Editor’s note: I’ve discussed this kind of topic recently, but I think it’s worth bringing up again.

I’ve said a few things about Facebook privacy before here. I don’t want to belabor the point made by Jason Calacanis and on Diggnation, but there is something bigger going on here, bigger than just Facebook, to discuss.

Facebook has been moving more and more to resemble the always public services such as Twitter, Flickr, and others. The controversy mainly stems from the history of Facebook being a private service with your information only facing towards your friends. Great, sounds good. But as so much of this information is public and searchable by people outside of your circle of friends, there are some issues to consider.

My point is: If I give all my information out to Facebook, or even Twitter, or even this blog for my friends to see. We friend each other and discuss different topics and catch up on the latest we’re doing. Fine, great, sign me up. The real issue going on here is when companies use this information to fine tune their marketing. If you take away the part of social media that is your friends and contacts, it really just becomes a feeding ground for marketers. In reality though of using these services, we get the benefit of keep up with our friends and sharing what we are doing. If you consider that next time you tweet or status update or whatever, it will make you ask: am I sharing something useful to friends or am I just feeding the marketing department of some company?

While, yes, I would rather see ads that are relevant to things I care about, I worried that Facebook is seeing us, the user, as a point of data to be used for advertising dollars and missing the mark of the people using the service. I know I’ve said this before, but at what to degree will this go on?

Social media sites will come and go, I don’t know if the problem is necessarily Facebook right now as it is the culture of over-sharing. Yes, Facebook’s privacy settings are confusing, but as public-ness becomes more and more a part of our society, maybe it’s time to really rethink how much we share. The tool isn’t just the problem it’s us.

This post isn’t directly about design and the web. It’s more about the idea of what good design should be. Certain ideas of what makes something truly great, something beyond the standard, are ideas that transcend just one medium. When I talk about design in this post, or really any time, I am talking about something bigger than just the way something looks. It’s how things work and what’s capable of. Today, we are talking about car design.

Sure, we have our favorites, the standard bearers of great design: BMW, Audi, Volvo, Mercedes, etc etc. Car manufacturers seems to go out of their way to change their product lineup every year. Lately, I’ve been wondering just how sustainable that mode of operation can last. You can only change the lines of a car’s shape so many times. Cars are not a commodity item that people need to buy on a frequent basis (unless you are made of money). The auto industry knows this and spends millions, if not billions, yearly on making you want this year’s model. Aside from maybe having a GPS built in and maybe a few dials on the dashboard are different, how is this hugely different from last years model?

Enter the Tesla

Tesla Motors has been known for their all electric roadster. The company has been producing this one model for a few years now, but now has plans for an all electric sedan, the Model S. This is where great design falls into place. This is a car that is drastically different from anything before. A 45 minute full charge can give the car a 300 mile range. In addition, it will feature a 17 inch touch screen display to handle the car’s climate controls, sound system, and navigation. A 3G connection will give passengers access to restaurant listings, Pandora, and possibly other types of data from the Internet.

All of this inside a beautifully built exterior and an all electric motor. The Model S is currently in preproduction under pre-order. If this can be delivered, this will be one great car. It will be a great example of design, thinking beyond cosmetics and lists of features. It’s the start of something fresh with automotive design.

To bring this full circle

Great design in any medium be it automotive, web, phones, houses, or whatever should be striving to stand out. Find the what the thing you do is and focus and sharpen that area until it shines. Quality and innovation will stand out.

Well, here we stand at the soft opening of a new portfolio design. It seems that this thing happens about every six months. While I loved the previous design, it really didn’t allow for much expansion. It was all one long page, which wouldn’t really work in the long run. Updating the portfolio content involved a lot of copy and paste and uploading files. So it was time to try starting from scratch with a content management system. Having worked with it a lot in the paste on other projects, I decided to have it a go with building my entire portfolio site around WordPress. I absolutely find it a joy working with WordPress, there is so much flexibility beyond building a simple blog. This also gave me an opportunity to try a fresh new look for the site, breaking away from the traditional sky blue and spectrum of colors.

Enter SmithScott.Net

I have also decided to drop the Silver Box Design moniker. When I first came up with that name about three years ago, I knew it was to be temporary until I thought of something better. All along, I really just wanted my name, Scott Smith, as the domain. However, since my name is so common, is a little difficult. So after a long time finding the right combination of first, last, and top level domain names, I landed on smithscott.net.

Change bookmarks accordingly, please.

On the new aesthetic

The Silver Box symbolism, I’ll admit, was never very original. I had started using the cut-out “S” for a few months now, and luckily this is also my initals. Perfect match by accident.

I also wanted to experiment with a new color palette and opted for a shade of gray complimented with yellows, blues, and greens.

I have also begun experimenting with the TypeKit service that helps bring non-standard fonts to the web. It’s a really wonderful service that I may write about in more detail down the road. Currently, I am using League Gothic for the large titles and navigation along with Etica Display for the blog titles.

The orange comes from my desire to celebrate my home state, California (which is featured on the home page as well). Southern California, particularly the inland areas, was once a major hub of the citrus industry in the US. I grew up seeing a lot of orange crate labels in my house and had my German ancestors settle in Orange County with their orange groves many generations before me. So it is something to celebrate, even if it doesn’t exactly tie into modern day web design.

No Comments

Also on this blog, I have not chosen to allowing commenting on posts. This is by design. I’d rather you drop me a direct line rather than litter my front lawn, so to speak.

Enjoy!

I hope you like this new layout. I sure do. I plan to update this blog about once a week with posts mainly about design and technology. Elsewhere, you may still read my personal blog over at Tumblr and follow me on Twitter over here.

Is it just me, or has Facebook lost it’s soul? The whole original premise of the site was a perfect storm for success: college students, later non-students easily able to connect with each other around the world. Great, sign me up! As with any Internet startup, there comes a point where they need to grow. They need to prove to investors and the mainstream that they are not simply a curiosity. I believe, for Facebook, it was around they introduced the Fan pages (which are now “Liking” something, same thing with different vocabulary). Fan pages gave business’, non-profits, groups, clubs, etc a platform to broadcast their message out to a lot of people at once. While in principal this is the same premise as Twitter, this was fully integrated into Facebook’s walled garden.

In order to keep up with future of the open web, Twitter, and being more visible in Google search, Facebook began experimenting with unlocking our data. First it was the confusing privacy settings, the accidental public settings for the photo albums, and now to the latest: the profile/fan page linking. In the age of the Internet, where free and openness reigns, business can take more and more advantage of this public data. I believe this is the idea behind Facebook’s ongoing destruction of it’s own walled garden. It also doesn’t help that the privacy settings require a PhD to deciefer. The more Facebook goes down this path of opening for the sake of business and leaving their original base of people connecting with other people, I feel they are loosing the magic of what originally made Facebook so popular.