Minube released yesterday their international city guides for iPhone and iPad of Granada, Barcelona and Madrid in 5 new languages (English, French, Portuguese, Italian, and German). The guides in Spanish were released a few months ago. Back then they won the App Date’s prize for best design. We worked with Alex Martín (lead designer at Minube) and the rest of Minube’s team. You can download the apps here.
Things worth noting about the guides:
You can download all content beforehand so you can have it available offline whenever you want. Even maps with your favorite places.
The content is excellent. It’s all content from Minube’s community but highly curated by Minube’s staff. So you’ll only have the best of the best.
You can favorite places and filter information so you only see what you want to see.
Last but not least, a pretty cool feature are the user guides. They’re available for in-app purchase and take you around specific tours around the city. The ‘best hamburgers’ in town, the ‘best gintonics’, the ‘prettiest parks’, the ‘coolest things about a certain neighborhood’, etc. Anyone can create their own and, if Minube likes it, publish it and share revenue.
And they’re free.
This is a great step forward for Minube’s enterprise: their product is now fully portable. Paper guides? Who needs them?
It’s no news that Spain’s unemployment crisis will get worse before it gets any better. What might be news though are the patterns that arise when you contrast these numbers with different sets of criteria. And that’s just what we’ve done in this video for Actibva. Not your typical poster info-graphic nor your average internet-stats video:
You will notice as well a restrained use of visual design. If there’s one thing we’re obsessive about at Vostok is of not overcrowding our work with a mix of shapes, sizes, colors, etc. If done right, a small visual change should suffice. Like in this video. Where a change in color means something, a change in size, a change in position. Because when trying to get information across, nothing is arbitrary: every single detail counts.
Many of you know we worked hard to bring Bill Jersey and Jason Cohn‘s documentary ‘Eames: the Architect and the Painter’ to Madrid. Although it was a private screening for family, friends and clients, we’re proud to say that this was the first time the film was screened in Europe and probably –and I sincerely hope I’m wrong here– the last time it will be screened on the big screen in Madrid.
Lucky for us though, Canal+ Spain will premiere the film sometime in May. Take note of the date because this one’s definitely not worth missing. The amount of archive material these men had access to is astonishing and the way Jason Cohn’s script interweaves private and public aspects of their lives, pretty enlightening.
But, movie-aspects aside, this is a great opportunity to revisit the Eames’ work and, especially, their philosophy. El Pais’ Anatxu Zabalbeascoa did a pretty good job at grasping what this event was all about in her article a few weeks ago: Eames for times of crisis. Charles and Ray taught us that difficult times are a great opportunity to change things: to do more and better.
They injected some of this ‘good design is good business’ mantra in companies like Herman Miller, IBM and Polaroid but they also engrained this in future generations of designers. Like us. Many years after them. This is the main reason why we decided to do this event in the first place and share it with the people we respect. For those of you who came: thank you. This is the first time we do something like this. Hopefully it won’t be the last.
We’d also like to thank the great team behind us in this event: Pelayo and Marta. And Vitra Spain for their generosity.
Designer Michael Bierut says the best clients fall into two categories: the ones who trust you because they know they don’t know and the ones who trust you precisely because they do. To his notion we would add: the best clients are the ones who challenge you. Challenge you to challenge yourself.
We make a big effort in Vostok to choose our clients wisely and there’s a reason for it: when you work with people you admire you work better and quicker. Like a well-oiled machine. There are pros and cons, true, but they’re worth it. Basically because you have days like today.
Today Minube and Ducksboard are taking two important steps forward. For one, Ducksboard has launched. If you haven’t checked out the pretty awesome video yet, do. We made the video with the Riot Cinema team.
Next in line is Minube. After winning Apple’s Spain’s best app of the year award and the App Date [links in Spanish] award a few days ago, they’re organizing a pretty cool event today to celebrate the launch of their social traveler guides on iPad.
All in all, a pretty good way to begin closing 2011.
Only two companies were featured in RTVE‘s (a Spanish national TV channel) coverage of FICOD (Spain’s most acclaimed forum for digital content) last night. We’re proud to say both of them are Vostok’s clients with whom we’ve been working and desigining together for some time now.
Are we bragging? You bet. It’s not every day that two products you did strategy and design for receive this kind of offline attention. We’re thrilled. Kudos to Filmin and Minube
As ‘Gabriela who works at Vostok‘ this is pretty much what I have to say. But, as ‘Gabriela who loves movies and doesn’t know what she would do without them’, I would like to say a few more things about Filmin:
1. It’s one of the best online video services out there. It’s run by people who love movies, it’s simple, it’s efficient and it has a great catalog. Sure there are a few things I wish they could do better… but hey, I also want my man to be handsome, intelligent, sensitive and understanding…everyday, at all time…so hey, who cares?
2. It’s one of the few bridges between –and I’m gonna be intentionally simplistic here to stress my point– the two sides of the Spanish film industry today: the more “internet is the devil” side Vs. “internet is our savior”. There are millions of caveats, trillions of nuances and loads of things one cannot talk about unless one’s there, working at it and sweating it but, I can say this: we need middle-grounds, we need fresh air, we need companies, people, organizations and production companies that realize film distribution (and exhibition) has changed and that the new change will only bring good things for cinema.
And that’s it.
So congratulations and in Monsieur Tarantino’s own words:
We were hired by Movistar, a high-powered Spanish telecom with important international presence, to envision the best solution for what their online video and television service should be like. We have spent the last few months designing it and collaborating with Movistar’s UX team. And we are incredibly proud of the results.
It’s the product of months of work but, most importantly, it’s a representation of Vostok’s design principles: it’s simple, it’s elegant, it’s honest.
The premise: An online service for film, TV series and linear TV that could be accessed anytime, anywhere. For clients and non-clients. Our solution: a native grid system that responds to a set pattern of interactions that work across all platforms (PC, TV and mobile phones).
To share our thought process we have uploaded a slideshow that puts together the design premises we kicked off with. And a webpage that shows a selection of the design aspects in the final product we find most interesting.
Last, but not least we release a video made in collaboration with Riot Cinema that is the perfect accompaniment to this product. Don’t forget to check it out
One day, not too long ago, Bernardo Hernández mentioned he was looking into redesigning his website. He wanted something simple and functional. Our territory no doubt. Him being such a close friend of Vostok’s and having collaborated in various projects already, we didn’t have to think twice about giving him a hand. This is what we came up with:
Bernardo, for those of you who don’t know him already, is Worldwide Director of Emerging Products at Google.
Website credits: Vostok has done the design, Pep Gómez has supervised the implementation and Jorge González from Wakalaka has done the mockup and CSS.
We’re working on a little something that’s really putting to test our concepts of analytic and synthetic. The teaser page was launched today. Here’s a teeny weeny peek:
