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"[...] if you read Russian, you can convince yourself of this by browsing his blog."

there is an English version of it here: http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/

which is a translation of http://www.artlebedev.ru/kovodstvo/sections/

(I don't know if this is the blog you were referring to)




No, that's not it at all - I am referring to his main blog at tema.livejournal.com. It's a profanity-laced display that really needs to be appreciated in the original to be believed. E.g. his response to the bus stop fiasco was along the lines of - I am translating liberally here, and you may want to cover the eyes of any small children reading along with you - that as a designer, his ass doesn't get fucked with this, and it's the builder who takes it up the ass for anything not built to his sketches.

That's a pretty original concept of industrial design - all product designers I know follow the product from sketch to engineering drawings to casting molds to the prototype to the production line, to make sure every little squiggle is just right. Now, if he wants to be a sketch artist, as opposed to a product designer, that's fine too, but that's not what he gets hired to do.

You may remember the disaster of the "Optimus Maximus" keyboard - this is the $1500 keyboard with LCD displays on all the keys. It ended up being years late and looked nothing like what was promised - he couldn't handle the engineering of placing the LCDs on the keys, so the keys became transparent with the LCDs under them. Now, that was a privately-developed product, but he's done this to paying customers any number of times as well, leaving them with a misdesigned product and late to the market. He then explains in his charming manner (see above) that this is all their fault.

He is a fantastic walking self-promotion machine, which is why the studio seems unsinkable despite being kind of lousy in terms of actual product design firepower.


Probably this: http://tema.livejournal.com/ Com/mandership is much less douchy.




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