Results tagged “design”
Today's word of the day comes from Adam Greenfield in an excellent post on Apple's interface design choices. Specifically, Greenfield decries Apple for their cheesy faux-analog Calendar, Notes and the cringe-worthy page turn within iBooks. As you might now imagine, a skeuomorph is "a derivative object which retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original." Seems like a word that might come in handy.
Greenfield's solution:
What Apple has to do now is find the visual language that explains the difference between a networked text and a book, a networked calendar entry and a page leaf, or a networked locational fix and a compass heading, and does so for a mass audience of tens or hundreds of millions of non-science-fiction-reading, non-interface-geek human users. The current direction is inexplicable, even cowardly, and the task sketched here is by no means easy. But if anybody can do this, it's the organization that made generations of otherwise arcane propositions comprehensible to ordinary people, that got out far enough ahead of the technology that their offerings Just Worked.
[Via Daring Fireball]
Tags: apple, design, iphone
Looking for new ways to tell stories.
Over at his Reuters blog Felix Salmon points to today's New York Times story on a waiver AIG signed giving up its right to sue the banks it paid off. While the story is interesting in and of itself, for the purposes of this post I'm going to focus on the source materials (the actual waiver), which the Times posted in a special browsing interface.
Funny enough just two weeks earlier Salmon had written a piece calling the paper out for not posting this sort of stuff, so it's a nice about face. But it also is a really interesting way to tell a story differently. As I see it most of what journalists are doing these days is not a lot different that what they were doing when we weren't all staring at screens for eight hours a day. Of course there are exceptions, whether it's liveblogging Wimbledon or, well, I can't really think of another example right this minute but I'm sure there are more. Journalism, for better or worse, is still mostly the same journalism it always was and we still engage with publications in the same sort of ways (albeit with more lists and slideshows now that they're on the web).
Source materials seems like an incredibly interesting and untapped area of innovation for news organizations. While I understand that posting this sort of stuff is often out of the question, it can't always be and I have to believe there's much fun to be had in telling stories through the documents collected instead of just the paragraphs that boil them all down. I guess some might see this as diminishing the role of the journalist, who has traditionally been tasked with finding the story, I'm not sure I agree. I dont think that there's any less of a need to find the story in a sea of documents, I just think this is a different (and hopefully more compelling) way to tell it.
In a lot of ways it feels like I'm talking about media invention, which Robin Sloan was kind enough to define last week:
Fundamentally, I think, a media inventor is someone who isn't satisfied with the suite of formats that have been handed down to him by his culture (and economy). Novel, novella, short story; album, EP, single; RPG, RTS, FPS--a media inventor doesn't like those choices. It turns out a media inventor feels compelled to make the content and the container.
I think maybe we've all become a little too comfortable with our CMSes (whether they be some big enterprise job or Wordpress or even Tumblr and Twitter). While these do an amazing job getting content out into the world, they also dictate how we present that content. Most CMSes want words, in paragraphs, in stories. Even Tumblr, for it's different approach, now just spawns content that can be scooped up and turned into a 150-page book with pictures.
So as not to end on a down note, though, the whole point of writing this is that I'm pretty excited with the stuff the New York Times is trying in this realm. They're playing with ways to tell stories and lots of others are as well (though most of them are outside the big news organizations). Even MSNBC's new page design seems like a step in a new direction. So please don't take this as some sort of whine about the state of things, but rather as excitement for what's coming.
Update (6/30/10): I should have mentioned the Guardian is doing some really cool stuff as well.
Tags: creativity, design, journalism, news
Is it time we started making things harder on purpose?
I broke my iPhone before I left for my honeymoon and a friend was kind enough to lend me an old unlocked Nokia. The phone worked out fine and not having access to all the iPhone holds was probably a bit of a blessing (though I'm pretty seriously missing it now that I'm back home and can't get my hands on a 4G).
Anyway, as part of having a phone with a keypad (not even keyboard) I went back to T9 (you remember it, predictive type for SMS messages).1 The struggle to send a simple message made me think about how we are likely going to need to start add elements to our interfaces that actually make tasks harder, not easier. Imagine how many fewer emails you'd write on your iPhone if you were forced to use T9 for instance.
While it's not the perfect parallel, something like WriteRoom lets you block out everything else when you're trying to write (Pages now has a full screen option as well, actually) and I remember hearing about an application from a few years ago that turned off your WiFi until you restarted the computer so you could get something done. It's funny to think that we've reached a point where things are so easy that we need to start making them hard again.
[PS: I'm married, honeymooned, done with Cannes and back in NYC.]
1 As a side note, the guy who invented T9 has a new text input method for touchscreens called Swype. ↩
Tags: design, interface
A new coat of paint for the old site.
