The Deglon Meeting Knife set is cleverly designed to save space in the kitchen. Four stainless steel knives of diminishing proportions nest inside from largest to smallest. There’s a 3 1/4-inch paring knife, a 5 1/4-inch utility knife, an 8-inch chef knife, and an 8 3/4-inch slicer. All four knives nest in in a block of stainless steel.

Designed by Mia Schmallenbach, the set won first prize in the 5th European Cutlery Design Awards. Press down on the blade of a knife and the handle lifts up so you can safely remove it from its nest. The Deglon Meeting Knife set a perfect example of design that unifies form and function into that takes up less space than just my chef’s knife.

The set is expensive though. Retail prices $1,000. Amazon sells it for $858.59. That’s not too much to pay for knives, but if I was spending that much, I’d buy carbon steel knives forged by Bob Kramer. If I could only keep 10 things I own, one would be my 10-inch Bob Kramer chef’s knife.

Facebook Timeline Template Design Sandbox Transparent .PNG

I love the opportunities for creativity within the design constraints of the new Facebook Timeline Cover. I created a Facebook Timeline Cover photoshop template you can download for free (right-click and choose Save File As). It’s a sandbox to play around with design ideas for your Facebook Timeline.

A Timeline Cover has two elements: Your profile photo is the same as before. It’s a 125 x 125 square. The Cover is the new edition and has a resolution of 850 x 314.

Facebook Profile Tips

I like to create Facebook Profile photos in photoshop because it’s easier to control exactly how that photo will look when it’s in that square box. Don’t upload a 125×125 image though. Make your profile photo square with a resolution of at least 800 x 800. Facebook will shrink it down, but when your friends and followers click on it, you want them to be able to see a full-sized photo in great resolution. Your profile photo is contained in a white frame that can be used as a design element that you play with in in relation to it’s place in front of your Timeline Cover photo.

Timeline Cover Tips

The size of Timeline Cover is 850 x 314. When you upload a cover image, you can adjust it up or down, but not left or right, so if you’re using a larger image keep in mind Facebook will use the full width of the photo, but only 314 pixels of it’s hight. I was playing with a Timeline Cover design for Geoff Smith‘s page where he has a very cool profile photo. I put a photo of his daughter holding his baby boy in the Cover space. One photo didn’t work because his daughter’s face was too far from his son’s face. It was an awesome photo, but it didn’t work within the constants of the Timeline Cover space. I found another photo that worked great.

The advantage of working out your design in a Photoshop sandbox is that you avoid uploading lots of Cover images to Facebook that you ultimately end up not liking.

Right-click to download the Facebook Timeline Cover Template PSD for Photoshop here (right-click and choose Save File As) or the Facebook Timeline Cover Template Transparent.png here. If you find it helpful or fun, please tweet a link to this post! Here’s a short link you can copy and past into Twitter:

http://neal.fm/rslHsf

Here are some of the coolest Timeline Cover designs I’ve found…

When you’ve got your Facebook Timeline Cover looking awesome, I’d love it if you shared a link in comments!

Two Web companies have been crap at design since they launched: Google and Facebook.

After Larry Page met with Steve Jobs and started to simplify, Google started paying attention to design. Google+ was the first Google produced product that looks warm and inviting. It’s been great to see the Google+ design sensibility roll out throughout the Googlesphere, from YouTube to Gmail to Docs.

Today Facebook made Timeline available to everyone and it could be the beginning of the end of Facebook being so hospital ugly. Like a Facebook relationship status, it’s complicated. One of the things that made Facebook better than MySpace is that users were not able to over personalize to the point of crap. Facebook chose to look like a hospital. That design decision took the look of personal profiles off the table so that ALL value was placed on content users were posting. In Facebook, value was based on words, photos and video.

