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.

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complex structures, not to mention the frustration of having to play by the rules when you know the rules are no longer valid.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’s a bigger version.

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

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:

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.

• 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.

If you want a copy, here’s the PDF.

The World as Design
Otl Aicher

Honesty and design. It’s a book about integrity, about what decisions should be made, when and why. My favorite book about design, it has really changed the way I see my profession.

The book is a series of essays written by Aicher relating to all sorts of things; from how the Eameses designed chairs to the morals behind choosing one color over another to paint a house façade. This book made me understand that there is a reason for everything and every design decision should have a reasoning behind it.

101 Things I Learned in Architecture School
Matthew Frederick

It’s a tiny book about the basics of architecture and therefore, about the basics of the relationship between people and space. It’s very interesting because it gives you good advice for whenever you need to think about information architecture in terms of environments, just as an urbanist would. Not what happens inside a page but how to receive a user, how to guide him, what should the paths look like. When to make “open spaces” and when to make aisles, etc.

Designing for People
Henry Dreyfuss

Dreyfuss designed many iconic objects we still use nowadays. He was also the first one to apply human factors to his designs. He stated that the characteristics of the human body should be taken into account when desiging something for human use. The idea was revolutionary and completely against the design of his time (the 50′s), which was much more worried about forms that would sell well.

On Designing for People he exposes his ideas along with some thoughts on how to run a studio, its processes and methodologies. A classic.

Universal Principles of Design
William Lidwell

A great compliation on design principles (behavioral, mostly). Each principle is carefully explained; on one side of the page with text, on the other with illustrations or diagrams. Perfect to learn the basics and see them in action; it conveys the message clearly using excellent examples.

It touches on many subjects, among them: how appearance influences people, how many options are optimal, how to order stuff… It’s a must for anybody who wants to understand how users make decisions.

The Psychology of Everyday Things
Donald Norman

A great introduction to cognitive psychology applied to design. Very good at helping understand how we relate to the objects that surround us and the things that go on in our minds. Norman introduces the concept of affordance, among many others, one of the few things I try to always keep in mind when designing.

The Industrial Design Reader
Carma Gorman

A compilation of readings (articles, essays, excerpts…) on design, architecture and the like. I’d say 80% is still applicable to interaction design no matter the year the texts were written (some are from 19th century and very valid).

It’s a good book to help remind us that, even before our times, great minds put a lot of time and effort into thinking how things should be made. It helps me keep focus and give foundations to what I do.

The Invisible Computer
Donald Norman

This book by Norman has a few extremely good chapters on how design (as user experience), technology and marketing interrelate in a project and the role each one should play. It provides you with (and helps you understand) the whole picture; how technological products are made and why most of the time we fail.

Information Architects
Richard Saul Wurman

Wurman coined the term “information architecture” and uses it in a slightly different way to what we are used to. We think of it as structures of webpages, he thought of it as what we now call “information design”. The book is a great compilation of examples by excellent designers on how to shape information in a way that conveys the message more efficiently (most of the times that means visually).

Ambient Findability
Peter Morville

Morville, one of the founding fathers of information architecture, wrote this excellent book about how information acquires new dimensions when leaving the realm of the traditional website. He talks about how GPS, RFID, sensors and many other technologies are creating new forms of data that make information more meaningful. To me, this book was a great introduction to the value of metadata, the internet of things and geoeverything.

Being Digital
Nicholas Negroponte

It’s the bible of the digital realm, a book that sheds light on the consequences of converting everything to ones and zeroes. Most of what he says on the book is stuff almost everyone knows now but back then: it was shocking. It should be a mandatory read for some policy makers even today.

Inside Steve’s Brain
Leander Kahney

Learn marketing, design, communication and product strategy from Steve Jobs. Who else could teach it better? The book is half biography half chronicle about Jobs and Apple. It goes deep into many issues in a very entertaining style. Some chapters are worth their weight in caviar. The book was last year’s Vostok present to our clients.

