When not blogging, or thinking about blogging, all of us here at metacool spend our waking hours scouring the net for other blogs that might help all of us get to a better place vis a vis the art and science of creating cool stuff.  In short, metacool aims to provide you with a fully edited user experience, saving you time and energy.  Kind of like Costco.

So, here are the latest additions to that most dynamic of lists, COOL BLOGS (at lower left):

• Future of Marketing:  from the people at IFTF, this is Gizmodo for marketing types.
• Noise Between Stations: thoughts on design & business.  Like metacool without the fluff.  Oh, wait, I just scanned his site and he’s linking to me.  Ships that pass in the night, indeed.
• Orange is the New Pink:  Daniel Pink’s blog about this new book.  Should be interesting!
• Simplicity:  I wrote about John Maeda’s simplicity workshop last year.  Here’s the blog — it’ll blow your mind.

The Bugaboo Frog

If caskets can be made sexy and interesting, well, maybe there’s still room for innovation in the realm of vacuum cleaners:

The Ball

If you’re Dyson, how do you make a better vacuum cleaner?  You can’t make it lose less suction, because it doesn’t lose any to begin with.  Instead, you break the existing paradigm of maneuverability, producing something that broadcasts its unique value proposition loud and clear. 

Does The Ball need mega advertising to succeed?  No way, because its marketability is embedded in the remarkability of its design. 
Marketing = Design = Marketing.

Tim Manners, whose Cool News is listed in the metacool blog roll, has an interesting column in Fast Company called "Marketing to Death".  In it he expounds upon the theme of Godin’s Purple Cow: it’s not about marketing something that sucks, it’s about building things so remarkable that they market themselves (and make you look even better if you spend some additional marketing bucks, too).  Along the way, he tells some pithy stories about things like:

• Caskets
• A library
• Artificial Xmas trees
• A trip to the dentist

All of these seemingly moribund market offerings can be transformed into delightful human experiences if you just spend some time and energy to listen, take notes, and invest in making them have intrinsic value.  Such as the Seattle Public Library pictured above.  It’s the zone where design = marketing = design.

In both professional and academic settings I’ve had good success helping non-designers partially "get" what the whole design/brand/quality/experience furball is all about just by having them bring in their favorite object and then talk a bit about what makes it good.  There’s something about the process of having to articulate mushy subjects like quality, heft, smell, taste, and feel that wakes the formerly dormant "goodness sensitivity" gene in people.  Deep down inside our modern brain, we all know what good is all about, but somewhere along the line we forget how to listen to our senses.  It’s there, can you here it whispering?

I’ll never forget the time a co-worker brought a piece of her underwear (okay, okay — it was just a t-shirt) to one of these meetings.  She spoke from the heart about why this was the absolute best undergarment in the world for her.  It taught everyone in the room about quality in a deep way, and we just couldn’t have gotten there via PowerPoint.

A little while ago I wrote yet another episode in my "Sound Matters" series.  It generated some good feedback and ideas: 

• Ryan suggested that we also add "smell" to products to push them over the top.  Absolutely, man!  I got a whiff of a 1962 Porsche 356 the other day, and it smelled like Germany!!  Now that’s what I call brand essence!  What if you could buy a new 911 that really smelled the way a Porsche should, instead of smelling exactly the same as a 2005 Camry?
• Valentin came up with the nifty, nifty idea of holding a "sound tasting" party.  I can just imagine it: you walk into a room, you get blindfolded, and then you listen to a series of 20 or so vintage mechanical cameras being put through the paces…  Voigtlaender Bessamatic, Leica II, Exakta Varex VX IIa, Robor Star…. it would be an aural fiesta, a feast for the ears.  The sound of quality.

I think design thinkers need to be able to feel design quality in their bones.  Why not hold a sound and smell tasting party of your own?

The Senft Tandem

(The world’s largest tandem bike.  While you’re at it, why not do it to the hilt?)

School of Bright Ideas

Here’s some deep wisdom from Milton Glaser, who says, "I am going to tell you everything that I know about the practice of design. It is a sort of collage of bits and pieces that I have assembled over 50 years…This is what I’ve learned."  You’ll need at least an hour to soak all of this in.  Here’s an overview:

1. You can only work for people that you like
2. If you have a choice never have a job
3. Some people are toxic; avoid them
4. The good is the enemy of the great
5. Less is not necessarily more
6. Style is not to be trusted
7. How you live changes your brain
8. Doubt is better than certainty
9. Solving the problem is more important than being right
10. Tell the truth

I particularly like no. 5:  "Just enough is more". 

via Seth Godin

The Laverda SFC 1000