In this post I discuss a simple heuristic that I have found useful when designing things.
When I first started using CAD I was amazed by their lack of usability. All the parametric modelling programs I tried felt like relics with bolted on features that made little intuitive sense. The result was that modelling became a drag.
This changed as I discovered Fusion 360.
There is no point in me going over why this is happening. We all use touchscreens and know the ways in which they are awesome. What I would like to spend a second talking about is what we are loosing as we switch to the glass interface.
In this post I go over some high level concepts that will help you create photorealistic product renderings.
The ability to focus is becoming rare With the arrival of the digital age our attention spans have dropped significantly. If inspecting our surroundings is not sufficient to convince us of that, we can look to relevant research. One eye-catching study done by Microsoft determined that the average attention span had dropped from 12 to…
Letting users customize various aspects of their products has progressively become a more common practice. Consumers today often get to choose a multitude of product traits, such as colour, size, texture and tech-specs. Despite all of the great things about customization there are some problems that can appear if implemented incorrectly.
Unfortunately for us product designers our occupation and what it entails, is still a mystery to many. I find the confusion about what we do very understandable as I myself have long struggled with defining what we do.
So what effect does a designer’s beliefs have on the output he produces? First of the beliefs will guide the multitude of choices that need to be made in order to get to the final result. This means that if he is true to his values the product will reflect how the designer thinks about the world and perhaps most importantly how he thinks about the users of his product.