Designing Pleasurable Products
Patrick Jordan

Forget Donald Norman’s “Emotional Design”. If you want to know about emotional design then get this book. It’s entertaining and rigorous and it has everything you need to know about how emotions play a role in the way we choose and use products.

In Praise of Shadows
Junichiro Tanizaki

It’s japanese aesthetics in prose poetry. It speaks about organic materials, objects that age gracefully and the beauty of imperfection. It describes the secret pleasure of wabi-sabi.

Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers
Leonard Koren

A great essay on wabi-sabi, that side of Japanese aesthetics that looks into the graceful decadence of materials, seductive imperfection, shadows, organic materials, wood, ceramics and beautiful rusty colors. To me, modernism is great but sometimes you just need a break, a good break, not one of those breaks that postmo hipster boys have in store.

Braun: 50 Jahre Produktinnovationen
Bernd Polster

Braun is the Apple of the 20th century. This book is a catalog of all the stuff produced by Braun during the past 50 years. You can see the influence of the Ulm School of Design, Dieter Rams, Hans Gugelot, Otl Aicher… And also learn through colorful examples how Oral-B ruined the best design driven company that’s ever existed. The book was a gift from my students some years ago and I go back to it when I need inspiration for use of color, layout, etc. Full disclosure: Dieter Rams is one of my prophets.

Digital Diagrams
Trevor Bounford

I lend this book to whoever asks me to recommend a book on information design that’s not just theory. Edward Tufte is fine but it may leave you clueless about how to start. This book will give you many examples and even Illustrator tips on how to visually display data. A great book to have around.

The Kitchen is for Cooking
Otl Aicher

Aicher had to redesign a kitchen. In the process he learnt so much about how everything works inside, an entire microuniverse, that he decided to write a book about all his findings. I consider it a great example on how to understand contexts of use, which are often wider and more complex than expected.

Typography
Otl Aicher

There are many books on typography and I confess that I’ve only read a few but, boy is this one good. It makes you feel a complete ingnorant. What’s wonderful about is that it makes you understand how people read so you can make design decisions on how to display your type. You have to read a good book on typography before you design anything intended to be read and this is probably one of the top books to aide you.

From Bauhaus to Our House
Tom Wolfe

Good modernists sometimes get so fed up with ourselves that we need a break. Wolfe’s book is a satirical essay on the modernist madness and all those “white shoe boxes” derived from the first Bauhaus buildings. Is there a modernist aesthetic and you just used it without being it a derivation of function? Perhaps you are modernist-sick. Go get the book.

Conversations with Jean Prouvé
Armelle Lavalou

A tiny but marvelous book on how an industrial designer thinks and works. In this book Prouvé is extremely honest and modest, a quality difficult to find in today’s designers. He was also a real innovator in materials, form and structure. The way the book is written is like having the master talking about himself in front of you.

Sistemas de Signos en la Comunicación Visual / Zeichensysteme Der Visuellen Kommunikation: Handbuch Fur Designer, Architekten, Planer, Organisatoren
Martin Krampen and Otl Aicher

The book is worth its price just for one chapter, the one where Aicher explains the difference between analytical and synthetic information. It’s the first thing I teach to my students every year. When you know that, you know 30% of everything a designer that works with information needs.

The Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell

It’s a great collection of stories about how people behave unexpectedly in certain situations. Gladwell is very good at pop psychology facts that sometimes are good for understanding user patterns or for provoking them.

Designing Web Usability
Jakob Nielsen

An introductory classic. One of the books that started it all. Nielsen is not the guru he used to be but he deserves credit for this great compendium of applied human-computer interaction that kicked our profession in its initial days. The book was also great for convincing clients and “evangelizing”, if you ever want to use that word.

Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
Steve Krugg

Krugg’s book is also an introductory classic; if Nielsen’s was about principles this one is about techniques. How to run a usability test without a white coat, how to report usability issues effectively, etc. Many examples and cartoons, easy to read (it took me less than 2 hours!). Very good for superbeginners who need to do usability tasks at their products. Also very good for those who’s job is not on the usability/design trench but need notions.

