Have you seen the internet lately? There’s high quality content all over the place — most of it in good old letters, supported by carefully selected images. But setting up those publications is hard: it takes time, expertise and care to make them great. Let’s talk about some timeless paradigms for online publishing that go beyond just setting up a scraggy blog.
While some have predicted the end of the web as we know it — and with it high quality publishing —, last time I checked it was still here. Offline services like Pocket or Wallabag, combined with high-resolution displays and tablets, made longform reading of web articles very accessible. Platforms like Medium, The New York Times Magazine, Wait But Why, and a dozen others propel digital, sophisticated longform content to the masses.
Classic newspaper articles serve shorter pieces of information. Books are on the other end of the spectrum. Websites continue to fill all the spaces in-between. And why shouldn’t they? There’s infinite space in the digital landscape and diverse audiences can be found all around the world.
With a rising demand for quality, both for the content itself and its presentation, Opoloo has worked on plenty of publication systems lately. While this process continues, we want to share some learnings and insights apart from the general blog setup tutorials. If you’re serious about publishing content on the web, consider some of these web publishing paradigms.
Writing long articles means lining up plenty of thoughts and ideas, and putting them in a comprehensible order. Pieces of that information are obvious to you, but might be completely unknown to your audience. Leaving out such crucial data could quickly turn an enjoyable read into a Wikipedia scavenger hunt.
Working with a second pair of eyes and opinion helps to fill these logical gaps. Someone who’s not familiar with your topic or approaches it from another angle is often the perfect editor for your content. Not only can she point out leaps and gaps in your narrative, she’ll also improve accessibility through simplicity and clarity. Everything is better with an editor.
You need to factor in extra time between wrapping up an article and publishing it. Plan with this additional resource — your readers will be thankful for a more fluid experience.
This is the internet, kids — your words won’t stay in one place for long.
While most writers create articles for their particular blog, magazine or outlet, that content will work its way through time, space and plenty of screens. Quickly, your perfectly arranged, big-screen-optimized texts will make their way through an RSS feed to an aggregator and end up saved in Pocket to be read on someone’s watch.
However your story is composed, make sure that it can stand the test of distribution and sharing. Don’t rely on complex systems to convey an idea, but make sure that text and images get the point across. Even if your platform supports unique features, animations or JavaScript niceness — your reader must be able to follow your river of thoughts without this fancy stuff, somewhere else besides your website.
We get it: most content on the internet is free and nobody will pay for it except scraggy advertisers. While this a far cry from what’s possible in 2015, many have thus built platforms around ad-banners where the story is broken apart and only seems to serve as a filler. There’s no real value in that — neither for the user nor the advertiser.
The same is true for company blogs that waste a visitor’s valuable time by explaining how great the company is. Understandably, they want to sell, but who wants to read self-adulation over and over?
Show, don’t tell.
Give examples, show your work, point out specific take-aways. We read because we want to learn. We read because we want to understand the finer details and the big picture. We read to make meaning. So that’s what we need to write for: an interested audience that gets a benefit out of your writing. This benefit might quickly turn into a business opportunity after all.
Highlighting the importance and value of typography seems tedious until you experience a poorly executed reading experience.
With plenty of free quality fonts out there, one can easily fall for fancy headline styles and unique letter details that make every peacock feel dull. But when styling copy for the purpose of reading, the fonts need to get out of the way. This does not mean that your font of choice can’t carry specific character that fits the brand — it means that clear and fluid reading comes first.
Picking the perfect blend of fonts is a science in its own right. Some of the things to look out for are
Against popular opinion, serif fonts don’t necessarily perform better at longform reading. Choosing between them rather depends on the character and style of your publication.
Typography is an art, brought to perfection over centuries. If the old masters created curly quotes and em-dashes, they probably knew what they were doing. Using them shows you care about what you release into the world.
Most quality fonts support characters beyond what’s obvious from your keyboard for a reason. They improve the reading experience. Here’s an example:
Barthes writes: "Ultimately - or at the limit - in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,' Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We "photograph" things in order to drive them out of our minds.'"
Compare this to:
Barthes writes: “Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. ‘The necessary condition for an image is sight,’ Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: ‘We “photograph” things in order to drive them out of our minds.’”
Be honest — the latter is not only aesthetically more pleasing, but by simply using the proper characters for quotes and dashes, the whole construct becomes much simpler to scan and process. While this attention to detail is often dismissed as a type-fetish, it makes all the difference between a nagging blog and a quality magazine. That’s how typography do.
Creating long copy is one thing — showing it to your audience is another. In a world where everybody uses a different device to read, this can become a science of its own. Instead of diving too deeply into this field, we want to offer a simple checklist — rules of thumb that will improve every reading experience:
Here, bigger is better. If the fonts are too small, you have a hard time reading at all. If they are too big, you only read more slowly. A solid body-text size should be between 16–20 pixels, depending on the font-family.
A large monitor sits roughly 40cm away from your eyes; a smartphone is much closer to your coffee-widened, googly peepers. Make sure to reflect those distances in your font-size
and media-queries
. Ultimately, there’s no way around real-live testing.
Probably being the most underrated metric, line-height makes all the difference. 140–170% feels like a good benchmark for body text. Headlines, though, work better with 120–140% line-height, since they are perceived as dividing blocks of information.
Placing black text on a white background or vice versa tends to be hard on the eyes. Instead try to go with more subtle shades of gray, without losing the needed contrast — always to be tested with a small screen in direct sunlight.
Steadily, markdown is becoming the standard in the world of digital writing. It’s fast to pick up, flexible in use and scales very well for an abstraction language.
But make no mistake: as simple as it is to put words on a screen, as hard it is to get a perfect presentation of the final content. Depending on the markdown version used, writers have plenty of options to format individual copy. If there’s a semantic element that can be used, be certain that somebody will.
Too easily we forget to properly style the less frequently used headlines or we skip the second level of an ordered list. And how about image captions and attribution of authors to quotes that aren’t even covered by most markdown specifications?
Almost all semantic elements are there for a reason. When we create longform content, each element serves its purpose and will get used, eventually. The lesson here is to make sure that all of them get their deserved attention when styling the presentation, and to make sure that they all work in harmony.
Here’s a short list of often missed possibilities that will ruin a beautiful reading experience if not taken care of:
Some cheap, ad-overloaded, SEO-optimized stories aside, things get written to be read. You don’t want to spend those long evening hours on a piece just to see it paddle and drown in the stream of time, because everybody missed it.
Considering that every publication has its own audience, we need to keep in mind that they have their own expectations and rhythms. Understanding and tailoring to them is relevant for every magazine’s success.
If you want people to read your output, you need to work towards their schedule. A magazine for children publishes in the afternoon since kids go to school in the morning and might spend their weekends outside with friends. A tech article may get better traction in the afternoon hours (depending from where you publish), but not immediately before the weekend.
Reading needs dedicated time. The longer an article gets, the more time is needed for it to be consumed. Never release more content in succession than your audience can work through — if visiting your platform feels like stress, you’re doing something wrong.
Offering valuable content regularly is great, but it comes with expectations. If the publisher sets out to release two quality stories each week, she needs to make sure that this schedule can be kept over a period of time.
Spreading content and finding audiences has never been easier. Social networks are great multipliers for your content, and so are platforms like Medium or email newsletters. After all the internet is a network that was meant to spread ideas and connect them to people.
With that said, we encourage every publisher of content to keep a certain level of control over her writing. Social services and technologies change rapidly, and most act in their own interests first. If your handcrafted stories don’t favor their agenda anymore, you will be dropped or shut out.
Sure, setting up your own publishing platform takes time and work, but it will be worthwhile if you’re in it for the long run. Your content will be stored in your personal archive, safe and sound while you spread it across the web.
Understanding and building publication systems took us years, and we’re still learning. Writing this article had me sit down for approximately six hours with another one hour for proper editing — the graphics added another two.
With all that time and energy spend, one will quickly understand that publishing any kind of story is directly linked to the authors’ egos.
A good story carries an author’s personality, character and soul — the currencies of publishing. We pay back with admiration, respect and proper attribution.
Whatever kind of information gets published, especially when more than two creators are involved, needs to make room for the author’s name, links, image and description. Still, quality stories are written by humans, and this must be reflected by the underlying platform — it should always be about the content and its creators alike.
Our open source publishing platform LINES has evolved into a Ruby gem that you can plug into your Rails system. You may use it as the foundation for your blog or client work. It’s customizable and establishes a simple, comprehensive publishing process from writing to reading.
Now, you’ve got it good, because previously no Ruby on Rails blog engine of the sort existed, so we decided to build it ourselves. OK, to be honest, we made this for us just as much as for you, so we’ve all got it pretty good.
A clear focus of LINES is responsiveness. Writing is complex and publishing is too. But we believe both must be possible wherever you are. We wanted to be able to write and publish anywhere, on any device. So everything about the blogging platform is responsive, from the writing tool to your article dashboard to the presentation your readers see.
No more legacy code: we slashed the original code of earlier LINES versions down to a fraction. In fact, Jochen and Max wrote the whole platform new, from scratch. Legacy code, however well-documented, can quickly turn into a bloated, heavy whale, especially if it’s just the base you want to build upon in your customizations. Nobody wants to carry whale around.
As far as features go, we stuck to the tried and true (everything we already had in LINES 0.x), but revised, improved, optimized:
The sources and all the code is on GitHub.
Find the gem as a plugin on RubyGems. Head over to LINES to find out more.
The entirety of information architecture is hard to communicate to outsiders. Oliver Reichenstein’s unofficial axiomatic dictum that information is like cleaning your kitchen, has helped me give people an idea of what I spend my time with.
I owe this small but significant insight to one of the smartest people I wish I knew: Oliver Reichenstein. In a talk at Responsive Day Out Conference, he drops this line:
“Information architecture is horrible, depressing … it’s a little bit like cleaning your kitchen, where, you know, when you’re done, you’re actually feeling you’ve achieved something and you’ve not just made a lot of foul compromises.”
Maybe you’re different, but I have trouble explaining to people what I do sometimes, because information architecture in its entirety is terribly complex. Typical scenario: I’m at a party, sipping my Gin Tonic, and at some point in a conversation with a stranger it’s bound to come up.
“So, what do you do?”
Oh god, there it is. Staring hard into my gin, wishing I could just do a cannonball plunge into the glass and disappear, I take a deep breath and answer:
“I’m an information architect.”
“Ah.”
Awkward silence. (They are just on the verge of realizing they have no idea what that is.)
And here they go again: “So, what do you do?”
Then I either go explaining, obscurely, something about data and websites and software and structure, design, usability, mental models, user flows. Or I say:
“You’ve probably used Microsoft Word before, right?”
“Of course.”
“How was that for you? Easy enough? Did you enjoy it?”
“Uh …”
“See: that’s an example of terrible information architecture. I try to make things better than Word.”
And that solves nothing. I don’t want to be a nerdy bore, and I certainly don’t want to have a conversation about Microsoft Word at a party. (As a side note: I get the feeling Word isn’t as terrible as it used to be in the days of Clippy the Paperclip. But it still tries to do too many things at once.)
So I’ve resolved to saying something like this to describe what I do:
Imagine you want to surprise your new boyfriend / girlfriend with a nicely cooked meal. She’s not not home yet, so you go into the kitchen. There’s plates piling up in the sink on top of pans with missing handles. You find chili sauce in the icebox, right next to a couple of spoons sticking out of bananas, a trout’s head is dangling from the ceiling, there’s a solid 20 pound block of salt in a corner, eggs are scattered across the floor, there’s an olive oil dispenser screwed to the top of a cupboard. It has a picture of Hulk Hogan on it. The stove has weird unicorn buttons, its display blinking in rainbow sinus waves. You know it must be possible to cook a meal here somehow, but you haven’t the slightest clue how.
You really want to cook this meal, so what do you do? You probably feel like you should go get a bulldozer and tear down this behemoth of a mess to start anew. But chances are, you don’t know many bulldozer-drivers. So you get down to business: put the eggs in the fridge, toss the trout’s head, put the cutlery in its drawer, grind the salt and sort it with other spices on a shelf, and write down what you figured out about how the stove from outer space works. Now, not only you, but pretty much anyone coming into the kitchen is able to prepare a decent meal.
Cleaning up the kitchen is the prerequisite for being able to cook, because that was what you wanted to do in the first place. Just as information architecture is a prerequisite for achieving a goal related to anything displayed on a screen. So, to put it in a pedestrian way, what information architects do is cleaning up the most messed-up kitchens imaginable—a travail that might not sound as rewarding as it is.
For me, that explanation has worked so far. But I’d be curious about how you speak to other people about what you do, be it information architecture or anything else.
In 1933, during the last census in the Weimar Republic, all citizens were asked about their religious affiliation. This information was later used by the nazis to find and murder fellow Jewish citizens.
It should be the purpose of any state to give its citizens as much freedom as possible, while at the same time protecting them from harm. Freedom involves certain risks, so security means the loss of certain freedoms. In a democratic state, the concepts of freedom and security must therefore be balanced out against each other.
The term “surveillance state” describes a form of government that tracks and records locations, conversations, and connections between its citizens.
This manner of imposing control will eventually influence how people act, which imposes boundaries on privacy. Privacy is a basic human right, just as peace, food, and physical integrity are. That makes privacy a prerequisite for a functioning society.
A historic example of the surveillance state is the State Security Service (Stasi), the intelligence service of the GDR (German Democratic Republic). They used surveillance technology to intimidate and terrorize their own people, in order to suppress opposition against the government. Some of their methods were:
This set of methods, called “Zersetzung” (degradation), served the state of the GDR in manipulating its citizens and playing them off against each other. About one in ninety of all GDR citizens was either an employee or an informer of the Stasi. Communication technology in 1970 was essential for them: telephones were wiretapped, neighbors were double agents, members of the opposition were named and shamed in public media.
Even back in 1970, these techniques helped the state enforce its goals against its own population. Today, however, our governments have much more potent tools available:
All this means that any citizen can be tracked and wiretapped anywhere and anytime. States also do this with the argument of early prevention of crimes and fighting terrorism. Every person, however, is thus being treated as a potential criminal.
The crackerbarrel-logic of “I don’t have anything to hide, let them have my data” must be refuted once and for all: the danger for people is not what happens with their data right now, it is much rather what might be done with it in the future.
Critical voices can be—and are—identified and silenced very quickly. This means restricting the freedom of speech, which in turn directly subverts democracy.
“He who prefers security to freedom is a slave by all rights.”
—Aristotle
In the vein of September 11, 2001 and the destruction of the World Trade Center, the U.S. issued a series of laws that are closely related to the concept of the surveillance state: the Patriot Act.
This series of laws immediately restricted many rights of U.S. citizens and people entering the country: from that point on, the FBI was allowed to monitor anyone’s telephones and activities on the internet and to enter homes at will, all without the need of a warrant. Bank accounts and money transfers of all citizens were laid open to the FBI, and even the foreign intelligence service CIA is now being employed for internal affairs.
The measures entailed by the Patriot Act were introduced on an international scale and they violated various national laws, even in Europe. If at first it was assumed that these violations were only isolated incidents, the intelligence- and surveillance-affair unveiled by Edward Snowden in 2013 put an end to this assumption—individuals and corporate bodies all over the world, including politicians and managers, were being spied upon for years by U.S. secret services.
The NSA (National Security Agency) is the largest U.S. foreign intelligence service. The NSA is responsible for the evaluation of international electronic communication. This includes the surveillance of political allies and corporate espionage.
In June 2013, NSA spy Edward Snowden flees to Russia, after having made public the greatest surveillance scandal in history: PRISM.
“I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good.”
—Edward Snowden, 2013
Since 2005, PRISM collects and stores data and interactions of all internet users worldwide: e-mails, search requests, video conferences, and generally all data that is saved on the web—with the help of popular services of the great internet corporations: Microsoft (with Skype), Google (with YouTube), Facebook, Yahoo!, Apple, AOL, and more.
In 2009, INDECT, a research project by the European Union, was called into being. Participating countries are, among others, Poland, France, Bulgaria, the UK, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, and Germany.
The project’s goal is the automatic interconnection and analysis of surveillance data from CCTV-cameras, drones, internet forums, social networks, search engines, and smartphones. The software is supposed to detect “abnormal activity” at an early stage. Examples for such suspicious behavior are “sitting on the ground for too long” or “losing a piece of luggage”.
The INDECT program is receiving harsh international criticism for its foreseeable infringements of fundamental civic rights. German newspaper Die Zeit called the project the “the E.U.’s dream of the police state, in which concepts like the presumption of innocence or compelling evidence lose their meaning”.
What we have covered so far are only one part of the surveillance activities that are employed across the globe. Further examples are GCHQ, MI5 & MI6 in the UK; DDIS, GCSB & NZSIS in New Zealand; CDIS, CSEC & CSIS in Canada; or ASIS, ASD & DIO in Australia.
Together with the NSA, the CIA and the FBI in the U.S., these measures are called the “Five Eyes Alliance”, and the participating states unhesitantly spy on each other and share the data they aggregate. In doing so, they deliberately ignore individual state legislature.
In the end, the question remains in how far all these endeavors serve the security of citizens if they bypass human rights and democracy. In our information age, personal data are the most important good, and everyone should be anxious for them not to fall into the wrong hands.
What can an individual person do to work against the surveillance state? Here are some quick fixes and alternatives that can go a long way.
Be aware that all of your personal data are being collected constantly and can be combined at will, once you give them away. So, if something appears to you as important or worthy of protection, you should not put this information out on the web or spread it without your control. Watch your personal data and also whom you’re giving access to it.
Especially on the internet you can find and use alternative software that respects your privacy and data security.
As an alternative browser to Internet Explorer or Google Chrome, we recommend Firefox. It is open-source and managed by the non-commercial Mozilla Organization.
As an alternative to Google Search, you can use duckduckgo.com, because it does not store search requests and personal data.
Additionally, we suggest using ad blockers like AdBlock or Tor Browser, so third parties cannot track your internet activity.
Your smartphone constantly transmits your location and other data to various service providers, whether you want it to or not. You cannot prevent this altogether, but you can reduce it. To do so, simply turn off your mobile network connection and your location data (GPS) when you don’t need them. You could also just leave your phone at home every once in a while.
On the internet, everything can be recorded and evaluated. This is the prerequisite for an extensive surveillance. So you should refrain from using digital communication whenever possible. Hang out with people instead of chatting with them, or buy stuff in the store around the corner instead of on Amazon.
Most loyalty cards and sweepstakes don’t serve the purpose of giving you any value. Instead, they are used to track and analyze your shopping behavior, on the internet and in your convenience store. The data they aggregate, including your personal profiles, is then sold off to other companies. If you don’t want that, just don’t use those cards.
When you join services on the web or in the real world, never give them more information than needed. As soon as you stop using their service, cancel your subscription and delete your data. In this way, you keep better track of your data and reduce the danger of giving information into the wrong hands.
When you install an app on your smartphone, usually the permissions that the app wants are being displayed. Take heed that software doesn’t try to access your sensitive data, like your address book. If that’s the case, question the app’s actual value for you or look around for an alternative.
Many services, including your registration office, will ask you for permission of transferring your data to third parties. Disallow this as often as possible, because usually there’s nothing in it for you. On the contrary, this data might much rather be used to send you advertisements and the like.
This article is intended to further raise awareness of a topic that will eventually impact everyone. We wrote it especially for the people outside of the information industry, without a deeper understanding of the technologies and patterns. Please share it, translate it and distribute it freely, without the need of acknowledgement or credit.
We’ve been working with the people of the podcast app BeyondPod for years. They’re one of our favorite clients. When they decided to completely re-think their app and transfer it to the year 2015, we couldn’t wait to reassemble this Frankenstein’s monster and turn it into a real people person.
“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
What happens to the body of a man-made creature when you replace its head? Will the body live? How will it behave and what will it look like?
BeyondPod is a very popular podcasting application on Android. It’s been around for a long time, 2 million people use it worldwide. The small team running it is lead by Stefan “Dr Frankenstein” Kyntchev, who reached out to Opoloo almost two years ago, when we helped with some smaller UI optimizations and talked about the application and its ecosystem frequently.
Over the years, BeyondPod’s feature-set had been stitched together like limbs, eventually turning into a monster: it was becoming huge and ugly and had a hard time to reach new audiences. Eventually, we realized there would be no way around an extensive redesign — we had to cut off the monster’s head and replace it with a new one.
Many of the millions of BeyondPod users love their podcasts, and so they use the app every single day. We wanted it to connect to new audiences while keeping the existing user-base happy. Replacing some colour and styles would not have had the impact we were looking for. But cutting out features, on the other hand, would certainly cost us plenty of loyal and outspoken fans.
Unfortunately, there weren’t many case studies to start with. The Android ecosystem is still very young, and extensive redesigns like the one we were approaching are usually not well-documented. What were we to consider if we wanted to attract new users and keep the existing ones happy? We had homework to do.
“How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.”
—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Let’s start with podcasts. The technology became extremely popular with the rise of Apple’s iTunes — a whole industry was created around it. Now, with emerging streaming technologies like Spotify, the mindset has changed. A common use case was the primary action behind an episode: Classic podcast users expect the episode to be downloaded first, with enough control over storage space and band width. A user influenced by Spotify, however, expects a file to be played right off the cloud, with some buffering at best. Both use cases need to be reflected in a podcast player’s logic and interface alike. To handle those dual perspectives, classic information design introduces Personas — diverse, fictional characters, that are used to determine different approaches and expectations.
Honestly, we’re not the biggest supporters of Personas in UX-studies, but in the case of BeyondPod they helped us keep the focus and determine edge cases. We ended up creating John, the technology-savvy guy who cared for full control, and Jane, who enjoyed listening to random podcasts while driving.
The diverging mindsets of those two lead to another fundamental problem: the decentralized distribution of podcasts. Basically everybody can create, host and distribute a podcast feed. But that also means they can remove episodes at any time. So let’s imagine: a user has downloaded and saved an episode on her device. That episode then gets deleted from the webserver, making it unavailable for everybody else. How does this reflect on common practices like bookmarks and favourites?
The questions are not new, but we have found various answers for the, and building a solid understanding of the core mechanics is vital for being able to bridge the gap between the iTunes- and the Spotify-Generation.
With that goal, we turned to the user stories. Over the years, the BeyondPod team gathered quite a bit of feedback, so Stefan was able to create most of the stories himself, adding plenty of edge cases and special requests.
“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!”
—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
As one of the first podcast players in the Android space, BeyondPod had grown a very dedicated user-base over the years. These users strongly influenced the feature-set of the app, which eventually lead to a crowded and chaotic interface. New users had quite a hard time to navigate the plethora of possibilities, trying to make the most of the available options. Adding more and more organs to the creature over time made it a monster in complexity and appearance. Bringing clarity and accessibility back while keeping all the features became our paramount goal. We wanted the monster to be loved again.
Based on our previous research and the user-stories, we divided the application into two main building blocks: a library for all the available content and the player with its rich capabilities. From there we started to dive into explorative sketching and wireframing on paper and whiteboards.
We could hardly build on the old architecture if we wanted new users to be comfortable with BeyondPod. Early on we realized that we simply lacked the fundamental understanding of the nuances and workflows BeyondPod’s audience was used to. We also didn’t want to start a long and expensive back-and-forth process, discussing every wireframe in multiple revisions. As a solution, we started to create the core set of wireframes as a Google Drive presentation with the BeyondPod team: everybody worked on the layouts, use-cases, and notes in a single document in real-time. This helped tremendously to keep discussions brief and we were able to map the whole complex application in just a few of days.
