Design
Great Info Graphic from the NYT about Traffic Lanes on Broadway
I actually came to the NYT story Broadway Is Busy, With Pedestrians, if Not Car Traffic from a post on Reuters by Felix Salmon How the NYT sees bikes on Broadway which offers a fascinating counterbalance to the original article. However that isn’t what I’m wanting to post about. What I did want to note is that the info graphic is an interesting study of simplification and visualization of a street that I’ve often walked down. If a person walks down any of those... Read More
Exploring Gesture Deficiency
Yesterday while working on a multi touch iPad UI issue with Chris Fahey, the phrase “gesture deficient” came up. We were looking at some of the iPhone swipe actions to multi delete and wondered how many people like or even know about some of the things a person can do to swipe. Essentially there’s features built around those that are “gesture deficient”, for those that didn’t know that they can swipe delete things on their iPhone. This also relates to the... Read More
QR Code Replaced Long URL on Poster
This morning as I do every morning that I walk to work I try to capture a photo of something that caught my attention. Today I stopped to notice a poster that had QR code on the bottom of it. Up until now most of the QR code stuff that I’ve seen on ads has been pretty gimmicky—but something about the placement had me curious. Plus the poster was from nyc.gov so I figured it probably had more value than just a coupon. The three images show the chronological order of... Read More
Talking about Weims and Design on @Core77
Last weekend Madison and I met up with Sarah Cox of Core77 and Raleigh Pop fame in Washington Square park to discuss dogs and design. It was fun to hang out on an early Saturday morning talking about two of my favourite topics. If you’re curious to read some of the conversation, please visit Dogs on Design- Surtees’ Oversized Lap Dog. Read More
Looking at Sketches from street level by Amanda Wood
Just received a really nice zine from Auckland, New Zealand from Amanda Wood. It’s 22 pages plus cover and is balanced between black & white images of cityscapes and text. While I do push the speed of technology on this blog, I have to admit that I really appreciate when someone takes the effort and time to create something like Sketches. When someone creates a pdf the thing can be as many pages as possible, infinitely colourful and any dimension. Looking at this... Read More
White Label Mobile Check In’s to Enhance Events & Outdoor Experiences
This post is half recap, half collection of a couple mobile apps that found out about last night and how I saw things take off. I came across a post from Bob Lefsetz who typically writes about the music industry though occasionally brings something else into the mix. He was talking about a ski resort that was thinking more into the mobile future than anyone in the music industry. There was a lot of good points plus the attached video of the ski resort implementing check in’s... Read More
A Bathroom Worth Noting
Sunday morning I had the opportunity to hang out with Randy J. Hunt, a smart design guy that I respect a lot. He has a habit of mentioning great places to eat so when he emailed me on Saturday wanting to meet up on Sunday I wasn’t going to say no. I had never been to Pulinos before but have walked by it quite a bit with Madison checking out what was going on Bowery. We ended up splitting a couple pizza’s. There was the Nutella (extra virgin olive oil, sea salt +... Read More
Back to the Future Automatic Lacing System
Usually patent diagrams aren’t that exciting. The above images are—they’re illustrating an automatic lacing system. A couple years back I had a post about the actual shoe here, here, and here. Now come the laces. More info about the laces at Street Giant and Nice Kicks. Read More
Playing Pandora vs Vevo on the iPhone, or better known as random things I might like vs start/stop of selected artist
Just as the title suggests I was curious to examen how these two on demand media types benefit and distract people that want to enjoy music. Pandora allows a person to search for an artist and stream music from their choice along with other that sound similar. In theory the stream will play as long as someone wants. If they want to advance to a mystery next track they can, but with the free version this can happen only for a limited period of times. Vevo on the other hand streams... Read More
Rain Inspired Sunday Afternoon Outside my Window
With the humidity at levels that I can’t really tolerate I’ve been spending most of my Sunday afternoon reading. I’ve also been keeping an eye on the clouds roll in and out, sometimes turning my view completely white. But things move fast and a couple moments later I had a new pointillism inspired view. Tons of clear raindrops turned my view into something that if I didn’t capture that moment would likely not be seen again. Here’s a couple of... Read More
