This is where the Vostok crew blogs
Articles clasified as "Product Design"
Go back to the homepageMost 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:
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 happens when you put more effort on marketing than on design:
This post by Amit Gupta pretty much says everything about the issue here:
A simple video with some of the Braun/Rams stuff that coincidentally arrived to my place on the same day.
I think of UCD (User-Centered Design) a little as I think of Christianism. The fact I’m an atheist today does not stop me from recognizing that some Christian values have shaped my worldview and my belief system in very positive ways.
Ariel Guersenzvaig, who knows me well and understands my take on user-centered design, refered me to Apple’s Secret? It Tells Us What We Should Love, an article that questions UCD as a tool for radical innovation. I’ve been moving from true believer in UCD to these positions over time and, although I think it’s easy to use Apple as an example, I consider this article by Roberto Verganti full of true statements:
User-centered innovation is perfect to drive incremental innovation, but hardly generates breakthroughs. In fact, it does not question existing needs, but rather reinforces them, thanks to its powerful methods.
Firms that create radical innovations make proposals. They put forward a vision. In doing that, of course, they take greater risks.
Thanks to this process these companies are serial radical innovators. Their non-user-centered proposals are not dreams without a foundation. Sometimes they fail. But when they work, people love them even more than products that have been developed by scrutinizing their needs.
User centered-design (observation, interviews, user testing, etc. ) is for those who want to improve something existing, not for those who want to create something new. Those need to understand human nature but don’t need to microscope every little behavior and take it as a starting point.
Today is Apple fanboy day. Go get one of these 101 Apple t-shirts, popcorn and a beer so you can fully enjoy the Keynote.
Kanya Hara, art director of Muji, explains Japanese design taking knives as an example:
Japanese cooks who have special skills prefer knives without any ergonomic shape. A flat handle is not seen as raw or poorly crafted. On the contrary, its perfect plainness is meant to say, “You can use me whichever way suits your skills.” The Japanese knife adapts to the cook’s skill (not to the cook’s thumb). This is, in a nutshell, Japanese simplicity.
The piece, translated by Oliver Reichenstein is also part of a larger article about Japanese aesthetics published at the NYTimes under the title Beauty and the Bento Box where also John Maeda, Nick Currie and Denis Dutton go through the subject.
Worth reading.
When I see these things I feel designing websites doesn’t make any sense at all anymore:
(thanks denegro)
I.D. will close. It was announced recently on a press note published on FC:
Since 1954, I.D. has served as one of America’s leading critical magazines covering the art, business, and culture of design. Today it is with regret that we announce its closure. The January/February issue of I.D. will be its last; subscribers to I.D. will receive Print magazine for the balance of their subscription.
Image ©Fast Company
I used to buy every number of it when I was a junior interaction designer. It was fascinating to see those amazing projects and prototypes where technology met real atoms. You couldn’t (and still can not) see that in Spain. I even dreamt of working for the companies mentioned there: Pentagram, IDEO, Teague… After some time I felt that the interaction side of it was weak and form + firm was somehow more important for the Magazine than real life projects and I quitted buying it.
I don’t buy design magazines any more. Well, somtimes I pick Metropolis at a press kiosk in some internationa airport (it’s hard to find in Spain) but I mostly read about design on the web. I feel kind of sad, though. It was part of my professional life for some time.
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.
We could go for hours on how well designed are paper towels but this is way more effective ;)
The funny thing is that this vid is a response to a ShamWow infomercial)
Nearness explores interacting without touching.
With RFID it’s proximity that matters and physical contact isn’t necessary.
(thanks mort)