With the timeline cover (that cinematic image that appears behind the personal avatar) adds a beautiful design touch to the Facebook experience. It isn’t like MySpace where a user can make ANY bad choice they want. Facebook offers two choices: the avatar and the cover. Some people will do better things with that choice than others. Here are four great ideas I saw on Mashable:

I’m looking forward to seeing what people do with their Timelines. I’m not sure what to think about Timeline outing me as a huge Manilow fan, though.

Apple took advantage of the gyroscopes it put in recent iDevices to show off how the store fits in the gigantic train terminal. If you have an iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPad 2 or iPod touch 4G, take a minute to open Safari and go to apple.com/retail/grandcentral/ and click the litte box on the bottom left of the photo you see of the new store … the one that says “view more photos.” A photo window will pop up. You can click through photos, but the coolest one is the last one that says 360°.

Tap that on an  iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPad 2 or iPod touch 4G and when you move your phone, you’ll get a 360° look at the new Grand Central Apple Store. Pan up and you can look at the constellations on the blue ceiling. It’s like a one-minute mini-vacation for Apple fans.

Some of the most well-known Steve Jobs quotes actually come from people Steve was quoting. “Great artists steal,” is one of those quotes. Steve quotes Picaso, and Picaso was adapting his quote from T.S. Eliot

Here’s the T.S. Eliot version…

One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

All that came to mind when Andrew UK, the most frequent commenter on this blog, pointed out the new Apple HQ, The Click Wheel of Cupertino, looks a lot like the new GCHQ in the UK.

Like everything Apple steals, borrows or however you like to frame it, the new Apple HQ improves on this existing circular GCHQ building. The lack of visible parking lots and abundant orchards of blooming fruit trees improves on the GCHQ campus and then there’s all that innovation in the way Apple will use curved glass. Apple’s building will do what Steve Jobs describes in the video embedded above…

“It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done, and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing. Picaso had a saying. He said, ‘Good artists copy. Great artists steal,’ and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

The Click Wheel will be magnificent and it makes me smile to know it improves on something that kind of already exists.

Evernote almost works for me. Out of every tool I’ve tried, I like Evernote best, and I LOVE that they’re tackling new Apps that improve life. Today there are two new Apps I’m looking forward to trying, Hello and Food.

Hello tackles the problem some of us have with remembering names when we meet people at events. I’ve used an App where I’ve explained that I’m bad with names and asked if I could take a photo. That process seemed a little awkward to me. Hello handles it in a way that makes it kind of cool. Hand your phone to the person you meet, they hold the phone up to their face and the App automatically takes four photos that string together to create a mini animation of the person’s face.

Here’s a video so you can see for yourself…

Hello is free in the App Store. I had to search for Evernote Hello to find it. After testing the App, the feature I wanted to see most was the light face animation. I went back and read the Evernote blog post about Hello again, and it looks like that’s a feature coming soon?

Then there’s Evernote Food, an App designed to help us remember as much about a meal as we want to capture. You can capture photos of food, drinks, dining companions and recipes. Give the meal a title and it’s there for you to remember anytime you want to look reminisce.

Here’s how Food works …

During the years I produced GeekBrief.TV, I had a lot of great meals with interesting people. It would be so cool to have them captured like this. I’m looking forward to capturing even more awesome breakfasts, lunches and dinners with this App in the future!

Apple just submitted updated plans for its new headquarters in Cupertino. The circular building was first unveiled by Steve Jobs at a Cupertino city council meeting (video below). It’s a glorious looking structure that is reminiscent of iPod Click Wheels. Therefore, I’m proposing to geeks everywhere that we refer to it as The Cupertino Click Wheel. From this circle, the world is played.

You can download and drool over the plans like I am. Just spread the word … we’re calling it the Click Wheel.

• Introduction
  
• Site Plan & Landscaping
• Floor Plans
• Renderings

Here’s the original Steve Jobs city counsel presentation…

Thanks iPhone in Canada!

