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.

Some major changes, not always apparent in the video:

• cleaner navigation
• ‘My Times’ a personalized NYTimes.com
• articles are more scanneable and scrolleable
• more videos, and better players
• the sections of most popular, most emailed, most blogged
• Times topics (articles organized by categories and not just sections)
• Articles can be printed and shared online

Years of trial and error redesigns, facelifts, surgeries and tests implemented by the NYTimes.com design team to keep in check. Admirable? Absolutely. Enough? No. What happened with less but better?

• 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.

Ryan Tate puts together several reasons why the latest Murdoch’s project for the iPad will fail:

• It will be a *daily edition* published every morning, not a stream of constant information.
• It will cover all topics, without focus, unspecialized.
• “The business model is extremist” meaning that it relies solely on subscription to feed the 100+ journalists on board.
• It’s just for the iPad, although versions for other plattforms have been announced
• Etc.

It surely doesn’t look like the much needed new paradigm but we should wait and see what really comes out of this before having an opinion.

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

FIRST, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH PIGMENTS

Man has always wanted to tell stories through images. It all started with cavemen and their paintings. Their language was probably not very rich in vocabulary but they knew they wanted to show others what their memories held and what populated their imagination. So they painted it. But access to pigments and the ability to paint on stone was limited to only a few.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH STONE

Sculpture, along with wall paintings (or glass) paintings were the way advanced civilizations (from mesopotamic to christian) represented visually the characters in their stories. Stories were told and not read for many centuries and sculptures would help people visualize their heroes, saints or divinities. Think of sculptures in palaces and churches where generals and saints were displayed in their epic endeavors. Also painted glass windows and mosaics of those who were powerful and where their power lied. Only the “official” artists had access to such expensive means and their stories were limited to what was the official version of the official story.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH PAPER

Paper was a very expensive technology until just a few centuries ago. It was difficult to manufacture and only a few lettered people had access to it: mostly scholars and monks, some of whom were specialized in miniature paintings illustrating the concepts explained in the books.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH INK

Newspapers slowly started to incorporate pictures in their stories but they tended to be small: sending them was techically complex and the ink was expensive. Stories had be told textually or with a few small photographs. Or at least until the 60s when photography became a commodity for magazines.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH CAMERAS

Photography allowed memories to last forever but, again, it was limited and expensive at the beginning. It took 100 years for that industry to make photography available to everyone. In the 70s people could only afford to have one camera per household. Then they were able to have relatively cheap photoalbums where the stories that mattered to them the most were stored: new born babies, marriages, adventures, trips… they were all narrations composed of visual memories. But still, you couldn’t share them easily.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH BANDWIDTH

Photos and images have always been part of the Internet, especially of the Word Wide Web, but the first modems were very very slow. You had to scan a picture (no digital cameras yet), you had to compress it, reduce its size and expect visitors to wait several minutes for the image to load. The standard was around 200 pixels wide for a rectangular picture. So, we had a medium that allowed us to share our messages with the world but the use of images was still scarce. Text was the only way to go.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH RESOLUTION

Digital images became widely available, everyone could create and share them. Bandwidth grew fast: size was no longer an issue. But… Monitors still didn’t have enough resolution to show pictures in all their glory. Remember when 800×600 was the reference when it came to website matters? Nothing bigger than that was allowed. It took us 10 years to start moving to 1024 pixels wide and even then there was some fear of using big format images. Powerpoint was there and allowed some to tell stories visually (most just used it for bulletpointed BS) but images were still just there to dress a good text.

THEN, WE DIDN’T HAVE THE SOFTWARE

Sure there is flickr now, and many others, but until not so long ago there was not a single piece of cheap software that allowed people to tell visual stories in a sequence of images. Just as we could do in a photoalbum, or a Powerpoint in fullscreen mode, attracting the viewer’s full attention. Images that ARE the message and not just the accompaniment. The Big Picture, at Boston.com got it but they didn’t make it sequential. The iPad did it with its image galleries but they weren’t shareable on the internet. We were almost there…

AND NOW…

We now have the bandwidth, the cameras, the screen size and the Internet. We all need to tell our stories, to show our projects, to be able to share our memories with pictures and videos. And we cannot pay a high price for it.

So we, at Vostok, have made it possible. It had to be done.

We created a tool that allows people to tell stories visually and to share them with the rest of the world. We also made it affordable. It’s a WordPress theme, it’s called BlackVostok – www.blackvostok.com and it’s just $16.

Now tell your story, take over the full browser window with your images and share them with the world.

BlackVostok
Here’s the website: www.blackvostok.com
Here’s the theme in action: www.blackvostok.com/test

Help scientists recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. Historians will use your work to track past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.

Want to help?

The best thing about it is that you don’t need to chose beforehand, you just install one file and BOOM! Both themes appear on your WordPress so you can fit them both and chose one right away.

Remember, Vostok Theme is for those who don’t want attention to be distracted from content. Colors and typography have been carefully chosen to achieve maximum legibility with minimum eye fatigue. Also, code has been written with extreme care for web standards and accessibility.

NOTE TO TUMBLR USERS: Ricardo Fernández just made an adaptation and now you have the Vostok Theme for Tumblr available in black (white soon to come).