This way of communication and collaboration lead to two concepts that became the core of the new BeyondPod: four directional swipes and action-cards. Due to the various use-cases, we needed certain groups of information to be accessible at all times: swipe from the top to refresh, swipe from the left for the feed structure, swipe from the bottom for the extended player, and swipe from the right for the playlist.
Action-cards, on the other hand, are simply an extension of Google’s card metaphor. They are used to structure the information of each episode while controlling individual actions and the overall application simultaneously.
So far we had a blueprint of how the new face could work — now we needed to puzzle the monster together and define what it would look like.
Comparing plenty of applications with rich media libraries and playback capabilities, we came to a simple conclusion: extensive information could better be displayed in a light environment, since subtle differentiation would help to scan the amount of data. Playing the content, however, works better in a dark theme, since it lets you focus on the pure information itself. For us, this meant light colours for the library and dark colours for the player.
From there a long phase of mockups started. We went from the player to the library, from the navigation to the playlist, always circling back to the information architecture, refining whenever possible.
While doing so, new concepts emerged: the “charms” — little clusters of information that extended the players capabilities, like playback speed or a sleep timer.
Every time we were satisfied with a particular area of the app, we quickly cut up all the graphic assets and handed them to Stefan and his team. They then built a rough visual prototype, while we moved forward with the next chunk of work. Every so often we took a step back, testing the interaction and gathering some first feedback, which then made it back into designing the new BeyondPod. The whole process was highly iterative and helped to keep time and budget manageable.
Eventually, we had a prototype that worked quite well on the visual and interactive side, further confirmed by the beta community. After all, we needed to see how it would handle real data. Finally: time to sever the monster’s old head and replace it with the new one.
“There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.”
—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
It ached and groaned and came to life for a brief moment. The physical body was working, but the thing was far away from being a beauty, still clunky and mechanic. We shut it down, and went back to work.
Contrary to other projects, we tried to keep the application’s branding, typography, colours and styles at a minimum, since we didn’t want personality and ego to get in the way of a clear information presentation.
With a working prototype in place, though, we needed to add character and quality to new BeyondPod, without getting in the way of the user experience and interaction principles. Up to this point, we had worked completely in black and white, so adding some vibrant colour seemed like a solid first step.
After some experimentation, we came up with a set of 11 unique colours. We sprinkled them into actionbars, special cards, categories and tour segments. Was this enough for a clean, yet characteristic experience? Almost. BeyondPod deserved a new logo.
From there we went into an exhausting polishing phase. With the old monster’s powerful body, its new re-wired head and a colourful soul, we tried to make sure that as many stitches as possible were covered before reanimation. This took many weeks of reviews, improving assets, testing devices and fixing bugs — and honestly, we’re still not done.
The creature lying on the barge was anything but a monster now. We hit the switch and saw electricity flow through its body. Sparks rained down as it slowly got up and started to move out of the laboratory. We certainly knew that not everybody would love what we created—the new BeyondPod seemed to have nothing in common with the old one. But we were proud of our work, knowing only too well that a time will come when we may have to remove its head again.
Like every application as popular as this, the redesign sparked very emotional reactions in the following weeks. A lot of bad reviews hit us on the Play Store: users were complaining about almost every detail, big or small.
“It took me two years to understand the app and now you changed everything.
Thanks. Uninstalled.”
—An unhappy user on the Play Store
This clearly showcased a major problem with the “buy once, update always” model. The old version kept growing, taking its fans along, but to new users the app was hardly accessible. Then again, the new interaction and design decisions attract a new user base that is willing to pay for the upgrade, while alienating some of the more seasoned users.
“I am seeing some strange behaviour after the update: everything just works! Also, I am not having trouble finding my stuff in the new UI. I don’t want to rush to a diagnosis but I suspect that is because the new UI is intuitive and looks awesome!
Really nice job, thanks a lot.”
—A happy user on the support forum
What makes development even harder is Google setting a crazy fast pace with the update cycles of Android OS and its fractured market. A small company like BeyondPod has a hard time to keep up. We were tempted more than once to try and keep everybody happy. But ultimately, this would have lead to our Frankenstein’s death, because he simply wouldn’t have been able to do that. We wanted to give the new Monster a real chance, even if that meant leaving something behind. As it turns out, BeyondPod’s monthly revenue more than doubled after the relaunch.
“...if I see but one smile on your lips when we meet, occasioned by this or any other exertion of mine, I shall need no other happiness.”
—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Our work on BeyondPod is not over yet. We’ll stick with the application, and keep improving it along with its website and Chromecast capabilities. Whether you’re new to podcasts or a seasoned advocate — download the app and give it a spin.
An investigation about metaphors as a concept in the digital space and beyond. Going from trope to technology to improve design system and experiences.
You and I, we’ve done something terrible. We’ve used certain words, although we only have a fairly vague idea of what they mean. Yet we use them, either because we want to sound smart or we feel that they’re appropriate in a certain context. Or because we actually think we know what we’re talking about.
That’s terrible, but most of the time it sort of works, because our vague ideas are often more or less similar. But you know it works only sort of, because boy are we glad we didn’t get found out by having to explain the word.
Have you used the word metaphor before? Because not only since Google’s introduction of Material Design the tech world is abuzz with it. Do you know what a metaphor is? Do you have a vague idea? That’s alright, we’ll be more confident in a few moments.
Really understanding the deep structure of a concept or a word helps articulate ideas more clearly. Let’s start with some ground work:
Metaphor: Middle English methaphor, from Greek metapherein “transference”, “to transfer”: meta- + pherein, “to carry”.
So, (taking etymology into account,) when you use a metaphor, you transfer and apply one concept to another. Here’s how that works:
The metaphor as a literary trope is basically a shortcut; a mental and a linguistic shortcut for expressing a comparison. But in taking the shortcut, it becomes more than a comparison. Let me elaborate: If we liken one thing to another, we call that a simile, for example “Your mouth is (red) as a rose”. The appropriate metaphor would be: “Your mouth is a rose.” The so-called verbum proprium (the actual word, in this case mouth) is charged with the characteristics of rose, the verbum improprium (i.e. deep red, velvety, redolent, etc.).
The verbum proprium (mouth) may also be left out and has to be deducted from the context, leaving us with “Your rose ...”. Consequently, as we saw above, the verbum proprium is not just replaced by the verbum improprium, but it becomes semantically charged, that is, enhanced with new content that is not originally in the word mouth itself. Likewise, if we say “the pearls of her mouth” and mean “her teeth”, they obtain that quality of hardness, shine, durability, value, and jewelry. However, a metaphor only works, if the reader can interpret it with moderate effort. Anyone will stare at you blankly if you say “the pearls of your rose”.
Metaphors help us express ideas and concepts that are hard or cumbersome to utter. Take the famous beginning of T.C. Boyle’s Drop City: “The morning was a fish in a net“. What he might want to refer to is brightness, glistening, sparkle. But this short sentence encompasses so much more, from freshness and purity to powerful death throes, violent displacement, captivity—you get the picture.
How does this help us understand a metaphor in the digital context? Clearly, a digital metaphor is different from a rhetorical or philosophical metaphor in that it does not exactly substitute one thing with another. Applying a high level of abstraction in a digital context also does not seem feasible—after all, we want to communicate as clearly and directly as possible in the digital space. And the semantic charging is, at best, very low. Why, then, do we talk about metaphors at all?
“A metaphor makes us see one thing as another by making some literal statement that inspires or prompts the insight.”
—Donald Davidson, What Metaphors Mean
Compare that with the introductory statement in Google’s Material Design Guidelines:
“A material metaphor is the unifying theory of a rationalized space and a system of motion. The material is grounded in tactile reality, inspired by the study of paper and ink, yet technologically advanced and open to imagination and magic.”
In the digital space, visual cues help us interact with metaphors. So, if we see black letters on a white background, we probably cannot modify them. Something that has a shadow to create the illusion of depth, however, can probably be modified and interacted with. Still, both can be metaphors: the first may be the ink on paper of an ebook, the second may be the bin you use to delete files.
Here we can bridge the gap between the rhetorical and functional. The common denominator is the shortcut: We see or hear something and we instantly know what it means and how it works. We know that because we know how the natural world functions, we have experienced the touch and scent of a rose and we have written on paper, stacked it or moved it out of the way. When we move in a non-natural space (language or user interface), the metaphor allows us to transfer our knowledge of the natural into that space. We don’t need to be told about the qualities of a rose or of paper, so we can show rather than tell and still make meaning. That is the shortcut that makes for such efficient communication.
So in language, as in design, we usually use metaphors where more concrete concepts fall short. When we draw a picture of something, we are able to remember and relate to it much more easily. That’s why our brain is always in metaphor-mode.
We make an as-if construction and pretend the world is not as it is. In doing so, we obtain new perspectives and are able to see analogies between objects. As Raoul Schrott says, “the metaphor creates its own universe, in which categorial gravity and semantic force of attraction take on different levels and directions. It is a form of optical illusion—one that, paradoxically, makes us see the real world more clearly.”
Metaphors work best if they are consistent and form an integral part of a design system. They begin at one end of the digital experience and move you swiftly through, all the way to the other end: your desired goal. The greatest danger that threatens to make your metaphor worthless is mixing it with other metaphors that don’t share similar qualities (like using paper and ink with one element and crab cake with another).
Ultimately, metaphors can help you add a system of cohesion and coherence to your design. Ideally, that system is glued together by the metaphor and just falls into place. That’s why we always hear that simple design is so hard: we have to find a concept that is consistent and clear—which incidentally is the opposite of “fairly vague”. It’s something we can confidently talk about. It doesn’t make people think, it makes them know.
The most peculiar thing about technology is not that it’s neither good nor bad, but that it’s an amplifier for each. We built the first tools to help us harvest our food—or we built them to slay our neighbor and steal it from him. Using technology for the good or the bad makes us human.
The most peculiar thing about technology is not that it’s neither good nor bad, but that it’s an amplifier for each. We built the first tools to help us harvest our food—or we built them to slay our neighbor and steal it from him. Using technology for the good or the bad makes us human.
In our day, bragging and arguing about our technological advancement is easy. What devices are you using? Should I get a new gadget since I’ve already had this one for 6 months? How fast is this processor, how high that screen’s resolution? Should I get my notifications on my smartphone or my watch? Or maybe on both at the same time? So convenient, but who is winning the wearable war? Does your TV support 3D even though you hate wearing glasses at home? Don’t you hate how that app drains all the battery?
We love to talk about these things. We love to talk about them, because they don’t matter. Five years from now, nobody will care if I chose iOS or Android, or how old my phone was. Nobody will care about its speed or resolution. Absolutely nobody will care about the plethora of gadgets now covering my body, stealing my time and attention. They don’t matter.
Talking about the things that matter is so much harder. Because these things won’t be irrelevant in five years. If we don’t talk about them now, they will spread and become bigger—possibly expand to a level that will have an impact on us all. For the worse, that’s for sure.
Wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria and Iraq. Police oppression in Ferguson. 50% unemployed youth in Spain. Mass surveillance, the NSA, PRISM, INDECT, or the Five-Eyes-Alliance.
We, the people behind technology, need to talk about these things, because we create them. We create the apps to rate the best-looking food and those that help bring fresh water to people who are starving. We build the systems that distribute information or keep people away from it. We set up the data-centers that threaten the privacy of individuals. We write the software that guides missiles into homes and hospitals.
We need to talk about these things, because we need to have an opinion. There’s nothing worse than having no opinion about the things that will impact our future and that of our children. Without a solid understanding, we can’t form those opinions, and neither can we act accordingly.
We need to talk about those things in public, because this is the only way we can work out a global consensus. And a global community we are, the people behind technology.
I am afraid to talk about these things. It’s not easy.
I could be wrong. I could offend others. I could be criticized on behalf of my opinions. But I need to talk about these things, because I need to understand them and how they will influence my life and the lives of everybody else. I need to talk to help build that global consensus and act upon it. But before I act, I need to decide.
I can decide if my app needs to access a user’s contacts. I can decide if I leave that backdoor open for third parties. I can decide if I set up this database to collect questionable meta-data. I can decide if my software compares faces and tracks their locations. I can decide if I help build the guiding system that kills people.
I can decide if my work and knowledge are used for good or bad things. And so can you, people behind technology.
All good things don’t come to an end—some just continue in a different form. We’ve decided to make our popular Android Developer Icons an open source project. You may now download the set for free and do with it whatever you like, including the icon font.
Thanks for stumbling across those 20 free icons in 2009. You seem to be an early adopter of that new thing called Android. Brave one.
Thanks for enjoying those loony monster icons. Also, did you notice that androidicons has grown to 30 glyphs?
Thanks to you, early client, for trusting us with custom work in late 2010. Android now supports three sizes for icon graphics and so does our little set—grown to 50 icons, still free.
Thanks for supporting us by buying the Developer Icon Set for $45 in early 2011. Sure, this isn’t cheap, but you’re getting everything in five colors, with sources. Hang in there, we’ll expand it to 125 icon and add more colors until late 2012.
Thanks for making the rebooted androidicons.com such a success. Now 200 icons in 4 sizes are available in 14 colors, for just $25, and you seem to love it. We’re having a hard time keeping up with custom icons and interface designs. See how Android has grown up over night?
Thanks for being patient. Updating the set with 50 additional icons and the new xxhdpi-size in October 2013 takes a lot of time. Google has put a lot of pressure on sensible design lately and we don’t want to fall behind.
Thanks for still being a fan of the icons. We’re heavily involved in some big Android projects throughout 2014, hardly finding the time to update the set properly. But you might enjoy its new icon font which works quite nicely on the web.
Thanks for motivating us to update the Android Developer Icons to the new Material Design guidelines. We’d love to, but Google offers its own extensive set now. It’s free and can be colored easily. Our set has become obsolete. We will shut it down soon.
Thanks for the journey and your constant support. All things come to an end, and in the digital space this means either pulling the plug or open sourcing. It’s December 2014 and we’ve decided for the latter.
After 5 amazing years, we’ve decided to make the Android Developer Iconset an open source project. Download it for free on Github: use it, modify it—do whatever you want to our little icons and distribute them however you please.
How one little word has helped us explain the sometimes terribly complex (even to tech-savvies) matters of UX and IA to people we work with, be they clients, friends, or colleagues. And how to make sense of anything at all, really.
Working with UX, information architecture, and content strategy, it’s sometimes hard to make people understand what we’re really doing. That’s partly because these disciplines are young and constantly evolving, and because our ideas about them differ widely. Here’s an attempt at making clear what we talk about when we talk about our work.
In various conversations we had recently, one word somehow always pushed its way forward as we were talking about past projects or having first meetings with our clients. That word is “clusterfuck”.
Want a definition? Thought so:
clusterfuck, n. A chaotic situation where everything seems to go wrong. It is often caused by incompetence, communication failure, or a complex environment.
Synonyms: omnishambles, imbroglio
More often than not, our clients find themselves clusterfucked. Most of the time, they don’t know it yet—they just notice that something is wrong: sales are going down, people have stopped using their service, their competitors have gained ground, etc. But that is, of course, only a symptom of the clusterfuck-disease.
“Incompetence” or “communication failure” sounds very harsh, like someone just did a shitty job and then made a mess of a conversation about it. But it’s not that easy: a clusterfuck situation is where one problem begets another, and changing something about one of them will affect a whole bunch of areas. In a word, it’s complex.
That, however, is not anybody’s fault in particular. Websites, interfaces, and software tend to be entropic, striving towards chaos (even if, or especially when, we throw in more content, features, and functionality over time). And frequently, we’re so terribly immersed in fixing one problem that we don’t notice how chaos has already taken over.
But that’s a big part of UX, IA, and CS: being able to do the right things at the right time, planning why you need what, when, by whom, where it goes and what happens with it. Some of our clients are well aware of that, but there are just so many options and possible actions to be taken that all of this can easily result in clusterfuck. And no, there simply is no easy way to tackle this. There is just the long hard stupid way.
So what we as user experience designers or information architects often do is cleaning up. We take big, complex, overwhelming, unstructured, cluttered, noisy, messy things and re-order them. We take clusterfucks of information, screens, UI components, services, code, ideas, communication structures, discrepancies in metaphors, message and branding and we tidy the shit out of them. We un-clusterfuck.
How?
Every huge problem can be broken down into smaller problems. Then even smaller problems. Until it doesn’t get any smaller or until you have understood the core of one of the problem. You make decisions. Arrange. Re-order. Prioritize. Build small solutions. If you think those solutions are pretty decent, test the hell out of them. Then you build bigger solutions by combining small ones. Out of those, you build one of the best possible solutions within your constraints.
Sounds easy enough? Almost a litte too easy, I’m afraid.
Indeed, because this approach relies exclusively on reduction. As information architect Peter Morville reminds us in his new book Intertwingled, reductionism has worked so well for two-and-a-half millennia that it has blinded us to alternatives. And some problems cannot be solved by reductionism. We also have to think in systems:
“While conventional thinking uses analysis to break things down, system thinking relies on synthesis to see the whole and the interaction between parts.”
—Peter Morville, Intertwingled (p. 16)
Thinking in systems looks at the interrelations, connections, and processes of information; in other words, at its context. So we don’t only have to ask how we can reduce complexity to tackle our clusterfuck problem, but analyze what we analyze, keep our environment in mind, and understand the sum of the parts of a problem.
To close with one of Morville’s key messages: Everyone today must be an information architect in their own right, because it’s a core skill for survival in our information-overload world. Using that word “clusterfuck” made clients suddenly understand that they, too, are UX designers and information architects, albeit on a different level, and they were able relate to our work much more easily. Now, making it your job because you just love to un-clusterfuck is a different matter altogether but that’s essentially what any good information architect or user experience designer is there for.
I sincerely hope to find “un-clusterfucker” in job descriptions in the near future, I want to hear people say that making breakfast was total “omnishambles”, and I wish that “clusterfuck” would make it into the active vocabulary of any project manager, designer, and developer, let alone UX persons or IAs. Sometimes, just one beautiful little word is enough to help people understand a complex process much more easily.
Achieving a great information architecture for a digital product is hard, but it’s always worth the effort. So this Friday we wanted to share with you some valuable resources on IA that may have an effect upon how you think about design and development as well.
The awareness of the term “information architecture” has declined significantly in favor of “user experience”. That’s okay, we need new hobby horses every once in a while. Nevertheless, the foundation of IA is so immensely relevant (and I think the need for good information architects is undiminished) that a solid understanding of it can improve anyone’s workflow. As Peter Morville says, everyone’s an information architect. We have to be, so why not improve our skills a little?
by Andrea Resmini & Luca Rosati / Journal of Information Architecture
“When we live in a world where relationships with people, places, objects, and companies are shaped by semantics and not only by physical proximity; when our digital identities become persistent even when we are not sitting at a desk and in front of a computer screen, then we are reshaping reality.”
A comprehensive account, historic and readable all the same, on how IA was born and how it matured to its current state, from information design in the ‘70s to pervasive and ubiquitous IA today.
on Huffduffer
“Information Architecture is horribly boring and depressing. [But] when you do it with a container system, it’s a little like cleaning your kitchen, you know: when you’re done, you feel like you’ve actually achieved something and not made any foul compromises.”
Oliver Reichenstein on containers, structure without content, taxonomy decisions that result in confusing navigation. A wonderful and funny talk on basic IA techniques that can make all the difference. While you’re at it with time on your hands, also watch his wonderful talk on “Information Entropy” held at Smashing Conference a couple of weeks ago. There’s some slides to that, too.
by Abby “The IA” Covert / at UX London 2014
“Simplicity can be complex.”
A slide presentation by Abby the IA that covers the systems of meaning-making, organizing, and vocabulary concerning their importance for Information Architecture. These lucid slides are intended to increase our awareness of the questions we have to ask when we try to make a product that makes sense to its users.
by Ryan Singer / on Signal v. Noise
“As important as they are, flows are hard to communicate during the design process. Drawing out every state of a flow is too time-consuming. And drawings become instantly outdated as screens change.”
Ryan Singer, one of the most prolific user experience designers of our day, wrote this five years ago, but what he has to say has aged really well. He introduces a shorthand for conceptualizing UI flows.
Compare also these amazeballs slides on “How to craft clear user interfaces”.
by Darren Northcott / on UX Booth
“You’re probably thinking that you need a good IA in order have a good UX. Exactly.”
User Experience Architect Darren Northcott explains the confusion between Information Architecture and User Experience and clears it up.
by Andrew Maier / UX Booth
A comprehensive overview, quite old already by internet stadards, but a good start into the subject matter nonetheless.
In his new book, one of the founding fathers of information architecture investigates the inter-relationships of technology, nature, urban structures, society, life and systems and much more. It is a manifest of connectedness via information and well worth your time. Also, do read this interview with him and Timothy Jaeger on Medium.
Taylor Ling is a passionate advocate for great UI and UX Design. Famous in the Android realm for his (re)designs that focus on clarity and usability, he is frequently invited to speak at conferences all over the world.
Taylor’s blog androiduiux.com is one of the most substantial resources for …
Taylor Ling is a passionate advocate for great UI and UX Design. Famous in the Android realm for his (re)designs that focus on clarity and usability, he is frequently invited to speak at conferences all over the world.
Taylor’s blog androiduiux.com is one of the most substantial resources for inspiration and wisdom concerning Android design and development. On Google+, he shares profound insights into best practices in Android, UI&UX, and especially the new Material Design.
We jumped at the opportunity of talking to him about User Experience Design, the future of Android Design, about becoming great at what you do by just doing it, and the responsibilities of a digital designer today.
A couple of weeks ago you were appointed an official Google Developer Expert (GDE). Congratulations! What’s your role and responsibility there?
It’s not much different to what I’ve been doing all along: sharing tips and tricks, engaging with the community, helping out with design questions. I talk to designers who are looking into Android Design, or are interested in working with Android in general. I try to figure out how designers can help out developers to realize some of the more complex design stuff. So becoming a GDE has made not much difference, for me at least.
“What I took as my aim when I became a GDE is to help reduce the gap between the designers and the developers.”
Bridging that gap is so important, because most of the time the designer will come out with an awesome design, but the developers have no idea how to implement it. The main problem is that they don’t understand why we do certain things. So as a GDE we can jump in and tell designers: “Hey, besides creating awesome designs, you have to let the developers know why you want something to look like you envisioned it, why this is important for user interaction, why this icon is meaningful. You can’t just use another icon to represent this action, because...” and so forth.
Many times I see people from different design backgrounds, like print designers or graphic designers, coming into the mobile app space. Of course, I mean, this is still the thing that’s growing. But most of the time, they bring issues that they have experienced before to mobile app design, without actually knowing the fundamentals of it, without knowing what the developers will need from them to transform their design into code, because they often lack knowledge of the design guidelines. So we try to deliver this message to blog posts, to conferences, and so on: make something the developers know how to use. I often hear developers saying: “The designer sent me this design, but he never sliced the assets, so now I have to do it myself in all the different densities.” So we try hard to share our knowledge, our experience, problems we have encountered.
Three years ago our aim was still to create a community. Now there is one—not huge, but sizable I’d say. And you can learn things there. So the GDE is a more formal way to get those messages across. To minimize the gap between the design and the development part.
“Those two guys, the designer and the developer are not supposed to be enemies, but allies—they’re inseparable. Only then they are able to create awesome stuff.”
Your focus is on UI and UX design. Recently, UX has become such a buzzword that nobody really knows what it means anymore. Everybody wants to be a UX designer, because that’s the cool thing to be. So, for you who has been immersed in that for a long time, how would you define UX?
