The Cosmonauts

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.

Chances of surviving a plane crash according to statistics:

Plane chrash on Hudson river:

What would you chose?

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)

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

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.

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.

Vostok está buscando una persona con perfil técnico, media jornada o prácticas profesionales, para trabajar presencialmente en Madrid. Buscamos gente con potencial, con miras formar a parte del equipo más adelante.

Necesitamos a alguien con conocimientos prácticos sobre desarrollo web (html, css, ssh, xml, ftp y demás acrónimos), y algunos conocimientos de programación (javascript y php o rails). Preferimos candidatos con nociones de diseño, pero si eres muy bueno en la parte técnica y estás dispuesto a aprender, también nos gustaría saber de ti.

Somos un equipo pequeñito, por lo que importa la química personal. Te adelantamos que nos gustan las personas que le prestan atención al detalle, con una amplia gama de intereses y con mucha pasión por su disciplina.

Es imprescindible presentar un portafolio, sin importar si los proyectos son profesionales, personales o académicos. Si está montado en una web recibes puntos extras. Envía el enlace o PDF con una carta de presentación a hello@vostok.es.

I found this pretty illustrative. Too bad I don’t know its author (source here).

UPDATE: Here is the author info (thanks Ale).

This picture I took yesterday at a magazine in Barcelona symbolizes all the pain and suffering Windows users have to cope with…

A few months ago I wrote an article expressing my displeasure with American Airlines‘ hideous online presence. I also spent some time mocking up a redesigned version of their website. To my surprise, a user experience designer at AA.com emailed me an amazing response describing some of the design problems faced in large corporations. You should read my original article here and the response from Mr. X here.

An hour after I posted the response, American Airlines fired Mr. X.

Dustin Curtis at The Incompetence of American Airlines & the Fate of Mr. X

(Thanks Bastian)

Juan Leal is on a travel trip in Helsinki. He is using his blog to document his observations and meetings with interesting people in the interaction design field. That is what he calls Helsingfors Series, definitely worth reading.

Today we played around with Google Insights. We started out by searching ‘sex‘ (of course) and discover that Vietnam and Eritrea are the countries most obsessed about it. ‘Free sex’ is the most sex-related search, and here we stopped our investigation.

We went on searching for terms that make a real impact in our personal lives: zombies vs vampires, unicycle vs spacecraft, palin vs obama, etc. We wrapped it up with a name search, and finally… Maria wins! (thanks to Brazil, wtf).

We end up searching war vs love, and we find out our next project, Okamore, will be successful :)

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.

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):

Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.

Derek Powazek at Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists

This article is so clear, so well explained and so aligned with us that I am seriously thinking of translating it into Spanish.

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)

We congratulate Mark MacKay for acquiring his first Canadian passport. O Canada, Mark’s home and native land, with glowing hearts he sees thee rise, he stands on guard for thee…

And now DANCE with us!!