"I suddenly understood with great clarity that nothing in life—except
death itself—was ever going to kill me. No meeting could ever go that
badly. No client would ever be that angry. No business error would ever
bring me as close to the brink as I had already been."
– David E. Davis, Jr., on the liberating effects of the automobile accident which almost claimed his life
It seems I’m not the only one enamored of satin finishes.
Rob Poltras of I Love Substance has been tracking this trend for the past year. Check out his portfolio of mattness: Catching Up on Flat Black Hotness
Last weekend, as I tended to my newest market offering’s complex fluidic thermodynamic power systems in the wee hours of the morning, I flipped on the tube and watched more than a few laps of the 24 Hours of Daytona.
A Mazda RX-8 (pictured above) won its class, beating out a gaggle of Porsche 911’s for the honor. In no sense a stock car (see the video at the end of this post for a walkaround this full tube-framed racer), this RX-8 nonetheless points to the future of car design for us civilians: look closely and you’ll notice that the paint isn’t glossy. Instead, the luscious carbon fiber panels on this machine are matte black, or satin if you will. Wax not needed or desired.
We’ve been raised to believe that gloss is good, that shiny equals quality. Those days are over. Hear this now: the cult of the waxed car body is melting, and this RX-8 represents the tipping point. Sure, beating the 911’s at Daytona is a win for the ages, but sporting a matte finish and finishing first — that’s a tipping point. If manufacturing and repair (how do you buff out a matte finish?) issues can be solved, I think we’ll start to see a lot of matte paint jobs rolling around. And a lot of them will likely be dirt-shedding nano particle finishes. Even cooler. We’ve already see matte paint on show cars from BMW and Lamborghini.
Matte is the New Black.
Here’s a video of the Daytona-winning RX-8 from the driver’s seat (oh, the wail of a rotary motor!):
And here’s an extra treat in the form of a most gnarly walkaround the car in the presence of race Nick Ham. Check out the paint (shown to best effect toward the end of the video):
Here’s a fantastic Director’s Commentary for gearheads. Honda’s Bradley Buchanan takes us through all the design work that went in to the creation of an Odyssey that hauls at both ends.
What a sound this thing makes! And how it hunkers! It has all the gravitas of a hairy-armed first-generation Porsche 911 Turbo.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: there’s a market out there for vans that pack the punch and handling of a BMW 535i. People in my demographic and psychographic could easily absorb 10,000 of these a year in North America alone. I’d buy one in a second, especially if it were powered by a turbodiesel.
Space is the ultimate luxury.
Space coupled with warp-speed performance? Well, that’s nirvana. Honda, are you listening?
Yeah, I dig the MacBook Air, too, but Apple’s big announcement of January 15th pales in comparison with big news coming out of metacool today: I’m very proud to announce that today we shipped yet another fantastic offering to market. It’s much cooler than that other thing.
Coming from the same corporate gene pool, as it were, very little distinguishes this version from that of our last announcement in 2005 — they share not only total cuteness but an amazing list of features and functionality. And yet each one is uniquely individual. Look at this feature list and eat your heart out, Apple Design Team:
Branding is still TBD. Am going to sleep on that (I really need to sleep, come to think of it).
HonestIy, I can’t say that this one is in any way better than the previous one — I love ’em both. But, I would say that metacool’s software development process has certainly benefited from the real-world experience gained over the past 31 months of intense development activity. To quote Indiana Jones, it’s not the years, it’s the mileage.
Sure, blogging is an integral part of what transparent leadership looks like cira 2008, and bloggers do great things, but blogging has its downside.
Hear Yossi Vardi speak eloquently about some downside of having a G5 humming away in one’s lap. If nothing else, this is a great example of how to use PowerPoint. It’s not the crate, but the person who pilots it, as was once said.
And check out this great profile of Vardi in The Economist.
This week’s unveiling of the Tata Nano is yet another piece of evidence that "nano" is the new "turbo".
In our world of bloated, inane Flabbigators and ANC SL2455’s and RSQ77 urban land yachts, the Nano is a refreshing point of view. Instead of car design being done from an elitist point of view whose aim is to find ever new and novel ways to heat, cool, and pamper our fat asses, the engineers at Tata have said "here’s all you need" and nothing more. It’s a populist design approach visited before by such iconic designs as the Model T, the Beetle, the Mini, the Cinquecento, and — my favorite — the 2CV. Unlike those designs, however, I don’t believe the Nano is the rational enough. That swoopy windshield is a hollow attempt at style over substance: who needs an expensive, complex, Le Mans-quality aerodynamic solution when one’s top speed (let alone average speed) is so low? Something more planar would be simpler, cheaper, and easier to fix and replace over the life of the car. Of course, reflective design is the lord of the manor when it comes to automotive sales, and what people really want is swoopy, I suppose.
And, doffing my hypocrite’s cap, I can’t help but think that the last thing the world needs is another car, let alone a popular, high-volume one. However, if we’re going to have more, they might as well be nano-ish in mass and form. Where’s the true cradle-to-cradle personal transportation solution we all need? Perhaps I should get on that…
John Lilly, a long-time member of the metacool blog roll, was named CEO of Mozilla today. I’ve been lucky enough to work with John at the Stanford d.school, spend many hours together swapping war stories about business and the nature of product development, and even toil for a few days as fellow Lobbyists.
Not only am I happy for John, I’m really psyched for Mozilla, too. Firefox is one of my favorite products. It is incredibly reliable, very easy to use, and is the most personalized product in my possession. I use it for play and for work; in any given day I spend four hours staring in to the Web as mediated by Firefox. It’s safe to say that Mozilla is one of my favorite brands, right up there with Apple, BMW, The Economist, Honda, The Cortiina, Subaru, McGuckin Hardware, and McMenamins Kennedy School. I can’t wait to see where the Mozilla goes with John, and vice versa.
That last vice versa is crucial. As I wrote about in MIT’s Innovation journal last year, John and the Mozilla community represent a new way of getting things done, one which requires a new paradigm of leadership and participation. They live in a world that thrives on transparency and openness, a place where web thinking is freedom thinking. We can all learn a lot about innovation and the art of getting stuff done from Mozilla. One thing for sure: this is a story with many chapters left to go.
w00t!
(you didn’t think I was going to write this without saying that, did you?)
"There is a common belief that all designers are artists. I am not. I studied engineering at Stanford and although I took some drawing courses for fun, I am sure that a good many high-school students can top me in free-hand sketching."
