We will forgive them for using comic sans, if only because it's used in the correct bubble-caption context. Creating Passionate Users talks about Sexy design. Which raises the question, what makes a design sexy?

Clearly no one is lining up to hump an iPod. But it's often cited as a sexy product design. It makes us covet, and that's hard for a chunk of plastic to do. Is it:

1. scaling -- perfectly sized for hand.
2. controlled palette - two-tone silver and white, or brushed colored aluminum and white.
3. simple interface

Or: is it possible that what makes the ipod sexy is that it's a caricature of a gadget, sort of a cartoonist's rendering of a handheld device? This would make sense when compared with the iMac, the Volkswagen Beetle (both old and new), and things like the Michael Greaves teapot.

If it helps, you could think of Apple's single-buttoned mouse as a four-fingered cartoon mouse. Cartooning often challenges the animator to evoke a personality with minimum lines, and successful product design might be doing something very similar. We might think of it as akin to functionalism, but instead of form following function, form follows signification -- the gadget design that appeals to us most strongly is the one that seems most gadgetlike, or conveys "gadget" most economically.

But is this sexy or cute?

We might refer to it as sexy because sexiness works the same way: while natural selection might give us a set of heuristics for fertility, our minds don't register it as such -- we seek sexy for sexy's sake, and the right combination of variables sets our brains awash in the hormones for desire.

Whereas "cute" is a lot more specific. "Cute" requires an infantalized feature set. The Volkswagen is cute because its profile is soft and bulbous, and its hood is small in proportion to its cabin -- it looks like a baby car, if there were such a thing.

So, next time you see a sexy product -- is caracture at work? Does the design strive to distill the object into its quintessence? What is the platonic ideal of a vaccuum cleaner?