Designer collaboration with brands
I have a couple of great designer collaboration profiles. The first designer collaboration is Susan Kare. Kare reflects on how she started at Apple and her work on designing the graphic elements of the original Macintosh operating system.
Her work as a designer collaboration with Apple’s engineering team, still echoes down through Apple lore and in the work of user experience (UX) specialists to this day
A second interview on Sarah’s designer collaboration with the Mac development team is equally illuminating.
Nike produced documentary on Tom Sachs on his relationship with Nike, the eventual designer collaboration on the Mars Yard series of shoes and the development of Nike Common Craft series of shoes. The childhood joy of the project Apollo era space programme shines through in Sachs’ thinking.
Manga Video
Andy Frain and an oral history of Manga Video, which as the video company responsible for my love of anime as an art form. Akira, Fist of The North Star, Legend of the Overfield and Ghost In The Shell were all out on video from Manga Video.
The philosophy of AI opportunity
Ben Thompson on the philosophy of different technology firms and their approach to AI. The commentary on both Apple and Google are fascinating, in particular the discussion about vintage Google’s ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button.
Contrast Ben Thompson’s video with Benedict Evans on AI. I like the idea of Benedict’s that ‘AI’ is effectively a synonym for ‘magic’.
Marketing effectiveness
The Media Leader had a great interview with Les Binet at Cannes Festival of Creativity. The result is 27 minutes of marketing effectiveness gold.
Andy Hertzfeld smartphone demo
Andy Hertzfeld is famous amongst the veteran Apple Mac community for being the software architect who built most of the key parts of the original Macintosh operating system. Hertzfeld’s business card at Apple was ‘Software wizard’ – so can be partly to blame for all those people who had wizard, guru and ninja in their LinkedIn job title decades later. After Apple, Hertzfeld went on to found three companies:
- Radius who made Mac accessories from monitors to high end video cards
- General Magic who designed productivity devices and software that were the ancestors of PDAs (personal digital assistants), smartphones and tablets. It then pivoted to voice based computing that supported General Motors OnStar system. General Magic got so much right about technology but was far too early and featured in its own documentary on what went right and wrong.
- Eazel who developed the Nautilus file system for Linux, which preceded the use of cloud computing storage like Google Drive and Box.net.
Hertzfeld captured the most complete version of the Apple Mac’s history in his blog folklore.org and the accompanying book Revolution in the Valley.
This smartphone prototype demo comes from his time at General Magic, was recorded in 1995.