April 12, 2019
Oversharing: it is worse than you think it is · A while ago I subscribed the Oversharing newsletter („more than you wanted to know about the sharing economy”) from qz writer Alison Griswold. Even if you already know that Uber is greedy and Silicon Valley has its flaws – it is actually even worse. March 14, 2019
Designing is not a profession but an attitude · From Vision in Motion, László Moholy-Nagy, Chicago 1947: April 1, 2016
Looking at the interior of the Tesla Model 3 gives me a déjà-vu · … plus serious nightmares about the German automotive industry. September 20, 2012
Google Maps for iOS 5, Google Maps 6.9.2 on Android 4.11 and iOS6 Maps compared · Apple Maps is a reason not to buy an iPhone 5. September 20, 2012
iOS6 is a design disaster · I cannot believe what I am seeing, this is a total mess. August 15, 2012
KCRW is the greatest radio station ever · and Music Mine is on my iPad homescreen now. August 11, 2011
Wonderful Table Of Contents Design By Willy Fleckhaus 1965 · What a beautiful design from Willy Fleckhaus who is said to have been Germany’s first Art Director. Found in the twen magazine from 10/1965. June 25, 2011
Goodbye Basecamp, continued · This is in reply to the discussion thread in the Hacker News, related to my post Goodbye Basecamp. June 24, 2011
Goodbye Basecamp, This Is The End Of A True Love. My Heart Is Broken. · I am not angry, this is just the end of a love story, and i want to say goodbye. December 19, 2009
German Spotify Premium Subscribers: How To Install The Spotify iPhone App · Luckily there is a simple Workaround. June 30, 2009
For Me, Michael Jackson Is The Icon For All What Went Wrong In The Music Industry · And now this coincidence in 2009, he suddenly dies, at the same time as the music industry, it’s like a bad orchestration or a twist of fate. May 26, 2009
The True Reason For The Current Breakdown Of The Music Industry: Don’t Mess With Art! · Authenticity is something that everybody carries inside, it derives from life itself, it is not manageable and cannot be created artificially. March 1, 2009
My Guess: We Will Pay $3 For An Album – For Service Fee And Fairness · Why so low? It’s not only random customer behaviour. February 13, 2009
Long Tail Info Porn: Lil’ Wayne vs. Regina Spektor · Did you know… …that the best selling album of 2008 – Tha Carter III from Lil’ Wayne – sold 2.88 million copies and for the very first time since tracking album sales started under the current model in 1991, the number-one album didn’t clear 3 million copies (mediapost.com) … but still, Lil’ Wayne alone… sold more CDs February 11, 2009
Trying Out Spotify: I Like It, But I Wouldn’t Bet On Its Success · There is an ongoing buzz around Spotify – a new streaming music service from London
February 6, 2009
Marketing Kills Music · If anybody wonders what’s the real problem with the music industry, read this note from NYTimes’ Winter Miller.
September 23, 2008
MySpace music comes with store, finally · Can it be true? This is what we’ve awaiting for a long time. December 10, 2007
A must-read about online music marketing · The new model is about starting an ongoing economic relationship with a community of fans.”
Sounds like a blueprint for my upcoming work. July 18, 2007
Obscene design copy · I’m a friend of getting good inspiration from best practices, but this goes way too far. June 25, 2007
A tsunami is on the way, does XING even notice? · A social network without open APIs will be just blown away – if not from facebook then somebody else will do. June 22, 2007
I love this slide · Just watching the videos from the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this week. June 1, 2007
Reboot9: i liked the micropresentations · .. its also a fun game, and it is perfect to cram a much information in a slot as possible. I loved it! May 25, 2007
LastFM sketches: a neighbour- centered dashboard · .. felt like photoshopping a bit. Just an experiment, comments appreciated. May 24, 2007
Fyi: this blog is not about… · …christianity, regardless what Google Translate suggests. May 19, 2007
Notable definition of design: simplify, differentiate, innovate · especially this post is worth a bookmark. May 1, 2007
LastFM: where the fun is · I have tried others, like Pandora and iLike, and i must say: LastFM is the champion, Pandora is crap. March 24, 2007
Dan Saffer from Adaptive Path, what exactly does “design” mean? · „Design is like California – nobody is born there.” March 17, 2007
3 reasons why i hate wikis, too · Stowe Boyd picked up a point from Ian Ketcheson who wrote: „Wikis: Am I the only one who gets frustrated?” No! Of course not! We poor enterprise wiki victims, we are all frustrated! And i can tell why, it’s no rocket science: Wikis do not incorporate the time dimension. Any enterprise wiki user knows the problem: there is January 16, 2007
RIP, hlx.com · hlx.com was buried yesterday, time to post some old artwork here before it gets forgotten. Hlx.com was a low cost carrier brand from the „Touristik Union International” corporation (TUI). TUI is the largest tourism company in europe. They now merged their two german low cost airline brands into a new one which is called tuifly.com. Here are December 13, 2006
