THE COSMONAUTS

I just found Modernist, a WordPress theme by Rodrigo Galíndez. Although I think the tags for each post and the social media links could more discrete, overall it’s a very good theme and I would recommend it for anyone looking for something clean in two columns:

BTW, We are about to release a white vostok theme and as you may see (if not using a newsreader) we are tesing it around here.

I’ve been collecting charts and infographics about drugs for a while. The topic is multidimensional and that makes it interesting for visual representations. Some of its facets:

• type of effect (euphoria, relax, allucinations…)
• level of addiction provoked (very, little, extreme…)
• legal consequences of consuming/dealing (jail, misdeameanor…)
• secondary effects (nausea, sleep, appetite)
  price

• social acceptance
• context of consumption (marginal, social, individual…)

And here are the charts, numbered for your convenience when commenting:

1

2

3

4

5

Am I missing any classic that should be on this collection?

My favorite is #1 for obvious reasons. Which one is yours, you little druggies?

I deeply believe that honesty and beauty are two of the most important values in design. We put as much as we could in the redesign of the Search Results page of Minube for flights and hotels and the result has been good. Here it is:

Our assumptions

We (both minube and us) put extreme attention to what information mattered the most and made it stand above the secondary data. These were our main assumptions:

• Price matters most than company.
• Price (usually) matters most than hours.
• There is the cheapest and then the rest.
• Airlines are better recognized by their logos/colors than by their names.
• Some things don’t need to be a in a filter: price ranges, airline, websites searched, etc.
• Those with flexible dates need a different way to look at it.
• It’s easier to redo the search than to refine through ajax.
• Flight and flight back are consecutive, so let’s show them consecutive.
• It’s likely that your choice will be among the first 10 results (although you may want to see more).
• White space helps people identify choices, it makes everything clearer.
• Boxes help you separate between different types of content.
• It’s better to show just the essential data.

Old and new versions side to side

Minube is always quesioning how they do things and how these things can be improved. I like to say that at Vostok we are not good at innovating but at improving. The old version was good. But good as it was it could be, and should be improved. Here you have both versions side to side:

Facts prove it

We know the new one is more beautiful and more honest. Facts prove it. Raúl (Minube’s CEO) told me about the A/B Test results and the main indicators doubled in the new one. You should check Raúl’s post in Spanish about it.

We both believe

It’s a great thing we have clients who share our believes. Working with minube is always of great pleasure. We have a relationship based on trust and shared values. They also think that beauty and honesty are two of most important principles of good design.

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

This is the kind of stuff Mark tells you to justify his totally unacceptable levels of coffee consumption:

(original at Homeowners Insurance)

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.

These past few days have been rather depressing. We feel this way for two reasons:

1. We live in an online world that needs a plug-in like Readability to make it bearable.
2. A divisive but exciting conversation thread powered by iA Oliver Reichenstein‘s image titled “3-5 words per line, just to make it look like paper? No NYT, this is NOT how it’s done”. Well done!

Readability (the service)

Readability, which you probably already know, is a free button for your Web browser’s toolbar that eliminates everything from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. You can get the button at the arc90 website. The idea is great. Nobody has said it better than NYT’s David Pogue:

Readability makes the world online a calmer, cleaner, more beautiful place.

But shouldn’t this make us happy? Well, let’s just say that we couldn’t agree more with yewknee‘s view on Ryan Catbird’s tumblr:

Very cool, excellent product, but I can’t help but think of how fucked up it is that this thing even needs to exist. Because here’s a novel idea: Hey Publishers: How about you just stop putting shit all over every single pixel on the screen?

Read the entire comment here.

Here’s a peek of how Readability works using an article from the NYT  Young Americans Embrace Rigors of the Bolshoi (and this newspaper is far from being the most cluttered one out there):

Before Readability

After Readability

So what has Readability done?