This is always a very tough question and people will have different viable answers to it. Many people know that the user experience is important, but it’s something quite intangible. It’s not something you can see. It’s in the finished product.
You know when you have a bad user experience, but you don’t notice when you have a good one.
Exactly. When we talk about user experience, it’s always about the bad one. No one will remember the good user experience, because they just achieved what they wanted. If it’s a bad user experience, you will remember it for your whole life and say “Oh no, not this product, that was horrible.”
By definition, of course, it’s simply the experience that the user has. But if you talk about what UX Design actually is: it means crafting a mindset into the entire process and organization. Having sympathy with the user, understanding that the experience of the user is equivalent to how successful your product is. That doesn’t mean your product will be successful just because the users love it, but it’s the first step.
“UX is a mindset, and it’s relevant for every part of the product: interaction, interface, copy. Every single part plays an important role in crafting a good user experience.”
I have one friend, a UX advocate, who goes across the country promoting the importance of UX. He actually went to a job posting site and looked for all the jobs related to UX Design. Then he went to the interviews. To every single one, just to do research. He wanted to see how much these companies actually understood about what they needed. In the West it’s probably a little better, but in this region, he found that 95% of the companies were looking for the wrong person. They were looking for a unicorn: a guy that can do development, design, and everything else all at once. That funny little experiment shows we still have a long way to go to push UX forward. If you want a good user experience in your product, it’s not just hiring one person who sits around and your product will automatically be awesome or loved by people.
How did you know you wanted to do UI & UX Design? How did your career path come about?
A lot of people are surprised when I tell them I have a biomedical engineering background. And I loved that. It’s a lovely cause learning about anatomy combined with engineering disciplines. But in my country, it’s tricky finding a job in this field outside the lab. And I didn’t want to be a researcher in a lab. So boring. So I was thinking about what I could do with my life. Design was something I was always interested in, even before university. I loved drawing, even won a few awards in school. It’s in my blood. I love art.
I got my first job as a functional analyst, which is a job that helps translating the product manager needs into a low level requirement set, so the developers know what to do. But, of course, there was no designer in the team, so I had to do the design, the layout, everything. I wasn’t aware that this was something you could earn money with.
It wasn’t until about three years ago that I started looking into blogs. I found Juhani Lehtimäki’s blog, talking about Android design and thought “OK, there are people talking about mobile interface design—that’s interesting.” At the time I wasn’t all that clear about it, because Juhani is still a developer, and I didn’t have a strong technical background, so I wasn’t sure if that was something I could do.
During that time I also got my first Android phone. A Sony Ericsson Xperia X8. It has a very small screen. I played around with it and was so amazed that I could do so many things I never imagined were possible. That was the Gingerbread era. The apps were designed somehow, but there was no consistency at all. At that time, the iPhone came out in the second generation, so I was asking myself why high-quality apps were only available on iPhone. It was very expensive. I wondered why I should buy an expensive gadget to get a high-quality digital experience. Why couldn’t I have that on an Android device?
So I played around with it a little more and eventually I got myself a Nexus S via my local mobile carrier—that was pretty much when Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) was announced. And I was so excited about it and made my first ever Photoshop Android UI Design Kit. After some time, I decided to start a blog about Android Design, which was in June 2012—I wrote about the side drawer, the navigation menu. That was the first blog post I ever wrote. And it started from there.
“Initially, I just wanted to share stuff.”
Did you get any responses?
Yeah. The response was so good that all the sudden I knew: “OK, this is something that I want to do.” That’s why I bought that domain androiduiux.com, really dedicated to Android. It’s something I want to keep reminding myself: the focus is pure Android.
So the feedback was coming in, people actually responded, and I was happy. And it’s two guys: Juhani and Roman Nurik. They really inspired me to see that if you have an opinion on something, don’t be afraid to share it. And that’s how I got into the design thing. After one year of running the blog, people came to me and asked for help doing redesigns. I never planned anything, but then all of a sudden I was a freelance designer.
But Juhani Lehtimäki and Roman Nurik, they were far away, right? I mean, you were connected through the web, but were there any mentors in Kuala Lumpur who lent their hand and helped you along the way?
Yeah, the power of internet! About the mentorship—no. It’s all self-taught. My photoshop skills I simply learned by feeling my way, by trial and error, a few tutorials. But there was no one mentoring me. I always thought I was able to do that myself. And yes, maybe that takes a little longer, but if you do it yourself it will have a more lasting effect. You learn how to acquire new skills. Back then I didn’t have a computer, so I flipped through magazines to learn how to do stuff. My first computer was a intel-powered PC with Windows 95, and that’s where I saw all that potential.
So I’m just a little proud of myself here, because, I mean, it’s not easy.
“Of course, there are design classes, or classes about human-computer-interaction, but they take you four years—and sometimes, when you talk to people who teach these classes, you think, ‘Dude, we’re already so far ahead of you, as a community.’ Because what they learn are things that are still maturing and so theoretical. And for me, it’s really about the real experience, the real feedback, the way I actually feel when I use something digital. And as you learn by doing, you remember it forever.”
What had a huge influence on me was reading The Design of Everyday Things. That changed me and the way I think. One thing that we tend to not understand is that when we fail to operate a machine or device, it’s the designer’s fault, not ours.
But I strongly believe that if you’re passionate about something and you want to become good at it, you are able to achieve that yourself. That’s something I learned starting out and it has taken me to where I am now.
Switching from the past to the present and into the future: Google just introduced the Material Design guidelines at I/O this year, as a new direction. Is this a trend or really the future of Android. Where is Android Design headed?
One thing that Material Design has changed is obviously cross-platform consistency. I do have some doubts about that, because, just as an example: if you have an iPad, you have a very unique experience. So the doubt I have is whether the user wants to have a consistent experience or a unique one. But I have decided to ride the wave, just because Material Design is awesome, very well thought-out.
For me, it definitely is the future. But it’s very similar to when Holo Design was introduced two or three years ago. During the early stage, everyone would just follow exactly what the design guideline proposed. That’s why many apps would lack variation and innovation. If you follow what’s going on now, there are people actually doing redesigns of Instagram or Facebook with Material Design. But none of those are unique or show variation. They’re just replacing the colors and the content, and then call it a redesign. Which is not a bad thing, because it will make people realize the beauty of Material Design, but I think in the coming months we’ll see a lot of apps looking exactly like the Google apps. People are still exploring, they don’t have a clue yet. We’ll see round avatars and floating action buttons everywhere. That’s normal. But we’ll need to start thinking out of the box again.
I still think that users will want unique experiences on desktop, tablet, and phone. I understand the consistency they want to achieve and I agree, in large parts. It’s important, but I don’t think uniqueness should be sacrificed.
Generally though, the introduction of Material Design, was mind-blowing. I’m very happy about it, because you can feel that it was created specifically for the digital space.
“Material Design brings back some real-life things into our digital life. It allows the user to interact a digital product without much thinking and processing which is very important in the long run.”
This is drawing on the difference between the skeuomorphism and the metaphor concept that they’re introducing: it’s not just depicting the real world in the digital space, but more of a transferring action.
The choice of the paper-and-ink concept, I think, may be a little confusing to some people. Because they have some unique properties in the real world: paper can fold, ink is a liquid and flows, etc. So developers and designers start asking questions like: “If it’s paper, why can’t I fold it?” Those who are not actually going through the guidelines, they might be confused. But they have to realize that the digital space is a constraint. It’s a human touch Material Design is bringing into the digital space, which I love.
“The interfaces in iOS are cold. Material Design is very focused on what the users actually perceive and making them realize what’s happening with less processing going on.”
Somehow, it’s really a human thing, I suppose: when I was in London, I went to the British museum and they have an exhibition about ancient Egypt. I found it amazing. 4,000 years ago, they already had a grid system, iconography, subtle use of color. Isn’t that crazy?
As a designer, your work has to be highly creative. How do you come up with ideas?
There’s really no ritual involved. I try to be inspired by everything—nature, people, landscape. And conversations. A funny thing is, I do a lot of eavesdropping—or let’s call it observation. Not that I would follow people around, but I like hearing what other people talk about, what moves them, what concerns them, and so on. I like to listen to their conversations. I feel that this has often helped me keep the user of the product I design in mind.
I know you have a deep interest in typography. What do you think of the Roboto redesign?
It’s good. When I look at it, it already feels more familiar, maybe because it has become more similar to some very established typefaces. And it works very well across platforms. I can already see that those minor changes have a great impact, improving readability. It looks fresh, but it’s still the Roboto you’re accustomed to. It finally feels like home.
I like it, too. The only thing I feel a little sad about is that they got rid of the more opinionated strokes in the “K” and the “R” that gave a little playfulness to the font. But no matter. Are you reprinting your t-shirts now?
No. That’s just a part of history.
Do you own any wearables: a smart watch or Google Glass? Do you design with those in mind? What do you think about them?
Yes, of course. Before I actually owned a Google Glass I designed two Glass applications, just by following the guidelines very closely. When Google Glass came out, there were clients approaching me and asking how they could transfer their product to Glass and if I could design something special for it. That comes back to typography as well, because those wearables are terribly text-heavy.
I own the LG G Watch given out at the I/O, but so far I haven’t designed anything for that. Still, you can see the trend that people are already heading the wrong way. They try to make a phone out of the smart watch. They put in a keyboard and other processing-heavy stuff and that’s discouraging, because they’re actually doing things Google says not to.
“One thing is true, though, I think: those wearables have the potential of changing the way we think about design itself.”
What does a day in the life of Taylor Ling look like?
(laughs) I’m a pretty normal guy. Once I get up I check my news to see what’s happening in the world while I’m sleeping. I use Feedly and Google Newsstand, mainly, and of course Twitter and Google+ are good sources to keep up-to-date. Once I reach the office I check my tasks, do a stand-up or catch-up with the team. And then the daily business of research, playing around with apps, design in photoshop, etc. So a pretty normal app development cycle.
Once I reach home, I do my freelance work, and that looks about the same. My day is pretty packed. But I’m happy about it. I believe if you do more, you gain more, you experience more.
What are the tools you work with?
To be frank, it’s only Photoshop. That, for me, is such a powerful tool, because not only can you create mockups and complete designs, but it also allows you to do animations. Oh, and I use Sketch, too, but not so much. So far, nothing beats Photoshop.
Especially in Material Design we talk a lot about feedback, animation, and moving stuff to enhance the user experience, so it’s important for designers to know how to create that to be able to show developers what they actually expect from them. Sometimes I also do that with PowerPoint or Keynote.
I loved your Android Design challenge. What was the motivation behind it?
This is the second time I’ve done it, but I had the same goal in mind: promote Android Design and inspire people, show them what can be done. That’s true to my principles, too. The subline on my blog is “Inspiration source for developers and designers”. That’s the aim. A lot of times, if you give people some kind of incentive, they will actually start doing something and they might outgrow themselves.
As a designer, you want to get recognition for what you do. So I kind of already knew this would get their attention. I talked to some community friends, like Juhani and Günther Beyer, whether that was something feasible to do. And they gave me their full support by being the judges.
I’m very happy about the participations this year. Compared to the first year, this second round I received far more entries, and more quality entries, too. So it’s already starting to mature. More people are doing an amazing job, which is great to see.
I paid for the first round from my own pocket, which was fine for me, because the designers really put a lot of effort into their designs. In the second one I had some small sponsorships from a few people.
And why I do it? Well, I’m just really a community-driven guy. I believe that when you give much, you get much back in return. And I do get a lot of stuff from them, so I try my best to give something back.
Do your family and friends support what you’re doing? Do they understand it at all?
My parents are still not very clear about what I’m doing, even though I try hard to explain it. But they are extremely supportive. One very strange thing is that they can’t really believe I went to London and Tunisia to give talks. And I didn’t expect that either.
Are you happy? What are your plans for the years to come?
Am I happy? Yeah, of course. I couldn’t be happier. I mean, I’m doing the stuff I feel really passionate about. I actually made a lot of friends I never even expected to meet. I gained much more than I ever imagined, and I’ll definitely continue to do what I’m doing now—being an advocate for my industry, trying to push the right things. I will go as far as I can, and do as much as I can.
What advice would you give someone who wants to follow in your footsteps and do the same as you do?
Train your eyes. Be picky. Be passionate about what you do. If you keep your passion alive and work with it, everything will fall into place.
An exploration on the background and motivation for setting up a home server, along with practical instructions for taking control of your digital life again.
“Whaddya wanna be when you grow up?”
“I wanna be like you, Superman!” answered the little boy.
“What do you mean?” asked the protector of the human race playfully.
“You can fly and you are super strong,” said the boy, beaming with energy. “... and you protect people!”
Superman smiled.
“Protecting people”, mainly ourselves and our loved ones is a universal element of human culture. A mother cares for her child, the bigger brother helps his younger sister, the strong look after the weak. Most societies have enshrined the right of not being harmed in their constitution. This includes not only the obvious protection from physical damage and psychological harassment but also the protection of our privacy, which is a crucial aspect of living together in a functioning society. Despite a few opposing voices, privacy matters.
“Protecting people sounds like fun,” Superman explained, “but from what? Big, wobbly, mean aliens from outer space are pretty rare nowadays.”
The little one’s eyes glazed over with disappointment.
“Alright, alright!” The man of steel felt the need to give the boy a valuable lesson. “First of all, you need to find out who the bad guys are, which is usually much harder than you would imagine.”
Sadly, after the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013, we have to realize that our ruling elites and governments do not protect our right for privacy anymore. Instead, every single soul on the planet is being treated like a potential terrorist and subject to general suspicion. Our use of modern technologies like smart phones and the social web enable our constant surveillance: we are observed and x-rayed in every possible way.
Every piece of information we send into the cloud arrives on a server that belongs to one of the few U.S. corporations that run the World Wide Web. During the last decade, almost all of them have joined the NSA spying program. It’s probably unfair to assume their voluntary cooperation, but since their server farms are located on U.S. soil and they must obey U.S. laws, it’s probably fair to assume that the government and the NSA are able to access all of our data whenever they want to.
“So if the good guys who are supposed to protect us don’t protect us anymore, are they the bad guys now?” The boy was confused.
Superman didn’t know what to say. While he was trying to come up with a satisfying answer, a strange-looking creature rose up from the shadows behind the two.
“That’s the way it is today, boy.” The creature answered the boy’s question with a dark, distorted voice, “You can only trust yourself!”
We have lost our privacy these days, but the right for it is still formally intact. The web that we know and love is not what it used to be anymore, it has become implausible, unworthy of our trust. All this leads to one conclusion: we have to build a new, trustworthy web—which sounds rather impossible.
“Boy, you don’t need super-strength to break the bad guys. You just need the right tools.” The man from the shadows took a glossy gadget from his yellow utility belt: “Let me show you how!”
History shows us that every great technological advance was driven, commercialized and run by a few large companies: printing, recording, computing, etc. Nowadays, the same goes for the few tech-giants that run most of the web. History also shows us that as time passes, these technologies become cheaper and available for the masses. Today, we can all write independent news blogs, record and create music in our living room, and calculate the most complex mathematical problems with our smart phones or our home computers. The same applies to the world wide web, which basically runs on servers, open source software, and IP-routing. And, most importantly, all the necessary components are easily available for little money or even completely for free.
The following few simple steps will show you how to set up your own private web server at home, which is actually much easier than it sounds, although a little Linux knowledge is helpful. In doing so, you can help building the foundation for a new, free and private World Wide Web—run by people instead of companies.
In general, a web server should be small and quiet, especially not too energy-hungry and connected to the web 24/7. My choice fell on the ProLiant G7 MicroServer N54L built by HP which you can get for 200€ or about $400—a small price for your freedom. But any similar machine will do the job. Connect it to your local network or router.
Choose one of the many flavors of Linux or some other open source system as an OS. I chose Ubuntu because it’s free, easy to set up and has a huge community to ask for help, should anything go wrong.
Install it. Follow the instructions on the screen, choose the LAMP server option during installation and activate automatic updates and encryption as well. The LAMP server is the part of the software stack that runs your web apps later on, regular updates and encryption are crucial for securing your system. After a reboot your web server will be running already.
ifconfig
will display the server’s IP-address within the local network. Enter the IP into the address bar of a web-browser on a different computer and you should see the Apache greetings page with the words “It works!”.
Your web server is now available in your local network.
If your internet connection has a static IP you are lucky and may skip this part. Usually that’s not the case and your external router IP will change from time to time, so you need a dynamic DNS address (DDNS). From a number of free and paid providers, I chose freedns.afraid.org, which works extremely well for me:
Create an account and a domain name.
Go to http://freedns.afraid.org/dynamic/ and click on “quick cron example” at the bottom of the page. Follow the instructions in the text file. All it does is creating a cron-job with your login information.
Wait a couple of minutes and then enter your domain name into the address bar of a web-browser. You should see the same Apache greetings page, but this time your server is available from every location on the planet—only for you, of course.
At this point, you are running your very own web server!
“So what do you think, boy?” asked the bat-man. “Feels good to have control over your own life, right!?”
Confident of victory he grinned at the other man who stood in the nearby corner. Superman felt useless, somehow antiquated. His super-strength wasn’t needed anymore.
After some time, the boy finished playing with his new toy. Slowly he turned to the heroes: “Thank you very much. Now I know how to protect myself.” He left.
Suddenly the bat-man’s jaw dropped. He realized that within a second, he had become obsolete as well.
I still believe that the world wide web is the foundation for a better future, but we mustn’t entrust our data and our lives to anyone else anymore. The private web is still in its infancy, but it is a path worth going down, if we want to take the web back—we only need some brave souls and make the first move.
Someday we will reach a point where we don’t need heroes for our protection anymore. In a follow-up article I will explain how to secure your server and how to turn it into a social-productivity-sharing-hosting-monster that can rival most of the cloud services that we all use on a daily basis.
The best band in the world needed a great user experience for their Digital Concert Hall. Here’s the story of building an Android app with the simple principle of keeping the audience in mind.
“If classical music is to have any future, it must embrace all the media it can and find new paths to its listeners, no matter where they are and how they wish to indulge in their passion.”
—Alexander McWilliam, Director of Online Development at Berlin Phil Media GmbH
In December 2013, we teamed up with Novoda once again, this time to create a user experience for the Berliner Philharmoniker.
Being one of the most renowned symphony orchestras worldwide, they realized the need for distributing their concerts across digital channels. Frequent live broadcasts, a concert archive, movies, plenty of interviews with conductors and soloists, and more can be found in their digital repertoire: a selection that many a fan of classical music would be eager to get their hands on.
All this content is housed in a streaming service called the Digital Concert Hall, accessible through web browsers, smart TVs, iOS and Windows apps. The last missing piece was a proper Android client and Opoloo was more than happy to step into the breach.
To understand the company, the brand, and the audience, we met in Berlin for a two-day workshop. The setup was a beautiful mix of project owners and managers of the Berliner Philharmoniker, nxtbgthng (in charge of the iOS development), and Novoda covering the Android side.
Our job was to make sure that the apps deliver their content according to the expectations of the audience—in short, to create a solid User-Experience.
During the workshop, we learned about the Digital Concert Hall’s history, their global audience, business goals and how our work would tie into their future strategies. Every idea and question that emerged was scribbled down on a post-it or typed into a text editor, then put up on the wall. Categorizing and sorting those notes helped us evolve a strong vision for the app’s information architecture and feature set.
After those two days we headed back home, feeling great about the project. It was motivating to work with a company as respected and value-driven as the Berliner Philharmoniker. But it didn’t take long before reality caught up with us.
As it turned out, the budget of the Berliner Philharmoniker was tight. After all, this was their first foray into the world of Android. Would the platform reach their target audience? Could it handle their high-quality content on a large scale? Understandably, they were skeptical about the app’s success.
With just two developers and one designer on the project, we certainly were limited in scope and features, contrary to other divisions of digital design. Then again, Novoda and Opoloo are a well-established team. Challenge accepted.
With the limitations in mind, we fleshed out a new strategic information architecture for the Android audience: give them exactly what they want, skip everything optional.
We wanted the app to be the 101 of Android development, complemented by a solid user experience, stable API communication, and smooth responsive design to cover plenty of devices. No Chromecast support, no widgets, no unnecessary extras.
To set the right expectations for the whole team as early as possible, our first goal was a fast prototype: we wanted to cover all the content that would make it into the first release. While one developer tapped into the Digital Concert Hall’s API, the rest of the team sketched simple wireframes and welded them together with a running Android prototype. This helped us get a good feel for the content and the layout of the application within just two days. From there, we were able to experiment with alternatives, to add and remove features without slowing down.
The Berliner Philharmoniker present themselves in a beautiful brand experience. Everything—from their movie covers and record sleeves to their concert house—is coherently designed with exceptional quality and aesthetics. Unfortunately, of course, their style guides were never created with Android in mind.
Mobile and responsive designs demand a certain simplicity and flexibility to be able to work and scale across sizes and devices. Detailed patterns, high resolution images and delicate typography are certainly not what the plethora of smartphones and tablets can handle equally well.
We went though plenty of design iterations before we found the right balance between native Android components and the unique brand. Relying on a simple, dark card-layout, with some spots of yellow and red felt just right. The heavy lifting was done by the flexibility of Android’s Roboto font and the quality pictures of the Digital Concert Hall.
We can’t stress enough how important responsive design has become when trying to deliver a solid Android experience. The first batch of mockups started with a 4-inch device in mind. Alongside, we explored with simple sketches how those mockups would scale across screens and orientations. This helped the developers to adapt styles from the mockups while incorporating break points and layout changes from the wireframes. As we moved towards the final phase of the project, more detailed mockups and occasional reviews helped improve the quality further. Ultimately, we went back to Berlin for a final day of optimization and tweaking, all looking at one screen.
The development was accompanied by a small but dedicated beta-tester group, managed via Google+. Those people helped tremendously with finding bugs, testing plenty of devices, and offering feedback on accessibility and usability. The launch on Google Play went buttery smooth and as of my writing this, the app stands at a strong 4.7 rating with more than 5,000 downloads.
One thing echoed throughout all the planning and development stages of this beautiful project:
Small teams can create great experiences if the expectations are set according to the demands of the project and if they are agreed upon by all parties.
We never tried to design the most innovative application, crazy interaction patterns, or cover every piece of content available. Instead, we aimed for an application that would give Digital Concert Hall users exactly what they’re looking for: access to the best classical content wherever they are—all wrapped in a smooth user-experience.
This is how every Android project should be approached and executed, and we are not alone with this opinion:
“Opoloo understands the Android platform design guidelines at its ultimate perfection and takes them to the next level. Not only with fresh and responsive concepts but also with a balance between UI/UX and development effort like no one else out there.”
—David Gonzalez, Senior Software Craftsman Novoda Berlin“In all seriousness, this project has been the smoothest I have ever experienced.”
—Alexander McWilliam, Director of Online Development at Berlin Phil Media GmbH
The mobile game is in a desolate state, but it can be fixed. Guenther Beyer shares three in-depth pieces that articulate the zeitgeist of the gaming industry.
This rather short Hook hovers around the state of the mobile game, its development-distribution-monetization side, and what that means for us as gamers.
by Colin Campbell / on Polygon
What in the world happened to games that they’ve become a mere subject of numbers and matrixes in spreadsheets? An in-depth piece about the state of mobile gaming. And yes, about data and analysis.
“While there are still creative guys in their back-rooms knocking out surprise hits, most of the money in mobile gaming is going to performance-marketers who understand how to take a hit game and monetize it all the way down to the very leavings. The ability to navigate response advertising is not so easily found among sexy young game developers. It is the domain of people in gray suits, adapted perfectly to a number-crunching matrix where zero point one of a percent can make all the difference between success and failure.”
by Barry Meade / on Polygon
This article turns against the common conceptions and misconceptions of a games industry that seems to have abandoned interest in the audience. A case for why it’s time to change tack in thinking about and executing mobile gaming, so developers can deliver great gaming experiences.