LeWeb3: hijacked or raped? · It is so sad. Something went completely wrong yesterday. I remember Loic announcing the extra speakers on Monday evening, he said something like every speaker has the same conditions or so, Shimon and Sarkozy will have the same 20 minutes like everyone else. For me it sounded that his intention was honest. So i can’t totally believe what December 12, 2006
Election campaign at LeWeb3 · Man, that was bad. Nicolas Sarkozy, designated french presidential candidate, was giving a 20 minute political monologue. He was talking french, despite he’s fluent in english, it’ said. Must be because of a half dozen TV cameras. He held his speech – an then left. No questions. No talk. David Weinberger sort of hated him. Dieter Rappold has November 2, 2006
3 relevant topics for designing web 2.0 platforms · What are the 3 main topics when talking about a (so-called) web 2.0 service? I collected some thoughts for a talk at CoreMedia recently. Although some days passed by since then, i don’t want to miss posting them here. It’s not rocket science, just a personal view on what should be considered. Most important to me is the discussion September 25, 2006
The new XING · The openBC crew invited me to a blogger workshop today. While i am not a dedicated blogger, this is a great honor! Around 10 people were discussing with Daniela and Lars about the new Logo, the new site design and the corporate weblog. When the new logo leaked public on last weekend, i didn’t understand it really. My first impression September 18, 2006
CoreMedia got a corporate weblog · My employer CoreMedia launched its first corporate weblog today. In fact, it is online since a couple of weeks but we didn’t claim it so far. But now it is public and Sören is starting with a pretty important statement on CoreMedia’s strategy and the relationship between the CMS and DRM product. Thats gonna be interesting to September 6, 2006
Tchibo.de relaunch reviewed · Tchibo.de relaunched today yesterday. They reworked their design for the first time since 2002. To be precisely, the Dusseldorf based agency „argonauten360″ did the new look and feel, at least that what’s the legal notes say. So, who cares? Well, i do. Because it was my design from 2000 and 2002 when i was Art Director at SinnerSchrader. The August 23, 2006
openBC sketches (6) · There has been some enthusiastic commenting on this openBC thread, thanks. This encourages me to complete the series and try to win a one year’s free membership maybe:) How does the business card look like when accessed via google? I think openBC should understand themselves as a platform. All openBC contents – the profiles – are accessible via August 22, 2006
Neighbourhoods would work better than groups in openBC · There is another post from Stowe Boyd about the social dynamics in openBC. I think he is perfectly right: automatically aggregated neighbourhoods (matching interests wants & haves, location etc.) would be useful and would work much better as the current groups. Just another thought- if the algorithm would not only analyze your but also your contact’s profiles August 20, 2006
openBC sketches (5) · Finally, i have got some thoughts for the profile page – the „Business Card 2.0”. Currently, the profile page displays a lot of different „business details” and „contact details”. I think it is a bit confusing because there are too much of them and many users do not fill out every form. I want to display only data fields that August 20, 2006
openBC sketches (4) · This is the last update for the start page for now. It is the last week of the openBC contest and it is time to start with the profile page… I cleaned up the contents and deleted everything not really necessary. The start page focuses now completely on the Premium Membership teaser. I do not think August 16, 2006
Seven years ago · Matt Balara – the guy with the very earliest internet experience of all designers i know, check out this newsgroup post from 1992 – replied to: What were you up to 7 years ago? I can contribute something. That was 14th of August 1999, i just had started working at SinnerSchrader 2 weeks ago. There was a total solar eclipse August 13, 2006
openBC sketches (3) · One more for today. I reduced the header in size and added a bit fancyness by something like a watermark in the background. Its better now, a bit more unique, i think. Work in progress. In the main content area, there are 2 new thoughts. First, some inbound sales effort in the middle. There is a big teaser with openBC’s killer feature August 13, 2006
openBC sketches (2) · It’s not the key task for the contest, but the current logo is painful. It is hard to imagine to do something reasonable without changing it. So i make some quick wins here. There are already some new ideas in the opendesign logo i can reuse. The typeface used for „open” is a Futura bold with a decent negative tracking August 12, 2006
