It’s a first edition of Design This Day by Walter Dorwin Teague, one of the first industrial designers and founder of a design firm that’s still out there after 80 years keeping a no-nonsense approach focused on creating quality products.

the concept is to reuse your furniture…we see recycling as a defeat

Modularity and no-aesthetics as design is my big obsession when designing interactive products (mostly websites). It’s not about designing a good website, it’s about designing a system of elements that can be arranged in certain ways and that can fulfill the company needs over time and for different reasons. If done well, when there is a need for some module that’s not designed, its shape, look and behavior comes out of intuition, it’s evident. My goal is to leave something in the hands of my client that will be there in 4 years, probably rearranged, perhaps with more pieces but within the same system.

When I fist read the Ten Principles for Good Design (that was back in 2004) I was shocked. It was like a revelation that made reconsider all I knew about information architecture and HCI. Here are the ones that hit me harder:

4. Good Design helps a product be understood
6. Good Design is honest
7. Good Design is durable
10. Good Design is as little design as possible

In Dieter Rams’ words: less but better.

I’d sell my soul to Lucifer to be on that team.

In some of my recent talks I’ve mentioned the story behind USA Today. I think it’s one of the best examples to learn about information consumption and adaptation.

USA Today launched almost 30 years ago built on a premise: that most Americans didn’t read, that they mostly got news from television (color television) and that they spent a lot of time in front of the tube.

Al Neuharth, USA Today’s founder, understood the new context and decided to design a newspaper from scratch, one based on these premises where:

• there was color all over (for pictures, for sections) just like on TV
• photos drove the stories and not the opposite
• articles were short
• news didn’t need a follow-up, there was no incremental coverage

This was the result, the fresh design of the USA Today in 1982:

And here is what the New York Times looked like in the early 80′s (see how big the change was?):

In short, USA Today wasn’t targeted to newspaper readers but to TV watchers. The critics called it the McPaper, the junk news, the fast food of information. But despite that they ended up being the most read paper in the USA. They understood their new readers and the new context. They won.

And that is why most old newspapers redesign for the internet or for the ipad and they fail miserably. Why? They don’t pay attention to new users and their new contexts of use.

There is something subduing in the creation of structures we humans inhabit or use in any way, something about those structures condioning our moves and behaviors. Architecture and (even more) urbanism have that powerful quality.

Architects project their structures to influence in the way we feel and behave. They manage flows of people, they regulate our exposition to daylight to condition our feelings or they make us feel free and empowered through space and height. They make structures that manipulate us.

Architecture and urbanism could be the use of power though means of space. That could explain why politicians have always flirted with architecture, and dictators love to have scale models of their dreamt cities.

Designers instead, have never been that interesting for the powerful (with some interesting exceptions). Their work is usually not that influencing. Designers make things that tend to be smaller than humans. Their structures may condition but don’t force us to do anything. It’s not the space which conditions the individual but the individual who manipulates the object.

Their original post is here.

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.

Mine is a personal interpretation of what that fourth column should be, if there should be a fourth column. I encourage you to make your interpretation too, filling the blanks with what you consider more appropiate. I’m sure there will be some common points.

Here is the original Schematic Chart of Ideological and Design Changes from the 60s to the 80s by Vignelli:

And here’s my interpretation. It’s a Fireworks PNG file for your editing convenience:

Now come and do yours, or at least help me out with rows 1 and 3.

• 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?

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.

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino on innovation hubs (and coffee)

The third documentary in this trilogy is about the design of cities. Urbanized looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design, featuring some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers.

(via I Love Charts)

Paul Giambarba

(via Minimal)

He decidido volver a enseñar diseño de interacción.

Quiero volver a formar gente como creo que hay que hacerlo: sin prisas, enseñando con ejemplos, hablando, debatiendo y trabajando. Creo en la honestidad absoluta de enseñar ejemplos buenos y también errores, de hablar de lo que no funciona y de lo que sí, y también de invitar a gente mejor que uno mismo para que comparta sus formas de hacer. Quiero que mis alumnos practiquen, discutan, lean, salgan a la calle y observen para luego volver a practicar.

He estado dos años sin enseñar. No me sentía con ganas porque dudaba de muchas de las cosas que había enseñado antes. Tras dos años de trabajar muy duro he desterrado alguna creencia y he reforzado unas cuantas certezas. Primero pensé en organizar un curso de dos días, algo intensivo. Lo descarté porque realmente no sería capaz de transmitir todo lo que quiero transmitir. Si hay que enseñar diseño, hagámoslo bien.

