The Vostok blog

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:

We used Isotype icons as a small hommage to Gerd Arntz and Otto Neurath. In Frank Hartmann’s own words: the first to really understand that information must be transformed into pictures in order to be perceived at all.

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.

Let us know what you think.

Infographics are super useful to help you understand complex information quickly. Minube, Spain’s leading social network for travelers (and cherished client), is giving them a try. How else can you convey that in four years the number of visits to your company (website and mobile) has increased by over 600%? No small feat by the way. That travelers value mobility immensely. That what seemed like an enormous amount of content three years ago, today, users can create it in just a few months?

Minube keeps growing and we’re proud to join them on that ride.

Khoi is former Design Director of NYTimes.com, he has a blog called Subtraction and an elegant WordPress theme called Basic Maths. He’s also one of the most outspoken critics of how the news industry is dealing with changing consumption habits and vanishing revenue streams. He’s poignant but respectful, an insider who never quite stopped being an outsider. A designer we respect for upping the ante.

It’s quite discouraging to see so many failed attempts at adapting a product as important to society as newspapers that we felt we needed to ask the guy to go to for this subject to share his thoughts on what has changed, what newspapers are doing to adapt and why their changes are so timid. We encourage you to watch the full-length interview in case you want more information or, like me, are just curious about the man. If not, here’s a good 4min compilation of snippets of the most important things we touched on.

On a side note… One of Vostok‘s dream jobs would be, without a doubt, to design an online newspaper. It would also be one of our worst job nightmares…You have to deal with infinite layers and inevitable complex structures, not to mention the frustration of having to play by the rules when you know the rules are no longer valid. It’s not an easy task. You can read a compilation of what our stance is when it comes to online news design here.

Agree? Not agree? Let us know what you think.

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

Curious to know what you think.

To me, The Daily is a near perfect realization of exactly the idea that occurs to print editors every single time they get their hands on digital media for the first time, regardless of what the underlying technology might be: “Let’s make it just like what we know so well in print.” As a result I found it sadly lifeless and lacking in urgency. What a waste of US$30 million.

Khoi Vinh on The Daily

Here is the chart we displayed on yesterday’s video on the 15 years of NYTimes homepages where you can see the absolute lenght of each homepage year by year.

Here’s a bigger version.

We release it to the public domain. Feel free to copy, share or republish it.

There are few design studios who share the values Vostok abides by so fiercely. But some do. And Vizzuality is one of them. Led by Javier de la Torre and Sergio Álvarez Leiva, Vizzuality’s approach to design is fresh and honest, they create tools that are transparent, efficient and incredibly useful.

They put their visual and interaction design skills to the service of initiatives that, using their own words, matter. Be it to locate and identify stars, endangered species, protected areas, migratory species or even visualizing aid in disaster stricken countries. To put it bluntly, they choose their projects wisely and put their money where their mouth is. It makes us proud to have someone we respect so close to home.

Yesterday they launched a video made by Riot Cinema featuring one of their most recent projects: Planet Hunters. Let them speak for themselves:

LinkedIn hit 100 million users yesterday. Today they released a pretty clever infographic to go with it.

Go back ten years or so and the image would have looked something like this:

Today though, pixels can be just as beautiful as (and more informative than) picture posters:

What’s the best approach? Let’s see…

• Ad posters make us skeptical, we’ve been so perverted by publicity we no longer believe what they say; numbers on the other hand…well, we still associate them with hard facts.
• Infographics allow you to  play around with data visualization, using images, diagrams or icons to make your data more…(for the lack of a better word) graspeable. 100 million means nothing, a pile of cards that’s actually taller than Mount Everest, does.
• Ad posters are movie-frames, Infographics are more like short films, you need to put several frames together to come up with a story.
• Ad posters allow for one layer of (simple) information (the message must be understood at a glance, so the idea must be conveyed quickly and efficiently); Infographics allow for various layers of (simple) information helping you give more bits of information without over-complicating the message. Plus, the LinkedIn guys even get to be kind of funny.

