The Vostok blog

The London’s Design Museum launched a couple of days ago version 1.1 of their free Collection iPad app. In our bookcase you’ll find this app’s distant cousin from the paper world: Charlotte and Peter Fiell’s Industrial Design A-Z. Put one next to the other one of the pros is blatantly obvious. The rest though have less to do with heftiness and more to do with practicality:

• Products are searchable by date, color, material, location and manufacturer.
• You’ve got pretty good audio and video content by museum director Deyan Sudjic, museum head of learning Helen Charman, and founding director Stephen Bayley.

This app is worth downloading and revising every so often. For those just starting out, it’s  a great read alongside Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. An overview of good, solid basics on product design that give many more insights into fundamental interaction design principles than most design courses out there today.

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?

We’re pretty big fans of this book at the studio. Javier included it in his list, ‘The 26 books that shaped me as an interaction designer‘. Thanks to Bruno Teixidor we now know that it’s available in Spanish.

Things we love about it: it’s concise without losing scope, its simple without losing depth. All in all, a book that helps you understand how much interaction design and architecture are linked. It makes you aware of the importance of process in design, the importance of space (negative space and positive space) and function.

You can buy it online here.

It’s no secret that we make a big deal about eating well at Vostok. If there’s one thing Javier, Ricardo and I have in common is just that. Sure we try to eat healthy but, what really rocks our boat is good, hearty, unpretentious food.

The correlation is quite obvious once you get your mind around it because the same reasoning that guides our design principles, guides our eating habits. Or at least, what we –with more or less luck– aspire for them to be. In other words:

In this comparison we’re not taking into account food à la Ferran Adrià. Not because we don’t consider it food or we don’t like it, but basically because it can’t be separated from Art*. In Adrià’s own words: food at El Bulli isn’t meant to nourish you (though it does), it’s meant to be an emotional experience, an event. And we don’t consider Design to be that. For Vostok, Design (with a capital letter D) is, to quote Mr. Eames, a method of action: a tool to solve problems. And therefore something that can only be compared to basic, hearty food. Food that is useful, that has a purpose. That has no artistic aspirations.

At a first glance this appreciation might be quite banal but if you take a closer look, you’ll realize it all makes sense. Because these principles aren’t just our design principles, or our food principles, they’re the principles that guide who we are and what we do.

What about pleasure, you might ask? Eating good food for the mere pleasure of it? Well, to quote Charles Eames again, who would say that pleasure is not useful?

*There’s a wonderful exception to this: La Comida de la Familia, a recipe book that has been recently edited and that includes most of the dishes the team at El Bulli had for lunch before the action started. These are all good, traditional, hearty and timeless recipes. A little gem.

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

You can watch it online here.

Our friends at Arquinauta released ABCkit, an iPad/ iPhone app to teach kids the letters in Spanish, a couple of months ago. They’re currently working on a version for English. And are now getting all set up to make a pitch for the AppCircus. They needed a video and got in touch with us. We, in turn, got in touch with Riotcinema to work together our magic. This is what we came up with:

The location, the actor and the voice-over are made by Vostok. The script, the photography, the music and the editing are made by Riot Cinema. A special thanks goes to Luis Enrique Carrión. This man can do wonders with a Canon EOS 5D and a bit of light.

I would encourage you to read along side a great post by Arquinauta’s Karina Ibarra in UX Mag that covers extensively lessons learned, she now shares, when designing for kids. Especially kids 3 and under.

We wish Arquinauta’s team the best and hope to see such a beautifully-designed app used in many more languages.

A good lesson in history. Important to keep in mind what was, to know what is and craft what might be.

1. Demonstrate from the top that high quality and attention to detail are prioritized and appreciated above everything else, including being the first to market, having the most features, or having the most aggressive prices. If you can get those as well, that’s great, but quality will not be sacrificed to do so.
2. Instill these values in your staff. If you can’t, hire a staff for which you can. Better yet, hire a staff for which you don’t need to.
3. Aggressively pursue simplification, elegance, craftsmanship, and the highest-class user experiences in the product line. Ruthlessly cut or hold features or entire products that aren’t good enough.
4. Make it pretty.

How not to bring good design to a platform?
Skip steps 1–3 above.

Marco Arment

Mark MacKay and María Munuera, former members of the Vostok crew and now merry autonomous soloists started Method of Action a few months ago. In their own words: “peer to peer education for people who want to get things done”. Their latest education tool is pretty fun. It’s called KernType and it’s one of many soon to come tools meant to help people become more familiarized with design notions.

We write about it because it’s a simple concept beautifully designed with a twist on the game-ification of learning (not new but always fun to watch when done right).

Things we like:

• The use of color. Neutral-coloured backgrounds allow color to be used more resourcefully.
• That you need to wait a few seconds to know what your score is. The more you wait, the higher your score, so waiting is not a drag.
• Small details like using lighter/darker shades or subtle lines here or there give a lot of texture to what is basically a pretty monochromatic website.
• You learn a bit about typography (the who’s, the what’s, the when’s).
• Learning is a game (missions are accomplished or failed, you need a certain score to ‘pass’ on to the next mission).

Overall a sweet entertainment for all those closeted O.C.D’ers out there. I would also suggest reading Mark’s post You’re already a good designer alongside it.

Looking forward to what’s next in production. If you want to learn more you can follow Method of Action on twitter.