Maban » Design

Inspired by affordance on a vacuum cleaner

Anna Debenham — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:38:08 +0000

I’ve been looking a lot at the use of colours in physical objects recently. Often you’re asked to work on a site where the brand colours are some hideous combination of yellow and blue or red and green, and you’re expected to make those colours work well together.

I watched a video about vacuum cleaners back when I was studying Product Design for A-Level, and the presenter was talking about the use of colour on the Dyson range. The buttons and levers, the bits that you interact with, were designed to be a contrasting colour to the rest of the machine, and that instantly makes it so much more useable because it’s obvious which bits you interact with and which you don’t.

It’s frustrating when you try and interact with products that are beautiful to look at in the showroom, but difficult to use in their native environment. Take television sets. If you’re watching a film in the dark and want to turn the volume up, or change the channel without the remote, most of the time it’s impossible to tell which button does what because the corresponding symbol is such a low contrast to the background. Give it a different colour or texture, and immediately it’s more usable.

With so much choice over what products we buy (that all do pretty much the same thing), the products that do things differently really stand out. Take the Joseph utensil range. It’s a spatula. It doesn’t do anything that other spatulas can’t do, except it has a bit of plastic on the bottom that stops it touching the worksurface. And that tiny bit of plastic makes it new, more human and desirable. Also note the lime greens on the handles – the bits that you hold and interact with.

Next time you’re faced with a hideous colour scheme, ration those colours and use them as visual tools.

Chessbrook Education Centre

Anna Debenham — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 22:30:27 +0000

Chessbrook is the second school I have worked with. It was a really great project to work on because it was quite challenging. The school is an education centre for students who have not been able to cope in mainstream education.

I really like what Chessbrook are doing, and they were perfect clients to work with. At the end of the project, I did usability testing with the students to get their feedback on the website.

Training U

Anna Debenham — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:39:01 +0000

While attending a Business Link course on starting up, I met Nicola Dolan, a lady who was setting up her own company that offered IT Training courses. I worked with Nicola to design the branding for her company, and also designed and developed her website. I had fun building a nice jQuery accordion menu for the course outlines page.

The Portland Arms Pub

Anna Debenham — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:23:51 +0000

The Portland Arms pub website was commisioned by the landlady to provide information to locals about events at the pub, as well as an up-to-date seasonal menu. The pub dog, Buster, updates his online blog (http://www.theportlandarmspub.co.uk/blog/bustersblog.html) with his perspective of life at the Portland Arms, with photos of the people, and other dogs, he meets.

The landlady takes photos using her iPhone of the food served in the kitchen and uploads them to the website via Flickr. She also takes photos at special events, and these are automatically posted to a slideshow on the site (http://www.theportlandarmspub.co.uk/gallery.php). Many locals didn’t know where the pub was, so I added a Google map which shows users where the pub is, and they can plan their route to the pub using this feature.

Britball Run (Kempt)

Anna Debenham — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 22:52:23 +0000

I built the Britball Run website while working at Kempt. It’s a car tour event held in the UK that raises money for various charities. I found it quite a challenge because I don’t know much about cars, but it was a fun project nonetheless.