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Ah, Sixties are knocking! Steel, Aluminium, Glass & Leather. Shrugging....
the degrade of design & perception is remarkable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, what I'm after is a page layout that is designed with compactness and readability in mind. Going from a product database to that requires quite a lot. An example: https://archive.org/details/mouserelectronic00unse/page/190/...
A printed catalog also provides discovery that no website has ever matched.
Is there a reason IKEA doesn't bring back all of the classic designs from time to time?
Some would be hard for them to make at a reasonable price today and they wouldn't sell in big numbers at a higher price. Adam Savage recently posted a video about his favorite IKEA cabinet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLAAxxjM_7U The drawers have box joints which is something I can't imagine IKEA of today doing. It's on page 311 of their 1997 catalog FYI.
Woah...that brings back some memories. In a whole different timeline 22 years ago I was printing them for literal months. We did all European versions and it was 8 weeks of nothing but IKEA catalogs. They were highly optimized so for a language change we only had to switch the black cylinders. The whole IT was bonkers for the time we used SGI workstations for pre press and had like 100 bonded dial up connections for…
For decades we used to have daily newspapers delivered to our doorstep, and the price was low enough that almost anyone could afford it.
Very cool. I wonder how much of that 1950s IKEA furniture has survived to today.
The IKEA catalogue through the ages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997461 - Oct 2021 (64 comments)
Woah...that brings back some memories. In a whole different timeline 22 years ago I was printing them for literal months. We did all European versions and it was 8 weeks of nothing but IKEA catalogs. They were highly optimized so for a language change we only had to switch the black cylinders. The whole IT was bonkers for the time we used SGI workstations for pre press and had like 100 bonded dial up connections for…
I don't think most people appreciate the miracle that is paper publishing. For decades we used to have daily newspapers delivered to our doorstep, and the price was low enough that almost anyone could afford it.
I hadn't noticed the lack of printed IKEA catalogs until now. Seems like they stopped making them in 2021. They used to just appear in the mailbox. (I'm in Sweden. They were literally sent to every household in the country every year.) I'm a fan of print layout catalogs over database driven web sites. Can't AI help with making an appealing paginated layout of a product database? I'd be happy with a 1 GB .pdf. Edit: S…
A few years ago I did the website for a retailer of clothes for the elderly, and they were doing it old school with the catalogue, printed order form and excellent customer service by phone. Their niche was the demographic every other clothing retailer avoided. Unless you have a similar niche, you have to ask about whether a printed catalogue is worthwhile.
AI could potentially help but how do you plan and budget time for that? It could take anything between two minutes and two years to get right. Meanwhile you could do it old-school with artworkers slaving away. Alternatively, you could automate the process to use print stylesheets where you specify the page size and then populate the content with CSS grid layout. The printed catalogue could then be created on demand (and cached) so that it automatically updates itself. This could be a manageable process that you could plan and budget for.
In your product database you could have fields for layout preferences so that you can specify the featured product for each page and what to downgrade in the presentation. I would say this is definitely viable and one reason this is not done is that any company still invested in print catalogues will have an artworker department and nobody in such a department would invest time into automating their job.