Michael Bierut has a great post on Design Observer describing quintessence. I’m interested in the book, but I sense it’s long on example and short on analysis. What we really want to know is what are the patterns of designing the quintessential.

Predictably, many of the products are familiar from our childhood; kids seem to have a nearly infallible sense of what makes something the real thing. “A rule of thumb often useful in determining whether something is quintessential,” wrote Edwards and Kornfeld, “is whether it resembles a child’s drawing of the thing.” This childlike sensibility holds true today. Mays said the New Beetle’s circular shape had much in common with Walt Disney’s drawing of Mickey Mouse; David Galbraith goes to far as to label the Zune “unsafe for children,” imagining that any child unlucky to get one will be fated to get “the shit kicked out of him at school by mocking friends chanting ‘Zuny Zuny Zuny.’”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 6:52 am and is filed under Link, Design. It is further classified using the following tags archetype, Design, essence, Link and pattern. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.