Max Krieger’s Twitter Threads on Design

Thursday, 1 March 2018

A few nights ago I stumbled upon an excellent thread on Twitter by Max Krieger on the design of Sony’s ambitious but ill-fated Metreon complex in San Francisco. If you’ve ever been to Moscone for a conference, you know the Metreon — it’s the big weird mall across the street from Moscone West.

I found several things interesting about this:

• Twitter threads can be annoying at times, compared to reading a regular old article. But when done well, they’re engaging. Krieger is a natural at the format — breaking all his thoughts into tweet-sized chunks and including plenty of photos illustrating his points. And Twitter clients are good at displaying multiple images in a carousel.

• Krieger used the thread to promote his Kickstarter campaign for a puzzle game he’s making. As Ben Thompson noted, this is a great marketing idea. It looks like a cool game, and it’s 85 percent funded with less than a week to go. I backed it simply to thank Krieger for these terrific design threads.

• Cabel Sasser mentioned that Krieger had previously done a similar thread on Walt Disney World’s Tomorrowland. I love Tomorrowland, so I wanted to read that one too.

• I searched for “max krieger tomorrowland thread” in my favorite search engine, hoping to find his tweet starting that thread. Instead, the top result gave me something even better: a collection of five design threads from Krieger — the new Metreon one, Disney Quest, EPCOT, Tomorrowland, and The Cheesecake Factory (which Krieger describes as “a fully immersive ‘postmodern design hellscape’ themed dining experience”) — on a website I somehow hadn’t heard of before called Thread Reader. Thread Reader does just what you think it does: it collects Twitter threads on a single web page. It’s exactly what I wanted.

• Twitter and the good old fashioned World Wide Web can still be great.