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Designing a Bottle
- rubatuga 9y agoSame! Complete! Nutrition! More efficient! Please, it’s a bottle design. Is Soylent trying to create a following like Apple fans? At least Apple makes good products.
- miguelrochefort 9y agotou·ché
- eropple 9y agoHey now. Soylent is a perfectly cromulent Ensure knockoff. ;)
- chadcmulligan 9y agoindeed, they've managed to make powdered gunk desirable to 20 somethings, a marketing coup.
- thatswrong0 9y agoNot really. Check the nutritional label. Disclosure: tried Soylent and didn't find it agreeable with my belly.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoSoylent Cafe is almost exclusively sold online by the dozen, so a bottle that's more space-efficient and resistant to shipping damage is a tangible benefit to customers.
- nimchimpsky 9y agoYeah they are the first company to look at that problem :-|
- dkonofalski 9y agoIt does seem like they're trying to create a following like Apple. Instead of letting the work speak for itself, though, Soylent seems to think that they can incite that kind of appreciation.
- throwaway7645 9y agoApple might have some good products, but a lot of bad ones as well with a whole lot of marketing and devoted fans that will wait in line all night for it, so really not that different.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y agoI'm not an Apple person by a long shot (full-time Linux desktop / Android user) but I'm struggling to think of an outright bad product that they've put out in the past 15 years or so... I guess the Watch had its shortcomings and the specs on their computers are falling behind the competition but everything they put out seems very well designed and engineered.
- throwaway7645 9y agoWatch, new computers lacking many peripherals unless you buy a bag of dongles, rehashing the same product over and over while software upgrades make them obsolete...just saying marketing is a huge part of what apple does.
- tmccrmck 9y agoThe reference to Dieter Ram's Braun designs didn't tip you off? Jony Ive is well known to love that look: https://www.google.com/search?q=johnny+ive&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=jony+ive+dieter+rams https://www.google.com/search?q=johnny+ive&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8...
- emmett 9y ago"I am upset because someone working at a company wrote a blog post to share their design work on a new bottle." What's the value of sneering at someone else's work like this? Why the mean tone?
- idlewords 9y agoBecause the parent post is ridiculously pretentious, and funny.
- gtm1260 9y agoDon't you think its interesting to see the thought process of the people who make what we see in the world. Sure, it is just a bottle, but that doesn't mean that someone didn't put time and effort into making a good one.
- rubatuga 9y agoI mean, sure, but don’t act like you’re changing the world. This is nothing more than marketing. Also, 5 seconds of thinking would tell you that a juice box has more packing efficiency than a bottle. (I also have had a bad experience with Soylent)
- hyperdimension 9y agoDo tell...
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoJuice boxes have pretty obvious ergonomic issues. Also the article goes into detail on why they didn't make it perfectly square.
- hnzix 9y agoI have lactose intolerance and struggle to gain healthy weight. Off-brand Vegan soylent has changed my world. So, like, speak for yourself buddy.
- rootlocus 9y agoDon't mix apples and oranges. This discussion and the article are about the design of the bottle, not the actual soylent powder.
- skybrian 9y agoYep, it's marketing, but it's also somewhat educational. That's marketing done right. Compare to the marketing blurbs for most products that are fairly meaningless. Can you imagine if the people who marketed shampoos and cleaning products explained how they work in a similar way?
- booleandilemma 9y agoTheir new bottle has rounded corners. Apple might try to sue them for that.
- majewsky 9y agoAt least the cap isn't slide-to-unlock.
- mbesto 9y ago> Is Soylent trying to create a following like Apple fans? Everyone is trying to create a following like Apple. Key ingredients: 1. Simple name 2. Simple design with no instructions or "bells and whistles descriptions" 3. Act as if design is 75% of your value proposition If it isn't obvious, this doesn't always work.
- kennydude 9y agoIt needs one for such a niece product
- dkonofalski 9y agoI normally really enjoy insight into product design, but this whole thing seems a little masturbatory. Braun's designs were great because other people recognized that they were smart and simple. It seems like Soylent is squarely aiming for the hipster market (I'm not really sure what else to call it) where people praise an extraordinary effort regardless of if the end result is noticeably better. I'm not saying the bottle design work wasn't better or that the product doesn't benefit from it, but the write-up about it has this sense of self-satisfaction that puts a bad taste in my mouth (completely disconnected from the taste of the actual product which I can't really comment on).