“Free-to-play producers chime that quality levels are obviously fine, "If it's making money it's objectively good, see?" Well no, not quite, shit sells by the ton every day. In the real world Burger King doesn't get three Michelin stars. Burger King gets to be happy with its revenue not its reviews, and our industry’s inability to see the difference will only pull us further into our creative vacuum.”
by Andrea Peterson, with Gabe Newell / on The Washington Post
Some people say Valve is the future of the company. No hierarchies, no job titles, a focus on creating value for the people. In this insightful interview, Valve’s co-founder Gabe Newell talks about why they do what they do, how they manage, and how this somehow magically attracts some of the most talented people on the planet.
“One of the nice things about having pretty distributed decision-making in the company is that it tends to scale really well. You can trust that lots of good decisions are being made all the time.”
Although we tell stories all the time, we generally have no idea how they function. Partly, that’s because of all the buzz “storytelling” has created lately. It remains a very powerful technique, however, so here is an attempt to return some substance to the concept.
We tell stories all the time. Unfortunately, that does not mean we know how storytelling functions. (Knowing how to run doesn’t equal knowing how running functions, what muscles and sinews and bones and nerves and blood vessels and other physiognomy must be in place to be able to do it. Fine, you say, but I can run, so why should I care? Because only when you’re conscious about it, you can study and analyze your running, and you can improve it. You’ll become a better runner.)
“Storytelling” has become a huge buzzword on the web. Perhaps rightly so: we’re storytelling animals; a good story spreads like a bushfire and then sticks with us. However, as it usually happens with buzzwords, we’re likely to lose track of what they actually mean and they become a tasteless, watered-down imitation of the original concept.
Clever people have realized that there’s a lot of money in the story. If it appeals to people’s emotions and is connected to a product, it’ll go like hot cakes. Big corporations like Microsoft even have their own storytelling departments. But let’s lay down some foundations.
Crudely said: a story is a design. It is the (more or less carefully crafted) sequence of events in time. Sounds terribly unsexy and obscure? It is. That’s why hardly anyone outside of literary studies talks about those definitions. But a common terminology and language is needed so people outside the humanities’ and writing sphere can comfortably talk about it. Stories belong to everyone, and it’s detrimental to think that only scholars can or should discuss and develop them. Let’s hear some definitions. Getting some common terminology straight will (so I hope) make storytelling more democratic.
A story is the sequence of events in time.
A plot is the causal relationship of those sequences.
In a classic example by E.M. Forster, the story would be: “The king died and then the queen died.” The plot would be: “The king died and then the queen died out of grief.”
This is a much more convenient take on the Aristotelian plot, but one that encompasses a wide variety and will serve our needs just fine.
The structure of a story is very similar to what a designer or an engineer would think of as structure. It’s the map that intentionally transports your reader/viewer/listener towards a desired effect. Philosophically, the gestalt: the sum of the relationships of various parts to each other, to the whole. That may be sentences, paragraphs, statements, or arguments, as well as what we understand as beginning–middle–end.
Where and when the story takes place. Time of year, time of day, weather, light, location, surroundings: the sum of everything related to the environment outside of the characters.
Point-of-view, or also “viewpoint”, sometimes referred to as “narrator” or “persona”. Note (even people who study literature get this wrong very often): in a (fictional) story, a narrator is not the author, even if she sounds like it. The viewpoint is the “position of the narrator in relation to his story”.
We distinguish three basic variations, although many different ones are possible:
The omniscient narrator moves between characters, places—she knows all about the characters’ feelings and thoughts.
The third person narrator chooses a character inside the story and assumes the limited viewpoint of that character. He usually knows everything about the character’s inner and outer life.
Lastly, in the first person point of view, a story is told through the eyes of one of the characters.
Those various positions the narrator can assume makes for very different effects of immediacy and emotional relationship to the characters and the people who experience the story.
Narratives seem to be most successful when they follow the “Hook-Hold-Payoff” model. First, the author tries to hook the reader on something. A classic example would be an underdog getting bullied at school, but resolving to strike back: that appeals to the reader’s sense of justice, she wants to know how the underdog will get her revenge. (Injustice is a pretty good hook.)
Then, suspense is built up by the underdog fighting for attention or plotting her comeback. The reader wants to know if she can make it. That’s the hold.
The payoff would then be restored order, in the form of the bullies getting what they deserve. A cathartic effect seizes the reader in the ideal case.
That is, very basically, how most stories function, in endless variations. A story may not be the most innovative thing on earth, but it could very well be the most successful.
Have a look at this beautiful example of the hook–hold–payoff model.
Good stories work no matter where and when. There are some specifics for the web that should be kept in mind, though. We all know about the short attention span and the infamous alleged Ur-distractedness of web users, in contrast to the abundance of possibilities the web offers. So it’s a good idea to get to the point quickly. This is especially true if you want to sell a product or a service. (The longer a story, the more diabolically well it must be written to keep the reader reading.)
Along these lines, think about simplicity of plot and language, about sequence and causality. Think about how quickly readers can identify with the story, and if possible, how much time is needed to immerse oneself in it. Think about how closely related to the story a narrator should be, and if you have strong hook with sufficient payoff.
Also, think about readability, format, supporting media, animation. But the representation of a story is another thing.
Let’s talk about that soon.
Our plan B is always inferior, because it will not make us happy. Yes, it may save our ass, but what does that amount to if we’re unhappy?
“Everybody wants to give advice and no one wants to take it.”
—Frank Chimero
Here I am, giving advice that no one wants to take. I, like most people, like having a Plan B. A Plan B gives us security and comfort. It whispers in our ears, soothingly: If you fail, you’re not lost. You haven’t failed completely. There's something to return to. Move to mamma’s house again. Find yourself another girl. Get that safe job with a good salary and pension.
And we fall for it. Why? If our Plan B is so good, why isn’t it our Plan A? Yes, we might fail. Anytime. Guess what: others might fail, too, and that may have terrible consequences for us. But we don't know that; it’s beyond our control. Our plan B is always inferior, because it will not make us happy. Yes, it may save our ass, but what does that amount to if we’re unhappy?
My point is: there is no point in Plan Bs. Plan B stands for Plan Bullshit. Unless you’re plotting the art heist of the century, unless you actually have evidence or at least very good reason to believe that things will go terribly wrong, thinking about alternatives all the time will keep you from commitment, from devotion, from sacrifice. Not from harm. Not from heartbreak. Not from desolation. Nothing does. Least of all your plan B.
Relying on plan Bs makes you live in potential, which is, as Kierkegaard tells us, a distinguishing trait of adolescents. Adults are able to live that potential. Then why, as a grown-up person, do you need a plan B? If, if, if you fail (and having NO plan B certainly works towards NOT failing), there will be another way, almost automatically. Right? You know that. You’ve probably experienced it.
Want to know something else? If shit really hits the fan, your Plan B will be worthless. Inflation, war, accidents, death, sickness, havoc, hullaballoo, meteors. These things happen. But your Plan B is nothing existential. You think it can keep you from harm, but all it keeps you from is doing what you want to do, doing what makes you happy, and doing it right. The energy wasted in thinking about your Plan B would much more efficiently be invested in your Plan A. Because Plan A should stand for Plan Awesome. That’ll be the one to make you happy.
That’s my advice. Take it. Or don’t. Tell me yours.
“The larger role that a marketing and communication professional should play, is to listen to the audience, what it wants and needs, and bring that way of thinking back to the organization.”
If you have any interest in media thinking, entertainment, or marketing, it’s hard to side-step the work of Sam Ford. Sam is a journalist, writer, and strategist, co-author of the influential book Spreadable Media, and he regularly writes for magazines like FastCo or Harvard Business Review. Director of Audience Engagement with Peppercomm, an affiliate with both MIT Comparative Media Studies and Western Kentucky University, he is to be complimented on being a relentless advocate for the audience, always keeping in mind its needs and wants.
A seasoned speaker who is always generous with sharing his knowledge and vision, Sam provides us with some insights into his unusual career path, influences, the fun and the pain of working in the industry, writing, and storytelling.
We’re very pleased to have him as the first great conversationist of our interview series.
Sam, It seems to me that you’re doing about 5 jobs in one, all related to something digital. Those jobs can sometimes be hard to define. How do you explain to your grandparents what you do?
I went to college to study being a journalist, and I had worked for the local newspaper. My parents, my family, my in-laws, everybody understood what I was in college to do. It was very clear. As college progressed, I was a journalism major, then I ended up adding on English and Communication Studies, and Mass Communication, Film Studies — my interest really broadened to the study of popular culture.
One year, I went back home for the summer and wrote for local newspapers. While I was home I had the task at MIT to film a video introducing who I was, telling my story to the new crop of grad students who were coming into the program. So, like a true journalist would (but a bit tongue-in-cheek), I videoed different people in my hometown and had them tell the story of who I was. My favorite was, and this is the reason I’m telling this story, I interviewed my high-school principal. And he was talking about how proud he was of me, saying “I’m so proud of what Sam has accomplished and everything he’s doing at MIT. We’re all proud of him.
“None of us have a clue what it is Sam does. But we’re really proud.”
But the joke was, after spending those years in academia and moving further away from a career track that could easily be explained, I left academia and took a job in the industry. And everybody said: “Finally. We’re gonna figure out what it is that Sam does.” Then, my title at Peppercomm changed from “Director of Customer Insights”, to “Director of Digital Strategy”. Now, my title (what I’m doing hasn’t changed that much, but we keep trying to find an accurate description) is “Director of Audience Engagement”. The decision for my family is that it’s now even more impossible to tell what it is I do.
For me, “what I do” is more about the sorts of questions that motivate me. They’re about storytelling (how stories are told and how audiences engage with and around those stories). My background in studying popular culture came from studying and understanding fans and the fans’ relationships to the text being produced by a media property. I take very much that same ethos when I’m thinking about active audiences in other contexts. It is really, in cultural ways, more important to understand the audience’s motivation and interest and what the audience does with media text, than it is to focus on the producers. So much of our traditional communication’s focus is on the producer and the consumer, as if all meaning and power lies with the person who fuses that meaning into the text, while the consumer only extracts it out of things. For me, that seems to be a creatively draining way of thinking about the production of media.
Those media producers who listen, think about and understand the audience they’re seeking to reach produce much richer, more responsible, more responsive texts.
I spend a third of my time at Peppercomm doing consulting with our clients, a third of my time doing “thought-leadership in the field”, and the rest doing academic work. For the part of my time I spend consulting, I see my charge as helping companies understand that they need to prioritize the wants and needs of the audience they’re seeking to reach. The job of a communications professional is to be more beholden to the audience than the company that’s paying her. In my mind, that is advocating the larger role that a marketing and communication professional should play, which is to listen to the audience, what it wants and needs, and bring that way of thinking back to the organization to help shape the way the organization serves its audience.
How did you know you wanted to do that? How did this path come about?
I’ve always been interested in telling stories. But, as I got into college, I became really interested in how different types of narratives, different types of approaching culture connect with one another. My thought, going to grad school, was I wanted a tenure track job that focused on studying pop culture and American culture. The program I got into was this Comparative Media Studies Master’s program at MIT, which was really focused on what I was interested in: the intersection of studying culture and engaging with those who are putting content and messages out there into our culture, who are creating the media texts that circulate.
While I was at MIT, which has a focus on “applied research” (the idea that research shouldn’t just live in the ivory tower, but should impact the world outside academic borders), we were wrestling with the question of “What’s ‘applied humanities’?” That caused me to engage with independent producers, media companies, marketers and corporate communicators. They, as practitioners in the field, would often come to events at MIT, and were trying to figure out not just how to be more effective in persuading people to buy stuff they might not need, but to serve the audience authentically, that built a relationship. So, I became really interested in that translation work of how the theoretical stuff could apply in the industry.
This is, in a way, the intersection of a scientific task and a creative task. Both can be difficult, for sometimes very different reasons. Were there any obstacles in your way? Did you ever have doubts about what you were doing?
Yes, certainly. The tenure track process of academia has a certain career solidarity to it, sort of a career guarantee. They tell you “You take this track, here’s what happens: you land x, and then in so-and-so many years you land y, and then z.” So you pretty much know your path. On the other hand, one of my grad school mentors and co-author of my book, Henry Jenkins, was giving a talk at MIT last week, saying that if academia only trains people for tenure-track positions, it’s becoming a modern-day Ponzi scheme. It’s training people for jobs that aren’t there.
Seeing law students sue their schools for having promised them jobs that they knew weren’t there, putting them in loan-debt, brought about an interesting question to me: “What are other paths for academic work?”
When I graduated, I decided to stay on as a research manager for a year at MIT, because I didn’t know which direction I wanted to go in next.
You’ve published widely in a variety of magazines of renommé. But do you get stuck sometimes? What do you do against writer’s block?
I get stuck often. There are a few things I do. One is: these days I largely agree to publishing arrangements that don’t require a certain level of frequency, for example FastCo and Harvard Business Review. With them, I’m not obligated to submit something at time x on a regular basis. Rather, I’m able to take the approach of finding something I’m interested in writing, and then figuring out which editor might be interested in that piece, based on the angle that I’m taking. Or people contact me and I can experiment.
The other thing I do when I have writer’s block is: I write something that is not very good, and then I work on it (laughs). For me, the most paralyzing aspect of communicating is not having any frame to work from. Starting with a set of questions, I also often interview myself. Then I work them into a framework that has some narrative cohesion.
What are the writing tools you use?
Most of it is email draft. That’s where I end up writing stuff, sometimes whole pieces, sometimes the notes that I send to myself so I don’t lose them. Apple Mail really is the tool I use most frequently in writing. Now, the book Spreadable Media was all written in Google Docs. It was the first time that I took on writing a book with two other people.
You chose Google Docs for the collaboration aspect?
Absolutely. Especially because everything was written by the three of us, simultaneously, over the top of one another, editing one another, arguing with one another in the document. It helped us moving things around, checking revision histories, etc. That, for me, was a really interesting writing process. It’s based on trust.
Talking about trust: who influenced you the most in your career? Who helped you along the way?
I’ll have to name a few. Certainly Henry Jenkins: his work opened up the field of Fan Studies, the idea of studying active audiences in ways that he has gone on to take to activists and people creating civic media. In my own work, I’m very interested in the sorts of communities that companies are trying to reach, in addition to still studying deeply the fandom of worlds like soap opera and professional wrestling (the areas of study I’m involved in most frequently).
My other grad school mentor is a gentleman named William Uricchio, a professor at MIT and Utrecht, in the Netherlands. William is a media historian and his focus is on how we can often understand a current moment of media innovation by studying past moments of media in transition. To really understand the questions concerned with, for example, the future of TV or the Internet, is to look at the early days of television or the radio and understand the similar sorts of conversations that were happening at that time, the many parallels that exist.
And just one more: most recently, Carol Sanford has been of significant inspiration for me. Her book Responsible Business asks the question “What is corporate responsibility in an era where too many companies talk about social responsibility without actually being responsible?” Her claim is that companies can become more responsible by taking the needs of their audience first; the needs of their co-creators, employees, etc. second; the needs of the earth third; the needs of their local communities fourth; and the needs of shareholders fifth. All five of these audiences matter to a company, but you need to serve them in that order. Too often, that order gets reversed, and it’s the shareholders whose priorities are taken into account first, and the customers come in fourth or fifth. That set of priorities is good for us to think about.
I know you’ve had an interest in storytelling from an early age. What would be some stories that made an impact on you?
The most significant story for me may be the story of Oakdale, Illinois, which is the town that the soap opera As the World Turns is set in. That was the soap opera my grandma watched from the first day it came on in 1956. My mother was born in 1957 and grew up watching it. I was born in 1983 and grew up watching it, listening to my mother and my grandmother talking about the show. So that was sort of infused in the way I approach and think about storytelling—both the stories of the show, and the stories my mother and grandmother were telling in their re-telling of the stories of the show, as they talked to one another and analyzed what was happening. That—not knowing it at the time—played the most significant role in how I think about storytelling.
Second would be professional wrestling, the first deep fandom — no, I take that back. That was probably G.I. Joe. I have no interest in the military, but what interested me was that every character G.I. Joe produced, gave you the short bio and sketched who that character was (about 150 characters in the universe of G.I. Joe). I liked to make these characters my own and tell stories with them.
Professional wrestling, though, was probably the richest area that I engaged in as a fan. I could research the back stories of the narrative and the characters.
It’s hard to say from a book standpoint who influenced me the most. But certainly writers like Mark Twain shaped what I revere in a good storyteller: the playfulness and authenticity, saying something deeper about culture through fiction.
What do you turn to after a day of work, for relaxation, for zoning out?
Good television. My wife and I love to watch complex TV series: House of Cards, The Americans, Walking Dead, True Detectives is what we’ve been watching recently. Friday Night Lights, which was one of the best TV series ever aired, The Bridge. So for us it is serialized drama that you can get involved in, immerse yourself in and really explore, discuss, debate, critique as a duo.
Whom would you like to work for or do a project with?
It would terrify me to work for Vince McMahon (the creator of World Wrestling Entertainment). The wrestling fan in me would love the ability to collaborate, shape direction of, and think about the storytelling potential in the model of WWE. I’ve called it in the past the greatest reality game there is—it is a fictional world whose story world is the real world. Its characters play their role 24/7, 365 days a year. The narrative progresses in the same real-time as our world. There’s no off-season, and the storyline progresses in the same time our lives progress. As we age, the wrestlers age, as our lives go from Monday to Monday, so do their stories build slowly throughout the week. There’s so much narrative potential that I feel WWE has only scratched the surface of.
What part of your work do you like best?
I enjoy the collaborative participation in discussions:
The ability to meet up with people who are as passionately focused on issues as I am, with the hope of inspiring a new way of thinking and approaching things, of changing something.
That sort of larger strategy discussion drives me. That can happen with a client I’m working with, but it also often happens in industry discussions. For instance, I serve on the ethics committee of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association with other people in our industry who are trying to figure out more ethical ways for the marketing and communications world. For me, those sorts of issues and engaging with people who are deeply committed to them is fascinating. Or, having a chance to collaborate with someone who approaches things very differently than I do, who has a different world view, but shares a respect and an empathy for the dialogue.
What part is the worst about your job?
Brainstorming great ideas, coming up with great approaches and then having political issues or internal strife causing things not to happen in ways that are not to the service of the end audience in any way, but have to do with the priorities of the people within an organization. That happens in academia a lot, but also in the industry. That’s extremely frustrating to me.
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever written?
When I was a journalist, I had to write 6,000 words a week, without an editor. My charge was: don’t get us sued. That was it.
Who knows the terrible things I wrote sometimes to stay on deadline while I was a college student...But I know one week in particular, when I emailed something in and inadvertently pasted my groceries shopping list at the end; it got published in the newspaper, because there was no editor.
What were the reactions like?
People who know me made a joke of it, but I didn’t get very many reactions, so maybe just a few people made it to the end of the article anyway.
Are you happy? If you weren’t doing what you’re doing now, what else would you do?
I’m happy with the way I’m able to strike a balance between the different things I do. I would love to think more deeply about and spending more time working with the media and entertainment space. Most of the companies I’m currently working with are professional services and B2B, and I’d love to engage even more deeply with the storytellers in the entertainment world. By and large, though, I’m quite happy, and I’m interested in the way that I’m challenged by trying to apply what I study to the worlds of people in architecture or the professional service space, worlds that are far afield from my own. I’d love to work with the writers of a soap opera directly at some point...anyone managing a truly immersive story world.
What advice would you give your little brother who wants to be just like you and do the same things that you do?
I’m an only child (laughs), but I have two daughters. So, my advice to anybody who’d want to follow in my footsteps would be: don’t follow anybody’s footsteps and carve out your own path. Think about how you want to approach things differently. Role models and people who have forged a path—that’s interesting and good to have—, but always unique to the person who forged it. I’ve created a role that encapsulates what drives my passion, but that’s very unique to me. I don’t think it would be good to see a whole bunch of more people take a role like that. I would rather see them incorporate a role that takes all their strengths and focal points and let that come together uniquely.
Thank you so much for your time, Sam.
I had a great time, thank you. Now I need to get a haircut.
A case study to share insights into the process of how Günther Beyer went about designing the groceries app for TESCO’s hudl tablet.
“Günther, can you come to London tomorrow, we really need your help on a super secret project.”
Novoda’s Kevin McDonagh called us, late in February, 2013.
The super secret project was what months later was revealed as the Hudl—Tesco’s first foray into the world of 7-inch Android tablets. The idea: build an inexpensive device with good hardware and sell it in Tesco’s stores, providing a clean Android experience with Tesco’s services through a unique launcher and Google Play.
Opoloo’s part in this collaboration was to support Novoda in making sure that user experience and visual design of the Tesco Groceries app was on par with the high expectations of the Android ecosystem.
After a good initial round of sketches and wireframes, we hit our first rock. Bridging the gap between Tesco’s world-renowned branding and the Android platform was a huge challenge. Initially, the bold red-and-blue/black-and-white combinations seemed like a good fit for the operating system’s aesthetics. However, Tesco itself was in a process of refining its visual branding guidelines as we moved forward. We had to question every single UI element over again, sometimes with long feedback loops, to see if we were still in line.
Should we go with a blue actionbar or sidebar? Does a white background work across all sections, or rather light grey? Do we adapt button styles from the web or from the Windows 8 client?
As we worked through plenty of mockups and experiments, we moved closer and closer to Android’s native style. The strong brand colors we used as subtle points of attention, while shades of grey provided differentiation to the UI. Android's native font Roboto replaced Tesco’s custom typefaces. Cards and full-bleed patterns structured the extensive amount of information, bringing the content up front.
The application started to feel right as soon as the branding took a backseat to the operating system’s style and guidelines, which is exactly what users expect from an application they use daily.
One of the first issues we had to tackle was the entry point for the audience. Should we go with a products-first-approach to highlight Tesco’s extensive product range, or rather with a user-centered dashboard? We decided on the latter: a classic dashboard, since ultimately the app offered multiple approaches to the shopping experience, and we wanted every user to get the right piece of information and access at the right time.
To make things a little more interesting, we experimented with big background images of vegetables or fruits. While definitely beautiful, we felt that they didn’t add enough value to the experience. After all, looking at perfectly lit shots of tasty groceries makes you hungry. We wanted to go further.
So we had groceries. Groceries are used for cooking. Most people follow recipes for cooking. We had recipes as well. That was the solution. Finally, we displayed photos of nicely prepared meals on the dashboard’s background. Not only were those beautiful as well, but they added inspiration: now, if I needed an idea for what to cook tonight, I could have a look at the recipe and from there order the needed groceries, perfectly rounding out the shopping experience.
An experience depends largely on how it speaks to us through its design. We wanted to respect Tesco’s brand while staying true to the design language users know and love about Android. Luckily, the style guide employed since Android 4.0 is flexible enough to bend it a little without quickly feeling out of place. We took two of Tesco’s principles—“simple” and “human”—and redesigned a new set, combining both in the process.
Tesco’s iconic branding element, the chevron, makes an appearance here and there as well.
The timeframe of the whole development cycle for Hudl was ambitious. This was a new market for Tesco and they didn’t have an experienced internal team to build upon. Many people came and went in the course of six months, and everybody left a small hole that had to be filled quickly. Eventually, a common groove was established.
