Li Fan » design

NOV

2011

How better photography could change your brand image, especially in online retailing.

Photography is a key factor in online retailing business. Choosing a bad photographer could literally ruin your reputation and drive customers away from you.

Taken for example, a recent photo retouching request I was assigned to for some high value designer cufflinks. The photography is so so, the path cutout was okay, and it was just dull and seems unedited. Somehow the designer decided to just use these un-edited images for all their online presentations. It took me a good amount of time to at least correct them as best I can, so we can use them for our online product page.

You be the judge, were the original images good enough for publishing, or my edited versions (diagonally placed) better?

AUG

2011

Product design

I’ve just designed a multipurpose jig for our engraving machines in our office.

The new clamps design will streamline the engraving of our cufflinks and reduce the amount of time we spent on switching clamps

Let’s see if the CNC shop I’m meeting with next week would turn my first design work into actual product!

Update:

The final product came in, they actually worked better than expected, my initial design requires a flip of clamps to fit round or rectangular designs, but the new clamps would fit all of our round cufflinks and over 90% of our rectangular cufflinks, without even flipping it! Thus reduceing significant amount of time wasted on readjusting engraver head position.

I am quite happy with how it turned out.

JAN

2010

An excellent example of good design, Lenovo ThinkPad T61 Laptop.

I’m a big fan of the ThinkPad’s tough industrial design and bold style. And I’m lucky to obtain a ThinkPad myself just recently. The keyboard is legendary, I’ve never used any laptop with such comfortable keyboard. The business oriented laptop also features two pointing devices, a trackpad and a trackpoint. Both devices even have their own buttons. That’s lavish! The LCD display is asymmetrically placed on the laptop; it’s pretty obvious when the screen is not turned on, but during actual use, you do not notice it at all, a nice design touch. There is even a LED keyboard light that could be turned on when laptop is been used in the dark. I personally think this design is superior to illuminated keyboard, because you can actually read documents using the light, while a illuminated keyboard would do nothing for ya.

Lenovo’s technical support for the laptop is also top notch, the System Update software automatically picks correct programs for your ThinkPad, and update them through Lenovo’s server automatically. There is a technology called “ThinkVantage Active Protection”, which automatically monitor’s the laptop’s hard drive, and shut it down instantly in the event of an accident where you might have dropped your laptop, thus prevent data lose. An integrated fingerprint reader further enhances overall security by accepting your fingerprints as a source of authentication.

Performance wise, The ThinkPad T61 features a fast core 2 duo processor, upgradable to a relatively modern intel T9600 mobile processor. But even with its stock setup, which features a T7500 2.2ghz processor, the system runs windows 7 64bit very smoothly and play back HD contents just fine.

Sure there are some small quirks that need to be sorted out, such as the placement of USB ports are not ideal, and there is only a VGA output instead of a DVI port (although you can solve both problems with a docking station attached). The battery life is also not ideal, unless you use a 9-cell extended battery, which adds a significant amount of weight to your machine.