1. I didn’t want a MacBook Air then and I don’t want one now. Particularly one that turns the physical keyboard into a virtual one, and then puts it on the screen so that I end up with half a monitor.

2. When I’m reading the newspaper, while eating a bagel and drinking coffee, I don’t want to have to worry about smudging the text.

3. If I’m reading a book its because I don’t want to think about work, or politics, or what movie I might see later…or what my friends are up to on facebook. I don’t want to be distracted—I just want to read my book.

4. Hey maybe I’m overly sensitive, but when I’m sitting down in my comfy chair surfing the internet, I really don’t want 5 GHz of radio frequency snuggling up to my…well, you know.

5. $829* plus $15/month in order to be able to connect to the internet? Hey, I consider myself financially secure but I’ve got a MacBook Pro, and a Blackberry. Do I really need this?  [*Apple taught me a long time ago not to cheap out on memory.]

6. My laptop enables me to do my work anywhere. My Blackberry allows me to stay in contact, via phone or text or email, anywhere—as well as get directions, movie times, restaurant suggestions AND listen to most of my iTunes music. How’s the iPad going to improve my lifestyle?

7. Lastly, have you seen the pictures of Haiti? Do you know someone that’s out of work and is worried about their future? Could cancer, or alzheimers, or aids research use some more money? If, tomorrow morning, I write a check for any one of these things I bet I’ll feel pretty good for a lot longer than if I write another check to Apple.

Following is an excerpt from an article written by Cory Doctorow for The Guardian. See the full article here.

It is ugly – MySpace is a graphic designer’s worst nightmare

The word you’re looking for isn’t “ugly”, it’s “vernacular”. Graphic designers are paid to clearly communicate messages (both covert and overt) to strangers on behalf of clients. Kids who bling out their MySpace pages do so because they are exuberant and playful.

These pages are as deliberately ugly as the photocopied punk band-posters that graced every telephone pole and building-site hoarding a generation ago.

The kids who make “ugly” MySpace pages are hardly ignorant of the visual vocabulary of professional design. On the contrary, they have been saturated with professional design since birth, and can recognise amessage crafted by a designer on behalf of a client at 100 yards – and what’s more, they can distinguish it from a page crafted by a peer at the same distance.

These pages are made by people who know – to the femtometre –exactly how ugly they are. They are supposed to offend your sensibilities. They are intended to make designers weep. Their ugliness is a defence mechanism that protects them from being knocked off by marketing/communications firms, because most designers would rather break their own fingers than commit such an atrocity.

Prediction: in five years, some of these kids will have grown up, graduated from design college, and will be industriously turning out clones that authentically reproduce the exuberant no-design every bit as well as today’s high-street shops do Sex Pistols chic.

I like his take on why “MySpace” is so ugly to look at, and why that’s okay. And it reminded me how impersonal Facebook can be—which made me wonder if that’s okay.

Last week I read Verlyn Klinkenborg’s poignant editorial in the New York Times where he explores the “geography of familiarity”. It’s a quick read which you can link to [here].

Mr. Klinkenborg challenges his readers to think of home not as a world itself, but as a place we carry inside ourselves, a place where we welcome the unfamiliar because we know that as time passes it will become the very bedrock of our being.

As someone that spends a lot of time interacting with people on-line via Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc., as well as helping my clients to design and build social networking platforms, I was caught by the notion of “home” being something we “carry within ourselves”. That’s sort of what having on-line relationships is like.

Those relationships are greatly influenced by the digital environment they’re present in.

As a Graphic Designer, a “visual communications professional”, that’s a really important concept to understand. For a social network to be successful it really does need to become, at least part of, the very bedrock of our being. Otherwise what is the value of all that time I spend developing relationships on-line?

Lately I’ve been “un-following” people on Twitter. I’ve been “filtering” friends on Facebook—same with FriendFeed. I tell myself that it’s because I only want to read about those people that I really care about, or be introduced to ideas from people I admire. That’s a huge disservice to the people that “friend me” or “follow me” — as well as a contradiction to Mr. Klinkenborg’s challenge to welcome the unfamiliar.

But it’s easy. After all, I don’t really “know” these people. I can delete them from my imagination as quickly as I created them.

And that’s the challenge for us “visual communications professionals”. How do we create a digital social platform that encourages each of us to have stronger connections? How do we create an online system that exposes more of who we are and reduces the ease at which we delete our “friends”.

In this past weekend’s New York Times Ideas & Trends column there’s a story about “the new breed of corporate logos” [sic].

It got me thinking about when it’s appropriate to “refresh” a logo (a term the writer used). 

First (my definition of) what a logo is: A Logo is a visual element of a organization’s Identity that helps the viewer immediately recognize that organization. 

What a logo is not is an ad. And that’s exactly what I suspect many organization, including all of the companies represented in this story—except Blackwater*—thought they’d be getting when they had their logos redesigned.

I think a Logo should only be redesign when…

• The company has changed its focus and has become a new business.
• Two or more companies merge—each having equal weight in the new business’ focus.
• The original design was so badly designed that some quick thinking CEO recognizes that it has to change immediately.
• The company has a new name.
• A city hires a design studio to give it a new look.

* The company provides no information on how it chose its new name, “Xe”. The attempt to rebrand itself comes as six former employees face manslaughter charges for a shooting that killed 17 civilians in Baghdad. The company has also faced intense scrutiny since four of its employees were massacred and two of them hung from a bridge in Fallujah in 2004.