Opoloo’s experience in both design and development proved to be a valuable asset. We could quickly switch offices according to needs, bouncing off ideas and feedback with the Novoda team. After defining and tying together the lion’s share of screens and functions, we provided weekly reviews by pointing out unbalanced layouts, unclear copy, or rough patterns across the whole app. This helped keeping the quality of the project on a very high level.
Eventually, we gathered in London, three weeks before the official announcement for our first hands-on. The black prototype of the Hudl tablet felt solid, the screen was bright and clear. And with just a couple days distance from actually being involved in the development, we could finally get a clear picture of what we helped build over the last months: a great digital shopping & entertainment experience on a fine piece of hardware, that would be used by hundreds of thousands of people in the months to come.
“Android design is super hard to source. Opoloo are one of a handful of companies worldwide who have evolved their design consciousness at the same pace as the Android Design guidelines. Working with Opoloo is like working with the benefit of those many years.”
—Kevin McDonagh, CEO Novoda
A walk through the process of building and publishing a Firefox OS app. Max built BLIP, a small, minimalist whack-a-mole game to experiment with triggering hardware and controls of the One Touch Fire.
Dear developers out there,
I know you are tired of building mobile apps for nibbled apples and for millions of green robots with different screen resolutions. I’m sure you want to feel free again: to be able to see the horizon, smell a fresh summer breeze, and taste a sip of clear crystal water again. I would like to take a minute and introduce you to the future of app development:
We’ll build a Firefox OS app. I’ll walk you through the process of developing and releasing a Firefox game that I called BLIP.
You’ll see: app development for Firefox OS is very different and surprisingly easy—especially for frontend web-developers. You neither need to learn any complicated new languages nor a strange IDE. Just take your favorite editor and some web skills, like HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript.
To get started with our game, we first need to store basic information about your app. You need a file called manifest.webapp
, located in the root directory of your application and served as a JSON file. Generate the file and add this to your .htaccess
file:
AddType application/x-web-app-manifest+json .webapp
All set up, you’re ready to fill it with information. You can find an example manifest at the Mozilla Developer Documentation.
{
"version": "0.1",
"name": "Blip",
"description": "Blip is a minimalist Whack-A-Mole game.",
"launch_path": "/",
"orientation": ["portrait"],
"fullscreen": "true",
"icons": {
"30": "/assets/images/icon-30.png",
"60": "/assets/images/icon-60.png",
"128": "/assets/images/icon-128.png"
},
"developer": {
"name": "Max Boll",
"url": "http://opoloo.com"
},
"locales": {
"de": {
"description": "Blip ist ein minimalistisches Whack-A-Mole Spiel.",
"developer": {
"url": "http://opoloo.de"
}
}
},
"default_locale": "en"
}
All your application data can be stored in the local storage of your device to provide faster and offline access for further app usage. It’s as easy as setting up the manifest file. First, let your HTML document know the name of your cache manifest:
<html manifest="offline.appcache">
In this case, the cache file is named offline.appcache
and it’s located in the root directory of our application. You can now add new lines inside that file. Each line means a new document that has to be cached, like this:
CACHE MANIFEST
/index.html
/assets/stylesheets/application.css
/assets/javascripts/application.js
For more information about application caching, see an example at the the Mozilla Docs.
All this is reason enough to say: app development for Firefox OS is so much easier than for Android or iOS, at least for web-developers. The JS API provides access to native software and hardware functions like, in the case of our game BLIP, vibration, screen, and speakers. Meanwhile, there are a lot of plug-ins that you can use to make, for example, in-app-purchase possible. You get a list of all installed apps on the device and can check if yours is already installed. If not, you can install it with one simple function via the browser. You may submit your app to the marketplace, but you don’t have to.
function is_installed() {
var request = navigator.mozApps.checkInstalled("http://app.myxotod.de/manifest.webapp");
request.onsuccess = function() {
if (request.result) {
return true;
} else {
return false;
}
};
request.onerror = function() {
console.log(this.error.message);
return false;
};
}
function install() {
var request = navigator.mozApps.install("http://app.myxotod.de/manifest.webapp");
request.onsuccess = function() {
return true;
};
request.onerror = function() {
console.log(this.error.name);
return false;
};
}
function vibrate(ms) {
if ('vibrate' in navigator) {
navigator.vibrate(ms);
}
}
Read more about the Mozilla Javascript API.
When you are done and happy with your application, submit it to the Firefox marketplace by adhering to these guidelines or make a landing page with an install button on it.
Even if you’re not sick of app development for iOS and Android, you should check out Firefox OS. The system itself is in an early stage and I am looking forward to more stable versions, but app development and publishing is amazingly simple. Add your apps to the marketplace or just display an install button on your website.
Now, if you want to play around a bit, have a look at the little prototype of my Javascript game BLIP.
BLIP is a very simple and minimalist whack-a-mole game: a 6 by 6 grid and randomly appearing “squares”. If you tap on a square, it vanishes and another one appears in a random position. Every time a square is tapped, the phone will vibrate for 200ms and a sound will be played. The squares also have random colors and sounds. It’s a fun little game and pretty good for testing the basic functionality of app behavior on Firefox OS. The idea is to see how to trigger and play with the hardware and controls of the phone.
You can test it on your phone and find the source code on Github. Installing it to the dashboard from Firefox browser even works on my Google Nexus 4.
Any questions? Comments? Made your own Firefox app? Share it!
Happy coding!
Reading is the most crucial and most often performed task to obtain information. This is crucial for our work with information and screens. Let’s explore techniques and philosophy behind reading on screen and related tasks.
We read. All the time. Novels, newspaper headlines, blog posts, twitter status updates, inscriptions, street signs, code, labels, instructions, poetry. We even read involuntarily: as soon as we see a combination of letters that seems decipherable, we immediately try to make sense of it. We read on paper, on metal, on walls, on plastic, on screens. On screens, we even have to distinguish between different purposes of the things we read: links, button labels, hashtags, navigation items, body copy. We, the web people have to take care that everybody can decipher, read, process, and understand what to do with the readable things that live on our screens.
Reading is our primary intake of information, but we still try to figure out, who reads what, when, where, how, why, how much, for how long, while doing what, and what is done with what has been read afterwards (i.e. sharing, commenting, recommending, etc.). It may depend on the readability of a button if someone buys your product, or if she uninstalls it. It depends on the processing of a headline if your smart and funny post about, say, a typographic paradigm change goes viral and boosts your reputation. It depends on the reading habits of that MP if your email to her will find a way into decision-making. You get the picture. It’s important, but it’s a mess.
This hook will explore some starting points of reading in all the aspects that can’t be ignored when you’re working with screens.
by Mandy Brown / on A List Apart
I’m quite aware that this post is almost five years old. However, Mandy Brown’s statements still hold true and continue to be relevant for the way we treat text today. At its core is a respect for the reader: we want them to read our content, so we must enable them to read it, effortlessly, exactly like they want it.
by Tim Carmody
Tim Carmody, long-time writer for WIRED talks about how the reading experience changes over time. What happens when reading habits change? What happens when new technologies arise, like newspapers, telegrams, screen readers? What about more unusual devices, we wouldn’t typically associate with reading, but that also depend on text to let users perform actions? If you care about reading experiences, listen to this man.
by Oliver Reichenstein / iA Blog
The awareness of a need for responsive typography that allows you to read comfortably (if not perfectly) on different devices, with different resolutions, at different distances, is not such a new thing. Still, it appears to be one of the hardest things to get right. Line length & height, contrast, size, etc. This article provides for an excellent overview of things to think about.
As an addition, take a look at this comprehensive, practical guide on how to make your typography responsive and great: Techniques for Responsive Typography by Sara Soueidan.
by Jeremy Loyd / Tuts+
Jeremy Loyd pulls apart legibility and readability in relation to typography on screens. He shows how an awareness of typographic details, however small, may help you improve your design.
by Adrianne Jeffreys / on The Verge
Is there a correlation between reading and sharing? Apparently not, as a new analysis by Chartbeat shows. Of course, it’s not that easy. But how do we know and decide what kind of writing really reaches many people, how do we know what people are really interested in? As slightly different take on the reading vs. sharing issue.
by Paul Jarvis
Ask yourself, honestly: are you creating readable content for yourself or for your readers? A great piece on people, their intentions on the web, reading, distraction, and value.
Heeding your call, we made a beautiful icon font for developers and designers, with your beloved android icons — for all your web and app projects.
We’re happy to announce the all new Androidicons icon font—finally, and only because we love you. No kidding: we mostly did this because of popular request. Truth be told, this is also our first ambitious icon font project, so we rely on you, dear icon friends, to give us feedback.
In the more progressive web design community, it has already become a best practice to work with fonts, not graphics to implement icons. Mostly so for reasons of scalability, simplicity, and performance.
Native apps have been more reluctant to adapt fonts instead of graphics, but may in the long run also profit from them. Please do take this post as an invitation for discussing the use of icon fonts in apps.
The benefits of an icon font are tremendous:
There are many free icon fonts available. Even many good ones. We made this as an alternative or use case, for making our beloved developers’ lives a little easier and letting everyone enjoy clear iconographic communication. We chose to charge you for the set because we think that good work has a value, because we spent many hours developing the set, and because it wouldn’t be fair to our other supporters who bought the set if we gave away the font for free.
If you like, head over to androidicons.com and take a look.
We’re always happy to hear your thoughts.
UX involves the whole spectrum of digital processes. This link digest centers around a starting point of resources to freshen up your understanding of UX and get your cortex cracking.
“UX” has become almost a derogatory term. Sadly so, because the industry has finally realized that there’s a lot of money in it. The problem is that everyone now wants their share in UX, with most of them simply claiming that they are UX experts, just because it sounds totally cool. A result of this is that the people who do know what they’re talking about smell a rat whenever they hear the term and start running.
As an attempt to work against this, today’s hook tries to encompass some aspects of UX (and its relationships to IA, CS, UI, research, animation, etc.) in what we think is meaningful material. As always, this is to be considered a starting point. Do tell us your favorite resources, so we can all profit from them.
by Nazmul Idris & Izabel Grey / on Android Developers Channel
If you don't have a good idea of what user experience design means, yet, or have somehow lost track of it, because the word has been “thrown around” too much, here's a good opportunity to get an overview.
by Ryan Singer / on feltpresence
UX is tricky because it doesn’t refer to any one thing. Interface design, visual styling, code performance, uptime, and feature set all contribute to the user’s “experience.”
Ryan Singer un-confuses the relationship between UI and UX in this short, comprehensive piece, with the analytic precision we appreciate him for.
by Val Head / on A List Apart
Val Head’s elaborate piece on how animations can enhance the user experience by giving visual cues, without getting in the way of interaction, but rather supporting it and making it more intentional.
by Christina Halvorson / on UX Magazine
How Content Strategy and UX are related? “...it’s inherently impossible to design a good user experience for bad content", Christina Halvorson says.
If you’re passionate about creating better user experiences, you can’t help but care about delivering useful, usable, engaging content.
Simple as that. But Christina Halvorson really sorts out where, when, and why UX and CS come together and when they should stay apart.
by Aarron Walter / on A List Apart
The director of user experience at MailChimp talks about organizing and conducting research and its relevance for the user experience. Also, about how to bring teams together to tackle large amounts of data, what to do with rankings, and user studies.
This short post pushes and stabs at important points and questions. Its relationship with the discussion underneath makes it even more interesting and actually increases its value tenfold.
In interaction design and visual communication, we rely on metaphors and patterns that seem established and well-known. As time goes by, we revisit some of them and question their contemporary legitimacy. Is the magnifying glass still a good representation for a search? How does the ever-saving …
In interaction design and visual communication, we rely on metaphors and patterns that seem established and well-known. As time goes by, we revisit some of them and question their contemporary legitimacy. Is the magnifying glass still a good representation for a search? How does the ever-saving floppy disc stand the test of time? Once adopted, we assume that those metaphors communicate clearly forever, for young and old alike.
Bobby was our intern for two weeks, a couple of years ago. He was interested in design and interfaces, so I gave him the assignment to draw up some metaphors for an icon set we were commissioned to create at that time. Most seemed like obvious solutions to me, so I certainly didn't expect the creative extravaganza he handed over to me a couple of hours later.
One of my favorites is the mother presenting a tray of cookies as his personal interpretation of ‘home’. What kind of emotional connection would a kid like him have to a classic one family house, when he might be living in a high rise?
Also, note the pop culture influences in his drawings, like The Legend Of Zelda’s Link as a web-link, or the iconic Clockwork Orange eye for a clock. Hellraiser’s Pinhead also gets his cameo due to his name.
The most interesting sketches, though, are based on human language variations. There’s a log of wood within a small house and outside of it, as interpretations for ‘log-in’ and ‘log-out’. The wave or shower for ‘refresh’ is also closer to natural language than two arrows displaying a circle.
After having designed icons for more than 10 years, I had to admit that the boy taught me quite a lesson. Not only did he summarize the complexity of human language in a couple of quick scribbles—he further added a level of creativity to the task that had been lost under the pressure of standardization.
Enjoy the whole set below.
A closer look at the performance of applications and mobile sites in Firefox OS. The Firefox One Touch replaced a Nexus 4 for a week. Enjoy a trip to wonderland.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her green tin man on the bank, having nothing to do: once or twice she had bitten into her apple, but it had tasted dull that day. So she was considering, in her own mind, whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a red fox with black eyes ran close by her. Burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it disappear down a large fox-hole under the hedge. Throwing the apple away and waving her green tin man good-bye, down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.
I’m feeling slightly sorry for butchering Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece like this, but running with Firefox OS for the first time certainly feels like a trip to wonderland.
We ordered an Alcatell One Touch Fire, the weakest Firefox OS phone yet available—not necessarily a bad thing if you want to test the performance of applications and mobile sites. It arrived two days after our first Nexus 5, making for quite an interesting comparison: Android’s latest and greatest flagship device versus the entry level newcomer. Barely a fair fight, so let's give the Fox a little headstart.
The box is nothing less than boring and unexciting. You get basic headphones and an USB charger bundled, adding to the generic experience.
Picking up the orange phone from the box and unwrapping its plastic changes this impression. I definitely expected a less solid build quality from a 70,- Euro smartphone. It feels sturdy yet light and has a good grip in my hand. Don’t try to compare the plastic shell with the hardware quality of an iPhone 5 or Nexus 5. Still, after a couple of minutes I’m convinced that this phone will easily keep up with every day use and even survive being dropped on the street, at least once or twice.
The removable battery didn’t let me down in a week of testing. 16 to 24 hours at moderate use is generally fine.
‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).
Dealing with the high-end spectrum of web-development and Android devices every day, we didn't buy a Firefox phone for the hardware or to call Mommy. We wanted to see for ourselves how the operating system would perform and have a look at the ideas that went into its development.
Booting up the device with the top left hardware button, we’re greeted with a basic setup tutorial and an introduction to basic gestures. Without going into detail, one can already notice familiar patterns from other mobile operating systems. At the bottom: a centered home-button, as introduced by the first iPhone. The lockscreen layout feels a lot like Android, with the option to slide up or go straight to the camera. Pulling down from the top finally reveals notifications and quick settings, and you get a sense of homecoming. The familiarity of all those elements coming together luckily does not feel like a blunt copycat; rather like the best of both worlds combined. Picking up the device for the first time and being able to use it within seconds is a manifest to standardized mobile patterns.
Unlocking the screen continues with established analogies. There’s a hot-seat bar at the bottom for your favorite apps. All other apps are revealed in an iOS-like grid by swiping to the right. Here, they can be rearranged and deleted with a long press. The most unique element you’ll notice is a prominent input field right on the home screen, called Adaptive App Search, which says “I’m thinking of...”. Typing anything into that field will offer multiple relevant apps and suggestions to those keywords, and change your wallpaper accordingly. A search for “breaking bad” instantly shows me Walter White in panties and access to IMDB, Serienjunkies, YouTube and more. Picking the first takes me straight to IMDB’s search results, as expected. While this feature might not be as innovative nor as polished as Google Now is, it’s a great way to help people who are new to smartphones dive into its possibilities.
The Caterpillar was the first to speak.
‘What size do you want to be?’ it asked.
‘Oh, I’m not particular as to size,’ Alice hastily replied; ‘only one doesn’t like changing so often, you know.’
Like every solid operating system, Firefox OS comes with a decent set of core apps. Dialer and texting, gallery, clock and calculator are hardly more than the bare bones of what you would expect. Other applications like maps and the music player are further developed and offer quite a mature feature set.
Since the whole operating system is built on web technology, users can simply bookmark any website and call it an app, assuming there’s a permanent online connection. Mozilla has further established a marketplace, which promotes apps that are optimized for its OS with offline support and device-specific API capabilities. To date, this store offers over 200,000 apps, unfortunately many of those simply linking to the mobile website of its services. Digging through the featured apps and categories, one can find a good game or helpful app already, though the scope of highlights is limited. While users expect a certain quantity of well-known apps on a new platform, I found myself quickly bookmarking my favorite web services, and switching fluidly between native and online apps.
Now, this is something where plenty of opinions and criticism arises. We’re so used to perfectly consistent experiences and interfaces on our mobile companions that we forget the chaotic beauty of the web. While most Firefox OS core apps share a unified visual language and patterns, most additions don’t. One can quickly get stuck with an un-optimized app, leading to frustration.
After a full week replacing my Nexus 4 with the One Touch Fire, I am quite convinced that there’s a future for Firefox OS. Not only did the device work fine for most daily tasks, but I quickly started to enjoy the limitations. During that week I spent plenty of time focusing on the smaller things, instead of trying to manage the flood of constant information running through my hands.
While it’s obvious that Mozilla has quite a long way to go with Firefox OS, the One Touch Fire clearly shows that the vision is very strong and manageable. Having the overwhelming, chaotic web in your hand certainly feels different to the bottleneck ecosystems we’ve grown used to—challenging and frightening at times, but also empowering and limitless. Time will tell if the operating system will find its audience while Apple and Google nuke it out at the top of the market.
This device is definitely not for everyone. If you’re an iOS fanboy or Android addict, you might want to stay in your personal safety zone. If you remember the early days of Android and realize how far it has come, you should follow along. There might be adventures waiting in Wonderland.
The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it: ‘No room! No room!’ they cried out when they saw Alice coming. ‘There’s plenty of room!’ said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table.
I'm a stubborn guy. I always go down the hard way, trying to reinvent the wheel. This includes plenty of systems and web projects over the years. In the beginning of 2013, I felt a bit lazy, so I used Wordpress for my blog — it’s easy to use and you don’t have much trouble with it, eh? The …
I'm a stubborn guy. I always go down the hard way, trying to reinvent the wheel. This includes plenty of systems and web projects over the years. In the beginning of 2013, I felt a bit lazy, so I used Wordpress for my blog — it’s easy to use and you don’t have much trouble with it, eh? The problem is that you will mostly have features you don’t need, but some that you definitely need are missing. So I was right to develop my projects without any popular system.
Now, I had two major problems:
My good friend Kevin told me about the magical power of Jekyll. When I first checked the website, I wasn’t very impressed, because I really like external databases like MySQL. Jekyll, instead, was proclaiming:
No more databases, comment moderation, or pesky updates to install — just your content.
Nonetheless, I thought it would be a good idea to test it. Just in case it would turn out to be as good as Kevin told me. It’s really quick and easy to install, the only requirement is to have Ruby already installed.
gem install jekyll
Alright, let’s start a new blog:
jekyll new my-awesome-blog
cd my-awesome-blog
Jekyll creates a new folder with your project name and generates a clear structure in it:
Even if you have never worked with such a kind of system, it’s easy to follow this folder-structure. It connects HTML, YAML, Liquid, and Markdown.
Open the project folder with your favorite editor, which is of course Sublime Text. Before you start to change anything, go back to your terminal and type $ jekyll serve
or $ jekyll serve —watch
to build the site. Open your browser and go to http://localhost:4000
, and voilà. You can now see your new website running on Jekyll with sample posts.
To customize your layout (or anything else), go back to your editor. You’ll probably find out yourself what to do, but I’m going to publish another article about ”building own templates” for Jekyll. Until then, try to find out how it works. I’m sure you don’t even want to know anymore when the follow-up is published once you've started your own layout.
For help, you may want to refer to the Jekyll website: http://jekyllrb.com.
We would like you to be a part of this blog, because we value your ideas, feedback, and criticism—in fact, we need them to continue building good stuff and do our share for the community.
After bragging about our blog's output, we've been very quiet the last couple of weeks. That's because January, with his fat, wet butt of last year's residues was hanging around at our office. We had to kick him out first to make room for more beautiful things.
We thought we'd share our plan for what's happening with our blog in 2014 as well as our rudimentary style guide for those to whom it may concern.
Our primary goal still is: Publish good content, regularly. Squirrel Park is a beautiful and fairly popular playground. It will stay that way, but the toys will become more focused and more technical.
Our objectives are:
+ Write and communicate better
+ Develop ideas by expressing them
+ Connect with our community
+ Be of value: share knowledge, exchange thoughts, keep the conversation going
As we go along, we'll add a couple of slim, new features. This goes for design decisions, too, such as perfecting readability by reworking some of the typography. Of course, the improvements will be incorporated into LINES:
For now, we decided against comments or more social interaction. We still believe in taking the discussion to the people.
We will aim for two good Opoloo articles per month. Ideally, one will be more technology-oriented, the other rather design/strategy/philosophy-related.
We want you to be a part of this blog, because we value your ideas, feedback, and criticism—in fact, we need them to continue building good stuff and do our share for the community. So, we will try to host one awesome contributor from outside Opoloo each month. Yes, we hand-pick some people we admire, but (as we established in the very first post) we would like you to tell us your ideas for guest posts. Playing in Squirrel Park will be even more fun, if we can achieve a nice miscellany from new and established voices.
An interview series is planned, in which we’ll record some conversations with interesting people in the industry. If you’d like someone particular to be interviewed, please do tell us and we’ll see to it that we drag that person in.
Now it’s your turn to send in your idea. We’ll work it out with you, but just so you’ll be prepared, here is:
This is a very rough guideline for writing on Squirrel Park.
It is not the place for advice on how to become a better writer.
Articles will be mid-form, about 4–8 paragraphs. Make sure you write to the point and bring something relevant to the table. Don’t start articles with “10 years ago, when I was young, the bees bla bla bla ...”. Find a strong introduction that gets to the point and move on from there.
Also, don’t try to dive too deeply into philosophy or lengthy explanations. If your story is very complex, break it down into multiple articles.
A paragraph consists of more than one sentence. It should outline an idea in the first sentence. Then, you elaborate on your idea and explain what you really mean, or give proof for the argument outlined in the initial sentence. The goal is that all paragraphs contribute to the overall idea/argument of the article. Try to link paragraphs.
Each piece of writing should reflect the personality of the writer. The tone should be relatively warm, human, informal, without being cuddly, cute, or flamboyant. It should be lean, to the point, using common language while technically correct and specific, without being corporate and interchangeable.
Please be opinionated and not afraid to say what you think.
Generally, prefer short words to long ones (if your word ends with
“-dezificationaliciously”, there’s probably a better one out there).
Prefer short sentences to long ones.
An article does not need to have sub-headlines, but it might profit from them (e.g. when they expose and concisely sum up ideas). Be sure, in any way, to adhere to a structure (i.e. beginning–middle–end) to guide your reader.
Do worry about using language correctly, but focus on your writing. Don't worry about the finer details, such as capitalization, using curly apostrophes, Oxford commas, semicolons, or em-dashes. Squirrel Park's editorial process will take care of this.
