costs can easily spiral out of control on such projects.

Enter “Santos” part of the Virtual Soldier Research project at Iowa State University. Santos is a fully formed virtual human used to test the usability of objects before a physical prototype is ever made. While it will be quite some time before these kinds of resources become available to small industrial design firms like ours, it’s refreshing to see where the industry is going. If only we had this technology available when designing our Soap Dispensing Body Brush…

What if Microsoft were to redesign the iPod package? This video tells all. But what is it saying?
Apple’s main brand focus with the iPod, as illustrated by their related patent portfolio, verges on the iconic. Accordingly, representations of the iPod itself take up much of the package. The iPod plays music, as evinced by the musician on the box. You don’t even have to know who the musician is- the musical connection is established by the microphone and the guitar. The technical data present is limited to the capacity (5gb in this case) and some limited system requirement information.

The parody “Microsoft redesign” shows a box that is festooned with all manner of design elements and information. There are good reasons for a lot of this information (most of them outlined in the video,) but the combined weight of all of this stuff comes together to smother the expensively crafted iPod image.

There is a simple message here: packaging must choose what it communicates. It would be an interesting exercise to go the opposite direction with a more Microsoft-ish hardware box- seeing how many of the extra elements you could clear out without losing valuable data. You have to be sure of what it is that you are saying for your packaging to work. Apple has consistently shown mastery of this, which is one reason why they continue to survive to this day.

(Via Crooked Timber)