The Vostok blog

Bruno Teixidor brought me a wall map of the Moscow’s metro network some time ago. I have it hanging on a wall to remind me this exact quote:

The structure of a system reflects the structure of the organization that built it.

Richard Fairley

Now check the metro map:

How much information about the city and the country who build it, right? You can tell it has a strong, centralized and authoritarian political power just by looking at how the lines converge at the very center. Their concept of traffic transversality isn’t lines that doesn’t cross the center but a circular line that reinforces this idea.

But is the metro network what shapes that reality or was it there before? Let’s check a regular roadmap of the city:

Very much the same: strongly centralized, everything that needs to go from A to B needs to pass through the center first. Everyone, every matter.

If you check New York or Barcelona, for instance, you’ll se something different. Everything seems more rational and decentralized. Both cities have a strong grid shape reflecting that interactions between people (being social or business) are more important than political power.

The funny thing about this quote is that it was said regarding software and programming, not urbanism. Do you thing it applies to the design of interactive systems as well? Do we end up shaping structures that reflect the organisation behind. Is that good or bad? Are there powerful examples?

Getty Images photographer Chris Hondros, has come up with a beautiful way to convey information through images.  Add music –Bach in this case– and you have a documentary: not a narrative documentary but a powerful visual documentary. It’s called Sounds + Vision: At War.

In his own words:

The music amplifies the pictures, and the pictures amplify and clarify the music. It’s a way to get a really large amount of information in pictures and music to people in a way that is very intuitive and easy to absorb.

-Chris Hondros

You can read more about it in the NYT’s Lens blog.

Two things we like from their home:

1. Headlines are turned into photographs making the most out of the visuality of the medium. Kind of like what the iPad feed reader Pulse did and what we did with filmin’s catalogue.
2. The images are followed by a constant stream of news organized by time, with the newest item always at the top. Pretty much like Twitter (or Planetaki for that matter).

Twitter = (kind of like Planetaki) one single stream of information organized in chronological order.  (WIN)

Online newspapers = columns, too much information clustered into categories, no apparent distinction between important and less important info, Ads. (FAIL)

Why would anyone think a mashup of these two would be a good idea? Giving up all the good stuff and taking on all the bad. Well, we have found out through bitelia that paper.li has done it. In a nutshell: paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter into an easy to read newspaper-style format.

Sounds like a good idea? You bet! (if you like your twitter feed full of ads that is).

bitelia’s newspaper (hope they don’t mind us using their newspaper as an example).

Acabo de publicar toda la información sobre el próximo curso para formar a diseñadores de interacción. Será la tercera edición del Programa Vostok.

This is the kind of mess you get when you create an account at Eskup and first log in:

For those of you who don’t know, Eskup is a kind of social network, twitter-like, microblogging plattform which merges Elpais.com content with user generated microposts. Kind of like the dull answer to “how do we, newspaper, take advantage of social media?”

El Pais seems pretty excited about this. Their excitement is directly proportional to my skepticism. They’ve done a great deal of programming for this and they’ve taken risks, which is good. But they URGENTLY need to rework the design and functionality so the product is more understandable and easy to use. Otherwise it will be another missed atempt at redefining online journalism in Spain.

We want to build the best list of design (interaction, information, industrial, product design and architecture) movies and documentaries of all times. Here’s the deal: write down in the comment section the name of a film or doc that’s somehow design related and, in return, we’ll give you a code to watch any movie in Filmin‘s (Spain’s best streaming service for indie film) catalog for free.

We also have a promo code for a premium account at Filmin (any movie, any time anywhere) which we’ll give to the person who makes the best list (it’s ok to repeat some movie suggested by someone else). Easy peasy japanesey. A neat gift for little effort.

These are the movies/docs we have so far:

Kitchen Stories (Bent Hamer, 2003)

The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949)

Tucker: The Man and his Dream (Francis Ford Coppola, 1988)

Helvetica (Gary Hustwit, 2007)

Powers of 10 (and other films by Ray y Charles Eames, 1977)

The RTVE series ‘Elogio de la luz‘, each episode covering an architect

The Belly of an Architect (Peter Greenaway, 1987)

Sketches of Frank Gehry (Sydney Pollack, 2005)

Play Time (Jacques Tati, 1967)

Full disclosure: We’ve done Filmin’s web redesign and we love it (the service, not the redesign. Well… both). We’ll go into details in a future post.

Marco Arment does a great job not only at designing one of the best apps for reading online (Instapaper) but also at explaining all the decisions behind the design. I strongly suggest reading Instapaper Pro 2.2.3 now available, which could also be tittled Instapaper for iPad: its design explained.

Marco, who also happens to be the lead developer at Tumblr, dealt with several issues when designing the iPad version of his product:

• Placement of the controls: follow Apple’s lead or do what he finds it’s better (standarisation over effectivity).
• Placement of the action buttons (not where they fit but at the specific spot where you are when you may need them).
• Text margins and line readability.
• Single column vs. multicolumn layouts.
• Color and brightness for legibility (pure black on pure white on a screen is an aberration, don’t get fooled).
• Pagination tap zones (and differences between iPhone and iPad).
• Tipographies.

I wonder why Mr. Arment decided to let the user chose between 6 different fonts instead of chosing himself the one or two he thinks it works better on that context. What do you guys think about this one?

UPDATE:

Marco just answered my enquiry through twitter:

Marco: Because the people who care about fonts REALLY care about them, and appreciate the choice.

I think Hoefler Text works best, so I made it the default. I take the default settings VERY seriously.

Alissa Walker from Fast Company on architects’ websites:

The most un-usable architecture firm Web sites are often exactly like the buildings those architects design: Created to make a statement, rather than focus on everyday livability. Perhaps they have to solve one problem before they can tackle the other.

The article is rather shallow, but worth skimping to check out some info-architectural disasters.

Now this is a nice proposal (Spanish) for a search engine redesign by Yusef Hassan:

Where Search does a “classic search”, Re-find looks on what I already have seen (and starts digging on my social info up in the cloud) and Discover does te opposite bringing results I’ve never seen before.

It makes sense to me, ¿Does it to you?