Personality in Design
alistapart.com
alistapart.com
How do you distinguish a gimmick from a nice touch. Of course it helps to have the money to buy the best creatives, but it also takes strength of personality to sow the seeds and allow creativity to happen.
And you also need to know when weeds are growing too.
I often wonder if the gently breathing light on the old G4 powermac was the work of one person. "Your ONLY job sonny, is to design the thing that tells me the mac is sleeping. Make it special, real, ALIVE, but asleep. Now go. And don't come back untill...."
Or was it a team of turtle necks sitting around a big table brain-storming and drinking gunpowder tea, feeding off each other's creativity in vainglorious efforts to go one step further than the last?
You only know that something is a gimmick because it doesn't work on you. If it did, you would call it "personality". When you discover a gimmick in a product, you usually feel "cheated" because you realize that this product was not designed with you in mind but was designed for an audience whose abilities to tell a gimmick are less than yours. This leads to realization that acquiring said product will not add any marketing edge to your persona (you won't be able to impress people who matter to you with the product).