- ethagknight 9y agoWouldn't a Boxed Soylent (sealed bladder in a box like boxed wine) be most efficient for shipping to consumer, and most efficient for consumption? If they are really trying to optimize every aspect, that seems like the solution (from my armchair!). My first thought when seeing the headline was "oh boy, Silicon Valley has been shopping something in a bottle for 1 year now, and now they're experts in bottle packaging innovation, but I was pleasantly surprised by the write up. They identified problems unique to their product and addressed them. Nothing earth shattering glass, but also not settling for status quo. It's minor but non-trivial, and it speaks to the attitude of the overall product. I've been keeping Soylent around as a healthy meal-in-a-pinch option and I really enjoy it, plain flavor and all. Super filling, tastes like a plant-y pancake batter.
- supernumerary 9y agoI think the one requirement for this design was: "Just don't make it a bag and have the consumer have to squeeze it" - c.f. Juicero
- jameskegel 9y agoRIP
- microcolonel 9y agoBy the way, you don't need to put a period in between the c and f in cf, it's shortened from ConFer. Typically it's styled "cf.".
- nimish 9y agoYeah I thought they'd just go with a tetra Pak and move on But it would t make a nice blog post of be as distinctive brandwise
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kennydude 9y ago
- sushisource 9y agoSeems like a lot of effort to design an exact equivalent to an Odwalla bottle.
- rogocopH 9y agobut! Science??
- tannerc 9y agoBut isn't that exactly what design should do? Not mimic for the sake of mimicry, but attempt to better understand the rationale for any decision and ultimately designing with intent. The homework is the meat of the thing. So what if the result is the same? At least the team behind the work now understands how they got there—and communicate as much to their current or potential fan base. I wouldn't want to hire a babysitter to watch my child if their sales pitch was: "I've watched a lot of babysitters in movies, I know what I'm doing." It's a bit of a silly comparison of course, but the point remains: how you get to a result is just as important—if not more important—as the result itself. That's good design!
- farnsworth 9y ago"because I've experimented and I know what works with childcare and what doesn't" hm...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Spooky23 9y agoI guess it depends on how much time and money you want to waste. A team of people spent two years supposedly working on this. That same team could probably have gotten samples from 4-5 manufacturers and selected an Odwalla bottle with a brand design in 2-3 weeks. It just seems silly and wasteful to me. But hey, it's not my money!
- gwbas1c 9y ago
- Animats 9y agoNext, they're going to announce they invented the 6-pack.
- vinchuco 9y agoI wish more companies put out there the rationale for their design choices. Not sure why a lot of comments here are so negative about them doing their job and communicating it.
- rubatuga 9y agoSoylent pretends to be things it isn’t. This is easily one more example. This post reeks of “hipster”: name dropping of famous aesthetic designs, space references, black and white photos of milk bottles, some mathematical looking diagrams, talk of perfectionism (two years development)? This is a marketing ad, nothing more. “the same complete nutrition you have come to expect from Soylent”
- Overtonwindow 9y agoI feel like that would be a good idea, to know more about what went into a design, but I fear that we would just end up with tons and tons of Apple-like videos, British accent and all. Then the neat factor gets alluded by marketing spin.
- bykovich2 9y agoDoes anyone still drink this stuff?
- paulcole 9y agoClever trick to host all their blog images on imgur. My only wonder is if they legally licensed those Dieter Rams and Kubrick images?
- majewsky 9y agoNot familiar with US law (esp. re: fair use), but in Germany this would likely count as a quotation and therefore be admissible.
- drozzz 9y agoFirst time I had heard this: a pressurized cylindrical container pushes outward with equal force in all directions. This is crucial for pressurized beverages. My favorite bottle redesign (http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/2010/3/15/ecocoke.html http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/2010/3/15/ecocoke.html) was done on Coca-Cola and had a similar "sqround" shaped bottle, but I don't think he considered the pressure in the bottle.
- mrob 9y agoI find it hard to believe that the asymmetric design has optimal strength:weight ratio, which means it's not 100% eco-friendly. It looks like it's deliberately wasting material so it can have a distinctive shape that can be design patented, instead of a fully optimized generic bottle.
- tjl 9y agoThat's the difference between a freshman design project and an actual design used in practice. It's unlikely he has the mathematics/engineering background to do a proper analysis of his design. He's not thinking of the bottle as a pressure vessel (which it is).
- finkin1 9y agoThis is a nice blog post - what's with all the hate? So it's basically a marketing tool, but isn't that what blogs are for? As a customer of Soylent, I appreciate that they are writing blog posts about their thought process. It feels nice to be communicated with. Also, I highly doubt a detailed blog post like this is going to convert many new customers - seems like it's mainly for existing ones. FYI, the new bottles are a nice improvement. There's no wrapper at the top anymore, which is sometimes annoying to open and creates extra trash, and the shape of the bottle is more space efficient for packaging and storage.
- RodericDay 9y ago> So it's basically a marketing tool, but isn't that what blogs are for depressing thought
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y agoTrue for "corporate blogs" but remember there are still plenty of people (maybe more than ever?) maintaining personal blogs for their own less nefarious purposes as well.
