People everywhere felt Microsoft’s last go-around in the console design world lacked a bit, to put it lightly. The huge angular black and green box didn’t fit in with any adult’s electronic entertainment setup, and looked more like a prop from a terrible 80’s sci-fi movie. The sheer size of the thing made one Microsoft Exec comment “You couldn’t get it through the door of apartments in a lot of places.”

Everyone, even Microsoft, felt the sequal to the big black box needed a new look, so they did what any multinational ginormous corporation would do and threw unimaginable amounts of cash into hiring twelve design firms to each brainstorm ideas. Eventually, a system of creative development showed up:

Architectural vs. Organic. Wild vs. Mild. They moved away from the wild and architectural look of the original Xbox and something pretty cool came along. Here’s where my muse shows up.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 looks nice and completly non-offensive in any way possible. That’s what millions of dollars in focus group will get you. But the real intelligence behind that graph is realizing that you can’t do everything with one design. I’m making a theme for my site, and I have to give it a theme. I have to give it personality.

My first design was awful. Worse than Kubrick . It had all the the blandness with none of the inoffensiveness. It screamed “look at me: I’m uninspired and gaudy!” So, we move on. I want my site to be wild and organic. The first design was wild and lame.

So. Step one is realizing that a theme must well, have a theme.

Onward to page three.