Objectified

Tonight I revisited Gary Hustwit's film, Objectified. One of the interesting things that a few of the designers mentioned was the fact that people often notice bad design more than they notice good design. With this in mind I couldn't help but notice that for a movie about design, this film made some very poor design choices. It was nearly impossible to read some of the designers' names as well as some of the subtitles. If one of the main goals of design is communicating shouldn't we at least be able to read the words that are doing that communicating? In this way the design of the text in this movie does a great deal to detract from the content of the film.

Screen shot from Objectified. Text recedes into the background.

Some of the best desinged objects are those that dont apear to have been designed at all. The design is so well integrated into form and function of the object that acording to Apple designer, Jonathan Ive, people may think to them selves "...of course it's that way, why would it be any other way..." With resepect to the iPhone the design is so well integrated into the function of the phone that you may not really think about it. The thing that people will notice is the software and how they interact with it.

Apple iPhone

With all the technology available to us we often take it for granted until it fails to perform seamlessly. When pulling up Objectified on my television through Netflix's instant function for Nintendo Wii, I was instantly frustrated by the interface. While it was an innovative concept, it was different enough from everything else that I am used to working with that I was not intuitively able to navigate it. While I do apreciate good design, I find myself more often than not asking why things are designed so poorly.