En noviembre volveré a reunir a un grupo de 6 u 8 personas jóvenes que quieran crecer como diseñadores de interacción y que estén dispuestos a venir al estudio todas las tardes de los viernes durante 5 meses. Les enseñaré lo que sé, les haré trabajar duro y les trataré como si fueran mi proyecto más importante.

Empezaremos en noviembre. Dentro de poco tendré una web con todos los detalles: fechas, temario, precio, plazas) y podré empezar a seleccionar a los alumnos. Mientras tanto, si te interesa escríbeme a javier@vostok.es.

SUMMARY IN ENGLISH: I’m back to teaching interaction design. Starting this November I’ll repeat the Programa Vostok course I taught twice some years ago. It will be a 5 month course with classes every friday afternoon in Madrid. Classes will be in Spanish. Contact me if interested: javier@vostok.es

A few things that were important for us and wanted to abide by:

• It had to be handmade. We wanted good quality. Done with great care and attention. And the right tailor for that was jositajosi.
• It had to be pretty but practical. And what’s the iPad’s biggest hassle? Fingerprints. So choosing the right material was important. Solution: corduroy is perfect to clean glass. Slightly rugged but very gentle.
• The interior had to offer extra cushioning for ultimate protection and had to contrast with the outer cover (navy blue). Solution: a thin but resistant cushioning in Vostok blue.
• It should offer free-standing support. The sleeve is perfect to rest the iPad horizontally on top of it, the corduroy counterbalances the roundness of the base and keeps it steady.

It’s 35€ and can be shipped to anywhere in the world. Have a look:

You can buy it at vostok.es/ipadsleeve

In short:

• new design
• improved legibility
• ability to read posts offline
• fixed theme but customizable backgrounds

So, to commemorate such a grandiose day here is our favorite canadian hymn ‘Canadian, please’ by Gunnarolla. To celebrate, people have been remixing the original video.

It left me thinking about Planetaki and its iPad version, whether it should have a sidebar or not.

(original at Homeowners Insurance)

Hi Everybody,

I just wanted to say thanks for sending a t-shirt all the way to Alaska! You have a great portfolio. Keep rockin’ the minimalism.

Mikaela

No, thank you Mikaela!

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:

We hope you’ve all made good use of those Filmin codes and that you’ve liked the experience.

Here’s the announcement in video. Enjoy (especially after 32s).

Thank you Alicia :)

• Russian
• Hindi
• Dutch
• Arabic
• Greek
• Turkish
• Korean
• Polish
• Slovenian
• Bulgarian

Planetaki’s a small startup with little funds so we can’t pay you for your job, but we’ll give you a cool gift and you’ll have your name on the credits :) If you’re interested give us a shout hello@vostok.es

So far, the lanaguages available are:

• Spanish
• English
• French
• Italian
• Galician
• Romanian

And the ones that are in process, and you’ll be able to use soon, are:

• Chinese (Mandarin)
• German
• Portuguese
• Euskera
• Catalan

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.

Before starting my ‘mission’ here at Vostok, I had a bit of experience with the C language, and felt comfortable with Python, Java and PHP. So naturally, it was time for something new. I had no contact whatsoever with Mac development, and took the opportunity to dive into it.

I recently bought an iPod Touch, so that at least the iOS and its user interface wouldn’t be completely new to me. Now it was time to go behind the scenes of shiny buttons and polished layouts: I started to build the iPad Application for Planetaki.com from scratch. Here are some of the obstacles I encountered.

Problems and solutions

• While the web version of Planetaki is rendered by browsers, we wanted to build a native interface. This means that some things you take for granted when web designing simply don’t exist on the iPad. Where you just scroll down in your browser window to read the content of your planet, I created a table view with customized cells for each blog post. Since there is no automatic rendering of flowing text (we can’t know the height of a post beforehand), a few tricks were necessary: The HTML content of a post is injected into a web view, and those objects are capable of determining their height with Javascript. This allows us to dynamically redraw the scrollable list of posts with correct proportions.
• Before testing on the actual device, we weren’t sure if the planet screen with its many web view objects would render fast enough. Luckily, it did. As soon as the loading of images in posts will be implemented, which is notorious for being slow on the iDevices, we will see how good this solution really is – Fingers crossed.
• Multithreading was another new thing I had to dig into. The user interface can’t be blocked while new posts are being downloaded, so this needs to happen in the background. After messing with notification sending between threads, and thinking about smart ways to design all that, I read some really good advice: One usually doesn’t need as much concurrency going on, as one initially thinks.. So avoid the traps of thread programming wherever possible (Thanks, SQLite.org!). Using a NSOperation and keeping it small and simple was the way to go.
• Memory management is tricky if you have to do it manually. There’s no garbage collection with iOS, so the retaining and releasing of your objects has to be balanced. Occasionally, you have to make sure there are no memory leaks in your code, and if otherwise, get rid of them. It can be done and you get used to it, but it certainly adds to the overall complexity.