Studying @StartupQuote
ATOMIC IDEA “Observe the world around you – everything you do, and especially everything you hate to do. - Aaron Patzer” Simple quote (likely less than 140 characters) in text. DISPLAY Visualize and personalize quote with the face of the person that wrote it, make type better to read HOST Show on website with single url that is part of a larger collection, give the capabilities to pass core unit via text (Twitter) LOOP Give away the text knowing that there’s... Read More
Can We Date—the Illustrative Guide
I like this story for a couple reasons. I found it via Twitter from the person that actually designed it. The illustration is perfectly balanced between narrative and visuals. I can look at it more than once and it is going to have the same consistent impact. I also wanted to post about it so I can have the .png in my own database. Just press (or click if you’re not on an iPad) to view it at full size. So here’s how I found it. Twitter from a friend so I rt’d... Read More
REVIEW COPY: From Here to There by Hand Drawn Map Association
I really enjoyed reading and looking through From Here to There: A Curious Collection from the Hand Drawn Map Association. The book is divided into six categories of maps: directional maps, found maps, fictional maps, artful maps, maps of unusual places and explanatory maps. Each map that is a category explains what is going on with the map, and typically a story. What I found enjoyable was reading the personal anecdotes of why a person needed a map or what they doing as... Read More
A Link Drop of Sorts, 3 things that really spiked today & their similar paths
Up until a couple months ago I’d collect a number of links over a week, look at what patterns tied them together and make a mind map of it. Things have been really busy and I haven’t had the time to focus on that type of post. I’m also looking at a huge magnitude shift in the number of things I can read during a week—it is really hard to take the time to stop reading and start posting. Today was strange in that I kept tweeting about three topics that most... Read More
A Couple Angles About Education During This Economy of Online Scale
This is one of those posts that came together after reading and viewing three different angles concerning education. It made sense to lump them together to show the spectrum of where education might be headed. I remember watching the video from Salman Khan first. My thoughts after that were if a person was really motivated they could really teach themselves more than a person that is unmotivated that is going to University. There’s a lot of other free online resources that... Read More
Inside vs Outside Info Gathering
Over the past couple of months I’ve tried documenting how my consumption of information has evolved with my iPad. I’m using a couple different readers like Reeder and Pulse News. I’ve also noticed that there’s sites that are filtering Twitter like TwitterTimes and the new app Flipboard that is using tweets as the starting point to gather headlines. Pulling from Twitter is both helpful and a hinderance at the same time. Those sites are great to catch up... Read More
Checking out the Os Gemeos x Futura mural at PS. 11 Going Up
This morning I found out from a tweet of MarcDSchiller that Os Gemeos and Futura2000 have a painting going up. After spending some quality time enjoying the great weather at Madison Square Park I decided to walk a couple blocks to check out the progress. The painting is going up on the side of a school at 320 West 21st street and looks to be titled the “giant project” according to a post from Os Gemeos website. UPDATE: Below is the press release for the mural. FOR IMMEDIATE... Read More
Jeff Bezos, Charlie Rose, Streaming Interviews, Stretching Media Types and Transcripts…
Originally I wanted to do a post about the interview Charlie Rose did with Jeff Bezos. I had planned to embed the video of the talk and make a couple points about the things that stood out. But to my confusion I when I went to the share button on the page all I could do was email a link to someone. What surprises me is that I used to be able to embed the entire interview and now I can’t. I did notice that there is a six minute clip on YouTube. However what I did find interesting... Read More
Looking at the redesign of the @nooka website
I’ve been really lucky in 2010 so far. It has also been incredibly busy. While transitioning from Daylife and before starting at Behavior I had the opportunity to work with one of my favourite brands to design their new site in terms of UX. I’m not a huge fan of the word UX as I see it as part of the natural part of design, but I’ll save that discussion for a different post. Essentially I worked with Nooka to see what could be improved in terms of people... Read More
Some Ambient Themes about the #Flipboard iPad App