Hey all. Just a quick heads up that I've cleaned up the old site a bit. For the vast majority of you this won't matter, as you never visit the site and just read the RSS feed/email, but for those that do hopefully you like the new digs.
As always, if you run into anything that doesn't behave, please let me know.
Here's a quick rundown of the changes:
- Everything is in one big column: This was the big change. Basically I was tired of having two columns for my entries. Increasingly the quickies on the right were becoming the content of the site, but they weren't getting enough love because people weren't noticing them. This also takes a lot of pressure off me to keep the long-form entries flowing (which I've been totally terrible at lately).
- Thumbnail Stream: If you come over to the site you'll see a bunch of thumbnails at the top. This is just a little script I wrote that goes out and grabs stuff from Flickr, Delicious & Tumblr, makes thumbnails for all and then posts them. Seemed like a nice way to drive to the other stuff I read around the web and add a bit of flare to the site.
- Right Sidebar: Now that I don't have entries over on the right I had a bunch of space to work with. I'll try to keep that side updated, but for now it's a quick rundown of what this site is all about and will, in the future, include a bit of a blogroll. One big thing that's not changing on the right is the comments on the entry pages. This is something that I've had on the site for a long time and I still believe is the best way to illustrate my belief that comments are as important as entries.
Well, I think that's about it. Like I said, for most of you this won't matter, but for those of you that visit, I hope you enjoy. I have not done a lot of cross-browser testing with the new design, so if you run into weirdness please just take a screenshot and send it over. Thanks.
Tags: design, me
The always interesting Kevin Kelly points out how boring most of the stuff people put in time capsules really turns out to be and how what we should really be saving are things like the stickers we put on bananas or the lids we use for coffee ...
Because they are not trying to be anything other than what they are -- any beauty they contain is functional -- they also transmit the subtexts of their time. The "meaning" of the placement of the ridges and holes in the take-out beverage lids reveal all kinds of things about how and where these beverages are being sold and consumed. The designs will tell folks in the future far more about our lives today than tiny models of Darth Vader.
Tags: culture, design
Brand New's wrap-up of the best and worst logos of 2009 is a good read. Their choice for worst logo of the year is Bing, which I can't say I disagree with. It just sort of looks slapped together, which was probably the point to make it feel a little more cuddly like Google. Also interesting was going back and looking at the comments on the original MSN redesign post Brand New did, which they suggested because of the fight in the comments between folks at Futurebrand, the original branding agency responsible for the MSN butterfly, over who actually did the work.
Leaving the fighting aside for a second (it's just sort of amusing), I found this explanation from one of the designers for how the logo stuck around so long quite interesting:
Ten years is several lifetimes at Microsoft, so for a logo to last that long there is a little miracle. One reason I think it lasted so long was that the next version was designed at the same time as the original. The first version was with flat colors, and the subsequent version was with gradients. In 1999 monitors couldn't handle gradients very well but we knew the advance was just around the corner.
The idea of designing future iterations at the same time you're designing the original is a pretty interesting one. Of course it's much easier when there's a known known, like monitors that can handle gradients, in the pipeline, but it's still impressive.
Tags: branding, design
I just love this entry from Matt Jones about pareidolia, the phenomena that leads us to see faces in things. As he explains, it actually turns out that there is a reason for what happens, as we respond to faces more quickly than other images. Jones quotes a paper called Early (M170) activation of face-specific cortex by face-like objects.:
The tendency to perceive faces in random patterns exhibiting configural properties of faces is an example of pareidolia. Perception of 'real' faces has been associated with a cortical response signal arising at approximately 170 ms after stimulus onset, but what happens when nonface objects are perceived as faces? Using magnetoencephalography, we found that objects incidentally perceived as faces evoked an early (165 ms) activation in the ventral fusiform cortex, at a time and location similar to that evoked by faces, whereas common objects did not evoke such activation. An earlier peak at 130 ms was also seen for images of real faces only. Our findings suggest that face perception evoked by face-like objects is a relatively early process, and not a late reinterpretation cognitive phenomenon.
He then goes on to wonder how we can use this knowledge to help people comprehend data, showing some of the work they're doing with the idea. Be sure to watch the Chernoff Schools sketch. As a side note, there is a lovely American Express commercial that taps into pareidolia.
Tags: design, psychology
The other day I was having an interesting conversation about logos that seemed worth sharing. I was thinking about different media logos and how they were designed for the medium in which they were born. Take the New York Times or Washington Post (or any other newspaper for that matter). Their logos are long, generally a collection of a few words that stretches horizontally (this has caused me many headaches with Brand Tags). They, of course, were designed to live at the top of the paper so they had pretty of space to sprawl out.
