VCD + Facebook + iPhone

Things have been a bit crazy recently but I've been having a lot of fun.
I want to stop for a minute though and share some stuff I've worked on and talk about a few things that I've been spending time thinking about.

Visual Communication Design

I just heard from the Design department at UW that I've been accepted as one of the twenty-two Visual Communication Design majors for 2009, which I'm very excited about.

Last year we had a bunch of fun assignments. Here's some of my work:

• Playful Word Pairs — layout and typography study
• Recipe — layout and typography study
• Sweatshops — double-sided poster for both sides of world issue
• Teabox Set (blueprints: T / E / A) — 3D product packaging
• 3D Cube (side one / side two) — corporate case study on REI
• EngineerYourself.com (website / poster) — UN goal promotion

I love the faculty and the talented students I'm with and I'm looking forward to my classes next year as a junior in the program.

Facebook

Switching gears, if you haven't heard of Facebook yet, you must not be paying attention. With over 27 million people returning to the site every month, they're the 6th most popular site in the US and the #1 photo sharing site on the entire web. (I know, a lot of people think Flickr is the #1 photo site... but it's actually not even close. If you want to see the impressive numbers, check out this blog post on the stats behind Facebook photos.)

I mentioned Facebook here before and I said I liked the site, but what I didn't say is that I really believe they're doing some cool stuff. Just under a year ago I decided I liked them a lot, so this summer I'm interning here with them. They're a 200+ employee company in Palo Alto, which means I'm back in beautiful Silicon Valley this summer.

I joined the small team of Product Designers, so I'll be working on the user experience and look-and-feel of the site.

There's no doubt Facebook is slightly controversial and there's still a lot of opportunity ahead. I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts about the site: what you like, what you hate, and what you think in general about their future. I'm spending every day this summer thinking critically about Facebook and I'm learning a lot from being here.

But I think it's important for me to say that I don't think Facebook is just a dot-com bubble or a fad. I think it's actually a really neat tool that's useful and is a great way to keep in touch with real-world friends. I also think there's still a ton to do and the coolest stuff is yet to come.

iPhone

The web has been buzzing with talk about the iPhone for the past few months and especially the past few weeks. It is pretty funny to see everyone's take on the phone.

A lot of people spend time talking about Apple's marketing. And it's true that there is probably a good amount to talk about. Whatever you think, there's no denying they did a great job getting people talking... and that's the point of marketing after all.

But the real story is the phone itself. And seriously, I can say with 100% confidence that I think Apple is about hit a home run with this phone. They did what they do best: take the core of what a product should be and make that work really nicely, then throw away everything else.

That means you'll hear gadget geeks complain about it doesn't have this feature or it doesn't have that feature, but at the end of the day it does exactly what a mainstream phone should do and it does it incredibly well.

There are many examples, from Visual Voicemail to Google Maps. For a lot of people Mail is going to be the coolest part of the phone. I know that sounds funny because it seems so uninteresting, but it's actually a crucial feature that I could see myself using a ton of the time and it seems like it's done very nicely.

And it's always easy to point to technologies that should one day be in the phone but aren't yet... 3G, GPS, developer support, etc. But remember this is a 1.0 product. There will be a place for those features in the future (as well as a full product line and cheaper hardware). This is day zero and right now I think the iPhone is on track for a great release and I'm looking forward to using one myself. I can't wait to see them shake up the cell phone world a little. And I have no doubt they'll do exactly that.

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