The Vostok blog

Acabo de publicar toda la información sobre el próximo curso para formar a diseñadores de interacción. Será la tercera edición del Programa Vostok.

Most of you know that we collaborate closely with Floresfrescas.com. So it won’t come as a surprise to you that we received a beautiful assortment of flowers the other day and we couldn’t help but make a video of the unboxing. Perhaps some of you already know what it feels like to receive one of these babies. By the way, we designed and defined the identity of Floresfrescas.com and how it’s applied to their boxes.

Hoverboard. Nils Guadagnin. Back to the Future!

And if you believe (as I do) that Back to the Future is one true source of innovation and inspiration, check this delightful poster by Justin van Genderen:

This is the kind of mess you get when you create an account at Eskup and first log in:

For those of you who don’t know, Eskup is a kind of social network, twitter-like, microblogging plattform which merges Elpais.com content with user generated microposts. Kind of like the dull answer to “how do we, newspaper, take advantage of social media?”

El Pais seems pretty excited about this. Their excitement is directly proportional to my skepticism. They’ve done a great deal of programming for this and they’ve taken risks, which is good. But they URGENTLY need to rework the design and functionality so the product is more understandable and easy to use. Otherwise it will be another missed atempt at redefining online journalism in Spain.

We want to build the best list of design (interaction, information, industrial, product design and architecture) movies and documentaries of all times. Here’s the deal: write down in the comment section the name of a film or doc that’s somehow design related and, in return, we’ll give you a code to watch any movie in Filmin‘s (Spain’s best streaming service for indie film) catalog for free.

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.

Marco Arment does a great job not only at designing one of the best apps for reading online (Instapaper) but also at explaining all the decisions behind the design. I strongly suggest reading Instapaper Pro 2.2.3 now available, which could also be tittled Instapaper for iPad: its design explained.

Marco, who also happens to be the lead developer at Tumblr, dealt with several issues when designing the iPad version of his product:

• Placement of the controls: follow Apple’s lead or do what he finds it’s better (standarisation over effectivity).
• Placement of the action buttons (not where they fit but at the specific spot where you are when you may need them).
• Text margins and line readability.
• Single column vs. multicolumn layouts.
• Color and brightness for legibility (pure black on pure white on a screen is an aberration, don’t get fooled).
• Pagination tap zones (and differences between iPhone and iPad).
• Tipographies.

I wonder why Mr. Arment decided to let the user chose between 6 different fonts instead of chosing himself the one or two he thinks it works better on that context. What do you guys think about this one?

UPDATE:

Marco just answered my enquiry through twitter:

Marco: Because the people who care about fonts REALLY care about them, and appreciate the choice.

I think Hoefler Text works best, so I made it the default. I take the default settings VERY seriously.

This is what future cars looked like in May 1948:

The iPad is not a big iPhone. The iPhone is a pocket iPad.

Julio Loayza

This is what happens when you put more effort on marketing than on design:

This post by Amit Gupta pretty much says everything about the issue here: