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2009 Annual Design Review
Consumer Products
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Best of Category
VOODOO ENVY
THE JURORS REVERENTLY SLIPPED the Voodoo Envy out of its microfiber sheath, raised the glossy black lid, and basked in the instant-on glow of its fused-glass screen and backlit keyboard. “They just nailed every aspect; they invented solutions to every problem they encountered,” Brown said of the Voodoo/Hewlett-Packard design team, adding that the computer suits “the gamer who’s grown up.”
Voodoo PC, founded as a customized gaming computer maker in Calgary, Canada, in 1991, became part of HP in 2006. The goal after the merger was to “focus on extreme performance.” Envy ($1,799) was developed as a portable sequel to the Blackbird, a liquid-cooled aluminum desktop in the $6,000 range, as well as a retort to the market’s other lightweight overachievers, including Apple’s MacBook Air and Dell’s Adamo.
Solomon can tick off Envy’s advantages over the rivals, including glossier surfaces, more power, and less heat. The carbon-fiber frame, available in custom colors and measuring just 0.7 inches, is strong enough to contain a removable battery, which the competition lacks. Fused glass covers the screen edge to edge, and the trackpad is just a cluster of dots plus one horizontal button. Speakers are minute perforations alongside the keyboard, and tiny square vents are cut along the notebook’s rim. Envy’s accessories, including a power brick with a patented built-in Ethernet adapter, are made of glassy ABS plastic. No stickers for Windows or Intel mar any of the surfaces—stickers “are nasty and gross,” Solomon said—just some of Voodoo’s embossed face logos, which the jurors compared to Shepard Fairey’s Obey Giant.
The computer arrives in a thick-walled box, which is largely logo-free: “It’s meant to give a great unveiling experience, and then be reusable, not just recyclable,” Solomon explained. The tan-and-orange outer shell is worthy of coffee-table display, and the trays can be adapted into drawer organizers. The protective microfiber sleeve—a green substitute for the industry’s usual peel-off plastic layer—can live on as a travel case and a cleaning cloth for the carbon fiber and glass.
“The packaging is every bit as well-thought-out as the product,” Wilson said. He latched and unlatched the battery a few times—“that’s one thin battery”—and then declared he could scarcely believe that a global behemoth like HP had produced a design with so much elegance and personality. “To get something to come out at this level, at a corporation today—it’s unbelievably hard,” he said.
Design Hewlett-Packard (Cupertino, CA):
Mark Solomon, principal designer |
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