What is Surface Texture?
Surface Texture is a weekly newsletter covering product design trends and innovations for hardware designers, engineers, strategists, and entrepreneurs.
How does it work?
Every Tuesday morning, we’ll send you three notable hardware products that publicly launched in the past week. We cast a wide net, focusing on products that are shaking up their industry, introducing some new and interesting CMF or manufacturing technique, or notable trends within physical product categories. This includes everything from 3D-printed architecture to Google’s latest smartphone launch, but shares the common thread of existing physically. For now, it’s free!
Inspiration is scarce when infinite scrolling
How do you stay up to date with new trends, technologies, and consumer tastes? If you’re a product designer, you might endlessly scroll through Pinterest or Instagram searching for the signal in the noise. If you’re an entrepreneur, maybe you’re on VC Twitter, TechCrunch, or even Kickstarter monitoring what’s new. Between all the junk and the endless stream of information, it’s difficult to find the interesting new products and trends that are relevant to your work. We sift through hundreds of press releases, articles, and ads to curate a list of the products that count. Surface Texture helps break your media bias and introduce you to trends in other industries — our goal is to cross-pollinate trends across industries to help advance product design at a faster rate. Who’s to say the next big thing in the automotive industry won’t come from the medical industry?
Product reviews are a red ocean
Surface Texture is not a product review newsletter. There’s an abundance of tech reviews and “best of” websites online, and quite frankly, they’re boring. The relative difference between that 12 megapixel camera and the 15 megapixel camera is just not that interesting. The content on Surface Texture is more about understanding a trend and providing perspective in new product development. We’ll rarely recommend you buy a product, but frequently recommend you pay attention to what people are buying.
Reconciling concept and reality
There’s a ton of theoretical and conceptual work out there that we try to avoid featuring in Surface Texture. Sometimes it makes sense to feature a new concept car, but most of the time it won’t. As kids growing up, we always wanted to see the concept car become reality, baffled that the adults of the world refused to drive vehicles that were so darn cool (emulating Hot Wheels was a good thing). The fact that so few conceptual designs survive the harsh world of constraints like “manufacturability” and “budgets” lends us to believe they’re not worth sharing unless they’re really special.
Finally…
We’re just getting started!
Please let us know if you’re launching a product that should be considered in a future issue, or if you have a tip on something we should know about.
If you haven’t already, subscribe now to get full access to the newsletter and website!
