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Colin Schaelli

By squirrelbait - September 18, 2006

in Object Culture

Colin Schaelli describes his work and attitude as "design service meets design punk." A designer for Freitag since 2004, Colin has simultaneously worked on his own ideas which will be shown in October in Tokyo. Now about his kick-ass site...

The template-style interface and layout are extremely simple and clean--his excellent photos and images, along with neat text, are what make the pages pop. To express his colorful personality, Schaelli uses an energetic video upon site entry as a voice. Here he has balanced a great portfolio, clear communication of work, easy navigation, and personal flair all under one little url.

Work shown above: aluminum floor lamp, waitress wallet holster, hangtag.

Learn more about his Freitag Hangtag design in our Studio Bullitts section.

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Sean

18 years ago

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Kudos to Colin who e-mailed me to follow up on my critical posts. We may not end up agreeing, but good for him for engaging a critic constructively.
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Sean

18 years ago

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Hmm. Interesting conceit.
You only have to consider usability if you are designing for morons. Design cognescenti, like other designers and agencies, love unusable sites.

I for one wouldn't consider engaging a designer who didn't have a usable site. It demonstrates a fundamental lack of design empathy that will likely lead to similarly unusable products.

Also, it's terrible self-promotion. Who really has the patience to do all the work necessary to navigate an usable site.

Finally, it reflects a poor understanding of the way communication travels on the web. I'll bet you half the postings on mocoloco send you to a designer's home page rather than the product or building featured in the mocoloco post. Why no deep link to the product or building page? Because the sites are built with Flash or another technology that doesn't allow it. Wanna bet that not all of the people who would like more information on the product or building take the time to figure out how to get to the product or building page? Wanna guess how many of those are potential clients?

Of course, those potential clients are going to be wowed by the elegance of the information-less home page.

Form follows function, my ass.
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Peter Pan

18 years ago

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Dear Sean,
the medium is the message. Remember? And form follows function..... And this seems to be exactly what this site is about. It is simple and elegant. This is a portfolio site - in your face dumb-ass usability for internet beginners and the elderly not exactly necessary. Designers and agencies will love it - I am sure. If you do not - so what?

U.

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Sean Roche

18 years ago

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From a usability perspective, this is a terrible site. From the home page, you cannot tell what choices you have unless you mouse over one of the three numbers, and there's no indication that you should.

Hardly kick-ass, unless you consider cutesy, hide-the-ball, make the user frustrated design kick-ass.
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