Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
TROSPECTIVE<br />
After testing thousands of iPod accessories made by hundreds of developers,<br />
only a handful of products truly stood out from the rest. iDesign Retrospective<br />
gives us - and the designers - a chance to explain what made them so special.<br />
Saturation is inevitable for even the best things<br />
in life, and last year, the Apple accessory market<br />
actually became oversaturated: there were nine<br />
me-too speakers for every great one, two hundred<br />
cases for any given new iPod or iPhone, and it<br />
seemed as if white plastic add-ons had spilled into<br />
every drug store, supermarket, and cell phone mall<br />
kiosk in the United States. Faced with floods of new<br />
products to review, some of them bad enough to<br />
entirely ignore, we considered a different approach:<br />
what if we focused on truly superb designs,<br />
spotlighting them as inspirations for an industry<br />
desperately in need of both originality and good<br />
examples? We would look back at accessories that<br />
had changed perceptions of what the iPod could<br />
do, and what belonged alongside it. By illustrating<br />
greatness, perhaps we could encourage smarter,<br />
more worthwhile designs, rather than suggesting<br />
that everything was equally worthy of coverage.<br />
Thus, iDesign was born. For the past five months,<br />
we have published independently researched<br />
articles dealing with breakthrough products from<br />
the iPod and iPhone accessory industry, as well as<br />
the companies that created them. Our work on<br />
each article was kept secret from the subjects of<br />
our coverage in order to avoid actual or apparent<br />
editorial taint; only after we published each article<br />
did we contact the company to get the behindthe-scenes<br />
scoop from its designers. What follows<br />
are encapsulated versions of the seven iDesign<br />
articles we have published, as well as excerpts from<br />
the designer interviews we conducted afterwards.<br />
On the surface, each page is a look at two or<br />
three cool products, but careful readers will gain<br />
an insider’s perspective on how designers create<br />
truly great accessories. Many more details and<br />
photographs are available in the iDesign section of<br />
the <strong>iLounge</strong>.com web site. We hope you enjoy.<br />
29
Change language