The Vostok blog

One day, not too long ago, Bernardo Hernández mentioned he was looking into redesigning his website. He wanted something simple and functional. Our territory no doubt. Him being such a close friend of Vostok’s and having collaborated in various projects already, we didn’t have to think twice about giving him a hand. This is what we came up with:

Bernardo, for those of you who don’t know him already, is Worldwide Director of Emerging Products at Google.

Website credits:
Vostok has done the design, Pep Gómez has supervised the implementation and Jorge González from Wakalaka has done the mockup and CSS.

www.bernardohernandez.com

Here is the chart we displayed on yesterday’s video on the 15 years of NYTimes homepages where you can see the absolute lenght of each homepage year by year.

Here’s a bigger version.

We release it to the public domain. Feel free to copy, share or republish it.

There are few design studios who share the values Vostok abides by so fiercely. But some do. And Vizzuality is one of them. Led by Javier de la Torre and Sergio Álvarez Leiva, Vizzuality’s approach to design is fresh and honest, they create tools that are transparent, efficient and incredibly useful.

They put their visual and interaction design skills to the service of initiatives that, using their own words, matter. Be it to locate and identify stars, endangered species, protected areas, migratory species or even visualizing aid in disaster stricken countries. To put it bluntly, they choose their projects wisely and put their money where their mouth is. It makes us proud to have someone we respect so close to home.

Yesterday they launched a video made by Riot Cinema featuring one of their most recent projects: Planet Hunters. Let them speak for themselves:

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?

I think the human body and buildings have a lot in common. Buildings are as weak as they are heavy, and one tool in our armament is a process known as genchiku, which we can use to decrease the overall weight of a building – you could think of it as a process that gets rid of unwanted flab and beefs up muscle where it’s needed. However, I think that some people don’t consider balance in quite the same way – simply putting more on top doesn’t necessarily make a structure stronger.

Shigeru Aoki at The earthquake from an architect’s perspective

LinkedIn hit 100 million users yesterday. Today they released a pretty clever infographic to go with it.

Go back ten years or so and the image would have looked something like this:

Today though, pixels can be just as beautiful as (and more informative than) picture posters:

What’s the best approach? Let’s see…

• Ad posters make us skeptical, we’ve been so perverted by publicity we no longer believe what they say; numbers on the other hand…well, we still associate them with hard facts.
• Infographics allow you to  play around with data visualization, using images, diagrams or icons to make your data more…(for the lack of a better word) graspeable. 100 million means nothing, a pile of cards that’s actually taller than Mount Everest, does.
• Ad posters are movie-frames, Infographics are more like short films, you need to put several frames together to come up with a story.
• Ad posters allow for one layer of (simple) information (the message must be understood at a glance, so the idea must be conveyed quickly and efficiently); Infographics allow for various layers of (simple) information helping you give more bits of information without over-complicating the message. Plus, the LinkedIn guys even get to be kind of funny.

When it comes to advertising a company it looks like an infographic is better equipped for storytelling, better equipped to look more like a ‘serious study’ and less like blatant publicity. So well done, LinkedIn

See it in full here.

We’re working on a little something that’s really putting to test our concepts of analytic and synthetic. The teaser page was launched today. Here’s a teeny weeny peek:

If you wanna stay in the loop: @ducksboard

Those of you who know us know how much we admire and respect Japan, as a country, as a society. From yesterday on –and until further notice– all BlackVostok sales will be donated to the Japan Society’s Earthquake Relief Fund.

Celebrating many more years to come…

Jordi Parras has done a great job designing and creating the Spotify player. Techcrunch says he’s been inspired by Jonathan Ive, we say he’s been inspired by Braun. More specifically, by the 1955 SK2 designed by Artur Braun (son of Max Braun, the founder) and Fritz Eichler. Nice work.

If you want to learn more about how it works, watch the video.