- rpeden 9y agoIt's an old problem. There's a neat book, Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet, published by the EFF back in 1990. There's a quote from it[1] that comes to mind when I see people vehemently disagreeing online: Something about online communications seems to make some people particularly irritable. Perhaps it's the immediacy and semi-anonymity of it all. Whatever it is, there are whole classes of people you will soon think seem to exist to make you miserable. Rather than pausing and reflecting on a message as one might do with a letter received on paper, it's just so easy to hit your R key and tell somebody you don't really know what you really think of them. Even otherwise calm people sometimes find themselves turning into raving madmen. When this happens, flames erupt. And of course, Usenet was around long before this book was published. So now, when I see people being righteously indignant on HN or Reddit, I try to take it in stride. They're just carrying on the time honored internet flaming tradition. :) [1] https://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/bdgtti/bdgtti_8.html https://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/bdgtti/bdgtti_8.html
- dvcc 9y agoWhy not just go with a square carton design? Now the whole rectangle is full and they're mostly recyclable (I think?). It would probably also normalize Soylent into something like milk.
- ucaetano 9y agoIt wouldn't be as cool, and wouldn't be worth a blog post.
- jitl 9y agoThe blog post cites visible damage from door delivery shipping as the major design issue that they were trying to solve. (Paper) cartons are much weaker and less resilient than plastic bottles. Think about the number of times you've seen dented or folded chicken soup cartons on supermarket shelves... I've certainly seen plenty of Safeway soup boxes to avoid because of obvious exterior damage. I don't think cartons would get them very far in that area.
- dvcc 9y agoI've never really seen milk cartons delivered towards schools or shops (think juices and milk) be damaged all that often, but I'm not watching their deliveries either! I just imagined it was a problem already solved for non-pressurized drinks.
- pervycreeper 9y agoThose are often transported in thick reusable crates rather than cardboard boxes.
- idlewords 9y agoThis is what happens when you overfund a company. Artisanal blog posts about the two-year journey to a flat-sided bottle of nerd purée.
- mfrykman 9y agoPretty sure that Industrial Designers call this a "squarecle"
- wingerlang 9y agoThe blog post doesn't make it very obvious which bottle is actually new, I assume the left-most on the first image? The second image have them flipped and the last image is not the most clear. The first image, second bottle also look "more designed".
- heartbreak 9y agoI suppose that's true if you only look at the pictures and don't bother actually reading the article.
- Tepix 9y agoThey had a lot of problems with mold in the past with the bottles. They don't mention that in the article - i guess they don't want to draw more attention to that disgusting issue. But the mold issue was probably an important factor in their bottle design as well.
- hueving 9y agoDo you have a link to read more? Has it been solved? I sometimes buy these for road trips and I would like to avoid drinking mold.
- lightbyte 9y agoThey solved that problem a long time ago by making the caps sealed on the bottle. They originally were not, and some of the liquid would get lodged up along the rim of the cap during shipment. That was the part that got moldy.
- softwarelimits 9y agoInacceptable! Unfortunately "designers" nowadays feel more like self-loving "artists" rather than problem-solving engineers - we need better education! "Inventing a plastic bottle in 2017" - this could be joke, but the ignorance behind it makes me angry. http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782/tab-pdf http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782/tab-pdf http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/768 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/768 http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/1/4/140317 http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/1/4/140317
- Piccollo 9y agoDesign is about art though
- d--b 9y agoI wish they made a blog post about how they came about to think that Soylent was a good branding name. Having seen the movie, it makes me want to barf just looking at the bottle. This is not a joke, I actually feel nauseous because of the name.
- mmjaa 9y agoMe too. I will simply never buy or use this product because of the decisions made about how to name it. Those same processes will more than likely be involved in whats in the stuff as well, and .. yeah .. that just doesn't work for me. Seriously people, the irony levels are too damn high. This is a case of an absolutely atrocious brand decision being made by people whose hubris are blinding them to the fact that they're insulting themselves, and their customers, by associating their product with cannibalism.
- Kurtz79 9y agoProbably as a joke, but it served them well, it's really a clever name IMHO. I think it all started as a few blog posts about the founder's experiments in creating his own meal replacement, and after he got crazy media attention he decided to turn it into a product. Soylent as a name is instantly recognizable and has a sense of self-awareness/irony that many other products lack, I would be surprised if the name itself didn't contribute greatly to the initial media coverage.
- hedgew 9y agoI quite liked the European competitor's original name, Joylent. To avoid legal issues they eventually changed the name and somehow ended up with "Jimmy Joy". That name was so intensely disliked that they renamed it again in about a month.
