...But consequent to which last detail?

Do you like guessing games? I do. Here’s a fun one: let’s see if you can guess what this partially-obscured icon might be:

Part of a pair of scissors? A teapot? Volume control? Could be anything, huh? Let’s try another…

Care to take a stab at it? No? Too hard? OK, I’ll make life easier for you: let’s send our iPhones back in time and take a look at Thing 1 again, this time through the design language of iOS 6…

And Thing 2…

That’s better. You can actually tell what these two icons are now. Why? Because the original iOS designers had a key insight that for some reason the iOS 7 team found unpalatable: sometimes it’s the details that make an object recognizable, not the abstracted aggregate.

Let’s take a look at a real-life pair of spectacles…

Ah, do you see what I did there? That corner section, that one little detail, is the kind of shape that makes a pair of glasses look like a pair of glasses. Two connected discs with arms either side just isn’t the same: in purely topological terms, you probably won’t see such a configuration anywhere other than pairs of glasses, but I’d argue that’s not the point: the perfectly round circles of the iOS 7 reading glasses won’t indulge you with the confirmation you’d need that, yes, you are indeed looking at a pair of spectacles. Conversely, the classic shape you see in the Ray-Bans above is so distinctive that even without anything else to look at, you’d know right away that you’re looking at eyeglasses. Circles, arcs and rectangles: you’ll see those anywhere. But that shape... could only be eyeglasses.

I really think that Apple dropped the ball with the iOS 7 look. The garish gradients and lack of affordances I could drone on about some other time, but on icon design, I want to take a moment to question what the company was thinking.

Judging by appearances, it was thinking this:

Each icon should be reduced to its minimal topological form, then represented as an outline of unvarying thickness.

Why it should think that, I couldn’t comment, save to say that I think it’s misguided. Not just aesthetically misguided, but philosophically misguided. While the company has long been famed for its dedication to design purity, underlying it all, historically, had been a strong focus on customer experience. But the iOS 7 graphic design principles seem to me more focused on pursuing purity for its own sake than for end users’ benefit. Where conflicts arose between suitability and adherence to the rules, it seems to be the former that got thrown under the bus each time, regardless of how arbitrary the latter may have been.

Hence we ended up with icons that look like bifurcated love-hearts...

...that previously looked like books.

Going out on a limb here, perhaps this is the expected result of an industrial designer being given oversight of graphic design, as famously happened for iOS 7? I’m bearing in mind the famous Rams commandment that good design be consequent to the very last detail, and wondering if it could stir up an interesting conflict: what’s consequential for the usability of an object may have little overlap with what’s consequential to how the object might be recognized.

Consider the humble occlupanid for example: the puritan industrial designer would perceive the distal and proximal palps to be nothing more than vestiges of the manufacturing process and would take pains to remove them. The graphic designer, however, charged with drafting an iconic representation of the clip, may regard them as an integral part of its distinctive shape and would want to include them.

To the former, a pair of eyeglasses is a pair of lenses and a frame that connects them to a pair of arms. To the latter, the eyeglasses are a unique set of shapes that distinguishes them from anything else in the geometric lexicon of everyday objects.

iOS 7’s iconography is thus a showcase for how an industrial designer might prefer glasses and books to look, whereas previous versions capture how such objects actually look.

For an easy-to-use UI, I’d choose the latter.

Retail of the future

Walking past the storefront of a local ‘psychic’ this morning gave me an unusual business idea. What if you were to use honesty to gain an advantage in the competitive fortune-telling industry?

Sure, it sounds self-contradictory. Since time immemorial, deception has been the very foundation of the business. Anybody who claims an ability to predict events based on tarot cards, astrology, palm reading, or suchlike is an outright liar. That said, there’s a clear demand. So much so, in fact, that generations of customers have been willing to accept a placebo product in lieu of just accepting fate’s indiscriminate whimsy.

So here’s the idea: throw out the crystal ball, the tarot cards, the Ouija board. Let’s not ask for our palms to be crossed with silver: Visa or Mastercard will do nicely. Give up on the whole mystic shtick and replace the glowing neon pronouncement of “Madame W’zel: Psychic” with a new sign. A professional sign. A trustworthy sign. In the grandest, most upstanding serifs, it will read:

“Marianne Chanceweasel: Speculator”

This revolutionary new concept in retail ­­will give superior comfort to the anxious using the very finest in evidence-based statistical prognostication.

Witness the difference!

Madame W’zel, that girl I was telling you about… I’m still struggling to get her to notice me. What chance the masters of fate have destined us to be happy together?

