The New York Times began a beautiful series in January 2009 called One in 8 million. It uses photo and audio to convey an emotional narrative about the life, hopes, fears and desires of some of the people who inhabit New York City. It’s elegant, it’s touching, it’s incredibly well done.
We’re big fans of Scott Schuman’s The Sartorialist, it’s great to see that the NYT Lens blog has recently given him some love. I wish we could embed the video/interview here but NYT image archive has no embedding options (FAIL). You can see it here.
I don’t want to find out that much more. I want to shoot them the way I see them. As opposed to really creating an essence of who they truly are; it’s my idea of who they are.
We are big fans of Hans Rosling work. I first mentioned him five years ago (Spanish) when he was leading Gapminder, mixing statistics, data visualization, interaction design and storytelling. Now he’s a public figure doing amazing things just as this one:
Why does Twitter work better for news than Google Reader? Simple, Twitter gives you what’s new now. You don’t have to hunt around to find the newest stuff. And it doesn’t waste your time by telling you how many unread items you have. Who cares. (It’s like asking how many NYT articles you haven’t read. It would be gargantuan. I don’t bother you with the number of Scripting News posts you haven’t read, so why does Google?)
I remember when a good friend of mine coined the term “web 2.love” as a way to refer to those internet projects fueled with feelings and passion rather than money. It made me think a lot back then and I still give some mental RAM to that every now and then.
To me, methodology and techniques are very important for a designer but nothing great comes out if there isn’t personal involvement in it. Feelings are indispensable. Values are a must (honesty, truth, beauty…) are the drivers of our work. That’s why I respect so much Ale Muñoz’s approach when he talks about love and design all in the same sentence:
I really wish every web developer out there poured so much love into every form as we did with this one.
This article on The Design Observer about Massimo Vignelli’s desk has introduced us to a new little gem: Lines. A wonderful addition to our list of movies on design.
In their own words:
Lines consists of mini-documentaries, running 5 to 7 minutes in length, highlighting the beauty and importance of the architecture in everyday objects, and details how the design and structure of these objects affect and reflect our lifestyles.
In case you’re not familiar with The Guardian‘s beautiful series on writer’s rooms that the Design Observer article touches on, check it out: you don’t know what you’ve been missing. El País has tried to do something similar, missing the mark by a long shot unfortunately.
It all came to be with one of those ‘on the spur of the moment’ Twitter event kinda things. We ended up hosting a private reunion to talk about interaction design with some of the best senior designers out there and had loads of fun in the process. How cooler can it get?
