Michael Roller

My Favorite Things: An Analysis, Part One

I’ve posted a lot about the importance of understanding one’s personal design aesthetic. Selecting my favorite examples of design has been a good starting point. More importantly, I need to know why I like them and what similarities they share in order to evaluate project work and give design direction.

To further understand my aesthetic compass, I’ve populated a series of scales with my favorite car, chair, light, glass, phone, and packaging. The qualities I’ve selected to measure are based on the prominent features of the individual products. I’m interested to see which of these qualities will be shared across multiple products and which may be unique.

Each product shares similar formal and semantic characteristics. In terms of identity, every product looks like other products within it’s category. Vitamin Water is the most familiar product, sharing the same stock bottle as many of other ready-to-drink beverages. Konstantin Grcic’s May Day Lamp is relatively unusual but still has familiar elements like the conical frosted shade. Nearly all the products have simple forms rooted in basic geometry like cylinders, cones, and rectangular boxes.

The products have less in common in terms of formal and emotional details. The products range from the all-business Motofone and Saab 9X to Marcel Wanders’s whimsical martini glass. Although their identities are all relatively familiar, the execution of details varies. The tessellations of Grcic’s Chair One looks unusually uncomfortable (they’re not) but Motorola’s F3 uses a design language created years ago with the release of the Razr.

1 Comment to My Favorite Things: An Analysis, Part One

1. [...] onto a series of scales based on the prominent aspects of each product. This is part two, click here if you want to read part [...]
My Favorite Things: An Analysis, Part Two | Michael Roller on October 19th, 2008

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