Ah, son. Affairs of the heart can be among life’s deepest mysteries, and I can see the burden this longing is placing on your tortured, young soul. You’ve certainly come to the right place. Let’s shuffle a deck of cards and force tenuous interpretations on the draw until you’re comforted enough to ensure repeat business.

Reassured? Me neither. Let’s see if we can do better...

Ms Chanceweasel, that girl I was telling you about… I’m still struggling to get her to notice me. What chance the masters of fate have destined us to be happy together?

Well, to look at you, it’s very unlikely she hasn’t noticed you per se. Statistically I might put the odds of attraction at anywhere from twenty to thirty percent; if you wouldn’t mind stepping on the weighing scales just here, that’s great, I should be able to quote with a little more precision. I have to warn you though… in my experience, the very fact that you had to ask gives you less than a 5% hope of turning things in your favor. But, chin up, an hour a day in the gym and your odds could be well into the double-digits.

Did you see what we did there? Specificity in our predictions! Actionable advice! References to historical data! And we never once asked you to swallow any paranormal mumbo jumbo.

And that’s just for starters! At our upcoming drive-thru centers, we can assure you – for under a dollar! – that your careful choice of lottery numbers won’t improve your snowball in hell’s chance, and that your late uncle is not asking us to channel his thoughts from beyond the grave. Our network of coin-operated, fully-automated kiosks are ready to learn all about your dilemmas of career progression, and just can’t wait to tell you how you’ll always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Meanwhile, our fortune cookies bear only the most prescient information on the dangers of overindulging in sugary, fatty, baked snacks.

As competitive advantages go, you’d have to admit… it’ll be hard for the astrologers to stay in the game.

Franchise opportunities available.

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Ever discovered that a word you’ve been hearing forever turns out to mean something different from what you thought?

‘Tosspot’ I always assumed was an alternative for ‘tosser’. It means ‘drunkard’.

‘Enormity’ doesn't mean ‘enormousness’. It can, but specifically regarding atrociousness, immoderation or extreme wickedness.

‘Dastardly’ can mean underhanded, wicked or cruel, but only secondarily. Its primary meaning is ‘cowardly’.

More fool me.

The Gravy Train and the Great Onion-off

Grossly simplified, here’s the process for cooking a British Indian Restaurant curry dish. Having invested heavily in pre-prep, you can follow the five steps below to serve pretty much any dish within ten minutes of it being ordered:

1. Warm some seasoned oil in a wok
2. Add whichever spices are unique to the dish
3. Add pre-cooked meat and/or vegetables
4. Add gravy
5. Reduce

The spices unique to any particular curry are relatively few; it’s the gravy that carries the body of the flavor, and it’s common to every dish. Madras, korma, Bombay aloo… you name it; apart from the rice, onion bhajis and naan bread, that gravy makes up the bulk of pretty much anything you’ll eat. Because it takes hours to make, and gets used up at around 300mL for each and every curry serving, it pays to make it in bulk. My last batch made nearly ten liters, sufficient for 26 curries, and lasted me two months.

But therein lies the problem. I’m still experimenting with how to cook each of the curry dishes, and if I’m tweaking the unique spices that make, say, a madras a madras, but doing nothing to experiment with the gravy, then the tests I’m running could be fairly inconsequential. I need to optimize the gravy, and that means cooking it in smaller batches. And with nearly 20 ingredients used in its preparation (onions, carrots, red and green peppers, cilantro (coriander), tomatoes, garlic, ginger, vegetable oil, water, salt, coriander (powder), cumin, asafetida, curry powder, fenugreek, turmeric, sugar, and sometimes more), there’s a crazy amount of variables to experiment with.

Fortunately, there’s an obvious starting point. As Voigt describes it:

“95% of the base gravy is onions. If you’re ever wondered what gives BIR curry that slightly sweet gravy – it’s onions. If you’ve ever wondered what gives the curry sauce its thickness – it’s onions. If you’ve ever wondered what gave BIR curry that taste – it’s onions.”

So, today’s first step: what kind of onions should I be using? I’m told that the choice of the UK restaurants is Dutch onions, but since they don’t seem to be available here in SF, today I’m just toying with what’s available, splitting the usual 10L batch four ways and pitting off white, yellow, sweet and red onions.

Five hours later, and I’ve got four saucepans of brown gravy. The white onion gravy perhaps has a hint of French onion soup to it; the red onion gravy has a hint of… how would you describe red onions? The yellow onion and sweet onion gravies are pretty similar, the former being (to my surprise) a slightly stronger flavor than the latter.

Bottom line: they all taste like gravy. I’ll have to do a split test when I make my next curries out of them, and perhaps next time I’ll experiment with onion sizes and cooking temperatures/times. But today I don’t feel like I’ve made any great revelations. And my apartment really smells of onions.