How to [visual] design Timeless products?

Hi, There.

Thank you for the warm welcome many of you gave me to your inbox last week. This is the second letter, and this was a tough one precisely because I've to wait an entire week to send this. What would be fun is if you think out loud in a reply back to me.

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How to design Timeless products?

​In the last letter, I talked about "Non-Prescriptive Designs" i.e. designs where the designer doesn't force (read:prescribe) the user into using the product a certain way. Such designs honor the fact that if a tool can be used a certain way, it will be. Hence, rationally it is best to stay out of a user's way like how they mostly do on Twitter, and not commit the mistakes made at Facebook. (obvious, but explained in last letter.) Such an approach tend to create products that are happily used more and for much longer. I can bet that Twitter will still be widely used in 2040, but I am very skeptical about Facebook to stay relevant for more than a decade.

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Now to shift gears a little bit, I want to talk about how to create designs that are aesthetically timeless. The answer is actually deceptively simple: "Ensure that the design doesn't have any element that directly connects it to a trend or an era." A way of doing this is minimalism where you visually eliminate everything but the essential elements and then make it aesthetically (for the lack of a better term) nuetral. Example to this are apps that are completely Black-&-White (grayscale) like the note-taking app Notion. But then Notion goes a step further doing something ingenious:

Almost every icon in the app is replaced by an emoji. This not only unifies the UI with the emojis a user chooses to denote their custom elements, but also directly connects these to the zeitgeist which, in a way, automatically updates these emojis just like the default font in any period. Notion is a black and white software where both the icons and the fonts are filled by culture. This makes Notion as timeless as a notebook by being as "empty" as one.

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Original Essay

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But perhaps, a greater feat in timelessness was achieved by the designers at Apple. Their iMac, in it's current form, has lasted for almost a decade and still manages to look more modern than any computer out there. And they achieved this timelessness by making sure none of the technological limitations show up in the design. Technology that is limited today, won't be so tomorrow.

I've unpackaged this in a short essay called How to design Timeless aesthetics : the iMac.​

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Curations

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I believe "Things that stand the test of time point us towards deeper truths of who we are."

We turn to experts to tell us the most important truths, but NNTaleb asks: "Who is the real expert? Who decides on who is and who is not expert? Where is the metaexpert? Time it is. Or, rather, Lindy."

​An Expert called Lindy​

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Art Appreciation

Perhaps, one of the most interesting things you can take up to study is how different products (or rather, mediums) lead to creation of different artforms. Here's Evan Puschak from Nerdwriter appreciating how YouTube created a rather intricate art-form called Vlogging : What you don't See​

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That's it for today. It's ironical that the first few letters tend to feature some of the best ideas one has ever come across and yet these are the ones that are seen by the least number of people. It makes me want to request you to think hard about who might enjoy this newsletter, and send it to them.
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Just copy this link: https://www.abhishek1point0.com/newsletter​
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Talk soon,
Abhishek.
​abhishek1point0.com​

PS. I've designed a "non-prescriptive" curation platform called Project MEMEX. I am currently looking for people who will like to incisively review designs and/or work with me to build the product. I am immediately looking for a Technical Co-founder.

1. Check out the Free Email Course: "How to Productively Consume Information Online"​
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2. Manifesto for my software product: "Project MEMEX Manifesto"​
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3. ​My Website.​

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