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Comment by zichy | Hacker News Reader

Dear (Soylent) designers, please stop comparing yourselves with big names like Kubrick or Rams. You designed a plastic bottle - no more, no less.

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You are very condescending. These people are trying to do something, they share the process, they try to get some inspiration from people they like. What's the big deal ?

Exactly - no big deal, at all - but Kubrick is responsible for several really big deals.

If I go to the supermarket, almost every smoothie bottle looks somewhat like the new Soylent bottle. I can't tell if they actually took inspiration from Dieter Rams, but it's really easy to refer to him since he is like the father of modern industrial (consumer) design.

Soylent is an enterprise and they want to make themselves to look as good as possible in order to generate more revenue. No reason not to criticize awkward marketing blog posts like this.

I envy you. Could we import that style to Europe sooner?

The juice bottles from "The Martian" movie are the epitome of consumer product design for me:

https://media1.giphy.com/media/11bglU5OG7SJAk/giphy-facebook...

(I apologize for the crappy image; I'm nowhere near a copy of the movie to make a decent screenshot)

No bullshit. Just the product name and necessary information about its content. No useless colors, no pictures of animals, smiling faces or other crap. There are days I dream of starting a food company just to make food in such packaging.

This already exists in Europe. In the UK lots of companies us sqround bottles, like Innocent Smoothies:

http://www.wowfreestuff.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Inn...

I didn't mean the shape but the label. But still, I didn't even realize "sqround" is a word. Thanks!

I think Vitamin Water is pretty good in terms of clean marketing, except they fail when you actually read the rubbish copy on the label.

https://www.thewrendesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/vit...

Tesco's old Value range was also pretty good for telling you immediately what's in it: http://www.s4rb.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Old_Tesco_Val...

I do believe they are trying to do something, but it has more to do with marketing and product placement than with design.

Lastly, we did our best to follow the “less but better” teachings of 1960’s Braun designs. These enduring designs are known for their stripped down features and clean lines. No unnecessary buttons or extraneous curves, just what you need; everything in its place.

It's a bottle. There's no need to evoke Braun or their “less but better” approach, it's always just been a vessel and some sort of cap.

This is silly. Your argument is still "It's a bottle therefor stop making a big deal about it" - it's someone's job to care about it. They explain the problem they set out to solve, how they solved it, a background to how these problems are solved (I don't know shit about design, so the "less but better" reference is actually interesting).

If you want to say "It's marketing" no shit, anything any company publishes ends up going through marketing at some point. Every tech blog a company has is marketing. Who cares?

It's more about being pretentious.

If you show me a nice program you coded, I'd say "that's cool".

If you show me a nice program you coded and tell me that you've been inspired by John Backus, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, I'd say "yeah well it's still a program".

Thank you -- that's exactly how I feel about the Braun reference.

The "program" here being one of the simplest imaginable, with literally thousands of years of prior art.

What if they actually were inspired by one of them? Why not give some background and context to a crowd that may not be familiar with various icons?

No. My argument was that a bottle was a vessel with a cap, and evoking Braun's “less but better” approach, while interesting (iconic, even) in itself, is unnecessary. To me, it merely sounds like pointless name-dropping.

> You designed a plastic bottle - no more, no less.

To be fair, I often have the same reaction when I see CSS posts on HN.

E.g., this one recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14588924

You won't get much upvotes on HN with that... Comparing yourself to Kubrick, on the other hand, will create some reaction.

Design is design. Be it bottles or something else. You use references and inspirations to come up with a strong design.

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