Still, use a dictionary (Wordnik is perfect).
If you haven't yet, get The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. Read it.
We're looking forward hanging out with you this year in Squirrel Park. If you have an idea for a guest post, do tell us about it. Coming soon: An introduction to Jekyll by Max Boll, a Firefox phone review by Günther Beyer, and lots of insight into our latest projects.
Because we think that all these Christmas and New Year’s wishes are mostly bullshit, we would like to say “Thank You” for hanging out with us with us this year by feeding your head with some pieces of the web that influenced us the most in 2013.
The end of the year is nigh. It's been weird, fun, intense, terrible, and wonderful all at once. But then again: what year isn't?
Because we think that all these Christmas and New Year's wishes are mostly bullshit, we would like to say "Thank You" for hanging out with us this year by feeding your head with some pieces of the web that influenced us the most in 2013.
2013 was certainly not an easy year. While we are used to horror stories and catastrophes on the news, this time drama reached our safe little world of technology. The NSA debate ultimately made us rethink right and wrong in our always connected societies.
While I was surrounded by HD photos, video-games and apps all year, I learned that the written word still carries farther and moves stronger. Enjoy some links, below.
by Frank Chimero
Admitted: I was late to get my hands on this gem of a(n e)book. Taking the time and absorbing it in one sitting was a little revelation. We use the word “design” for almost anything these days that tries to carry value or has a human component. Frank Chimero gives meaning back, helps us understand what we’re really doing with context and clarity. Read it and think.
A strong brewed coffee and medium.com were the two things I enjoyed every morning, when 2013 was still young. At the end of the year, mostly coffee remained.
The constant quality of grounded articles and opinions soon gave way to bragging texts, fighting for some quick attention. I’m not saying that there’s no place for this on the internet, but Medium’s example clearly shows the importance to curate and filter on today’s web.
Building lastwebsite.io together with the talented Brothers Chapman was an influential experiment for Opoloo. It did push our technical skills on the mobile web and sensitized us for deep, immersive experiences and storytelling as a fundamental part of modern communication.
If you still haven’t found the easter-egg, maybe revisit it and enter the Gateway again ...
A lot of things happened in 2013, and it’s hard to keep track of all the fascinating, mind-blowing, funny, and immersive moments lived and experiences made. Throwing it all together in just a couple of links is an impossible task, since most of what really mattered happened in the real world: Conversations with lots of people, some really good books (yep, some of us still read old school books :) ), and finally the mandatory trial and error life experience.
Nevertheless there are some specials I’d love to present, and my third “link” refers to one of my favorite business related books for 2013.
After decades of struggling with dual boot (Linux for work environment and Windows for the spare time gaming experience) Valve’s announcement of Steam OS being based on Linux was long overdue and like Easter, Christmas and all past birthdays all at once. Lets hope that it will succeed and revolutionize the gaming world and especially the mindset of hardware vendors to support more than one operating system.
Upon making “The Last Website”, we needed something new to play with and keep up the team spirit. Some weird ideas rose and were thrown over board again, but what’s lasted was our mindset to share things and enlighten people. Developing our own blogging software to publish what matters for us personally as well as open sourcing the source code was a perfect fit.
“Team Geek: A Software Developer's Guide to Working Well with Others” was one of my favorites in 2013. Coding is not all about your code, but mostly about your team. This book teaches and/or reminds you on how to get a better developer by improving your “social coding skills”. Read it now if you haven’t yet.
Happy New Year to you all.
by Erin Kissane
You might have to have a really good life. It might be fucking amazing.
Something in me resonated when I read this short piece by Erin Kissane. She’s as emotional as she’s smart here, just speaking my mind about some things that have actually plagued me this year. Some of those things, I feel, are just capital-T-True.
by Craig Mod
Sometimes I really feel a certain way, but the right kind of words to describe that feeling can’t be formed just yet. Then, I’m all the more astonished that there are people who feel the same but are already 20 steps ahead of my naive ass. So is Craig Mod. This is what publishing on the web should look like, even a year after this article saw the light of day.
by Oliver Reichenstein
For me, Oliver Reichenstein remains one of the most influential people in all things web-related (even iA writer Pro left aside). What he writes is always accessible and useful—there’s no other way for you to feel about it, because you know he has thought about everything he says thoroughly (that might be his philosophy background showing, too). I haven’t read or heard a single stupid sentence by this man. This article, though, is him at his finest.
Codepen was one of my most visited links in 2013. I've never learned that much about web stuff as I did in 2013 on this site. Together with other codepen users I created a new dev-group to exchange our code and experience. It's fun and was a really good decision I made in 2013.
This ruby gem is really made for me. It's a small engine to convert dynamic content into a static website. Most of my friends and I use it for our personal websites. Small but powerful, I love it.
A more structured, analytic view of the term “Content Strategy” to take some of the buzz out of the word and get to the core of what Content Strategy means.
“The brain is hungry not for method but for content […].” —Frederick Turner
Despite, or maybe precisely because of the continuing buzz about Content Strategy, we still seem to have only a vague idea of what it contains. I love some of the definitions smart people have come up with and I don't mean to amend them. The following is to be seen as part of the discourse on how we, as content strategists, think about what we do.
Names and labels — especially successful ones — are usually not happy coincidences. We can learn from their implications if we turn them inside out. So, I'm proposing a structured analytic view of the term “Content Strategy” to hopefully connect some of the loose threads.
Part of our job is to take things apart, find out what the pieces are about (their intent, purpose, conclusions, and on), and then re-assemble them to get a clearer view, to find the “more” that's hidden in the sum of the parts.
Let's start with the taking-apart.
A look into a dictionary tells us that content encompasses a wide scope of meaning.
n. Something contained, as in a receptacle.
But content is more than something passive, unilateral:
n. The material, including text and images, that constitutes a publication or document
n. The substantive or meaningful part
n. The meaning or significance of a literary or artistic work
Content, thus, also establishes and enacts substance, meaning, and significance. Put in a pedestrian way, it is not something thrown in a box that we then rummage through. That which is contained also shapes the container, defines it, becomes its essence. By that, the content starts to communicate, but only — and this is merely implied in the above — if it is given a structure, a pattern that we can make sense of.
We do so, as Rahel Bailie points out, by contextualizing data. Content does not create meaning by itself, but relies on our ability to arrange it and form mental relationships, so that its individual parts can be mentally connected to form something coherent.
n. Containing capacity or extent.
Content itself contains something that we have to read and bring to the foreground. It is (and here we get philosophical again) potential meaning that we are after. Especially if we think about “capacity” and “extent”, there is quite a material feeling to it: Content takes up space. We have to create enough space for possibility and development, because they are an inherent part of content. (Notice again that terms like “capacity”, “extent”, and imply something active.)
So okay: content is not static, but rather dynamic, in motion — if alone for the fact that it communicates.
But funnily enough, content implies something more:
adj. Desiring no more than what one has; satisfied.
n. Contentment; satisfaction.
As strategists who deal with content, it is our job to make content satisfying. I would argue that what makes it satisfying is essentially “meaning”. Few things are more satisfying for us humans than obtaining meaning. On the other hand, things without meaning are, for the most part, utterly worthless, even frustrating to us. We have to make sure that our content contains meaning by way of its structure and contextualizations, and that this meaning is easily understood by the ones who peruse our content.
Let's dig a little deeper:
Etymologically, content is derived from medieval Latin: contentum, a plural form, and merely meant “things contained”. It's also worth noticing that there is hardly a singular meaning inherent in “content”. We generally speak about multiple elements.
Contentus is the past participle of continere, which also meant “to hold” and “to restrain”. Not only, then, is our content the holder of meaning. There is (etymologically at least) a limit implied, beyond which containment is impossible. We have all experienced this: too much content for the container obscures meaning.
For now, I hold that the main goal of “content” is making meaning possible.
According to our trusted dictionary, strategy is
n. The science and art of military command as applied to the overall planning and conduct of large-scale combat operations.
n. The art or skill of using stratagems in endeavors such as politics and business.
n. The use of artifice, finesse, or stratagem for the carrying out of any project.
n. an elaborate and systematic plan of action
Synonyms: generalship, tactics
“Strategy”, therefore, implies an approach both scientific and artful, elaborate but not artificial. It implies a certain artfulness even, in the positive sense. A “project” (whatever that might be) lays down very clear boundaries and restrictions — the space in which the strategist moves is limited — she cannot start from scratch, but has to use what is already there. The image of war and warfare is inherent to the word. From etymology:
Strategy. From Old French strategie, from Ancient Greek strategia, “office of general, command, generalship”, from strategos, “the leader or commander of an army, a general”, from stratos, “army” + ago, “I lead, I conduct”.
The commander-in-chief, the general, is the highest office in the military (in ancient Greece and today). Responsible for the carrying out of actions according to an elaborate plan that comprises many individual parts, the general uses stratagem (artifice to surprise an enemy) to successfully take over foreign ground. For this, naturally, he has to have an all-encompassing overview of capabilities, resources, and the terrain he is working with. It's not only what the strategists do, it's above all how they do it: according to an artful, meticulous plan. This might sound trivial. But it's the understanding of those trivialities that makes endeavors successful in the end.
General! We have to fight those damn Baccarudas!
It’s ‘Barracudas’, my Lord.
I can’t pronounce ‘baccaruda’.
It's easy: say ‘ba’.
‘Ba.’
Now ‘ra.’
Ra.
‘Cu.’
Cu.
‘Da.’
Da.
‘Now put it all together!’
Babararacucudada!
Much can go wrong with plotting a strategy. There's the capabilities and understanding of the strategist to consider, the material she has to work with that will pose difficulties, as well as the (sometimes limited) understanding of the client. The strategist’s responsibility, therefore, is to have a clear view of those constraints, the matter she works with (container of the content, its specifications with their constraints and freedom), the terrain she is working on, and the decision-makers she works with.
And yes, we have to guide our client through the whole process and take care of all matters, big or small, because the client can’t be bothered with what seems like “minor details” to her, but is a huge issue for us due to the fact that we think it is relevant for our users.
On a side note: It does not bring you into disrepute to ask for help. In fact, you will need to — generals always depend on input and help from other experts or informants. And clients.
To return to Frederick Turner, why is the brain hungry for content, anyway? Because it is already equipped with some very elaborate methods, so we can do the meaning-making ourselves, alright — if we get structured access to content. Let’s make sure nobody leaves hungry.
If we apply the implications of both “content” and “strategy” outlined above, one definition of “content strategy” could be: “The science and art of structuring meaningful communication.” That would make the content strategist the commander of the architecture of elements needed for creating meaning with communication. Does that sound in any way less vague?
I’ll spell it out again:
We try to establish meaning with our content.
Content is inherently dynamic.
It serves to satisfy the user.
Strategy has a scientific and artful approach.
It focuses on the how over the what.
A successful strategy imports an overview of all elements.
Content Strategy is the systematic, dynamic approach to creating meaning with structure.
You'll have to admit: The war is over. Those little Androids got the better of iOS, but new squabbles are already bubbling up. Operating Systems and software matter, but fighting about them is ridiculous.
“Linux? Hahaha. Can’t you afford a real operating system (Mac OS X) and professional software (Photoshop)?”
Fellow designers smirked and shook their heads a couple of years back. They were making jokes about me trying to create decent artwork and assets with open source software. My motivation of using FOSS software on a FOSS operating system didn't align with their definition of quality work. I don’t mind if the joke’s on me every once in a while, but being called unprofessional simply due to my choice of software was painful.
Fast-forward to today: if we consider its broader scale, Linux is now powering the most widespread mobile OS, has broken crowdfunding records and is gearing up to take over living room entertainment. Now, people yet unfamiliar with the OS ask questions out of curiosity rather than waiting for an opportunity to deliver the next punchline.
The same thing happened with Android, but on a much more dramatic scale. Having been the underdog for its first two years, hardly anybody in the professional industry cared about the OS. Apple’s iPhone was the cool thing to have and every business guy or designer was treating their Blackberries in for one. So, here too, users started fighting over acceptance and dominance of their favorite OS.
It was to become quite a long battle. Every iteration of Android lagged behind the elegance of its iOS counterpart. The implementation felt slow, most of the hardware was underpowered — the whole system seemed to follow no clear, recognizable direction for most people outside of Google. Every little step of the community was countered by cynical media coverage and pointing fingers by the self-proclaimed “professionals”.
With the introduction of Android 4.0, things changed. Suddenly, there was a unique look and feel to the OS, coupled with a forward-looking vision, and backed up by a solid set of hardware. Press and fans hailed the progress, and even infamous enemies became supporters of the green robot. In merely a year, the underdog became a major player in the industry — even the driving force depending on the numbers you compare.
While technology changes extremely fast, human emotions need a lot of time to adapt. One year the Android fans were bullied by the iOS crowd, desperately trying to fight back with hardly a valid argument. The next year they were the kings of the playground, but still as angry as ever. There will be no love lost between Android and iOS, but you'll have to admit: The war is over.
A look back in history helps to understand the connections, to account for what has happened, and what's to be learned for the future — nothing more, nothing less. While I have to admit I’m quite satisfied with believing in the underdog and my vision for FOSS turning out favorably, it’s time to smoke the peace pipe and move on. Because the next squabbles are bubbling up. I’m not even talking about Android against Windows Phone, nor iOS versus Ubuntu Touch.
Put on your armor: the arguments between native development and the web are heating up. And yes, sometimes we have to voice strong opinions and fight to even find out what’s going on.
Ready to pick sides? Me neither — for now.
Conversation must be preferred to anything. For one year, we’ve been pouring our thoughts over you, sharing our knowledge, nudging you, hopefully delighting you with useful stuff. Happy birthday, Squirrel Park!
“Conversation must be preferred to anything.”
So said my neighbor, the old man, sipping on a good single malt late at night. It sounded like nostalgia. As he continued, I realized that this was not a reference to a story past, but his way of participating in the society he grew up with.
Conversation was the intention when we built our very first weblog, one year ago to the day: We wanted to talk to people. We wanted to hear their opinions and ideas to support and grow our own. We wanted them to throw us off balance, so we’d have to get up and get better. We wanted to talk to the world, learn and mature. As a communication company, after all, we wanted to communicate.
While there wasn't a clear audience to target, we knew that we wanted to focus on readability, accessibility, and quality content. This was supposed to become the publication we would enjoy ourselves, regularly. Responsive optimization, hero graphics and quality typography were our technical swords, but wielding the feather was yet to be learned. And boy, was this hard to learn. Creating crisp icons, quality HTML or clean databases had been the tools we were versed with. Putting an idea on the screen with words alone turned out to be much harder than expected, taking in consideration that most of us aren’t native English-speakers.
Lucky us, we got some help. Lucas Rocha, Marie Schweiz and The Brothers Chapman have been amazing guests on Squirrel Park. They added their unique personality to the conversation and helped us to further define the rhythm of the format.
Certainly, the collection of Android tips, language explorations, and wallpapers sets seems like a chaotic variety of thoughts. In fact, we were tempted more than once to add a stronger thematic focus to the blog, to draw a key audience and build a solid marketing channel upon the output. Ultimately, we decided against it. We wanted to keep this conversation casual, experimental and human; after all, each writing represents a thought, an experience or a story of the people behind the company. This is what Opoloo initially set out to become: a small electric space within the industry that favors humanity over profit and growth.
Now if you're still reading, you might be one of the people who has been following us over the last 12 months and 62 blog posts. Thank you for this. We want to hear from you, we want to talk to you. We even want to see you write on this blog and participate in the society that is the web.
Cheers to the next year. Let’s keep the conversation going.
Though still a very young discipline, Content Strategy is profoundly changing the way we think about the web. These links provide a starting point and deep dive opportunity into the different fields Content Strategy influences alike.
This edition of the Hook centers around Content Strategy. Though still a very young discipline, it's nevertheless profoundly changing the way we think about the web. This is why I'm convinced that anyone working with the internet should have at least rudimentary insights into this field. The following links may therefore be equally relevant to designers, copywriters, developers, web psychologists, SEO people, and whoever else running around the digital space, shaping it with all their creative substance.
Unless you've been uniquely disciplined and passionate about keeping your product simple, you'll find that the vast majority of your users are using a tiny minority of your features. [...] The best engineering usually isn't showy or intense-looking. Given the same result, the simpler code is more valuable to your organization.
Believe it or not, many engineering decisions are also questions of solid content strategy established up front. It's a lesson to be learned that much of the overhead and analysis can be taken care of by practices of CS.
Just because someone articulates a problem well does not mean someone knows the solution. That’s when we’re susceptible to a false solution.
This article by Colleen Jones is two years old, but it hasn't lost a bit of relevance over time. It's a useful resource for Content Strategy pros, newbies, and curious people alike.
While we’re certainly churning out a lot of content, we’re not focusing on things like purpose, process, intended use, and the needs of our audience. Nor our workflow, systems, architecture, and processes.
A very astute analysis of what is wrong with the content we're constantly churning out and how it can be made better. You can learn a lot from the slides Colman provides, too.
Copywriting is granular. Content Strategy is holistic. Copywriting is the execution of ideas — content strategy is their organization and measurement.
Many content strategists are fortunate to work in small company that was smart enough to hire them. But that often means they have to tackle two (or more) related, but structurally opposed tasks. This article explains how you can manage to do great work in both CS and copywriting.
In content strategy, there is no playbook of generic strategies you can pick from to assemble a plan for your client or project. Instead, our discipline rests on a series of core principles about what makes content effective—what makes it work, what makes it good.
Apart from her very readable publication The Elements of Content Strategy, this article by Erin Kissane belongs to the essentials of useful CS resources. I find myself returning to this, time and time again.
Writing is a simple transaction between you and your readers. They have time and attention — which is more valuable than ever — and you have to provide content that is worthy of that time and attention.
Generating high-quality content is not easy. Publishing is a whole different thing. Reaching the right people is even harder. But if you see these aspects as being interconnected, you start with a different perspective. That's where Content Strategy comes in — from analysis, to audit, to architecture — to save your time and nerves.
If the visitor can’t rely on their previous experience, they’re not thinking about how innovative your site is. They’re just left wondering why things aren’t where it’s “supposed to be.”
There's a lot buzz about simplicity, in design, code, and thinking. This article breaks simplicity down to "scientific facts". It's a case for strategy also, specifically strategy for user identification and conversion, which is not the worst thing to consider. Keep in mind that a strategy aiming for simplicity might actually have to be very elaborate.
The dash introduces versatility to writing and takes it to another level — the level of consciousness, of elegance. It’s a very powerful tool if applied according to function.
The dash is a neglected species of punctuation marks — funnily so, not because it’s just an obsolete sign without purpose, and not because it’s not used. It can be spotted everywhere, in all kinds of writing. People use it, the dash fulfills a need. Rather, it’s neglected because only few people seem to care about using it correctly. By correctly, I mean: according to function.
A small line that simply varies in length? Why waste thoughts on sign that is typographically as challenging as the dot or the slash, that is about as sexy as the mole rat, and that makes your life — which is probably already filled with enough stuff you have to keep up with — even harder?
The dash is a simple line that can be applied very effectively. There is meaning in a dash. The dash introduces versatility to writing and takes it to another level — the level of consciousness, of elegance. It allows for variation in style, it changes the tone and voice of your writing. It’s a tool that can be very powerful if it’s applied for the right job. Yes, you can drive that nail into the wall with the back of a wrench, but you could also just use a hammer.
Along the same lines, you wouldn’t replace a period with a comma, a colon with an interpunct, a slash with a stroke or backslash.
Admittedly, I’m using the dash in an inflationary manner in this post — if only to make a point. But it’s much more about what in German is termed “fingerspitzengefühl”, the subtle touch that can make something go a long way.
No matter who you are, whether hitting a keyboard is what you make a living on or not: if you care about your writing, you should make sure to use the dash correctly.
Let’s make sure we get the terminology straight, so we know what we’re talking about.
(Yes, each of the following is usually represented in any well-designed font.)
(Yes, it matters on the web, too.)
Each font applies slightly different measurements and styles. The one above is Garamond.
The hyphen is often referred to as a dash, although that’s not entirely correct. The hyphen is used to connect words or prefixes and to sepa-rate words in justified text. That’s about it. So use it if you want to say “three-year-old banana”, “orang-utan”, “love-letter”, “soul-wrenching”, “arm-wrestler”, or in names (such as Mary-Anne Clumsberg-Finkelstein).
The HTML entity for the hyphen is
‒
Longer than the hyphen. Use it in mathematical equations. Not for anything else. Never.
The HTML entity for the minus sign is
−
Longer than the minus, about the size of an “n” in most fonts. Use it to indicate closed ranges of values, such as a time frame, temperature ranges, and from … to relationships or connections of any kind; especially if one part is to receive more weight than the other.
This dash lets you aim for accuracy and disambiguation. The classic example is from Strunk & White: The Chattanooga News and the Free Press merged, resulting in the Chattanooga News-Free Press. If you’re smiling, my congratulations: you have understood the use of the en-dash.
The en-dash is also the only appropriate sign for a bullet mark.
You may use the en-dash to introduce a segment — a thought — into your sentence by including a space before and after the en-dash. This is common practice in German or French, and the internet’s lingua franca — a watered-down version of English — seems to have generally adopted it. The die-hard dash-police officer would certainly disagree with this use in English. She wouldn’t be entirely incorrect: you may also use the em-dash, which might be more apt for your purpose.
The HTML entity for the en-dash is
–
Usually about twice the size of the n-dash, approximately the width of an “m” in most fonts.
Some writers use a double hyphen (- -) to indicate the purpose of an m-dash. That’s a relic from typewriter times. Are you writing on a typewriter? Do you want to pretend you’re writing on a typewriter? In that case, please go all the way and imitate that terribly obnoxious hammering noise, including the CA-CHING!!! sound at the end of each line. If not, don’t use double hyphens. Welcome to the 21st century. (Sometimes, however, you will not get around using double hyphens to indicate an em-dash, especially in some text editors and social media platforms. Most of them let you type an en-dash, though, which you should then space to create a similar semantic effect as the em-dash.)
The em-dash is one of the most beautiful punctuation marks. Not because of its visual concept, but because of the semantics it introduces. I’d like to refer you to some masters.
Apt use of the em-dash induces dynamics, rhythm, sprightliness, or reluctance and prudence. Its purposeful application implies a humbleness before the sign, before the craft of writing, and also indicates that you know about and care for what you are doing.
The em-dash can be used to insert a thought, or break of thought, a specification of a concept. In contrast to parentheses (also commonly used to set apart sections of sentences) the dash has the effect of highlighting the interpolation (which is meant to be read, rather than giving us cause to skip it as unimportant). If you feel that ending a sentence with a period and then introducing that thought with a new sentence would disconnect the thoughts, whereas a connection with comma would not separate them enough, use an em-dash.
The em-dash is also a versatile tool in creative (or let’s say “fictional”) writing, for example as an ellipsis or interrup—
You may also find it useful if you want to disjoint sentence parts, as in “So how’s the wife and — dammit Justin, how many times have I told you not to lick the dead rabbits! — anyway, what I meant to say …”
It’s fine to also space the em-dash (unless it’s particularly long and looks iffy with spaces).
The HTML entity for the em-dash is
—
Back-pedaling a bit, it needs to be stated that uses of the dashes, even the “official” or “authoritative” ones, tend to vary. But — as with most aspects of writing — consistence is key. Never, though, is it acceptable to just replace a dash with a hyphen or a minus, unless you aim to build a reputation as a bad stylist. Rather, experiment with them until you get a good feel for the dynamics. Awareness and a little practice will improve your writing skills.
You could be the em-dash of contemporary writers.