When it comes to advertising a company it looks like an infographic is better equipped for storytelling, better equipped to look more like a ‘serious study’ and less like blatant publicity. So well done, LinkedIn

See it in full here.

Full disclosure: My bank is BBVA. It’s been that way since I arrived in Madrid 3 years ago. Why? I guess it was the bank closest to my house. Nothing else. No bank allegiances or bank favoritisms clouding my perspective. I also know the studio behind the app design, Fjord, and although we respect them immensely, there are no secret allegiances there either. Neither public nor private.

This is an honest account of a girl infinitely grateful that after zillions of years of inept bank management there is finally a space that allows her to get things done quickly and effortlessly. So here we go:

Why making an app for day to day transactions is better than making a web?
Apps are more constraint. They give users the perception that the space they’re handling is less like a labyrinth and more like a familiar and unchanging path. There is a limited amount of things you can do, you know what they are and how to do them. This makes tasks not only effortless but more efficient.

Why is this super important when it comes to managing your bank current account? Because I’m handling MY money, and I’m doing so in MY space, not BBVA’s. An app gives me more a sense of control and personalization than any web tab titled ‘YOUR account’, ‘YOUR profile’, ‘YOUR bank’. I want to feel reassured, secure, I want to feel in control. This might be just the same for an app that handles your photographs, your movies, your web clippings, but it’s even more so when you’re handling your finances.

Plus, the simplicity of apps forces super intricate processes to be stripped down to their bare bones. It’s the perfect milieu to put in practice analytic and synthetic design principles.

Things I like from a customer’s point of view:

• It’s secure without being a f* pain in the ass. It remembers my user number but not my password.
• I can favorite stuff. I no longer have to make a gargantuan effort to consciously ignore the thousand other elements and numbers calling my attention.
• The most common action ‘make a transfer’ is right in the menu. You don’t have to go hunting for it.
• The use of GPS. You’re in the middle of nowhere, it’s dark and you’re in desperate need of an ATM but a branch of your bank is nowhere to be seen. Not anymore.

Things I like the most from a design point of view:

• The use of color to convey information.
• The use of color gradients to help you focus your attention.
• The use of graphs. Lines give you a sense of the oscillations of your spendings and earnings. Bars give you a sense of the amount spent. Position of a bar (below or above the x-axis) tells you if what you’re looking at is income or expenditure.

And that’s it. This app is not fancy-shmanzy. It is what it is. It does what it’s supposed to do. To the team behind this product in BBVA and Fjord: My hat to you sirs.

If you’re interested, you can download the app here.

We just finished watching a great conference by Étienne Mineur from Les Éditions Volumiques about using game design concepts to connect “ce qui est digital avec ce qui est tangible”. Mineur focuses mainly on touchscreen-based boardgames, but touches briefly on two concepts we have recently been thinking about a lot:

• redefining information design to new devices and experiences
• planned obsolescence

It all comes down to market economics and rethinking the value of both paper and digital. Rethinking the concept of “fragile et précieux”. Take paper for example. Before, it was abundant and less valuable. Now, or in the near future, paper will be scarce (not because there won’t be any, but because we won’t use it) and more precious.

For Mineur the question lies in:

…comment les deux peuvent communiquer ensemble de manière intelligente et plutôt complémentaire. Il n’y a pas d’affrontement pour moi.

In other words, how can print and digital best complement each other?  How can they interact to make the most out of their features? How can they be combined to bring down opportunity costs? Think of a newspaper for example, or better still, a monthly magazine that can benefit from both worlds without having to choose one over the other.

Combine a great journalistic piece (on print) about unrest in Egypt, for example, accompanied by your iPhone showing the latest images taken by people in-situ (video, audio, pictures) and bingo, you have both immediacy and insightfulness. Your audiovisual content is updateable but your text isn’t.

The value of your content lies not in getting there first, but getting there better.

Add to that, writing this piece on a type of paper that will get all ink-smudged after 20 minutes (waiting for just the right moment to start the clock on its life) and voilà… Who said print was dead?

No, seriously, there’s a world to explore right there.

We truly encourage you to watch the video, the meat starts at 17:00. Thank you Marcelo Soria for calling our attention to it.