If I could have any car in the world, other than a Maybach with a full-time driver making it possible for me to work in the back ;), I’d want a Tesla Model S. I’m not a car person, but I’d like a Tesla S because I love design and gadgets. Tesla S is a beautifully designed, drivable gadget. The green stuff, to me, would just be gravy.

Right in the center of the dashboard, the Tesla Model S has a massive 17-inch haptic touch display that controls lighting, climate, audio, door locks, windows and the panoramic roof. A browser connected via 3G provides access to Web content. It’s also home to GPS navigation. The audio player controlled by the touch screen gives riders access to audio stored in the car’s memory, streaming radio stations over 3G, and audio stored on portables that can be connected via Bluetooth or USB. The car has FOUR USB ports!

Bloggers started posting photos of the Tesla S touchscreen around the time the Steve Jobs bio came out. If you’ve read the bio, you know when Steve Jobs saw a new design, his first response was almost always, “It’s shit!” I think Steve Jobs would say that about the interface on the Tesla S center console. As bloggers were praising the Tesla S interface based on it’s size and coolness level, I was reading the Steve Jobs bio and thinking, “I could design a better looking interface.” This console is more state of the art than any one I’m familiar with, but to my eye, it already looks dated. Now, to be fair, I don’t think they’re done yet, and they may be working on something more polished and coherent as I write this.

One of the worst reasons for doing anything is because you can, and there seems to be a whole lot of “because we can” in this interface design. It’s a high resolution, full-color display and because it can display all that color, it does. That’s a mistake. At the top of the screen is an icon tray that borrows from the design of the Dock on Macs and iDevices. It also seems to be inspired by the shape of classic car design. The icons controlling media, navigation, energy, web, camera, phone and apps are each a different color. There is too much happening and it should be simplified.

It might look better in person, but in the photos, apps don’t flow together. It almost looks like there are three stacked screens rather than one large one. Underneath the App icons is a large space that is sometimes a Web browser, sometimes GPS navigation, the media player and all the other car controls. Other than the Web browser, this section has lots of room for improvement. Navigation elements and colors are inconsistent. Buttons on the media player look kind of cool, but they don’t share the design ideas you see on GPS or lighting controls. The Media player looks clunky and not very luxurious.

At the bottom of the screen is the climate control interface. That looks good and it looks finished. Designers didn’t re-invent the look and feel of physical buttons you’d find on a luxury car.

We know from iOS and Android, we gain a lot more than we lose when we give up physical buttons and knobs in exchange for software limited only by imagination. The design challenge is to use restraint so users can expect a consistent experience between Apps. Apple demonstrates how much consistency makes a difference through the use of objects that look and work the same from one application to the next. Based on what I’ve seen of the Tesla Model S center console, it’s something Tesla might want to think about.

In this conceptual re-design of the interface, I toned down the variety of color and tied the whole screen together so that one application flows into the other without creating a completely different look for each application. If I had more time, I would work on the App icons and the overly colorful display behind the steering wheel. I changed virtual buttons on GPS and the media player so that they look fresh and part of the same device. I also changed the media player to use album art as the background of the player.

I searched for the resolution of the 17-inch display. If what I found was right, it’s 600×1280. If you hit the more button, you can see my interface designed for 600×1280 and a side by side of the Tesla S interface and mine.

Shortly after Luria and I started GeekBrief.TV, we found out about a distillery not far from where we lived. It was owned by a husband and wife and it was the first legal distillery opened in the area since prohibition. They made vodka and gin and the distiller told us the difference between the two. Gin is about what the distiller adds. Vodka is about what the distiller takes away.

That’s a good explanation of the difference between decoration and design. Decoration is about what you add to a room, a house, a product or anything to make it attractive. Design is about what you remove from a room, a house, a product or anything to make it work without distraction.

Decoration is intended to be pretty. Design is intended to be thoughtful.

This is decoration…

This is design…

(it’s also funny.)

Steve Jobs Silhouette (transparent .png file)