Design Lessons and Bananas
The banana is one of nature’s great creations. They provide nutrition in a unique and useful package. You can learn a good design lesson or two from a banana.
Learn how to properly peel a banana
I've been eating bananas for over 30 years, and I've just recently learned how to properly peel a banana. If your banana peeling method is flawed, and you can remember one simple step, your banana eating experience will be greatly enhanced.
Peel the banana from the end without the stem.
It's much easier, it leaves the stem in place as a handle, and it keeps the banana peel in tact when you are finished, making it easier to dispose of.
I'm pretty sure that the banana was designed to be peeled from the end, but for some reason I've had it wrong my whole life.
Look to nature for design solutions
Nature provides us with the best examples of design and one of those unquestionably excellent designs is the banana. I'm going to emphasize a few of it's features.
- Bananas taste good and provide reasonable nutrition.
- The shape of the banana is very convenient to carry. The outer banana peel provides a anti-slip surface that can be handled along with additional objects. The peel also provides a clean method that allows you to eat the banana without getting your hands messy.
- The shape of the banana is also very convenient for consumption.
- Bananas have an excellent color scheme that is also functional, the color lets you know certain things about the banana. Green indicates that the banana is not ripe. Yellow indicates that the banana is ready to eat, and black, indicates that the banana is over ripe and ready to be disposed of.
- Bananas come in bunches. This is a nice feature that allows you to easily cary several, but at the same time, you can break them off one-by-one and give them to your friends.
- Bananas are completely bio-degradable.
Use examples in nature to enhance your design solution
When creating a design solution, don't forget to ask yourself how nature would do it. Look for metaphors and examples that exist in nature and chances are you'll have plenty to draw from to incorporate into your solution. If were were to take some of the features that exist in bananas and put them onto the web, what would this mean? Here's some ideas:
- Provide good, quality content that is useful to your audience
- Make the website functionally portable, viewable on different platforms. Use web standards and separate the style from the structure.
- Make the content of your website convenient for consumption, not to long like my articles, and not too short that it leaves you hungry.
- Use colors and visuals that complement the design and tell the users about the content, not just arbitrary graphics as decoration (it might be interesting to use color as an indicator for fresh content. New articles are full of color, and older content gets old and faded.)
- Make your content easy to share with others. Implement XML feeds and email functionality that allow you to share it with your buddies.
- Don't expect your content to last forever, recycle what was good and grow it into something new.
This post was tagged with:
