We’ve been working with minube’s team for two years, and now we’ve had the chance to redesign their homepage.
Minube.com is a traveller community where everyone shares their experiences, photos and videos. So you can plan a trip based on the experience of travellers along with minube’s flight and hotel search engine.
We’ve used a modular design that uses the entire width. Modules are easily interchangable, so adaptations can be done by adding, removing, and reordering whatever you want. Modules are also very comfortable to read on an iphone.
The users’ expriences of minube have been given prominence on the first shadowed module, which includes the destination search and all the relevant stats (users, experiences, photos and places). Minube is now pretty much self-explanatory, with a glance you know what is it about.
The new homepage is not only clean and lightweight on the visuals: thanks to minube’s stellar programming team, it’s now lightning-speed fast, loading in 1.2 seconds using our homebrewed tests. A very significant improvement over the 4 seconds of the previous version.
Our favourite detail is the realtime display of travellers’ experiences. we wanted to display a thriving community with user participation on the homepage.
Raúl (CEO of minube) has a great post on the redesign and evolution of their hompage.
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):
Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.
Just like Stalin used to remove people from pictures and pretend that they never existed, some guys do the oposite with Google (it’s just an analogy, don’t take me wrong) as if it always existed:
We congratulate Mark MacKay for acquiring his first Canadian passport. O Canada, Mark’s home and native land, with glowing hearts he sees thee rise, he stands on guard for thee…
Today we replaced our ageing white theme with a minimal theme named Helvetiplanet.
It’s no secret we’re huge Swiss nostalgics, and this is a little homage to one of our favorite typefaces, Helvetica. We hope you don’t mind us being retro-stylish once in a while!
To check it out in action just set ‘Helvetiplanet’ color in your preferences. Don’t have a Planetaki account? Sign up here, it will take you less than a minute, really.
You suddenly realize the world is well designed after you have a big plate of Mixiote Chicken (Mixiote Wheat Gluten for María) cooked by our always surprising comrade Mark Mackay.