openBC sketches (1) · This is my first draft for the openBC design. What i did is just arranging the contents as i would like them to be and getting rid of all decoration, as far as possible. The layout grid is pretty standard. Logo and navigation stay where they are, there is a meta navigation at the top right containing secondary August 10, 2006
Sketches for the openBC contest · I wonder why there are not more people posting designs for the openBC contest. About 20 submissions a week is not that much considering the 10k Euro – which is not too bad. Maybe, they are all working and submitting in the last week? And still, the desings submitted so far are more variations than great ideas August 6, 2006
Unexpected neighbours in LastFM · „LastFM changed my life”, that’s what Stowe Boyd said. I would not go that far, but in fact my amazon wishlist is growing as well as my expenses in the iTunes store. It’s really fun. Since i am not a musician and don’t know much about music i had always to rely on recommendations by friends. I am not particularily August 5, 2006
OpenBC design contest thoughts · 2 months after reboot and some days after my summer holidays it’s time to check: how is the openBC design contest going? They just announced the second week’s winner. I met some of the openBC crew in copenhagen and saw Bill Liao’s talk there. I liked the openBC people, but i’m still not sure whether the contest June 4, 2006
The reboot8 feedback loop · Back from reboot8. It was an impressive experience like it was last year. Great people, great talks, great atmosphere and well organized. Thank you Thomas and all the others, sincerely. It must have be an awful lot of work. For me the value of the two days in Copenhagen is priceless, and i think most of May 31, 2006
Are Google’s interfaces to be “designed” now? · Douglas Bowman is joining Google as Visual Design Lead. So what? People seem to be thrilled. Om Malik writes: „a likely end to the mishmash, drab and boring user interfaces from Google. Yeah!” This announcement made me click through Bowman’s company website and i stopped at the philosopy page where he gives a definition of his understanding May 14, 2006
Rethinking designers’ tools: some already do · Derek Powazek wrote an article in A List Apart about the role of writing in interface design. It reads: Calling all designers: learn to write! And he found a great example: Yes, Derek is right. The importance of the written word cannot be underestimated in web interfaces. That will be a part of rethinking designers’ tools. May 13, 2006
Flickr tags could be more useful using taxonomies · Flickr is a great site, no doubt about that. Great to share photos with others, brilliant design. But there is one thing that always made me thinking. Flickr often is named as a best practise for the strength of tagging vs the weaknesses of taxonomies. I do not like the way of tagging on flickr. I do not April 29, 2006
The ugly-design-is-most-efficient discussion misses the point · Just stumbled on a couple of not very fresh posts about the role of anti-marketing design, as Scoble calls it. His conclusion: The „ugliest designs” seem to make the best profit on the net. Or the other way round: some sites are simply too pretty. Of course there are a lot of so called Elite Designers shouting April 25, 2006
Thinking about design patterns for tagging · As tagging is a relatively new phenomenon, it is not surprising that there is not much existing literature yet. But when i was googling yesterday for tagging pattern design it was disappointing though. I didn’t find a collection of examples how adding/removing of tags and other metadata should be designed. So i have to start by myself? delicious is the April 6, 2006
New Vodafone in 3D and with a new typeface · The fontblog people spotted the new vodafone logo on the german Vodafone site first. It’s not yet rolled out on all sites, but this will come soon. Why do people – even designers – always complain about new logo designs? I see a clear improvement, it is smarter, smoother, better in typograpy and consequently a screen logo because of March 29, 2006
Very useful logo database · Brandsofheworld.com is something very cool and useful, a huge logo database, all vector files. Nevermore having to browse endless through press pages on websites. „The primary use of site is to enable designers to access vector-forms of the well-known brand-logos that they can use in their presentations, given the permission of the copyright owner.” March 27, 2006
reboot8 coming up! · Last years reboot7 was the most inspiring event i’ve ever been to. I was a bit worried, but now the reboot.dk website is up again and reboot8 is announced. Great! March 19, 2006
BIG is in · From the „Fisher Price School of Design” (Russel Beattie): big.com. It’s not only bigger typography, the search result itself also seems to be simplified, or shortened. Or are there only less results? Anyway, this refers perfecty to my favorite trend in webdesign. Unfortunately, there is another trend when it comes to mobile phones. Playing around February 14, 2006
Impressive interaction demo · Can be found on several blogs, nevertheless very impressive and worth a post: an experimental interaction demo by Jefferson Y. Han, Department of Computer Science, New York University.