• kept the photo that illustrated the article
• got rid of all the mess surrounding it
• changed column width
• increased interspacing

So simple! And now you can even change your settings so that you can see links as footnotes. Here’s a demo in video:

All in all the design blogosphere has been kind of hectic recently. Perhaps the iPad has something to do with this. Javier Cañada (@javiercanada) tweeted a few days ago:

iPad means extreme segregation between good and bad designers. Those who don’t embrace true simplicity will fail miserably.

A great conversation on information design…

… taking place on the less expected place: flickr. This interesting discussion on information design and presenting online content had input from Khoi Vinh, Lukas Mathis, Wired Magazine, Adobe and Hoefler+Frere-Jones where the following topics were discussed:

• legibility Vs. ‘a look’
• replicating print
• scrolling Vs. screen to screen
• eye-scanning
• columns

iA has a great image in their Wired app article showing what a mess columns can actually be (look at all the zig-zagging going on):

Even though we’ve grown accustomed to reading this way, it doesn’t mean it’s the best way. It’d be kind of sad to realize that we arrived to the best solution back in the 1600′s.

A few days ago we read this tweet from @Gatada :

If you combine Readability with Instapaper you’re all set; enjoyable reading by your desk and on the move! + Don’t forget Dropbox for files.

He’s right. But we hate to conform.

Here’s Vostok’s take on the matter: a list of things that should ALWAYS be taken into account when thinking about online design:

are you mimicking print? why? if nostalgia is the answer: forget it.

are you drawing a clear distinction between ads and content?

are you taking care of line spacing and line length? what works best for what medium?

are you using columns? why? and how?

are you understanding and respecting the medium you are designing for? are you making the most out of its possibilities?

are you trying to fit the same amount of content of a 22-inch broadsheet into a 9-inch iPad screen?

Yeah, these are the ones for us. Are there any others we’ve missed out?

What does Wall Street look like in 8-bits?

Our partners and friends at Riot Cinema (they make movies) just did this amazing video for Unience, a social network of investors. We love it not just becuse of the aesthetics but also because the script is so well written it makes you open an account right away:

Here is a great presentation by Harry Brignull about Eyetracking and why it is the perfect tool for misinterpretation. Check it out, seriously:

How much harm has eyetracking done to online newspaper design…

A couple of days ago Mark Mackay wrote post about the loss of quality and rigor of Spanish photojournalism, specifically at El Mundo, one of the main newspapers. The article (in Spanish), titled La lamentable situación del fotoperiodismo en El Mundo, is not a rant but a conclusion based on evidence. Worth reading if you care not just about form but also content in Spanish journalism.

I love everytimezone.com. It’s a great example of how information visualisation and interactivity can solve a very complex problem. Check it out:

You may say “c’mon, that was solved a long tome ago” but common tools only give you the time difference. From that you can guess if it’s morning, afternoon, night… But you often feel confused wheter it’s “today or tomorrow or yesterday”. That’s exactly what everytimexone.com fixes.

I’m sure it would make a very popular iPad/iPhone app.

Vostok’s senior designer, Mark MacKay, was one of the four professionals involved in developing Misparadas.com, a simple but efficient web app to get around Madrid by bus. The app was submitted to the 48-hour hackathon AbreDatos. We’ve asked Mark to tell us a bit more about how it works here:

Misparadas.com was developed by  Sam Lown, Fernando Blat, Christos Zisopoulos, and Mark MacKay for AbreDatos.

This is an amazing and rather critic infography about Japan made by Kenichi Tanaka. Even though everything said is true, we still love Japan. Here’s the vid:

(via Miguel Sabel’s blog)

This one is too good to let it go uncommented:

Seen at the always entertaining I love charts.

This one made me laugh.

(We love I Love Charts)

Jamie Bolton artwork and movie posters

FFFFOUND! | Solar Eclipse on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

Designing Design – Kenya Hara — The Designer’s Review of Books

A few quotes on design by our admired Massimo Vignelli:

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):