The Vostok blog

An array of beautifully-colored fusion-syled sushi from Miyama.

Full disclosure: My bank is BBVA. It’s been that way since I arrived in Madrid 3 years ago. Why? I guess it was the bank closest to my house. Nothing else. No bank allegiances or bank favoritisms clouding my perspective. I also know the studio behind the app design, Fjord, and although we respect them immensely, there are no secret allegiances there either. Neither public nor private.

This is an honest account of a girl infinitely grateful that after zillions of years of inept bank management there is finally a space that allows her to get things done quickly and effortlessly. So here we go:

Why making an app for day to day transactions is better than making a web?
Apps are more constraint. They give users the perception that the space they’re handling is less like a labyrinth and more like a familiar and unchanging path. There is a limited amount of things you can do, you know what they are and how to do them. This makes tasks not only effortless but more efficient.

Why is this super important when it comes to managing your bank current account? Because I’m handling MY money, and I’m doing so in MY space, not BBVA’s. An app gives me more a sense of control and personalization than any web tab titled ‘YOUR account’, ‘YOUR profile’, ‘YOUR bank’. I want to feel reassured, secure, I want to feel in control. This might be just the same for an app that handles your photographs, your movies, your web clippings, but it’s even more so when you’re handling your finances.

Plus, the simplicity of apps forces super intricate processes to be stripped down to their bare bones. It’s the perfect milieu to put in practice analytic and synthetic design principles.

Things I like from a customer’s point of view:

• It’s secure without being a f* pain in the ass. It remembers my user number but not my password.
• I can favorite stuff. I no longer have to make a gargantuan effort to consciously ignore the thousand other elements and numbers calling my attention.
• The most common action ‘make a transfer’ is right in the menu. You don’t have to go hunting for it.
• The use of GPS. You’re in the middle of nowhere, it’s dark and you’re in desperate need of an ATM but a branch of your bank is nowhere to be seen. Not anymore.

Things I like the most from a design point of view:

• The use of color to convey information.
• The use of color gradients to help you focus your attention.
• The use of graphs. Lines give you a sense of the oscillations of your spendings and earnings. Bars give you a sense of the amount spent. Position of a bar (below or above the x-axis) tells you if what you’re looking at is income or expenditure.

And that’s it. This app is not fancy-shmanzy. It is what it is. It does what it’s supposed to do. To the team behind this product in BBVA and Fjord: My hat to you sirs.

If you’re interested, you can download the app here.

The universal language of love? How about the universal language of pictograms?

Javier Cañada talked about the ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education) project in 2002. It’s hightime we made reference to it again. The project was created by Otto Neurath and designed by Gerd Arntz and is believed to be the base upon which the AIGA was built on.

Neurath recognised something crucial to the theory of communication, through creating icons of objectivity. Since a considerable part of the information to which an individual is exposed is optically processed, as Gestalt Theory and perceptual psychology were able to demonstrate at the end of the 19th century, it can be conclusive that information must be visualised or data must be transformed into pictures in order to be perceived at all.

Frank Hartmann

A new book on Arntz was edited last year by designers Ed Annink and Max Bruinsma. If you’re lucky enough to be in London before March, don’t forget to check out the exhibition on ISOTYPE at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

If you want to read more, Neurath’s book International Picture Language is a good start.

UPDATE (12 Feb, 2011)
Katie Treggiden, from ‘Confessions of a design geek’, has a great account of the V&A exhibit, with a bit more insight about the history of the ISOTYPE project and pictures of the exhibition.

We just finished watching a great conference by Étienne Mineur from Les Éditions Volumiques about using game design concepts to connect “ce qui est digital avec ce qui est tangible”. Mineur focuses mainly on touchscreen-based boardgames, but touches briefly on two concepts we have recently been thinking about a lot:

• 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.

We just redesigned our website. And we love it.

Our spaceship’s crew has grown by one this morning. Meet Ricardo Fernández:

Former developer at both The Cocktail and Simplelógica, he’s seriously into music, design (interaction design, that is) and hmmm…irish landscapes (we all need to have our own particular fetiches, don’t we?).

We’re flattered to say he left his hometown Oviedo to come and join us. He’ll be in charge of doing design and touching a bit of coding with us.

We hope he likes it here in Madrid ’cause we sure are proud to have him on board and would love for him to hang around and aid our navigation for some time.

Or better still what’s for breakfast? Pound cake with strawberry coulis and Moscovitas from Oviedo. Yum, yum? here’s the recipe for the pound cake and if you want to taste the wonders of Moscovita almond chocolateness you’ll have to go to Confitería Rialto.

Javier gave a conference about iPad design a few months ago in the iPadMadCamp conference. We thought it’d be interesting to recover what we said and share it with those of you out there giving iPad design a shot.

If you want a copy, here’s the PDF.

We’ve been ruminating on this subject for some time now but hadn’t had the time to organize our thoughts and jot them down. The opportunity came a couple of days ago when Mario García, newspaper design guru, asked specialists what they thought a modern newspaper design should look like. You can read what we had to say in García’s original post but the subject is worth expanding on.

In short:

In 1998, former Apple, former Microsoft, now journalist and consultant Linda Stone, coined the term Continuous Partial Attention. This should be the fundamental concept behind online newspaper design, what sets the difference between design that is modern and design that is expired.

Before the immediacy of the web, before feed readers, Facebook and Twitter, it took us 20 to 40 minutes to read a newspaper everyday. Today, we no longer read information in blocks, we scan for it or come by it in snippets. One article here, another one there. By the end of the day we have tailored our own newspaper with information gathered from all sorts of sources: blogs, newspapers, magazines. But it didn’t take us 40 minutes, it took us the entire day. I think there’s something there going on for newspapers if only they had the courage to move forward and forget about their print inheritance.

How can newspapers embrace this? By providing us with a homepage that:

• is easy to read, that is not cluttered or where I have to zig zag between columns.
• is continuously updated, and where updates are visible.
• doesn’t tell me what’s the most important news of the day but gives me the latest and allows me to set my own hierarchy.
• is designed to make information king (not the ads).
• visual, where without having to read much, photos can aid me to know what the story is about.
• can work in my iPad, where I don’t have to zoom in hundreds of times to reach a link.
• can inform me both superficially (online) and in-depth (to read later in my iPad).
• doesn’t organize the news into absurd sections (culture, politics, sports), but classifies it into easy to identify/searchable tags.

We’ll keep touching on this subject in the future. In the meantime, let us know if you think we have left anything out in the comments.