the Designer Pages blog

After a very busy summer, we have a lot of updates coming to our users the next couple of weeks, beginning with today, August 28, 2010. Starting at 3pm EST, we’ll be taking the site down while we deploy these updates. DesignerPages.com will be back online no later than Sunday morning, August 29, 2010. What’s new? 3rings has been redesigned from the ground up, and product detail pages have a totally new look.

3rings

3rings has really come a long way since first launching in early 2009. To date, 1,864 articles have been published by 19 contributors, with 3,255 comments. We’ve explored various article formats and mediums, featuring product trends in a wide array of industry segments: contract, residential, kitchen and bath, lighting, surfaces, and green. And after a lot of dabbling here and there, we’re confident that the new 3rings will deliver all this content to you better than ever before.

Specifically, our readers have asked for bigger images, and now you’ll have them. Each article has a Twitter and Like button so readers can easily share content with their favorite social communities; at the bottom of each article you’ll see even more share buttons for Stumble Upon, Digg, Reddit, Bebo, Technorati, and more. In the same spirit of being more social, commenting is now powered entirely by Disqus, so you can see comments across other web publications that have been posted by our 3rings readers.

Last but not least, videos will be clearly marked and easier to find. This is probably one of the most meaningful updates in my view, being that we’ll be investing in more and more video work each week. You can expect to see weekly video showroom tours and regular video interviews with your favorite product designers. In the mean time, here’s our most popular video to date - Live at Design Miami: Wouter Scheublin’s Walking Table - recently averaging 100k+ plays per week.

Product Detail

As for the DesignerPages.com product detail page, this initial update is the first of many deploys to come. Up until now, products on DesignerPages.com have really only been about information provided by manufacturers. And that’s still meant to be a major piece of the puzzle. But moving forward, we’d like to think of products as the subject of a story (it’s okay for you to begin conjuring up your favorite Disney fairytale protagonists). In that regard, we need to serve as storytellers to help communicate the narrative. What you’ll see launch tonight or tomorrow, is the base for this new approach, the book cover if you will.

Perhaps the first tactical example of storytelling, which will go live with this new update, is the “Featured in these Collections” module on product detail pages. For those not familiar, we’ve been developing a feature/program somewhat in hiding, Collections, which are public groupings of products curated by community members. Collections may be groupings of products for a project, a concept, a trend, a fascination, anything really. On point, we’re finally bringing Collections more to the foreground so as you’re looking at a particular product, you can see what Collection(s) it’s already been added to. Here are some examples of products that are already included in Collections: Fat Sofa, Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman, and Waterfall Clear Patterned Glass. Note: Collections are still in beta, so if you’d like to be a curator, please email us at info@designerpages.com.

Other updates, we’ve included share buttons, so you can email products to friends, post products to your Facebook wall, or post products to Twitter. We really want to help catalyze more user-generated publishing in this industry, in particular, content about products of course. In the next couple of weeks, we’ll begin to aggregate these Facebook and Twitter posts to display on the product detail pages so our community can quickly find this wide commentary, but that’s a horse of a different color (or at least a blog post of its own that I’ll write in September).

And probably the biggest update, at least feature wise, My [Saved] Products is no more. We decided that “Save Product” and “Add to Workspace” were really too similar to maintain as separate features. So for all of you that have previously saved products, we’ve created a workspace for you named Saved Products and have moved all past saved products into that workspace. Moving forward, if you want to save products, you’ll have to save to a workspace. Again, you can create as many workspaces as you want, and best of all, you can share workspaces with colleagues, friends, everyone and anyone. If you have any specific questions regarding this feature update, feel free to email Avi (avi@designerpages.com) or me (jacob@designerpages.com). We’re here to save the day.

That’s all for now. Happy product hunting. Enjoy the end of Summer.

The medium is the message is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. Wikipedia

This past weekend I went to Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum for Why Design Now? - the fourth installation in the National Design Triennial exhibition series launched by Cooper-Hewitt in 2000.

From improving access to safe drinking water for underserved people, generating renewable energy through sun and ocean waves, and offering low-cost corrective eyewear to underserved patients to proposing a post-petroleum urban utopia–Why Design Now? is chalk-full of big ideas that address big problems. These products, prototypes, buildings, landscapes, messages, and more address social and environmental challenges in contemporary society.

So why am I disappointed? The medium and the message don’t mesh. These innovative ideas are presented in outdated formats that can’t properly convey the importance of the work. The way a Monet is displayed at the Met isn’t appropriate for any of the work in this exhibition.

New media needs new media. An object that’s important for dynamic and adaptive nature isn’t going to be well-received in a static format. The power of a communication tool (such as twitter) won’t be ‘communicated’ on a small (non-interactive) screen. I’ll spare you the infinite examples of how I believe Cooper Hewitt failed in terms of presentation and just say that for an exhibition on innovation and contemporary culture, I expected a presentation format that conveyed this mentality.

When it comes to showing noteworthy design: show why it’s awesome; show how it works. If standard museum layouts don’t do the trick, try something new. It’s the most sustainable exhibition in the museum’s history, according to the website. But it’s not teaching and inspiring in the way that it should.

Our newsletters have been growing rapidly—which is awesome! Given the tremendous interest readers expressed in segments, we redesigned the newsletter structure and layout to provide you with more targeted content.

Here’s the glitch. Upgrading our newsletters may have accidentally resubscribed readers who have previously unsubscribed. If you’re one of these people, our sincerest apologies. While we’re in the process of fixing this mess, we can’t subscribe you to our newsletters on an individual basis. This means that you can either receive all newsletters (5 per week) … or none. We know this is unfortunate - but hope you opt for the former while we fix this mess

Here’s the fix. It will take us two weeks, but once it’s fixed – we promise it will be worth the wait. You’ll have an easy to use newsletter manage page where you can sign up for the newsletters you want, however often you want them. Easy, fine-grained control of segments so that you receive only the content that’s interesting to you! If you love lighting but couldn’t care less about surface trends, that’s cool with us. If you only want to hear about Green Trends on a bi-weekly basis, that’s how often we’ll send it.Why aren’t we stopping these emails all together in the interim? They’re valuable to people. We won’t deny 50k other readers content that makes their jobs easier and lives happier because a small percentage of readers are annoyed. Simple cost/benefit ratio.

If you want to unsubscribe forever–please do so in both boxes below. This will ensure that in 3 weeks, when the fix is deployed, you won’t start receiving the new ones.

If you don’t unsubscribe–leave a comment with your twitter handle and we’ll tell our 7k twitter followers how patient and awesome you’ve been.

Either way–you can publicly berade us by leaving a really nasty comment below.At the end of the day, let’s put things in perspective. We know how annoying unwanted email is. But it isn’t like we just dumped a gazillion gallons of oil into the gulf…right?