THE COSMONAUTS

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.

You know how long it takes to do simple? About ten times longer than fast and dirty.

Paul Giambarba

(via Minimal)

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

(original at Homeowners Insurance)

Hooray! We just got our copy of Designing Obama, a project that came out from Kickstarter in which we appear as Silver contributors, and it really is a great book. Here it is

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.

Today we had some spare time to do an iPad wallpaper feauturing our 3-window rocket. Here’s how it looks and the original file for you to use it:

… and the file (links to the one you have to use, 1024×1024 px.):

Enjoy it.

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?

These are @sebadog‘s notes on the presentation Javier and Mark did at the iPadMadCamp last Saturday. We think they’re great. Especially if you read the tiny letters on the bottom left hand margin  ;) You can see it High-Res here. Thanks for sharing this with us @sebadog. More to come soon…

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…

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:

• Placement of the controls: follow Apple’s lead or do what he finds it’s better (standarisation over effectivity).
• Placement of the action buttons (not where they fit but at the specific spot where you are when you may need them).
• Text margins and line readability.
• Single column vs. multicolumn layouts.
• Color and brightness for legibility (pure black on pure white on a screen is an aberration, don’t get fooled).
• Pagination tap zones (and differences between iPhone and iPad).
• Tipographies.

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.

Many of you may already know BeBanjo, the multi-talented Madrid start-up that develops software for TV and VOD operators. They recently released Movida, a web-based software that untangles the mess for international and multiplatform rights management.

To make good use of Movida’s release, we helped BeBanjo in the redesign of their website and their branding. Our goal was to help explain their products better, and to create a simple yet handsome and extensible visual system to represent them.

We started off by exploring a western theme, lots of things fitted in without being overtly obvious: BeBanjo’s name, Spain’s history of spaguetti western cinema, and the folksy personalities of the team (in a good way!).

We presented a couple of options with a western theme (boots, cacti, banjos, etc) and they fell in love with the simple shapes of this hat:

So I made a family of hats made out of lines. However, when you use a dark background and clear lines they seem more complex than needed. So we added a simple rule:

In the end we decided on keeping the logos black & white, that way we can throw almost any color or texture and it still look goods (not that we would do it!).

Head over to BeBanjo.com to check out their brand new website and identity. I’ll talk about the website later!

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: