Rare Ancient Engineering Joke Spotted in the Wild (on Shareaholic):

A priest, a lawyer and an engineer are about to be guillotined.

The priest puts his head on the block, they pull the rope and nothing happens — he declares that he’s been saved by divine intervention, so he’s let go.

The lawyer is put on the block, and again the rope doesn’t release the blade. He claims he can’t be executed twice for the same crime and he is set free too.

They grab the engineer and shove his head into the guillotine, he looks up at the release mechanism and says, “Wait a minute, I see your problem….”

So exactly how far has phone design has moved on in 35 years?

Oh boy… want a Friday 13th treat? Check out the Bell Company’s “so groovy it hurts” promo video of 1977 to see some really super examples of phone design. I mean, come on – what boss man in tight-assed flares wouldn’t want a Chestphone in a flip top leather box – perhaps purposefully placed near their ram horns, errr, (h)ornament of power?

Yeah. Does it for me. Get with it man:

In contrast the following picture reminds us what the phone marketing people think our world should look like today.

My how things change – where are the Ram Horns for starters?!

It takes two to tango… we’re all “made up” about this… ok that’s enough of the puns.

Did you know that Tangerine Tango (lovely red orange) is Pantone’s colour of the year AND coincidentally the new Realise brand colour. If you’ve looked at the Realise Product Design case studieslately, then you’ll know we have a passing interest in the design of cosmetics products. And of course, being designers we’re dealing daily with colour specification systems such as Pantone. Which is why we’re tickled tangerine by the new collaboration of Pantone and Sephora to create a range of cosmetics based around this orangey red colour we’ve come to so admire.

Normally more involved in specifying cap threads, working out switch mechanisms or styling the shape of the bottle – we’ve no idea if this is any good as makeup (honest!). We’ll defer in fact the knowledge of NYLON magazine on the subject who say:

Revolving entirely around Pantone’s 2012 Color of the Year, Tangerine Tango, the new collection showcases the bright reddish orange hue in a surprisingly wearable way. Boasting everything from a “Day to Night” luminous eyeliner to several creamy coral lipsticks, the range mixes a dose of ’60s mod zest with a dash of tropical sunset luster. But in case you fear the citrusy shade will clash with your complexion, there’s also a ton of colored makeup brushes and tools to get you in the tangerine spirit.

O K. Sounds good to us… here’s some funky pictures featuring our favourite colour. Go for your life!

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We discovered these images thanks to TAXI’s article: PANTONE Creates Makeup Line

Check this out. We’ve all heard of aurora’s, some of us may even have been lucky enough to see them. One of our clients spent time in Alaska last year, watching an aurora reflected in a still lake. However what about watching one happening below your feet. Have a look at this amazing view of Spaceship Earth:

This is not strictly a post about product design. But we think you need to see this incredible film that gives us an otherworldy, almost god-like view of perhaps the most colourful and extraordinary human expression on the planet – the Brazilian Rio Carnival. Watch and feast. Then tell us how this makes you feel…

The City of Samba from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

We have to thank our friends and branding speciaists at James Good for bringing this loveliness to our attention!

Have you had to choose a primary school for your first child? It’s a big step, which as a parent I found very daunting. Funny how how things can turn out though…

Back in 2008 it was time for our eldest son to start school.  We’d visited 3 local schools, none of which had really inspired us. It was only when researching one of these on the Ofsted website that I stumbled across Britford Primary School. Here was a friendly village school, with small class sizes and a progressive approach to teaching – within walking distance of the city! Visiting, we were immediately were struck by how happy, POLITE and enthusiastic the children were. The way all ages mix gave it a real family atmosphere. We could tell immediately our son felt more comfortable there.

Despite these qualities, the school was so unknown locally that it was under-subscribed. In 2010 I decided to become a parent governor partly to see what I could do about this.  At the time the school was having to decide whether to merge with an even smaller village school nearby that was struggling to survive. They chose to merge.

Seeing as it’s my day job, I thought it would be rude not to help with the rebranding. We renamed the school Longford, after the local estate that borders both sites. And we volunteered to run a branding workshop with the children and develop the new identity. You can read more about the new school branding here.

Having helped everyone focus on what they valued about their school and convey this in the branding – next we needed the website and prospectus to reflect this to possible new parents.

Having researched a number of primary school websites I realised that most of them are shockingly bad! They’re usually a muddle of messages, in a confusing structure littered with supposedly “cute” childish icons and rubbish images. Most of them have no concept of what their brand is about or how to sell their vision to parents searching for their child’s first school. Excellent, this meant that Longford with all it’s strengths had a chance to shine!

For example… wow, how about this for a example of a typical primary school website (where do you look?):

Helping Longford create a new website was interesting… firstly because I had first-hand experience of what a prospective parent would be looking for. Secondly as a voluntary project I knew I had to carefully consider the best use of my time. Despite the temptation to sling up a WordPress site and get designing, I had to force myself to stick to strategy, write a strong brief and find the right people to implement it for us.

Looking for web coders we decided to use e4Education as they are well versed in this market, provide a good tailored content management system with potential to scale up (if the school wanted to use it as a learning platform for instance). But most importantly they provided good quality design at a reasonable price. It was a very close run thing with another company who were probably better designers, but given the state of the competing websites, I judged we didn’t need to throw the most expensive design guns at this!

By now our family was in the throes of moving to Bath, so I was very lucky to find a great volunteer in Parent Governor Rebecca Cox, to take over managing the rest of the site build.

So I am delighted to say that e4Education and Rebecca have delivered on the brief… The new Longford Primary School website has gone live today! Have we done a good job? Would this persuade you to go and view the school? Please do let us know what you think.

And don’t forget, Realise can help companies improve their branding as well as schools!

Merry Christmas Everyone…

Thank you all for reading this year. Oh and nearly forgot to say, lots more news coming in 2012. We’re moving to Bath next week for starters!

Have a good one

Andrew, Ali, Gary, Ed

When you hear terms “Product Design” and “Design Engineering”, do you think of these as two separate services, or really as one activity?

The reason we ask is we’re rewriting our website to make the product design process clearer to real humans. We’ve seen other design agencies offering “Product design” and “Engineering” as separate services on their websites. We’re a bit confused by this, because under “engineering” they list things like “3D CAD”, “Structural Simulation”, “Design for manufacture” etc. As engineers ourselves, we just see this as things we do during the product design process. It seems a bit odd to us to split these out as something different, because that suggests Product Design is just the sketchy front end concept part.

What do you think? Are they right? Does this fit with your understanding of what we do, and it will be clearer if we split what we do into two separate services, being:

Creative Product Design:

• Product Design Briefing
• Concept Design Sketching
• Modelling & Mock Ups
• Design Development
• 3D CAD
• Visualisation

Design Engineering

• Product Design Specification
• Detailed Design Engineering
• CAD Based Simulation & Verification
• Material, texture, colour and finish selection & specification
• Design for Manufacture
• Manufacturing Documentation
• Supplier selection and production handover

Any feedback on this would be a massive help – clarity is part of our mission in life!

Thank you!