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Reports of the Mac Mini’s death are greatly exaggerated…

• The Mac Mini is #1 and #6 in Apple’s “Best Selling Desktops” at Amazon.com.
• It is also #16 over all in the ultra competitve “Best Sellers in Computer & PC Hardware.”

Phelps in Midstroke (Speedo USA/Michael Muller)

Michael Phelps is the billion dollar man of the moment. He’s the one the kids currently want on their Wheaties. So, let’s say, hypothetically, you’ve got his agent on the line and he owes you the biggest favor in the world…

So,what do you use Micahel Phelps to sell? Anything is game. (He’s already hawking Visa Inc., Speedo, Omega, AT&T Wireless, PowerBar, Kellogg’s, Rosetta Stone, and PureSport.)

I’d put his face on a box of fishticks. Maybe a box of Phelpsticks.

The latest Nordstrom Anniversary Sale Catalog has a model in a wheelchair on page 34. (In the next panel, she is inexplicably standing in order to show off her bedazzled-mom-jeans clad behind, but no matter.) This is a big deal, because they’re not making a big deal about it. It isn’t part of some exploitative reality TV publicity stunt and this isn’t a special catalog. It’s just there. Much like wheel-chair bound people in real life. Imagine that!

They say you have to sell yourself on your product before you can sell anyone else. That hasn’t been happening at Microsoft lately, what with the top brass not being able to figure out what Vista Capable means. And from the looks of this, that won’t change. This is the stuff Office Space nightmares are made of.

When it comes to cost cutting, many times it’s design or marketing that goes first. This is like an applicant ditching the cover letter on their resume when the job market is down: it’s laughably bad timing. (You’re business is the applicant; your customer is interviewing your product all day every day. See how that works?)

So, why is such a silly mistake so common? It has to do with vocabulary. Even people who don’t care about design, care about it. They just think they don’t care, because they don’t know the language. They don’t take note of poorly thought out ergonomics when they encounter them, but they sure recognize it when they’ve purchased a product the maker clearly never used for it’s intended purpose. When they feel they’ve wasted money, they certainly do take note. And they tell their friends.

People who say design is unimportant are taking it for granted. We’re literally surrounded by products, information, and communication that’s been worked over and focused grouped to death. Example: there are 300 kinds of cereal at the grocery store. All of these companies have 0.1 seconds to pitch to you as you fly down the aisle, hoping your rug-rat doesn’t see the really-sugary-crap, but does see the kind-of-sugary-crap that you want. The cereal companies know this, and 90% of those boxes have been meticulously designed to stop you and/or your kid dead in your tracks.

We are inundated with superbly designed products. A lot of us don’t know it, but it’s more likely that we just don’t know what to call it. When we see an ad with bad kerning, even if you don’t know what’s wrong with it, you still think it looks cheap; an impression you immediately transfer to the product. This doesn’t make you someone who’s into typography, it makes you a seasoned consumer. Which is what most of us are by the age of 6, thanks to McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and co.

So what about it? Well, if you want to sell somebody something; an idea, an mp3 player, whatever; then you’d better get your design shoes on. Or pay someone else to do the legwork for you.

A 3-year Fortune-500 study conducted by research firm Peer Insight found companies focused on customer-experience design outperformed the S&P 500 by 10-to-1 from 2000-2005. One more time for those in the back: that was 10-1. Your customers care about design; a lot; ten-to-one a lot. Even if they don’t (know it).

[Photo Credit]