Le Corbusier Talks with Students
Le Corbusier

Designers usually pretend to know a lot about Le Corbusier but they usually know little more than a few modern-design villas with beautiful horizontal shapes without understanding the reasons behind such decisions on form. This book summarizes many of his thoughts on design and architecture. Since the book is a transcript from his talks, it feels very natural and close. You end up learning a few things about systems and contexts from a discipline that has many things in common with interaction design.

UPDATE (31 Jan, 2011)

The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand

Yes, a novel. Setting aside Rand’s political views, The Fountainhead is clearly a good story about honesty and values in creative work. The book is about an architect who fights the world to stay true to his beliefs on what a building should be. There is much about his views on architecture that matches what I consider good design. Also, all the character’s struggle to stay true to himself is a great teaching in a field where clients, peers and fashions have so much influence.

Read it when you feel you are senior enough, not too soon. And stay away from work when reading it. A summer vacation would be ideal.

Javier Cañada leads Vostok, a design and strategy studio that creates smart interactive products. You can follow him on twitter @javiercanada or at Vostok’s blog.

BlackVostok WordPress theme in Japanese

Both the website and the theme have been translated by Daniel Gutiérrez Alías and his team at Shaking Asia. Thank you sir.

It’s meant for you to focus on what’s important: your writing. No distractions.

This dreamy video tutorial sets the mood to help you see it in action:

Other convenient functions on Writer: easy read, sync with dropbox, email content.

Click here for high-res photo

Click here for high-res photo

Concepts any John Doe needs to convey: date, time, water, food, lodging.

Concepts the US Army needs to convey: means of identification, ambush, booby traps, hideouts, weapons, destruction, pullover, surrender + date, time, water, food, lodging.

It exemplifies analytic and synthetic thinking at its best, no?

This guide was made by Kwikpoint.  A visual translator company that works with designers, linguists and diplomats to replace “pounds-or kilos-of language dictionaries and phrase books” with images. Javier Cañada bought this sample in 2004, at the height of  the Iraq War.

Among the many enchanting stories, there is one in particular that caught our eye: a design consultant/ adviser/ counsellor/guide personified in a wedding wardrober. Mr. Kramer- Metraux talks about certain aspects of life that are particularly close to our hearts: elegance, beauty, timeless design.

The series received a Silver award in the Best of Multimedia Design 2009 competition organized by The Society of News Design.

Take a minute to browse through the rest of the stories, they’re certainly worth your time.

The great thing about sites like Verkami is that while connecting creators and audiences, they take down the middleman, empower artists and turn into wonderful spaces where to spot truly smart and creative initiatives.

Some of the design elements we like the most

A detail from the creator’s admin page (project is still up and running):

and when the project has finally reached it’s original funding goal:

For those interested in the development, Linking Paths added the programming muscle.

Take a sec, check it out. No excuses to bum around: start a project or become a patron and make great projects come true!

Making something, data in this case, more or less interactive is another way for a newspaper of making a point, taking a stance. Interactivity is suddenly seen as an editorial tool (selecting which data to show, how to show it, what amount of detail it should go into). Interaction design has suddenly immense journalistic value: it all comes down to “how can newspapers (their curatorial expertise) help you, reader/citizen, understand this”. In that sense, it’s just as valuable as say, an Op-Ed piece. The purpose, of course, is entirely different.

What do I mean by this: good interaction design (and good narrative story telling at that) turns raw data into enlightening one and so, for a newspaper to put a big effort into making that information not only available but interactive, speaks volumes of the editorial value behind it. It’s not surprising that the NYT has a team of 25 people working on a deadline to accompany important stories.

Would I be stretching it if I said that somehow, interactivity (in data visualization) resembles accountability?

Plus, if you like NYT’s infographics perhaps you’ll like The Guardian’s new data site.