A link digest about business, work, capitalism, and revolutions. There’s some heavy stuff in here, so relax and get into reading mode.
This Hook is a little heavier on the reading side than previous editions, but we took great care to provide you with articles that should matter to you and make you think, regardless of your business background. They roughly circle around the themes of business, work, capitalism, and revolutions. An odd combination?
Make yourself comfortable and feed your brain.
by Henry Blodget / Business Insider
The law of capitalism which says “you should pay your employees as little as possible” is a myth that has been around since the industrialization. Henry Blodget dispels that myth, and very appealingly so, with rhetoric and real data.
by Casey Newton / The Verge
How even great companies and ideas can fail, and why this should still not discourage you: the story of everpix.
by David Graeber / Strike! Magazine
Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul.
Anthropologist David Graeber explores the current phenomenon of us working. Or, more precisely, working too much in jobs nearly completely devoid of value, meaning, and sense.
by John Lax
Teehan+Lax always had a slightly unusual philosophy; one that didn't exactly match traditional business structures. John Lax gives us some insights into a company that make some of the coolest products around today, with a different approach.
by Naomi Klein / New Statesman
There is still time to avoid catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which may be the best argument we have ever had for changing those rules.
Naomi Klein on the question of “Is Earth F*cked?”, and if it is — which seems to be “more or less” the case — what we can do about it.
by John H. Richardson / Esquire
A story about courage in an environment of repression and scaremongering.
A very personal look at the most expensive video game in history, inspecting some numbers and a lot of gameplay.
About a month ago, Rockstar Games released GTA V, which is actually the 15th part of the GTA series. It was titled “Best Selling Game”, “Most Expensive Game In Production” and so on. It also broke records like “Most Mini Games Within A Game”. But the most impressive part is something different.
GTA 5 had a total production value of about $137.000.000. Compared to the most expensive movie, “Avatar”, with a production value of $237.000.000, this may sound “cheap”. But Rockstar made about $800.000.000 only by the pre-orders in one day. Avatar, in comparison, made $233.000.000 during the first three days of the movie release—not even covering the production value. Rockstar gained almost 600% of GTA’s production cost. That is much more than Avatar made after a couple of days. It’s absolutely impressive how much money they made in such a short time.
I was pretty excited before the release, so I got myself a copy as soon as possible. The first reviews of others where amazing and gave me a deep look inside the gameplay. I took a short vacation from Opoloo, stocked up on fastfood and snacks and locked myself in for the full experience.
You start with a couple of easy missions to get familiar with the controls. After the first mission, it’s up to you to continue with completing the story or start exploring the world on your own. To get in touch with the whole game, I started to complete all the main missions before exploring other activities like skydiving, all kinds of races, rampages, driving around the world map, or playing mini games like golf, tennis and more.
In GTA 5, you can switch between 3 main characters. A ghetto thug boy, a rich family father in retirement, and a total redneck psychopath. This is the most epic combination ever! It’s so much fun because of the completely different personalities you get to play with, and it gets even funnier during heist missions where they come in conflict with one another. You need to switch between them to cover your buddies and make your way through.
The main story has 69 individual parts, some of them more extensive than others—the heist missions. You can even choose between different plans for the heists. The normal missions are usually shorter, but you can still choose different interactive solutions to pass them.
In heist missions, you gather with other characters and plan different ways to complete the heist. One of the characters is “the brain” of your team and he shows you ways to get the job done. After his short presentation you can choose between A, B and C and also select some additional accomplices, like a driver, a gun man, and hackers. This is amazing for the experience, because you can customize your team and really plot the mission.
The accomplices you can choose have different abilities. Depending on their skills, they also get more or less of the cake once the heist is finished.
If you don’t want to do missions, no problem. You can do a lot of things instead, like sports (skydiving, tennis, etc…), mini games, pissing off the police, or go to a strip club and get a private dance. There are so many opportunities to have fun, you wouldn’t believe it.
Some of my friends told me “The story is boring and pretty short”. 69 missions aren’t that long, but the missions themselves are amazing in their variety: Short, long, easy and difficult missions. Everyone will be satisfied. Completing the story took me at least 4 days of playing, which is totally okay. I’m not disappointed by the story like some of my friends. I can also see that I have a lot of days left to finish the rest of the game, so I can clearly not understand what my friends told me about the story and gameplay.
While finishing the main story, I also completed some side missions and came up with a game completion of 75% in about 4 days (8-12 hours playing each day).
After finishing the story, I spent some hours in the online mode. I was curious, because I had experienced the unofficial online mode for GTA San Andreas, which was already pretty good. But the online mode for GTA 5 has blown my mind, it’s a very good online game, where you can do whatever you want, together with your own friends.
First of all you need to create your character. This part is very interesting because you don’t only create your character, you also create 4 grandparents and 2 parents which automatically leads to your character. It’s not that easy to make your character look like you want, but it’s fun. First I had some trouble, but I came up with some redneck-looking grandparents, which led to the same appearance of the parents and led me to my character. He’s looking a little bit Southern, but is clothed and styled like a young business man. Once you’re done, you can join the online mode.
Starting with the initial missions to learn some things about the online mode. After that, you can do whatever you want. Kill other players, race them, or create your own crew with your friends to do the heists.
You can increase your rank with several methods, deposit or withdraw your money at ATMs, or put money on someone else head. In case other players are pissing you off and you’re not able to drive to your ATM, you can activate the passive mode in the settings (you’ll be charged $100 to activate it). In the passive mode, you’re not able to kill players or get killed.
I haven’t played that much online but it’s already a lot of fun and slightly different to the single player mode.
GTA 5 is absolutely worth giving a try. The story, graphics and online mode are awesome and full of fun. It’s an expensive game, but still worth buying it.
I’ve spent only one week’s time with the game before I started writing this article but I had a lot of fun and I’ll definitely go on playing. I hope you’ll have as much fun as I have with GTA 5.
Everyone who takes photos knows the difficulty: deciding about the perfect focus for an image and getting it just right before pulling the trigger of the camera.
Everyone who takes photos knows the difficulty: deciding about the perfect focus for an image and getting it just right before pulling the trigger of the camera.
Last week, I went to a photo store to have a medium format film processed. I spotted a poster of the new Lytro camera which promised to ultimately solve that focus problem.
Founded in 2006, the company Lytro Inc. developed a light field camera, which records the entire light field of an image instead of a 2D image. The first model was introduced in the USA in the summer of 2012. The light field measurement is made possible by a grid of multiple microlenses in front of the image sensor. Thus, with a software, subsequent editing is possible: you can refocus, change perspective, and add filters to the image.
Inspired by the poster, I looked for a salesperson to consult me personally. When I held the camera in my hand, the first thing that caught my eyes was the design. It’s very handy, lightweight, and available in many bright colors. The design is a bit unusual for a camera, but the body looks very beautiful nonetheless. At the rear of the camera, there is a very pixelated display that makes interacting with the small screen a delicate matter of precision. The cubical camera has only 2 buttons and 1 slider: the shutter button & slider for zooming sit at the top and the power button at the bottom.
At first, I was puzzled about how to hold the body correctly because of the unusual design. Holding it like a telescope seems to work best. First up, I tried out the zoom. The handling of the buttons is very easy, but finding a good image detail with the display, which has a really bad resolution, is troublesome. Moreover, it’s very small with a size of 1.5”. After a few shots, I noticed I needed to arrange the objects in the image. That is, the object must have a minimum distance to the background to get a good depth of focus to play with.
In addition to the optical 8x zoom the lens has an aperture of 2.0 throughout and a focal length of 43-340mm. This is important for shooting high-quality photos in in darker settings. Even when you have to zoom, no luminosity gets lost.
Videos are not possible with the first version of the camera, but are planned for the next one. The camera has a non-expandable memory of 16GB, so 700 shots are possible. The exported photos have a resolution of 540x540px and a size of about 120MB.
For me, the camera is just a simple and nifty gadget with easy focus control. The technology is definitely still expandable. I am very disappointed with the image quality, the display, and especially the price: in the U.S, you can get the camera for 399$, whereas the price starts at 480€ here in Germany. I think I’ll rather spend that money on a new lens for my actual camera Canon 60D.
If you’re still curious, go try out a living picture yourself.
This is a lesson in communication. A single word can take a country to war or bring instant peace. The right word at the right time and place can change everything.
Sitting at my desk, I put aside my digital pen and launch a basic text editor. The small window pops up and the blinking cursor draws my attention, urging me to answer its purpose. I obey. While listening to the rhythmic sound of the key strokes, letters appear in front of me. Dark pixels in a sea of white.
A less-than sign starts the journey to love & power.
<
Not clearly understanding what I’m doing here, I hit more keys, their plastic groaning under my fingers:
html
Slightly confused, I want to break off this endeavor. This is not satisfying at all. I look away, expecting to find clarity elsewhere. The desk with my laptop. Both placed with a geometric precision, their rectangles aligned. On the other side of the room, a door sits within the wall, sharing the same replicable pattern. The shapes of my surroundings are clean, geometric, recognizable — differentiation through perfect symmetry. That’s it. Shifting back to the tiny, white window, I can finalize the picture and infuse harmony and visual aesthetic. All I need is a
>
Leaning back, I try to get better view of my work. 6 black signs have populated my screen and thoughts.
<html>
I want to get up, grab coffee, move on, but the blinking cursor wants more. What are those letters without meaning, anyway? This is surreal. I want to connect more deeply with the signs, with the machine. I want to give her a face. By quickly typing
<header>
she starts to take shape. Hitting more and more keys, my mind attentively wanders down from her brow to her chin,
</header>
to her elegant shoulders.
<body>
I can’t help but smile, recognizing how beautiful she turns out.
</body>
</html>
Staring at her feet I flick back up. I shake my head in apology, trying to regain some trust. While I have shamelessly examined her from tip to toe, I hadn't even asked for her name.
<title>?</title>
She blinks, smiles back and replies
<title>Connect</title>
Connect? What a strange and interesting name. I want to know more. Careful now. She must feel very vulnerable. After all, she just revealed herself to me and the whole world.
I step closer to comfort her, listening to her voice, to her breath, to her heart. There, in the center of her body it beats with a constant rhythm. After a while, the rhythms seems to become a pattern. Slowly, from that pattern, words emerge.
<body>
<p>Hello world.</p>
</body>
“Hello world”? Seriously? This is so lame. It can’t be right. I created something that complex and beautiful and all I get in return is “Hello world”? How about my feelings, my dreams? Does she even care about me? Hoping this was just a misconception, I tilt my head slightly and listen, focused. More words appear.
This is your idea, your opinion, your message.
It slowly starts to sink in. This is a lesson in communication. A single word can take a country to war or bring instant peace. It can start a revolution or fix a crisis. It can be power for some and love for others. The right word at the right time and place can change everything. That’s what she’s been telling me all along. I could be nothing without her and everything with her. It’s up to me.
Grateful for the lesson learned, I step back. As her image slowly fades from my inner eye, everything becomes white. Black spots appear in this sea of white, forming characters, framed by the pixels of my screen. I hit save, close my laptop and leave you with a link:
After open-sourcing our LINES blog platform, we thought we’d share some geometric wallpapers with you that we created along the way.
Two weeks ago, we open sourced our blog platform LINES — the one you’re looking at right now — for everyone to try out, customize, and collaborate. We also went the extra mile and created a set of fallback hero images, for the extra lazy bloggers out there. Since those turned out to be pretty nice, we scaled those up a little for your desktop and device wallpaper pleasures.
Set them directly from the previews or download the ZIP below.
Enjoy.
01 "On Writing Interfaces Well"
by Jonas Downey / 37signals' Signal vs Noise
To all you great designers: you could be even greater if you made an effort to write. To write well, that is. This involves editing. True, it's hard and you need practice. But you'll never get the practice if you …
To all you great designers: you could be even greater if you made an effort to write. To write well, that is. This involves editing. True, it's hard and you need practice. But you'll never get the practice if you don't start.
A very nice responsive HTML5 template, made with the skelJS framework. What's even better: you can download it for free.
This is just ridiculous. (Ridiculously cool, that is. "The synthesis of real and digital space through projection-mapping onto moving surfaces." Yeah.)
It's said as an advice to every writer that the reader won't get if you're ironic (which is not true, I believe). With all our history of type and iconography, why is there still no symbol for irony? A fantastic book review on Brainpickings.
"The secret history of punctuation, spanning from antiquity to the digital age, from the asterisk to the @-symbol, chronicling the strange and scintillating lives of the characters, glyphs, and marks that populate the nooks and crannies of human communication. Though many of them are familiar staples of everyday life, the most fascinating story is one of punctuational peril — the failed quest for a symbol to denote irony."
A French studio with a pretty nifty, original website that includes huge HTML videos and sound as part of the experience. For all the freaky effects, it's a nice example of storytelling and letting your portfolio speak for itself.
I've always hated math. I still do. It's part of my horrible "I-don't-get-it-it's-the-devil-leavemealone" attitude. This guy made the first step to change my mind.
"As a mathematician, I can attest that my field is really about ideas above anything else. Ideas that inform our existence, that permeate our universe and beyond, that can surprise and enthrall."
“Ghosts in the Machine” with Maddy Myers, doing as little as possible with Lyza Danger Gardner, crafting words instead of pixels with Jeffrey Zeldman, parallax with Matthew Wagerfield, and Stormur with Sigur Ros.
A short story about gaming, and ultimately about life — about playing, killing & being killed, cheating, love, ambitions, passion, oblivion.
What we actually talk about when we talk about "the mobile web" and how to work with it. An appeal for simplicity and elegance, beautifully put by Lyza Danger Gardner.
Jeffrey Zeldman might be the only person in the world who could rightfully name himself something like "web guru". In this delightful interview about writing, content, copy, frames, and naturally the web, he does what he does best: communicate.
An open source project that shows you what parallax is up to these days, which is an awful lot. Get blown away.
Iceland is a place for stories, and Sigur Rós know how to tell them beautifully. For their song "Stormur", they made an ever-changing, interactive music video with instagram videos shot by their fans.
Our very own Max Boll made a jQuery plugin to easily preview your uploads — live — before they're actually uploaded to the server. Open source, of course.
As a musician or a band, the thing you're probably most concerned about is your music. You should be. Write great tracks, find a distinguished sound, file and refine it, record the songs. Awesome. Now how to get people to listen to them?
Of course, you play live. But how to get people to come …
As a musician or a band, the thing you're probably most concerned about is your music. You should be. Write great tracks, find a distinguished sound, file and refine it, record the songs. Awesome. Now how to get people to listen to them?
Of course, you play live. But how to get people to come to your concerts?
OK, you got it. You have to do some kind of marketing if you want to get out of your basement. If you think the music industry with its traditional record labels stinks, there are platforms you can work with: Bandcamp, Myspace, Youtube, Facebook, and on. This kind of dispersion has never been easier.
To keep track of, maintain, update, and curate all these platforms, along with maybe a nice website* where you post everything all over again is cumbersome. Chances are you won't find time to do all that properly.
And just because you have some kind of output, that doesn't mean you're doing marketing yet. It just means you throw something out there, hoping it magically finds an audience itself.
Part of the problem is that the way we consume music has changed. A couple of years ago, music was much more of a distinguishing factor for personalities. It was an identifier. You had to actively seek out the music that you were interested in, be it hardcore punk, tin pan alley blues, underground techno, or socio-critical hip hop. Depending on how eclectic or unusual your taste was, you had to go great lengths to keep up-to-date in your scene. That was part of the fun, part of the specific knowledge and insight, part of what made you the person you were. You spent time doing research, and once you paid 15 quid for an album, you enjoyed it with a sublime kind of appreciation. A while ago, you could still make a point in saying: "I like psychedelic rock."
But that has changed. By way of better, more efficient channels, we have almost all the music in the world at our fingertips. One result of this is that we listen to a much broader range of music. It has become easier to filter for the good stuff by being interconnected, but it has also become harder to really find the raw diamonds, the hidden treasures, the stuff that really matters to you, because we're flooded with consumer goods. There's too much to read, too much to play, too much to watch, and too much to listen to. So how can you make your music stand out and make sure it reaches your audience?
I'm aware that there is no easy or single true answer for this question. But one answer would be: tell stories. Enough of social media already! They do a couple of things really well, like sharing the stuff you produce and tracking popularity, but they do not engage your audience emotionally. They do not make you stick out of the bunch. They do not tell your audience why they should care. A good story does that. And if there's no story behind your music, it's probably not worth a damn.
True, there are also infinite ways of telling a story, and you have to find the one that fits you best. Consider. Think about what your music means to you and how you feel about it. Then, write it down. Get it out of your head. Hell, once you have a story, share it with social media. But tell a story.
Of course, this implies an investment if some sort. Anything that is aimed at creating revenue does. But there are people to help you. And you don't necessarily need a big budget.
Just think of Robert Johnson who created his reputation by claiming that he sold his soul to the devil to become the best blues guitar player of his time.
For inspiration, have a look at these bands telling very different stories:
Sigur Ros
Jack White with Third Man Records
Arcade Fire
Daft Punk
Or, even better, ask us about our new project, "Novella".
Think about why you're playing music. You want to move people, isn't that it? A good story does exactly that. So find out what your story is, find a medium to tell it in, if possible engage your fans, and tell it. Create the emotional identifier that has gone missing with the evolution of the music business.
The last step, the spreading of the story, is almost a piece of cake.
A bomb in a garden, a minimal editor, doing things the long hard stupid way, writing better, failing, and Neapolitan ice-cream.
The 2nd issue of our Hook Series.
Last week, we introduced the great Practical Typography book to you. The author, Matthew Butterick, gave a talk at TYPO Conference this year about what is wrong with the web, its standards, why we still cherish hideous design, and what we can do about it. He voices strong opinions and we'd love to hear yours.
If you read only one thing this weekend, make it this one.
If you've tried Medium, the thing you're likely to find most awesome about it is the text editor. Tim Holman has created a "minimal editor for the modern man". It's an open source project. Check out his other great projects, too. It's ridiculous what this guy has created.
"Whenever we make things [...] there's a value in them, that lives completely outside of commerce."
The author of The Shape of Design gives an inspiring talk on how we make things and the side benefits of this process that are sometimes hard to see, but that make it valuable. He endorses a new culture of giving that is right down our alley.
Writing is the most efficient way to express your thoughts. It's as simple as that. In order to do that well, you have to practice. There's no way around it. Colin Nissan gives you some good advice on how to get there.
A whole cult of an advocation of failure has evolved, going hand in hand with a whole heap of pretensions and complacency. Hannah Bloch turns the dial back and reduces failure to something much more essential and existential.
He picks a subject and leaves no stone unturned. This guy is terribly harsh in his judgement, but also dead funny.
Look at your blog. Now back at this. Now back at your blog. Now back at this. Sadly, your blog isn't this blog. But if you stopped using your theme-crazy, feature-overblown framework, you could well use this blog, because we just set it free.
See this beautiful blog right before you? Notice the appealing header graphics, the intricate headline styles, the typography that makes reading such a pleasure? If you find this pretty nice, you haven't yet seen the clear, consistent frontend with the beautifully slim editor that lets you just splurge your ideas.
Look at your blog. Now back at this. Now back at your blog. Now back at this. Sadly, your blog isn't this blog. But if you stopped using your theme-crazy, feature-overblown framework, you could well use this blog, because we just set it free.
Enough already with self-adulation.
As promised, we made an open source project out of it. We call this baby: LINES.
It's a blog platform that we offer especially for you awesome Ruby on Rails developers (and other tech-savvies).
We wanted to give you a solid editing system and an effective, responsive viewer, so you can share your knowledge with the world, saving you the hassle of having to program it from scratch or making a rotten compromise with existing blog platforms. Enjoy freedom and control with full OSS access.
And yes, the code is superclean, so you'll have no trouble adapting it to your needs and preferences.
If that sounds like it was made just for you — it was. Head over to LINES and take a look.
One more thing: this platform is still young and although we gave it a lot of brains and effort, a little love won't hurt it. So we heartily invite you to fork it on GitHub and develop it further.
Awesome typography, sidebar transitions, Editorially, and toilet paper orientation.
Introducing: The Hook Series. This little magazine will from now on provide you with glorious material from the interwebs, on a rolling basis. We'll regularly publish what we think are useful, interesting, or simply beautiful resources that we deliberately sought or stumbled upon in the course of the week. Not simply links, but stuff you may get hooked on, that you'll enjoy for the time being or use as a starting point to greater endeavors.
This is perhaps the most important resource for learning the essentials of typography for the web and print. In his lucid, comprehensive, down-to-earth style Matthew Butterick explains why typography is important, what it can and should do, and how to effectively work with it. A great guide for beginners, a reference for experts.
iA's blog posts appear rather infrequently, but when they do, there's a substance about them that seeks its equal. In this one, Oliver Reichenstein dissects Yahoo's logo rebranding process, and therefore, necessarily, about logo design, brands, and brand management. And he is diabolically astute.
Almost 40 years of logo evolution compressed in a somewhat lengthy, but thoroughly researched post with lots and lots of illustrative material.
The sidebar is enjoying considerable popularity, not only in apps, but also in web design. We're not advocating inflationary implementation (see this post), but if a sidebar makes sense, refer to this great CSS library.
A couple of weeks ago, I got an invitation for Editorially, a responsive platform for writing and collaboration. After a lot of playing around and testing, I must say that it's pretty damn good. Anyone who has anything to do with writing (which is practically everyone) will savor this tool.
Yes, I'm quite serious. A while ago, I met one of the more prominent Wikipedia organizers, Alex Stinson, and asked him what his favorite article was. Apart from this being very entertaining, it also shows once again how important conducting thorough research is: for your products, your customers, for marketing, and on. Because some things just aren't that obvious.
An update to our beloved Android Developer Icons, now with new icons, coming in more colors, sizes, and, as always, pixel perfection.
More than three years ago we created the first Androidicons set out of curiosity: 20 free icons for an undefined, extremely new, mobile operating system. No further intentions.
Since then, Android has grown beyond anybody’s wildest imaginations, and so has our small icon set. Thanks to those little pixel graphics, we’ve worked with amazing developers and companies from all continents, traveled to all kinds of meet-ups, and spoke at events with global impact.
It’s pretty hard to say “Thank You” for all this, but let us try anyway: We just updated the set to version 2.5, including xxhdpi resources, 50 new icons and lots and lots of polish and refinements. This update is free to anybody who supported the set previously. You should receive an email with your new download link in the next couple of days.
So let us try to give you a better idea what’s new. First and probably most important to you cutting edge devs is the addition of xxhdpi assets. Yep: big, glorious, colorful icons for HTC One, Nexus 7 2013 and all the other pixel density escalating devices.
We compiled the previous updates into one big set and added many new ones, raising the icon-count to 250. With 5 sizes and 14 colors, the whole set is now contains whopping 17,500 individual graphics. There are new icons for transportation, typography, social media, and many more — including the classic floppy save icon, which has been requested way too often for my taste.
Android’s visual style has slowly but steadily been improved by Google. The very harsh lines have become much smoother over time, while keeping the clarity and simplicity. We tried to reflect this in the update as well. The new weather icons are a good example of how Android’s 4.x style has evolved.
We touched up every icon, some more than others. They became crisper, got restyled, scaled and balanced to be more in line with the whole set. Although this was an enormous endeavor for all the 250 icons, we still feel there’s room for improvements. Feel free to let us know if you stumble across an icon that feels a little off, too small, too big or generally out of place.
Despite vigorous pixel-pushing, the previous set still contained a few inconsistencies. This was especially visible in the different arrow heads used on various icon combinations. Some were wider, some were less pointy, some were shaped differently. This is obviously not the best statement to make in a visual language, so we took the opportunity to correct as many as possible.