For those that have had the chance to read content displayed on Flipboard for the iPad, there is almost universal approval of the experience. Yeah there are people that weren’t able to download the app for the first couple of days, and they should have had better error messaging explaining why some Twitter lists and people weren’t able to be followed. But with that said there’s a lot to take note with how an app with content is dynamically choosing, sifting... Read More
Charlatan, Martyr, Hustler Poster by @joeyroth
You might know of Joey Roth because of his Sorapot for Tea and the ceramic speakers that he recently designed. As a designer who is constantly thinking about the bigger picture he’s made a poster of a concept that he did for 48 Hours magazine. I really liked illustration when he first mentioned it on Twitter and am happy to see it in a larger format. You can but the Charlatan, Martyr, Hustler Poster for twenty five dollars from his site. I’ll be buying on after I... Read More
Some Recent Press & Four Years in NYC
Bar codes get around town and get more useful Gizmodo: What’s Your Tech Setup to Watch the World Cup? Fast Company: World Cup: How Are You Watching? Perspective: Michael Surtees on User Experience within an Ecosystem of Screens I celebrated a small victory this morning. Four years ago was my first full day in NYC. I moved from Edmonton, Alberta Canada after setting my sights here for about six years. It has been a truly crazy and exciting time with lots of ups and higher... Read More
No Kidding that Kindle ebooks Outselling Hardcover on Amazon
I don’t think it should really come as a surprise that Kindle ebooks outselling hardcover on Amazon. The process of buying a book is simple and fast. Since buying my iPad I’ve bought four books so far. The last book I bought was a couple days ago—let me explain how fast it was to do. I was reading the blog post from A VC about the book Grumby. The book sounded interesting so I typed the name into my Kindle app on the iPad. The book appeared in Amazon and with one... Read More
REVIEW COPY: Obsessive Consumption by Kate Bingaman–Burt
At first glance Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today?by Kate Bingaman–Burt seems pretty straight forward. Kate has drawn objects, things and animals on a daily basis between Feb 2006 to Feb 2009. While each object is different, her recognizable drawing style makes all the miscellaneous consumption consistent. What makes the book worth looking at more than just the images are the personal annotations that follow each drawing. Because she’s dated everything... Read More
Comparing Real Time Weather Data from my Window and iPad
Looking outside a couple minutes ago from my window I noticed some ominous clouds approaching. Wanting a better idea of what might be coming I opened the WeatherBug app on my iPad. Sure enough there’s some nasty weather coming in my direction. Weather based apps have been around for a while but I wanted to note how quickly and easy it was to transfer what I saw with my eyes to other data displayed through technology. Read More
Awesome Food Truck Chart from New York Magazine
I’ve always been a fan of illustrated vehicles, but this collection of food trucks in New York from New York Magazine takes it to a new level of usefulness and aesthetic interestingness. Hopefully next year they can include carts like http://twitter.com/CalexicoCart. Read More
REVIEW COPY: 3D Typography
Spending time with 3D Typography, I did wonder as a book that is intended to be looked at (and read) I wanted to question how it would compare with what I might see on blogs that deal with typography. As I flipped through the book for the first time there were a couple things I recognized. That wasn’t a coincidence as the authors in their intro described their reason for creating the book. As they collected images of inspiration for a magazine they realized they had... Read More
Returning to Regular Blog Posts Soon
I didn’t plan on taking a break from posting for a couple weeks. My last post was from June 23rd—a couple things happened that made me stop posting. I started changing my morning schedule and the World Cup happened. Lately I’ve been trying to cram a lot of stuff into my mornings. With added adventures there was no time to post. I’ve been thinking a lot about design, just not in a public space. I’ve been working on a couple podcasts with a colleague and... Read More
A Couple Observations from @jenniferbrook #ixdanyc talk about #iPad #nytimes App
It’s never easy giving a presentation, even more so when the person is talking about high profile and visible work. I’ve only done a couple talks and from experience can say they’re never easy. Last night Jennifer Brook talked about one of the few iPad apps that everyone with an iPad has probably used a couple times. She described her approach to designing the NYT iPad app to a full (if not sold out) audience at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia for IxDA NYC.... Read More
Questions and Answers Directory via Twitter Conversations—Where is This Site?
