
Personality in Design - duck
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/personality-in-design/
======
chris_dcosta
Personality is good, and gimmicks are bad. Or are they?

How do you distinguish a gimmick from a nice touch. Of course it helps to have
the money to buy the best creatives, but it also takes strength of personality
to sow the seeds and allow creativity to happen.

And you also need to know when weeds are growing too.

I often wonder if the gently breathing light on the old G4 powermac was the
work of one person. "Your ONLY job sonny, is to design the thing that tells me
the mac is sleeping. Make it special, real, ALIVE, but asleep. Now go. And
don't come back untill...."

Or was it a team of turtle necks sitting around a big table brain-storming and
drinking gunpowder tea, feeding off each other's creativity in vainglorious
efforts to go one step further than the last?

~~~
bluekeybox
The one and only difference between personality and gimmick is that a gimmick
either is or feels cheap.

You only know that something is a gimmick because it doesn't work on you. If
it did, you would call it "personality". When you discover a gimmick in a
product, you usually feel "cheated" because you realize that this product was
not designed with you in mind but was designed for an audience whose abilities
to tell a gimmick are less than yours. This leads to realization that
acquiring said product will not add any marketing edge to your persona (you
won't be able to impress people who matter to you with the product).

------
GMali
Strangely, I can never read the articles on alistapart. I find them to have a
very 'boring' personality.