(this one goes right to our information design category)

Here's the translated text:

Do you agree with Austria’s reunification with the German Reich promulgated on March the 13th of 1938, and do you vote for the Party of our Leader Adolf Hitler? (yes/no)

Here’s the full picture, with all the fat adhered to the news pieces:

This is what’s wrong with flickr and why we made BlackVostok (among other reasons).

More info about the dress here.

Yes, it’s a beautifully framed first edition of his 1972 NYC Subway Map at the Vostok studio. It has been here since day 1.

Check the video of Mr. Vignelli talking about it, for those who lack a bit of context.

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).

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).

BTW, We are about to release a white vostok theme and as you may see (if not using a newsreader) we are tesing it around here.

• type of effect (euphoria, relax, allucinations…)
• level of addiction provoked (very, little, extreme…)
• legal consequences of consuming/dealing (jail, misdeameanor…)
• secondary effects (nausea, sleep, appetite)
  price

• social acceptance
• context of consumption (marginal, social, individual…)

And here are the charts, numbered for your convenience when commenting:

1

2

3

4

5

Am I missing any classic that should be on this collection?

My favorite is #1 for obvious reasons. Which one is yours, you little druggies?

Our assumptions

We (both minube and us) put extreme attention to what information mattered the most and made it stand above the secondary data. These were our main assumptions:

• Price matters most than company.
• Price (usually) matters most than hours.
• There is the cheapest and then the rest.
• Airlines are better recognized by their logos/colors than by their names.
• Some things don’t need to be a in a filter: price ranges, airline, websites searched, etc.
• Those with flexible dates need a different way to look at it.
• It’s easier to redo the search than to refine through ajax.
• Flight and flight back are consecutive, so let’s show them consecutive.
• It’s likely that your choice will be among the first 10 results (although you may want to see more).
• White space helps people identify choices, it makes everything clearer.
• Boxes help you separate between different types of content.
• It’s better to show just the essential data.

Old and new versions side to side

Minube is always quesioning how they do things and how these things can be improved. I like to say that at Vostok we are not good at innovating but at improving. The old version was good. But good as it was it could be, and should be improved. Here you have both versions side to side:

Facts prove it

We know the new one is more beautiful and more honest. Facts prove it. Raúl (Minube’s CEO) told me about the A/B Test results and the main indicators doubled in the new one. You should check Raúl’s post in Spanish about it.

We both believe

It’s a great thing we have clients who share our believes. Working with minube is always of great pleasure. We have a relationship based on trust and shared values. They also think that beauty and honesty are two of most important principles of good design.

(original at Homeowners Insurance)

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.

1. We live in an online world that needs a plug-in like Readability to make it bearable.
2. A divisive but exciting conversation thread powered by iA Oliver Reichenstein‘s image titled “3-5 words per line, just to make it look like paper? No NYT, this is NOT how it’s done”. Well done!

Readability (the service)

Readability, which you probably already know, is a free button for your Web browser’s toolbar that eliminates everything from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. You can get the button at the arc90 website. The idea is great. Nobody has said it better than NYT’s David Pogue:

Readability makes the world online a calmer, cleaner, more beautiful place.

But shouldn’t this make us happy? Well, let’s just say that we couldn’t agree more with yewknee‘s view on Ryan Catbird’s tumblr:

Very cool, excellent product, but I can’t help but think of how fucked up it is that this thing even needs to exist. Because here’s a novel idea: Hey Publishers: How about you just stop putting shit all over every single pixel on the screen?

Read the entire comment here.

Here’s a peek of how Readability works using an article from the NYT  Young Americans Embrace Rigors of the Bolshoi (and this newspaper is far from being the most cluttered one out there):

Before Readability

After Readability

So what has Readability done?

• kept the photo that illustrated the article
• got rid of all the mess surrounding it
• changed column width
• increased interspacing

So simple! And now you can even change your settings so that you can see links as footnotes. Here’s a demo in video:

All in all the design blogosphere has been kind of hectic recently. Perhaps the iPad has something to do with this. Javier Cañada (@javiercanada) tweeted a few days ago:

iPad means extreme segregation between good and bad designers. Those who don’t embrace true simplicity will fail miserably.

