The Cosmonauts

A simple wallpaper image with our three window rocket:

Downolad the one that better fits your computer:

· Vostok Wallpaper 1280 x 800 (.png file)

· Vostok Wallpaper 2560 x 1600 (.png file)

Jamie Bolton artwork and movie posters

FFFFOUND! | Hello Mark - Alex Cornell

FFFFOUND! | Solar Eclipse on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

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.

This is how movies are made nowadays.
ALERT: not suitable for those who want to keep believing.

Spanish online newspapers seem to be clueless when it comes to designing their homepages. Their strategy seems to be “put everything on the homepage, no matter how”. No order, no sequence, no freakin’ idea about reading patterns. I’m not making this up, check these screenshots, they speak for themselves:

The images correspond to El País, El Mundo and ABC.

These structures bleed consensus and politics from every pixel. I’ve been in a couple of these projects and I understand the politics behind a newspaper redesign. All the “we cannot harm our current readers” and “we need to find a spot for this and that” only leads to having the same again and again.

And the constant increase of screen resolution is not helping but increasing the damage. Remember when most newspapers went from 800×600 to 1024? Instead of using those extra pixels to make everything bigger and give some white space they came up with an extra column for junk.

Much has been said about how to renew online journalism. If they just started by questioning these obsolete structures… Jeez… I am so looking for the day when a big exec has the guts to get rid of commitees, consensus and departmental presence to make something different, some design where you see a strategy, a point, a purpose.

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.

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:

Google Maps 19th century (via GMM):

Vintage Google search:

This video just sums up to my obsession about form, figure and background in interterface design. Check it out, it’s plain amazing:

(via Ilustrae)

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.

Mark Coleran just commented on our recent post about designing interfaces for sci-fi movies giving very interesting insight:

In the movie business, screens and interactive elements have a very low priority in the grand scheme of things (with a few notable exceptions).To really sum it up, there are just three considerations.

The first is to do somethign that sits with the look and feel of the environment and set. The nature of the film always dictates. If it is in the future, then the desire is generally to have a different way of interacting or displaying things, than is currently the norm. It is a small way of differentiating the interfaces. The reality is that these systems might already exists, but are not widely used or known about outside of labs or specialist groups.

The second is the worst part. Prior art. Some of the people involved, directors, production designers, producers, bring with them their own biases, pre-conceptions and pragmatism that can result in less than satisfactory interfaces in the films and content on those interfaces. It is not uncommon to hear people day “I want it like it was in that movie” whether a good example or not. People try to play safe at times and it is not always easy to overcome.

The third and most important part is that the interfaces are there for only two things. Set dressing and story. Irrespective of design and plausability, if they tell the story they are deemed a success by those commisioning. CSI might seem implausable in action and stylistically but they do one thing and one thing well. Tell you what happened or what they have found. This can lead overall to interfaces and systems seemingly doing some very unrealistic things, but in the end the story is all that matters.

Mark Coleran

I am not sure wether this is art, architecture or both (artchitecture?). I just found it amazing and provoking at many levels.

“How it would be, if a house was dreaming”

The conception of this project consistently derives from its underlying architecture - the theoretic conception and visual pattern of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. The Basic idea of narration was to dissolve and break through the strict architecture of O. M. Ungers “Galerie der Gegenwart”. Resultant permeabilty of the solid facade uncovers different interpretations of conception, geometry and aesthetics expressed through graphics and movement. A situation of reflexivity evolves - describing the constitution and spacious perception of this location by means of the building itself.

It was designed by Daniel Rossa - rossarossa.de and produced by urbanscreen.com.

(thanks, Sergio)

Have you ever wondered who designs those cool (and sometimes impossible) user interfaces that appear in sci-fi movies. Well, it’s companies like OOOii.

They designed the exhausting multi-touch interface for Minority Report and more recently the intensive data panels at the last Star Trek movie. There is a very interesting interview to the guys in charge at the Flash Blog (Adobe). Yes, they do almost everything in Flash :)

I wonder how the specs are decided:

• realistic vs. futuristic
• intuitive vs. cryptic (hacker-style command line)
• resemble something existing vs. completely innovative
• real data (from the movie) vs. fake content (and data in small type so nobody can read it)
• user executes commands vs. user dialogues with an artificial entity (HAL)
• …

How many movies do you recall where interesting user interfaces appear? Would you help me make a list (and then make a collaborative post out of it)? Ok, here I go with the first that come to my mind:

• Minority Report (multitouch)
• Red Planet (augmented reality devices)
• Star Trek (intensive data displays)
• 2001 (HAL, natural language interaction)

More?

Approach A

A lot of designers want to increase the line height or padding in order to make the interface “breathe.” We deliberately don’t do that. We want to squeeze in as much information as possible above the fold. We recognize that information density is part of what makes the experience great and efficient. Our goal is to get users in and out really quickly. All our design decisions are based on that strategy.

Irene Au, User Interface Director at Google

Approach B

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions.

Douglas Bowman, Former Head of Visual Design at Google

Which one would you take?

(thanks, Missha)

This collection of all the Apple.com hompages is an amazing lesson on how to use color, space, type, photography and -what’s even more important- how to focus on what matters when designing a website. Worth spending an hour on it:

Via Clarisita’s I ended up on this great compilation of original business cards. This one made me laugh hard:

Check out the great work by Joan Pons Moll, a graphic designer from Menorca. Some of his logos are just brilliant:

I’ve spent most of my time to study the basic shapes, this in order to focus on those meaningful details which give meaning to those qualities we live our daily lives with and —somehow— help define ourselves too.

The Context of Form is a short (therefore very good) essay by De Gregorio on how form can be function. Please, read it.

I found Juan Leal’s post about Verplank’s definition on Interaction Desing very interesting, although I am no fan of definitions and compartimentations. I’ll jump to the train, however.

My favorite definition/description/whatever goes like this:

Information Architecture: how it’s structured
Interaction Design: how it behaves
Information Design/Visual Design: how it looks

These definitions are not mine and I cannot recall who wrote them first. I’d appreciate any feedback on it. I am also aware that the boudaries between concepts are not clear at all, especially between the last two. They tend to overlap a lot.