When a question arises, what’s one of the first things a person that spends a bit of time online will say? “I’ll just ask Twitter” is one of those thought bubbles that pops up. Why search the web when you can ask a real person? The person likely to respond is someone that they know (somewhat) and probably share the same interests. I’ve typed in a question many times getting a pretty good response within a couple minutes. As bad as Twitter is for trying to... Read More
#NYCUPA Event, a Couple of my Notes from Usable iPad Apps: HUGE Insights and a Case Study
Last night’s NYC UPA’s event wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t what wasn’t exactly as advertised either. On the NYC UPA website this was the outline: “HUGE Design Director Felipe Memoria will open the presentation by identifying key attributes of the most usable iPad apps launched to date. Creative Director Joe Stewart will then walk the audience through the design decisions behind the recently-launched Reuters app and invite the audience to evaluate... Read More
INTERVIEW: Sougwen
I first met Sougwen at Joey Roth’s Sounds Like talk. She had been invited by Joey to draw on a set of speakers and was on the panel to talk about it. I really liked what she had drawn on the speaker so over the weekend I took a closer look at her drawings. Later that week I interviewed her hoping that our conversation would shed some light on why I liked her work. Below is a condensed and edited version of our conversation that we had in a small dinner over coffee and... Read More
Examining my 5 Device Command Center to Watch the World Cup
I’m not sure what happened. I started watching the World Cup saturday morning and before I knew it, I had two laptops, an iPad and iPhone all running something related to the game. I never really designed it that way. It just happened. I think for something like a five+ screen command center to work, most of the screens need to have a primary focus and a secondary app. For all the mac stuff (4 out of 5 devices), I could basically do the same thing switching stuff up. The... Read More
New and Old Behavior with Power Outlet Plugs and Sockets
I’ve been noticing a trend around my own apartment in terms of plugs and sockets. Because I’m so reliant on battery power for both my iPhone and iPad (along with my MacBook Pro) I’ve realized that my plug and socket dynamics have shifted a bit. The second photo shows all the power cables that are connected to some older computer equipment. The top image represents a clean scenario that I have in four different outlets. The old behavior has tons of cables. Now... Read More
Bending Content Buckets, or How I Currently Grab Content Worth Trying to Remember
a> I’ve been thinking about doing an updated post about how I find stuff on the online for a while. The internet was a lot simpler before I found myself getting throttled by my internet carrier who claims to be giving me fast internet. Back in the day I could open 70–90 sites easily via tabs. Now I’m lucky if 8–10 sites will open up at once. Typically three or four sites will open inside of tabs and the rest of the sites will fail to load. I found myself trying... Read More
A Different Kind of Early Adopter Tax
A lot has been said about early adopters and specifically iPad early adopters. People that buy Apple things have come to expect that their first editions will go down in price and functionality months after they buy the first release. With the iPad it was also understood that some web sites wouldn’t work properly because Apple doesn’t allow flash. I didn’t care that much to be honest about the flash issue but when I can’t seem embedded videos from Vimeo... Read More
Product Cycles & Loss of Focus
I really like the illustration about Truth on Brands by Gavin Potenza. It illustrates how a lot of products eventually forget why they started in the first place. If we look at the different years as levels through the filter of a software application, mobile device or even toothpaste, those steps sort of explain product cycles. There’s the initial idea (1960), after the launch attention quiets down so additional features are added (1975), eventually other products are... Read More
First impressions of Beyond the Street, the 100 Leading Figures in Urban Art
Before I jump into my reaction to Beyond the Street: With the 100 Most Important Players in Urban Art I think it’s important to explain what I think is good street art and why I’ll stop and photograph something outside. While I’m familiar with a lot of the “names” out there I do try to stay a bit ignorant of who’s doing what. I don’t want to be persuaded by reputation—I want to be as interested in stuff on their own accord, not... Read More
Wired Magazine the App
I’ve only had a couple minutes with the new Wired Magazine App. As much as I wanted to hate it, it’s actually pretty good. Overall my first impression is that it feels more like a book than magazine which is cool. Biggest issue aside from not being able to share individual articles is that I can’t zoom in on everything. Aside from that, I was disappointed to read in the editor notes about as great as the site is, it’s not a magazine. Shouldn’t we... Read More
Why Are Professional Sports Leagues Slow with New Tech Inside Their Stadiums?
This morning coming across the Mashable post Yankee Stadium Bans iPads, it reminded me of a similar tech experience with the NHL a number of years ago. I was at hockey game five or six years ago when digital cameras where pretty common but still somewhat pricey. Taking some photos for my own purposes I was asked by security to stop shooting. I was given a lame excuse about being able to capture motion because of the visible screen on the back. It didn’t make sense then... Read More
Presentations from Michael
My Parsons Design IV Presentation is Up
Parson's Design IV Presentation: Unexpected Narratives and Creating the Right Conditions View more presentations from Michael Surtees. I’ve posted my presentation that I prepared for Parson’s Design IV class. It’s quite similar to the talk that I did in Dallas for the AIGA in February though I shuffled the order up for a more appropriate [...]
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Looking at the redesign of the @nooka website
I’ve been really lucky in 2010 so far. It has also been incredibly busy. While transitioning from Daylife and before starting at Behavior I had the opportunity to work with one of my favourite brands to design their new site in terms of UX. I’m not a huge fan of the word UX as I [...]
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DesignNotes is published in NYC by Michael Surtees, Principal and Creative Director of Gesture Theory. Michael tries to explore people's daily experiences and observations with design. He can be reached at michael at gesturetheory.com 
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