"I don't remember being forced to accept compromises, but I've willingly accepted constraints." - Charles Eames
How can I tell if someone is going to be a good strategic thinker?
To me, the shining example of how brand experience and technology intersect is Apple.
For decades we've all talked about The Big Idea. It has become half Holy Grail and half Sacred Cow.
Your brand is your reputation. If you are in business, you have a customer, who has an opinion.
Games are changing the TV landscape by altering distribution platforms, content programming and, finally, production environments.
We need to know what we're good at and what we're not good at - and we need to be honest about our limitations.
A recent family vacation presented me with a great allegory of business life.
Corporations (as well as schools) have too long shunned games as learning tools.
While distribution platforms are getting morphed by games consoles, the games themselves are becoming a source of programming for TV.
People are willing to go through the dark, dangerous cave, fighting monsters and digging through the dirt just to find the gold.
One of the more obscure and, in my opinion, underutilized shortcuts in Firefox is something called a Quick Search.
All signs are pointing in the same direction, and that direction is towards a substantial spending shift in advertising towards interactive media.
What makes brand extensions into virtual worlds a success or a failure? Part 1: less successful examples of consumer brands.
As we've learned from Apple's lead, building smart applications is good, but making them work with one another is better.
Americans love their cars. So what would it take for people to actually get rid of their vehicle?
One of the problems with basic XHTML markup is its inherent lack of meaning.
Second, Chindogu, if you don't know, is the Japanese art of the "unuseless." It is the ultimate in Not Form Over Not Function.
Luxury branding is the art of aspiration and escapism, and as such, the emotional impact of the brand in all of its manifestations is crucial.
A start-up (read: you) can't afford to wait until after its product launches to get to know its customers.
The MFA in me thinks about outsider art, primitivism and the artist's mark. The designer in me thinks about Postscript and TrueType.
Your phone is now your credit card and your cashier.
One of our unique challenges is to find ways to engage the audiences of our design more deeply in the process of our design.
What makes brand extensions into virtual worlds a success or a failure? Part 3: b2b brands.
Make sure you understand your user (or in the case of brand, your customer). This means listening to them in order to learn their motivations and desires.
We hope that it helps you understand who we are as a firm, what we might be able to do for you as a client, how we work, what we are like to work with and what it's like to work at Method.
In the end I have to wonder, whose opinion really matters?
How important is the actual path that a project team takes in order to get to the big "Ah-Ha" moment during a project?
If at the heart of design is the endeavor to solve a problem, then in theory, there are as many opportunities for design as there problems to solve.
Google and amazon are playing a vital role in leveraging their massive datacenter infrastructures and providing access to these resources to individuals and software startups.
I will tell you without hesitation that interactive TV (iTV) is here today - we've just been looking at the wrong boxes.
The oldest Method-designed websites still live on the Web.
In our current world of un-conferences, regular meet-ups, and foo-camps, I easily forget about how unidirectional traditional conferences can be.
Many of today's top companies are so fixated on their competition that they forget to focus on their single most important competitive advantage: their strengths.
In the web environment, the ability for a company to increase its findability in search engines is key.
Among my favorite things is getting to see good people win. It was an absolutely wonderful experience to be with Avner and Dave from boxee earlier this week at CES iStage.
What makes brand extensions into virtual worlds a success or a failure? Part 2: successful examples of consumer brands.
Our friends at boxee just closed their Series A funding round. This is an accomplishment in any market at any time. In the current market, it's a clear sign that boxee is on to something powerful.
It may sound entirely self-evident - "focus on the brand, stupid" - but I'm increasingly thinking that proposition is flawed, or at least in need of some retrofit.
In addition to great picture and sound the next generation of Blu-ray disc players have something that is just starting to come into focus: network connectivitiy.
