Andy Mangold: 3 tech and design trends from 2013 [LISTEN]

Was 2013 as big a dud when it came to consumer technology as some have argued? That’s one topic local designer Andy Mangold recently tackled.
Mangold of the Mount Vernon-based design, web and app development firm Friends of The Web is one of the three voices in the On The Grid podcast, a somewhat regular online meeting of three design professionals — from New York City, San Francisco and Baltimore — to talk about the intersection of design and technology.
In On The Grid’s 2013 wrap-up podcast, Mangold and co-hosts talk about the biggest trends in design and tech from the previous year. Here are three that Mangold touched on during the 40-minute session, including 2013 being a “lost year for tech“:

1. Is it important that people like a brand’s logo? Yahoo! took snark-flak for proudly announcing it spent 30 days on redesigning a logo that, in the end, looked bland. Mangold approached the idea from a slightly different tack, talking about how software design and user testing, unlike logos and branding, favors developers having a “specific goal,” then “trying different things until you find something that meets that goal” for the most people. Perhaps that’s how brands should approach redesigning logos?
2. Was 2013 tech boring? Mangold spoke some about whether 2013 was a sorry year for technology. “This year was less about actual cool new stuff and about all of the stuff in the periphery,” he said, citing Twitter’s IPO, Facebook’s stock price and the class battle waging in the Bay Area between techies and non-techies.
3. Are tech companies getting too big? “Tech companies are starting to realize they have much more power in this new economy that they did before,” Mangold said. For some tech companies, that means users’ data is able to be intercepted by the National Security Agency. For others, that means pushing ideas that have led to what Mangold calls “weirdly dystopian views of how the future might be.” (Think: Amazon Prime Air.)

Listen to the full On The Grid 2013 wrap-up podcast.