↪ What Every Hardware Startup Should Know About the Electronic Component Landscape
Great advice from the Octopart folks. Their search engine is also worth bookmarking as a reference for any electronic project you might be sourcing.
I’m joined by Andrew Kim, a good friend and one of my favorite young designers. Together we discuss the importance of harmony and attention to detail in design.
You might know Andrew from his branding exercise redesigning Microsoft. This 3-day project garnered remarkable traction online and eventually helped him land a job designing hardware at Xbox. Microsoft recently profiled Andrew shining a spotlight on some of his earliest work, including the Ecocoke project, and how it has flowed into his excellent blog Minimally Minimal and recently, 90°, his book on knolling.
One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Andrew is his keen sense of observation. Spend a few minutes reading his blog and you’ll begin to understand how he visually deconstructs a product into lines, shapes and colors, the sum of which can be called form language.
Why is form language important? Our conversation was a reminder that participating in mass production is a responsibility to create elegant, harmonious designs that contribute to society, rather than add to the cacophony.
↪ Winamp shuts down
Before I knew the words “industrial design” or “UI” even existed, I loved making skins for Winamp and various other applications (my 2004 skin, Impulse, still shows up on their site). It was a fun, approachable way to create functional pieces of art, and in retrospect taught me a lot about creating a product from start to finish. It was exciting to make something in my bedroom that hundreds of thousands of people around the world would use.
It’s sad to see Winamp go. The company had a great sense of humor and an inspiring indie culture that was gradually crushed after its acquisition by AOL. Sadder to me, is that I can’t think of today’s equivalent, a widespread and useful app that encourages its users to tinker and easily modify the interface.
↪ FiftyThree Pencil Stylus
There’s something wonderful about marrying natural materials and electronics. FiftyThree has beautifully translated its sense of intuitive design into hardware. I can’t wait to try this stylus, but until the response rate on tablet displays drastically improves I’ll continue reach for good old pen and paper.
↪ J Mays retires
A legend in the industrial design world, a fellow Art Center alum, retiring after a 33-year career in automotive design. My favorite design of his remains the New Beetle which I always found wonderfully geometric and a courageous update to one of the all-time classics.
↪ Shipwire acquired by Ingram Micro
Since my conversation with Studio Neat in which we discussed our experiences with it, Shipwire has been acquired by Ingram Micro. Shipwire powers fulfillment for numerous Kickstarter-backed projects, including Studio Neat’s and much of what we ship at Lumi.
People have asked me how this will affect their service but I can’t give a firm answer. It’s too early to tell whether the founders see this as a well-deserved exit or an opportunity to do more.
It’s important to remember that Shipwire is first and foremost a software company. As far as I can tell, they do not own any of the warehouses. Rather they provide software for them and a front-end that connects to popular e-commerce platforms such as Shopify. The brilliance of their design is making it all feel vertically integrated, and building their own customer service that relays issues to the warehouses. They understand the opportunity in serving tech-savvy small businesses.
Shipwire is the best I’ve seen when it comes to providing a simple front-end UI that doesn’t require a logistics background to grasp. It can’t be overstated how big of a deal that is in the fulfillment industry. This is where I get concerned about the acquisition.
I hadn’t heard about Ingram Micro, but from what I can dig up, their focus has typically been on the enterprise market, as a technology provider. I worry that this will gradually drive the Shipwire experience towards increasing complexity and horizontal integration.
That being said, Shipwire has had its own growing pains. The fact that their customer service staff filters issues before they reach the warehouse is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand it makes the user experience friendlier and more seamless, on the other it means their staff is less close to the metal and has a difficult time avoiding preventable issues.
My hope is to see Shipwire use its new resources to continue simplifying logistics and continue vertically integrating by increasing its presence on the ground in warehouses. Wait and see.
↪ Draft: From Zero to Kickstarter in $5K
The folks behind Draft (a notebook subscription and digitizing service) explain the process of launching their first Kickstarter campaign. I thought the brief they created for their app provides particularly useful insight for anyone who hasn’t written that type of document before.
And now for something completely different.
I’ve been kicking around ideas for a new blog for almost two years, never quite landing on something solid, and last week it finally dawned on me that I’d been working towards it all along.
Over the past month I attended two fantastic events: the second edition of XOXO in Portland and my first experience at Brooklyn Beta. It was such a thrill to be in the presence of like-minded thinkers and creators. For the longest time Jesse and I flew by the seat of our pants building Lumi. Our first Kickstarter campaign, back in 2009 was a stab in the dark. Many of the tools and software platforms we used to launch the business were brand new. There was no blueprint to follow.
Yet meeting fellow creators in Portland and Brooklyn, it became obvious that we all chose to follow a similar path. It simply made common sense. Reading Chris Anderson’s book “Makers” last year, I felt he had crystallized this new way to build modern products and launch creative ideas. It made me feel a lot less crazy—in a good way.
Throughout my work at Lumi, I’ve never stopped being involved in product strategy and industrial design. Jesse and I have often taken to platforms such as Skillshare and Google Hangouts to share our experience of using Kickstarter and building Lumi. We’ve advised project creators, and have been deeply involved in the product design stage (soon I’ll be able to announce a couple big new projects).
But after a few great conversations with Andy Baio, Barton Smith and Rusty Meadows, it occurred to me: I could be doing a whole lot more to help independent creators gain a foothold in hardware and physical products.
There are a lot of great things already in motion. Pioneers like Studio Neat and MNML, or projects such as Pebble, OUYA, MYO, Oculus Rift, Lockitron and many more. We’re living in an age where almost anyone with a good idea and enough moxie can build a product and take it to market. But by the same token, people are now approaching it from radically different backgrounds: inventors, designers, developers, engineers, entrepreneurs… and many who simply have a passion and a problem they’re eager to solve.
This is where the rubber meets the road. If you want to take on a big new project, especially one that concerns making physical goods, you better be ready to learn. None of it is easy. Prototyping, raising money, manufacturing, marketing, shipping. It’s all hard stuff.
My goal for Edgemade is to invite you in diving deep into the next Industrial Revolution, provide you insight into the successes and failures of this burgeoning movement, and continue to practice its values. In addition to the blog, the first episode of its companion podcast, You Can’t Eat Bits For Breakfast launches today. I hope you’ll join me!