Resources

A few words about the resources i’m using:

The IRC-Channel #iphonedev on freenode.net turned out to be quite helpful. Don’t be scared by a rude tone and people throwing ‘RTFM’ around, there are actually some seasoned developers how can provide new insights and perspectives. Sometimes, just not being alone with a problem is enough drive to keep going and eventually crack it.

Programming books (Objective-C, Cocoa) didn’t really do it for me. They seem to cling to successive example apps which they develop throughout the chapters, making them more and more complex. What I was really looking for were minimal examples, solely focused on one problem at a time with any other clutter removed. It sounds simple, but there are way too few of those around. I’m the type of learner who seeks those example to compose my own solutions bit by bit, instead of reading up on something for hours first. You might call this the ‘Google Generation’, but this method is quite efficient for technical things.

What’s next

As the project keeps growing, also does the overhead of maintenance and administration (probably true for most complex system). The cogs and screws of the machine need to be readjusted constantly. I’m happy that at this point the basic infrastructure works, and all basic problems are solved. You can see a schematic overview of the units of Planetaki for iPad below. The light gray boxes are external libraries, and PlanetUpdater is the background process mentioned before.

Now we ‘just’ need to do visual fine tuning, complete the communication with the Planetaki API, do some testing, and prepare for submission to the App Store. Stay tuned!

Written by Timo Taglieber

These are some of the principles we’ve applied here:

• Place the alert as close as possible to the spot where the decision has to be made.
• Add visual feedback that something important is going on (the message flashes) so it is noticeable.
• Change the form (size, color and text) of the confirmation element to make sure the user notices the alert

Here’s the full scene:

If we knew that not noticing the cards was too frequent we’d consider haing another step in the process just for filling the cards. But we are unsure about that and there is no easy way for knowing this (no, usability tests don’t work for that because users pay extra attention when observed). So instead of redesigning the process making it more effective and painful we went with this “user interface hack”.

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.

Here’s video proof:

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

Enjoy it.

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?

As part of the rebuilding of Planetaki we’ve switched from MySQL databases to MongoDB. It is quite a big change and the results are already noticeable. You can feel the wond in your face when in front of your planet. It’s fast, very fast.

Sam wrote a post about how it’s all set up. The techie inside you will enjoy it. Here are a few excerpts:

Planetaki caches huge amounts of data from posts all over the internet resulting in very large rows. The result is that the traditional database caching and optimisation techniques just aren’t as effective, and Planetaki was getting progressively slower and harder to manage.

[...]

Planetaki now uses a hybrid solution for storing data. The complex feeds and their entries are stored in MongoDB, and user data is stored in a traditional Postgresql database. This allows us to split the system into two parts, on one side we have the feed “reaping”, and on the other the website which mainly accesses the tables of data.

Read the full article: Planetaki powered by MongoDB

MisParadas.com tells you, for any given bus stop, at what time the next bus will arrive. It was developed by  Sam Lown, Fernando Blat, Christos Zisopoulos, and Mark MacKay for AbreDatos.

PS: We have good news on that. Wait until tomorrow, would you?

(via Barbarian Blog)

The Financial Times is amongst those seriously preparing to switch off printing presses, parent group Pearson’s director of global content standards Madi Solomon told me during a panel at the E-Publishing Innovation Forum in London on Tuesday…

Solomon says the FT is committing to “less print” and says the FT sees a five-year trajectory for having exited print in substantial part. “They’re not saying that, by five years, they’ll completely stop it, but they do see that the sunset is going to be in about five years for them.”

Now, let’s try not to get all excited.

Until newspapers come up with a simple and efficient design for their websites we’re far from achieving what the print page did for over 400 years.

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:

iPad + Velcro from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

How much harm has eyetracking done to online newspaper design…