- Sammi 9y agoIt's still called Jimmy Joy as far as I can see: https://www.jimmyjoy.com/ https://www.jimmyjoy.com/
- morsch 9y agoThe company still seems to be named Jimmy Joy, and the product Plenny Shake. Both somehow strike me as really terrible brand names. Can't find anything about a subsequent rename. That said, I'm a customer of theirs, and daft names aren't going to change that.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- zichy 9y agoDear (Soylent) designers, please stop comparing yourselves with big names like Kubrick or Rams. You designed a plastic bottle - no more, no less.
- atemerev 9y agoYou won't get much upvotes on HN with that... Comparing yourself to Kubrick, on the other hand, will create some reaction.
- sametmax 9y agoYou are very condescending. These people are trying to do something, they share the process, they try to get some inspiration from people they like. What's the big deal ?
- joyofdata 9y agoExactly - no big deal, at all - but Kubrick is responsible for several really big deals.
- zichy 9y agoIf I go to the supermarket, almost every smoothie bottle looks somewhat like the new Soylent bottle. I can't tell if they actually took inspiration from Dieter Rams, but it's really easy to refer to him since he is like the father of modern industrial (consumer) design. Soylent is an enterprise and they want to make themselves to look as good as possible in order to generate more revenue. No reason not to criticize awkward marketing blog posts like this.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI envy you. Could we import that style to Europe sooner? The juice bottles from "The Martian" movie are the epitome of consumer product design for me: https://media1.giphy.com/media/11bglU5OG7SJAk/giphy-facebook_s.jpg?t=1 https://media1.giphy.com/media/11bglU5OG7SJAk/giphy-facebook... (I apologize for the crappy image; I'm nowhere near a copy of the movie to make a decent screenshot) No bullshit. Just the product name and necessary information about its content. No useless colors, no pictures of animals, smiling faces or other crap. There are days I dream of starting a food company just to make food in such packaging.
- JshWright 9y agoThere are tons of bottles with that shape on the shelves of my local grocery store... It's quite common with any drink that isn't carbonated (and therefore doesn't have to contend with higher pressures). Juices, teas, etc...
- coldpie 9y agoYeah, I'm left wanting. I thought maybe there was something interesting going on, but instead they seem to have discovered that rectangles pack more efficiently than circles. That's it? I learned that in geometry class as a teenager.
- rahilb 9y agoreminds me of possibly my favourite document of all time, the pepsi galaxy. https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell-021109.pdf https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell... > The Pepsi Ratio is created by two simple circles, that are in a set ratio to each other: The Golden Ratio. > The Pepsi Ratio is aesthetic geometry. > The Golden Ratio establishes a proportion of one part (a) relative to another (b). Playing by these rules produces an aestetic that is universally accepted to be in balance and harmony. The Pepsi aesthetic respects these rules: The brand identity can be derived from two circles, that have a set relation to each other.
- petepete 9y agoI was about to post this too, it's my goto example of designers taking themselves a bit too seriously.
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoIt took me a long time to determine whether this was genuine, tongue-in-cheek, or a parody.
- rahilb 9y agoThat's the hallmark of all the best satire :)
- cyphar 9y agoNote that while that document is absolutely hilarious and almost believable, I believe that it was shown to be a fake some time ago.
- dkonofalski 9y agoI think the majority of the document is real but some of the pages have been swapped out with fakes. I totally believe that some pretentious designer did a lot of the backlog of work to look at the history of the design and I have a hard time believing that someone would put in all that effort to find those images, trace them in a vector art program, and then wireframe them just for a laugh.
- Ninjalicious 9y agoSqround is a great word which I will use now. Perfect for describing that weird ovoid square with fillets.
- Gatsky 9y agoNormally I would find this sort of thing quite interesting, but this is somehow... inauthentic. As is Soylent in general. Reading their blog posts, you are never quite sure if they are serious about the whole meal replacement concept or if it's actually a big joke.
- tonyb 9y agoAs someone that has a few commercially produced products (BBQ Rubs and Sauces) I never cease to be amazed by how much work the packaging piece of the puzzle is. I easily spend as much time worrying about bottle, closures, labels, etc. as I do about the actual product.
- kristianc 9y agoWhat is with this trend of making all products look identical? Surely a product's design is meant to give some indication of what is in the product and what the product does? This just looks like a completely generic bottle and could as easily be for a foodstuff or a cleaning agent. I saw something similar the other day, a 'brandless' supermarket where everything is designed in a similarly minimalist way. It's infuriating. http://designtaxi.com/news/394281/A-Fabulous-Brandless-Online-Grocery-Store-Where-Everything-Is-Priced-At-3/# http://designtaxi.com/news/394281/A-Fabulous-Brandless-Onlin...
- sidcool 9y agoPleasantly surprised to see 2001 reference there. That movie was so ahead of its time.