Now move to TV and look at ABC, NBC or even CNN (who came later). These logos tend to be squareish, fitting the aspect ratio of the medium. Now move to the web and even mobile devices. It's interesting to think about how logos are being designed for companies native to these conditions. Web logos, I feel, are generally rectangle (for whatever reason). The iPhone, however, only allows for squares. What is that going to mean? Are more people going to need identifiable marks? (And the iPhone isn't the only thing, I realized that I had nothing good to identify Brand Tags with on Twitter when they asked for a square logo ... I ended up going with a "b" that I am still not all that happy about.)
Anyhow, am sure designers have been thinking about this stuff for ages but it was interesting to me.
Tags: branding, design
Nicholas Felton, creator of the Feltron Annual Report and founder of Daytum had a pretty interesting interview over at the SVA Interaction Design blog where he talks about his projects and general outlook on collecting data. One thing he said in particular stood out to me, as it paralells something I've been thinking about a lot lately.
"The first step -- and the one we're concentrating on -- is empowering people to collect information about their lives that tends to go uncollected. Our electronic footprints are everywhere, but I don't believe they're necessarily the most interesting or comprehensive records. Once we've made the gathering as easy and detailed as it can be, some interesting things might start happening. I can imagine how counting fireflies over the summer would make a poetic record of the way the summer was spent for an individual, but if 100 or 1,000 people are doing the same thing, does it start to tell an aggregate story that speaks more to global warming or habitat loss?"
This ability of this aggregate data view to change behavior is something I'm totally fascinated by.
Tags: data, design, internet
Nice map that overlays the United States on Europe to help get a sense of scale. It's a pretty amazing thing to see. From the looks of it, the Mediterranean is about half the size of the US.
The site, radicalcartography is actually full of totally awesome maps: Manhattan building maps, currency pegs, time zones (an animation that cycles through all of them), errant Manhattan (size comparisons of Manhattan to other cities) and North American subways. Seriously, I could have listed just about every project on the site, just go click around, it's amazing.
As an aside, I've also cataloged it at a tumblr I may or may not keep up with called, appropriately, nice chart.
Tags: design, geography, visualization
I feel like I'm late to the game on this one, but Strange Maps is an awesome collection of odd and fantastic maps.
Justin, a fellow Barbarian sent it my way to show me this domain name ending map, which is pretty awesome (the size of the domain ending is based on the population of the country).
Tags: design, maps
There are a bunch of points in this entry on debris that are great, but this is my favorite: "It stopped mattering whether the feature was even useful to the visitor. We ask our visitors to 'Digg This' not because it adds any value to their experience, but because we need the traffic."
That's always really bothered me about those "bookmark this" or "Digg this" buttons. If someone already uses Digg or del.icio.us they know how to bookmark your site. It just feels so icky.
Anyway, go read the whole thing.
Tags: design, ux
This is a great little design idea for remembering the name of that tasty wine you were drinking.
Tags: design, wine
I first heard about desire lines from a great Peter Merholz article, they are the unpaved paths that get worn down from so many people walking on them. I've loved the idea for a while and now it looks like there's a Flickr pool devoted to photos of them.
Tags: design, desirelines
Quite a gorgeous site by Veer to show off their typefaces.
Tags: design, typography
Advertising agency, Modernista has a fascinating new site design: Rather than hosting anything on their own, they just do a nav overlay and drive you around what (at least looks like) the rest of the web. It's a bit jarring at first, but really quite a cool idea.
Tags: agency, design, marketing
Interesting interview with Michael Bieruit on Obama's brand identity. Choice quote: "One of the things that came up in the conversation is, if you think about it, the challenge for someone named Barack Hussein Obama is that he's such an unprecedented figure in American politics--so much so that everything he's trying to do is, in a way, trying to make him look smoother and more normal ... I think it's much more incontrovertible that he's actually using the seamlessness of this branding to convey a candidacy that's not a dangerous, revolutionary, risk-everything proposition--but as something that is well-managed and has everything under control."
Tags: branding, design, politics
Interesting video and comments by Edward Tufte on the iPhone. A few choice quotes from the video: "The content is the interface" (referring to the iPhone's brilliant lack of "computer administrative debris" like toolbars) & "To clarify add detail ... clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don't start throwing out information, fix the design." (I really love that last one.)
Tags: design, interface, visualization
Every year, Nicholas Felton releases his own personal annual report. He just finished up 2007 and it's just as fantastic as years past.
For the record, I wish I could design like this.
Tags: design, inspiration, visualization
Great definition from an article Steve Jobs wrote in 2000: "In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service... This is what customers pay us for--to sweat all these details so it's easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We're supposed to be really good at this. That doesn't mean we don't listen to customers, but it's hard for them to tell you what they want when they've never seen anything remotely like it."
Tags: apple, design, quotes
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