A great conversation on information design…

… taking place on the less expected place: flickr. This interesting discussion on information design and presenting online content had input from Khoi Vinh, Lukas Mathis, Wired Magazine, Adobe and Hoefler+Frere-Jones where the following topics were discussed:

• legibility Vs. ‘a look’
• replicating print
• scrolling Vs. screen to screen
• eye-scanning
• columns

iA has a great image in their Wired app article showing what a mess columns can actually be (look at all the zig-zagging going on):

Even though we’ve grown accustomed to reading this way, it doesn’t mean it’s the best way. It’d be kind of sad to realize that we arrived to the best solution back in the 1600′s.

A few days ago we read this tweet from @Gatada :

If you combine Readability with Instapaper you’re all set; enjoyable reading by your desk and on the move! + Don’t forget Dropbox for files.

He’s right. But we hate to conform.

Here’s Vostok’s take on the matter: a list of things that should ALWAYS be taken into account when thinking about online design:

are you mimicking print? why? if nostalgia is the answer: forget it.

are you drawing a clear distinction between ads and content?

are you taking care of line spacing and line length? what works best for what medium?

are you using columns? why? and how?

are you understanding and respecting the medium you are designing for? are you making the most out of its possibilities?

are you trying to fit the same amount of content of a 22-inch broadsheet into a 9-inch iPad screen?

Yeah, these are the ones for us. Are there any others we’ve missed out?

Our partners and friends at Riot Cinema (they make movies) just did this amazing video for Unience, a social network of investors. We love it not just becuse of the aesthetics but also because the script is so well written it makes you open an account right away:

How much harm has eyetracking done to online newspaper design…

You may say “c’mon, that was solved a long tome ago” but common tools only give you the time difference. From that you can guess if it’s morning, afternoon, night… But you often feel confused wheter it’s “today or tomorrow or yesterday”. That’s exactly what everytimexone.com fixes.

I’m sure it would make a very popular iPad/iPhone app.

Misparadas.com was developed by  Sam Lown, Fernando Blat, Christos Zisopoulos, and Mark MacKay for AbreDatos.

(via Miguel Sabel’s blog)

Seen at the always entertaining I love charts.

(We love I Love Charts)

Jamie Bolton artwork and movie posters

FFFFOUND! | Solar Eclipse on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

Designing Design – Kenya Hara — The Designer’s Review of Books

I don’t think that type should be expressive at all. I can write the word ‘dog’ with any typeface and it doesn’t have to look like a dog. But there are people that [think that] when they write ‘dog’ it should bark.

Creativity needs the support of knowledge to be able to perform at its best.

There are no hierarchies when it comes to quality. Quality is there or is not there, and if is not there we have lost our time.

Any color works if you push it to the extreme.

There is no design without discipline, there is no discipline without intelligence.

We detest the demand of temporary solutions, the waste of energies and capital for the sake of novelty.

I like design to be semantically correct, syntactically consistent, pragmatically understandable.

I like it to be visually powerful, intellectually elegant, and above all timeless.

It’s not important to develop your own style but your own approach.

And finally a couple of videos of him, one explaining his hated/admired NYC Subway map of 1972 and the second one on his appearance on Helvetica (with Spanish subtitles):

(via Ilustrae)

It makes me think about the convergence between video and data in new storytelling formats. These narratives jump from analytical (narrative details ordered in a lineal fashion) to synthetic (big picture view, more visual) communication styles back and forth, which kind of maps how people learn.

It’s interesting to see that this new format, which is kinda popular for explaining new internet products and services, jumps to the mas media and merges with old style things such as the anchor’s voice.

Do you think it’s just another import made by the old media from the internet (just as when they use Google Earth) or we are in front of somehting bigger? What’s your take?