So, there you go: Thanks a lot for sticking with us and supporting Android and our icon set. If you purchased it in the past, you’ll receive a new download link soon. If you don’t own it yet, there are 250 little reasons to get it now. Including a glorious mustache.
Most people are fatally unaware of the great potential the humanities have on store for excellent work in all kinds of fields, especially technology.
Prior to my working at Opoloo, I had always resisted technology as best as I could. This has to do (I think) with my kind of upbringing: in my earliest years on the farm of my grandparents who necessarily cherished manual labor, later with a lot of books. I found technology terrifying, but mostly because it was something unfathomable for me. I just didn’t get it and never made an effort to lower the barriers, partly because I’ve always preferred letters to numbers, partly because it was just too abstract for me to grasp. In confrontation with something, feeling like an idiot usually does not foster your attachment to it. True, although I was a late adopter of the internet, I grew to love its merits, but its real possibilities eluded me.
After a thorough education in literature, culture, philosophy, and critical theory I knew I didn’t want to become a high-school teacher. I had the opportunity to start my dissertation and academic work was what I was after. But knowledge, as far as I’ve been able to find out, has less than zero calories and you can’t spread it on your bread.
I needed money. Soon I'd be so broke I wouldn't even have been able to pay attention. I knew I was good with words and organizing things, although I had no idea what that meant.
When Opoloo and I started talking I had a Macbook, but only because I needed something to write and organize my thoughts with (and because a friend of mine worked with Apple). I also had a Samsung phone. One that you could flip open. One that could not do anything but make calls and send messages. Without a camera. Naturally, without apps or web access. My brother calls them mildew phones, because they can’t do anything but go moldy.
After talking back and forth, the guys at Opoloo asked me: “So what do you think about working with us?” I was on my way into town, clean-shaven for the first time in years to have pictures taken (two things I perfectly abhor), in order to apply for jobs. “I’m in”, I said. “You’re not just going to be a writer, though,” they enlightened me, “because that’s way too lame. You’ll be our content strategist. Read this.” They sent me a copy of Erin Kissane’s The Elements of Content Strategy, digitally. I knew PDF, but a digital book? ‘You must be out of your minds’, I thought. I printed it and then devoured it in two sessions. This was what I wanted to do. Finally a perspective, something that made sense, a beginning.
It’s been a love story ever since.
Why am I telling you this? I have a feeling that the humanities deserve a much broader recognition, far from their own core realm. The humanities are perhaps the most encompassing field of study and explicitly focus on the organization and access of a vast spectrum of knowledge about people (which is why they’re called humanities: they analyze and try to find out “what it means to be a fuckin’ human being”). Which is exactly what the web and the technology around it is about: humans, interaction, communication. Any business working in this area can profit from the humanities guys.
People with a background in the humanities have a very different and educated eye for a huge spectrum of businesses. But most of them just don’t know it. Fortunately, at least some large businesses and a few small ones have understood the merits of adding these people to their teams, but we need more of them. And we have to make them understand that they can do awesome, fulfilling work — seemingly far from what they studied, but really close to their actual set of skills.
So don’t be afraid of falling.
McLuhans’ most famous dictum might be more important than ever. We’re not living in a world of books, newspapers, radio, and television anymore. The web is mashing together every human output and content in new forms and ways.
A wise man once said "The medium is the message". Ok, ok, we all know Marshall McLuhan and his famous phrase and I won't bore you any further. Still, that sentence might be more important than ever. We're not living in a world of books, newspapers, radio, and television anymore. The web is mashing together every human output and content in new forms and ways — comprehensively so, but also crazy and chaotic at times.
Working in the field of communications, we are regularly exposed to more than one type of medium we have to channel and deal with. Knowing when to use a particular medium, though, is key to getting your information across. One might be safe just by looking at trends and compare what others are doing. But being aware of the strengths and weaknesses of each medium could make the difference between a good strategy for marketing, advertising or information and a great one. Let's have a quick look.
There's a reason that plain copy is the fundamental pillar of our society and one of the primary ways we have been communicating for centuries: it's very flexible and probably as precise as it gets. With text, we can get almost any information across, even long after an event happened, and then fix it forever. Reading and writing are relatively easy to learn — depending on the source, more that 80% of the world's population can at least handle one language in written words.
On the other hand, communicating with pure text is quite slow. Although our brain is a sophisticated text processor, the consumer has to scan for individual letters, forming words, forming sentences and finally extracting the core information from a chunk of copy. This is a very heavy process for our cognitive capabilities, so be aware that you will sacrifice speed for clarity.
Paintings, photos, icons, or any form of visual communication is fast. Really fast. Our eyes are one of the most evolved sensors and can process a great amount of visual information in milliseconds: dark, gleeful, bright, sinister, colorful, chaotic, or clean and simple ...
Also, our process of remembering improves dramatically by connecting a particular memory to a picture. Maybe a face, maybe a location, maybe a pattern. As soon as this particular visual element appears, you're immediately able to draw connections.
The downside of visual communication is your brain's capability and tendency to interpret things based on your experiences and expectations. An unfamiliar icon can be misleading. A color transports one connotation in a certain culture and a completely different one in another. A picture of a victorious fighter transports joy for a fan and disappointment for the opponent's followers.
If you're striving for fast attention, for quick access or motivating continuation, your first choice of medium should definitely be an image. But always be aware of a certain lack of clarity due to the nature of human interpretation. If you're not perfectly certain that your image gets its message across on its own, you should consider adding in some text.
Auditive signals are an essential part of human perception. Sound helps us determine a sense of location, physical awareness and completion. The clicking sound of a key pushed on your computer's keyboard combined with the pressure at our fingertip is just enough to perfectly understand that you are really writing.
There's also an emotional component to music that we can't ignore. More than any other medium, music and sound helps us to relate to something on a deeper level. I bet all your favorite movies feature a very strong soundtrack — this might not be a coincidence.
While you might not be able to use audio signals to communicate fast and clear, the best usecases might be the ones with a supporting role. This could be a short sound when you get a new message or an error dialog, a calm aural loop in an art gallery, or the pumping metal soundtrack while you're blasting aliens in the latest space shooter.
There are certainly other, more complex types of media to be explored, but most are based on or combine these three core forms. Once you clearly understand the strengths and weaknesses of each, you will be able to use different mediums much more efficiently, culminating in a perfect combination of all three. You will be able to communicate faster and clearer, build up stronger connections and deeper attachments for you, your clients, and your user base.
Now let's see what happens if we add in video, haptic perception, scent, interaction, gorillas, flying cars, the Milky Way, quantum physics, ...
Do you remember when teams creating products were led by developers and developers only? Those guys were able to work with code and databases – things nobody else understood – so they must have been the right guys to get the job done.
Do you remember when teams creating products were led by developers and developers only? Those guys were able to work with code and databases – things nobody else understood – so they must have been the right guys to get the job done. Developers were in charge since they seemed to understand the technology. Later it turned out that those technology driven products seemed to be hardly usable by anybody else than those developers. Bummer.
Then the designers emerged and claimed control. They were able to make beautiful things people liked, so they certainly were the right guys for the job. Interface designers, interaction architects and user experience creators with crazy acronyms worked out beautiful products everybody enjoyed using and playing around with all day. But after a while people got tired of all these overly beautified applications, that - while looking nice - didn't seem to do anything else properly.
Eventually, the marketing guys entered the stage. They were OK with mediocre software and rubbish design, as long as there was an audience they could sell the product to. Social strategies and complex focus groups were created, numbers crunched and at the end of they day it was all about the money, where the marketing guys scored. But this didn't last forever as well.
Turns out that a good product had to reach people, appeal to them, and be usable and stable as well.
Meet the hybrids. Developers with a sense for user experience. Designers, able to code up their own layouts. Marketing guys with great visual skills. Now put two or more of these together, flavor everything with a little character and emotion, and if you're very lucky, eventually they might be able to create a product, people really, really care about.
Here's a joke: A developer, a designer and a marketing guy are sitting at a table. A squirrel walks by and says ...
Technology should serve a very definite end. It should operate as a vehicle for the creation of beautiful, useful products — for communicating, touching people’s lives with meaningful content.
In the beginning, there was technology. And Opoloo is a hardcore technology company, since there's technology involved in every single thing we do: from code, to design, to photography and visual work, to strategy and architecture.
Technology, however, we don't use for its own sake anymore. That would mean simply running around in a circle, feeding a machine with the same fuel it generates. And to what end? There's no use in technology only serving itself, just like large parts of science and the humanities seem to create and having to justify a demand that is artificially created.
Technology should, however, serve a very definite end. It should operate as a vehicle for the creation of beautiful, useful products — for communicating, touching people's lives with meaningful content. This is the reason that publishing is now one of the focal points of Opoloo, it's why we have a blog, why we use social media, why we try to create visions and products for our clients, not just websites.
At first sight, our publishing of little stories on Medium does not have anything to do with our work, with our focus group, our clients, our community, our company, or our creation of products. Then why do we do it?
It's the human side of technology that we're after, and this has everything to do with us as a company. In everything we do, we noticed, is a story, however small or insignificant. They are the core of memorable, meaningful communication that we try to get across.
This is hard. Writing, communicating, thinking and telling stories is a huge effort, even for the few real masters of this craft. After all, we're still learning, still probing, jabbing and stabbing at the heart of the story, told in different ways, in new media. We're practicing.
Opoloo is fundamentally about people. Medium is fundamentally about telling stories (something our blog could, but does not aim to do). So both — people and stories — come together quite nicely on Medium, which to us is a system of knowledge shared by individuals, a most adequate platform for sharing stories, a new way of being social. This is why we share our non-technological creative output there and tell more personal stories.
Summer’s almost over, but we’ll never say good-bye.
After 8 months of darkness and sudden spring in July, summer finally arrived here in Germany. I was on vacation at my parents' house for a few days, so I got my camera and snapped a few great summer photos that make for nice wallpapers. The photos were shot with my Canon macro lens, with 60mm focal length and light intensity 2.8. I really love this lens because of the autofocus speed and sharpness. The closest focusing distance is 2cm. That works perfectly for me.
I've retouched the photos in Photoshop to get a retro look. I'm already a friend of analog photography anyway and it fits the theme of summer, so I decided in favor of this processing.
Feel free to download & share these 6 retro summer wallpapers.
I don’t believe you that your product is good, just because the model presenting it is languishing about on a paradise island, next to a diamond-pooping white tiger.
I'm a big fan of 37signals, in many ways. They build great products, push serious web applications forward and have been managing a solid blog for many years now. Most of the time they simply get it right.
Just recently, a new article on Signal vs. Noise emerged, entitled “Designing App Store screenshots”. Contrary to most publications by 37signals, this article caused quite some negative reactions — see the comments. Certainly, some readers felt betrayed by the misstep of such a successful company, but I think we must be aware of the bigger issue at work here. Let me try to explain.
Most of us remember the internet of the early days. We had been used to printed media, its metaphors and patterns for decades, when this new, exciting medium arrived. So we tried to apply as much as possible of the print world, simply because we were comfortable with that. Basically, we used websites like magazine pages, with huge billboards and ads everywhere.
It took us many years to understand that there is more to the web than glossy pictures and big claims. More or less suddenly, there was a certain culture and richness of information that was not pushed through a keyhole but rather connected organically. Since there were infinite sources for about everything, people started to care about the real thing — true representation, no bullshit information, a credible message — instead of a superficial advertisement, simplified for a simple-minded audience. I don’t believe you that your product is good, just because the model presenting it is languishing about on a paradise island, next to a diamond-pooping white tiger.
37signals understood that very early. Even when they were still a basic web design company, they cared for clarity of information, simplicity and honesty of whatever they communicated — ideals of the modern web. This lead many to follow them, to use their software, to read their books and even adapt many business decisions — Opoloo certainly did.
Now with that in mind, think about the issue of how to present your app or software to the audience you fostered and influenced over the years. This audience does not care for another marketing promise, an altered, beautified screenshot, a glossy shot of the device they probably already keep in their pocket. This audience cares for the real thing. They want to know exactly how the app looks on their screen before they install it. Did the developer care for pixel perfection? Are the buttons big enough and positioned adequately?
37signals: You helped tremendously in creating a culture of intelligent, caring users and professionals on the web. Just keep in mind that your audience might also be part of this audience next time you tell the them what to do and how to do it.
In November 2012 Niantic Labs at Google launched their second project: Ingress. Their first project was named Field Trip, an augmented reality app that displays information of buildings and sights while you’re looking at them.
In November 2012 Niantic Labs@Google launched their second project: Ingress. Their first project was named Field Trip, an augmented reality app that displays information of buildings and sights while you’re looking at them.
I recently switched from my old iPhone 3Gs to a new Google Nexus 4. There were several reasons for this decision.
As you can infer, Ingress is currently only available for Android phones. Let’s have a look at the app and break it down into its component parts.
Ingress is a free app for Android phones (iPhone support is not mentioned for the near future). The only thing you need to do before you download the app: request an access code. You can get one of these codes at the official Ingress website.
As soon as you get your code via your googlemail, you can sign up within the app. The registration process is pretty easy. As long as you use the same googlemail address that you used to get your code, you don’t need to enter the code anymore. You only need to choose your username called “Agent ID”.
After signing up, you’re ready to hack the reality around you. Almost. A female voice starts talking to you right in the beginning. She will guide you through 10 training missions, which are good for new agents. You don’t need to walk much to solve those 10 missions, because you can create new portals with only one tap on the scanner map. I suggest completing these missions — otherwise you won’t know anything and this could be a reason for instantly quitting the game and say it’s awful. So do the missions. Do them twice or as often as you need to understand what you are doing.
A quick overview of what you’ll learn during the ten missions:
Be sure you know this stuff before going any further. Do you? Great! But you don't know the connections between anything. I will tell you below.
10 missions are completed now. We have some insights now, but the whole game seems still strange. You can see the real scanner map now, with all the XM, portals, links, and control fields. To get a grip on all the functions, you should go outside and walk through your city. Collect some XM and hack portals. You need XM for any action you’re performing. For hacking a portal you’ll get some AP (action points), items (you can see a list of them when you click on “OPS” at the upper right corner), and you’ll lose some XM.
Portals of your own faction will drop more items and they won’t attack you. Collect as many items as you can before doing something else. Maybe you can meet other players in the city who can give you some items.
Don’t worry, that’s not the whole game. You’ll explore more and it will be more fun, I promise. Let’s check out each part of the game.
Exotic Matter is the one and only resource in Ingress. You need it for almost everything. You can find XM while walking through your city. It shows up at random places. You can be sure to find some near portals, since they generate XM inside their range. The maximum you’re able to collect increases whenever you level up.
To submit a new portal, you need to find a cool spot outside. Now aim at the spot on the scanner map, click and hold. When a small navigation pops up, select “New Portal”. Now you need to take a picture of the new portal and enter some more information. That’s it. The review time is about 2-4 weeks. You’ll be informed via email when it is accepted.
To deploy, you need to find a grey portal on the scanner map. Be sure to have some resonators at the same level or below. Now walk towards the grey portal and stop if the portal is at the maximum range (the blue circle around you). Why? I’ll tell you in a second. If the portal is at the maximum of your range, you can click on it and select “Deploy”. Hit this button 8 times to insert your resonators. This part is a little tricky for agents L2+. For example: As an L8 agent, I’m able to insert any kind of resonators (L1-L8). But I’m only able to insert one L8 resonator per portal. So it needs 8 agents to create an L8-Portal. Here’s a little help for you:
So why stand at the maximum range to the portal while deploying? If you stand near the portal (or exactly in the same spot), the resonators will appear directly beside the portal. This would make it very easy for the enemy to destroy it. Try to stay as far away as possible, so the resonators will appear at the maximum distance to the portal.
Hacking a portal is easy and there’s nothing special you need to know. As long as there are no mods installed at the portal, you can hack one portal 4 times each day, waiting 5 minutes between each hack (cool down). You’ll gain experience and items for hacking a portal:
Portals of your own faction will drop more items. The higher the portal level, the more dropped items you receive, according to your current level.
Enemy portals can attack you while hacking (this will increase the XM-loss for hacking).
To link two or more portals, you need “Portal Keys”. You can get them for hacking a portal. Here’s an example: I want to link from Portal A to Portal B. In this case I need the portal key of Portal B. At Portal A I click on “Link” and choose Portal B on the scanner map. Voilá: the portals are linked (you’ll get some AP for this).
There are some important guidelines for linking:
Attacking enemy portals requires items called “XMP Burster”. You should look for a weak enemy portal and be sure you got enough XMPs (about 50+). Before you run into the portal and scream “DIE!” you should check some things.
To smash a portal shield, you should stand far away (not too far for your XMPs) and start shooting XMPs (tap and hold scanner map and select “Fire XMP”). In this case your XMPs will reach the portal and destroy the shield while you’re too far away for the portal to attack you and increase your XM loss. Good eh? After the dome around the portal has disappeared, you can go closer to the resonators and shoot, shoot, shoot. For each destroyed resonator you’ll get a bunch of AP, the most for the last one. After you destroyed all the resonators, the portal will be neutral (grey). You’re now ready to deploy it (don’t forget to deploy at the maximum range!).
If your portals are hit, you can recharge them. This requires XM. There’s also a way to remotely recharge portals. All you need is the portal key.
You can also upgrade portals to higher resonators, levels, or modifications if you tap on the “Upgrade” button on each portal. On this page you can also recharge single resonators.
The global control is calculated in “Mind Units”. To get MUs you need to create “Control Fields”. To create Control Fields you need to link at least 3 portals. Control Fields will provide a huge amount of AP! You should try to create huge control fields or, even better, create many small fields. You can lock in some enemy portals inside of your control field. In this case the enemy can’t link anywhere from this portal, so they need to destroy one or all of the links of your control field.
Ingress is nothing you’ll join in 5 minutes and have a lot of fun. It needs a couple of days to get inside and enjoy the game. If you’re interested in new technology and geo-based games with “augmented reality” you should give it a try. For those who love great stories behind the game, you can follow Niantic Labs on YouTube or watch the Ingress Reports dropped from portals as some kind of web series after hacking them.
Excuse me please, the city is calling.
Even when designing for the screen, we still adopt many metaphors and patterns of print design: from newspapers, magazines, leaflets, novels, and on. We do this for good reasons, mostly. After all, the ecosystem of print has been around for hundreds of years, heavily researched and monetized.
This article was originally published on The Layout, a magazine about the craft of UI engineering by Lucas Rocha.
Even when designing for the screen, we still adopt many metaphors and patterns of print design: from newspapers, magazines, leaflets, novels, and on. We do this for good reasons, mostly. After all, the ecosystem of print has been around for hundreds of years, heavily researched and monetized.
Fair enough: there are many well-established and thought-out conventions that can perfectly be carried over to the pixel screen—like margins, fonts, pictures, and words. But we need to be aware of two very important approaches that represent pivotal differences of how we consume screen media and interact with them, as opposed to how we engage with print.
Once printed, a monthly magazine will be the same magazine, with the same content and the same layout until its disintegration, brought about either by natural decay or by the teeth of your dog.
Once you reveal something on a screen, though, it will change. Content might be improved, a database entry updated, or the list of user comments continues to grow. Eventually, the user agent or the design will change fundamentally, and a couple of months in, there might not be much left of the original publication.
Most books (yes, those with actual pages made of trees) are progressively read from the first to the last page. It’s exactly the linear process the author designed it to be. Some people might cheat by skipping a few sections or having a quick peek at the end, they might fall asleep and not know where to pick up again. But, this exception left aside, all content is placed on fixed pages, one hugging the other, in an unchanging order.
The complete opposite is true for web and software design. Your product might have a clear starting point and maybe it even has a clear ending. But there’s no telling what happens in between: how users interact with and consume your content, how they operate the functions, and where they hop in and out of the experience after adding and deleting content, after changing quality or mathematical values.
With those two principles in mind, we can clearly see that screen and interface design should never be focused on just one fixed state. A better way to deal with possible complexity is to approach visual screen design by considering a screen or part of a screen in interaction with its moving and scaling elements.
A very common problem for designers of the classical school is a strong focus on individual elements. Sure, we care about the details. They make the difference in the end. But what is a perfectly styled button with a beautiful gradient, gentle highlights, and just the right drop shadow opacity worth, if you figure out you don’t need it in the end? Better spend time refining the general layout after an orientation change, or improve the horrible error message that blocks all relevant information.
The baseline is: there’s hardly a use case within screen design where we have complete control over everything that happens behind the glass. We need to embrace those constraints and create user interfaces with change and variation in mind, always conscious of the big picture. There’s a context to every image, every headline, every icon, and every padding. That context is a combination of your user, her screen, and your interface.
Meet the new member of our Opoloo family and learn something about magic cubes.
I’m a new team member of Opoloo and very happy about it. So I guess I should introduce myself: my name is Max.
The most important thing about me is probably my hobby. No, it’s more like my whole life. Kinda. It’s called “Speedcubing”. This is what it is.
Speedcubing is all about solving the famous toy of the 80s, the Rubik’s Cube, as fast as you can. But this is not the only reason for me to be a speedcuber. The architecture of the cubes improves month after month. It’s crazy how small improvements can make you a lot faster. “A lot” means something about 0.5 seconds in my time range. You don’t think that this is a lot? Well, the current world record of solving the original 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube is 5.55 seconds, by Mats Valk. You need a time below 8 seconds to join the Top 100 world ranking!
The whole speedcubing community, competitions, and organisations are volunteer work. There’s no money in it for anyone. The official World Cube Association (WCA) was founded years ago and they wrote a huge document of rules which is continuously updated. I especially like the part of the rules that concerns the cube itself.
You can’t participate with any cube. You may use your own cubes but they need to fulfill many guidelines. For example: a clear and complete color scheme must be provided and the stickers must be in a good condition. Some cubes have a logo-sticker on it. It’s not allowed to have more than one of these logo-stickers on the cube. Also:
"Stickerless" cubes, and other cubes whose face colours are visible inside the cube, are not permitted.
Puzzles must be clean, and must not have any markings, elevated pieces, damage, or other differences that distinguish any piece from a similar piece.
It’s easy to work without constraints, but being limited in certain ways is what makes you creative and efficient.
I’m interested in technology, especially web technology. My work and my hobby fit together perfectly, I guess.
So this is how I spend most of my spare time. Scramble, solve, scramble, solve. I drive a lot through Europe to participate in competitions. At the end of July, I will be cubing at the world championship of speedcubing in Las Vegas.
This hobby should describe best how I roll. For those who don’t like to read, here’s me in icons:
Our little blog is enjoying considerable popularity. We're thinking about open sourcing it, just so everyone can enjoy simple, beautiful publishing.
Our little blog is enjoying considerable popularity. We're thinking about open sourcing it, just so everyone can enjoy simple, beautiful publishing. Here's what you would get:
This blog is designed to put the reading experience first. Everything the reader sees is responsive and scales perfectly to all screen sizes and devices. In a nutshell: no frustration caused by small, illegible text, no tiny clickable items, but full focus on content instead.
This blog is based on the latest Ruby 3.2, which is all you need besides a database that supports it. We're using a MySQL database. We stuck very closely to the code conventions so you'll have no trouble expanding and customizing it to your own needs. Of course, we'll maintain it and keep it up-to-date on GitHub.
block quotes
images, lists, links
code examples in markdown
javascript
function fancyAlert(arg) {
if(arg) {
$.facebox({div:'#foo'})
}
}
tags for articles
G+ link to social network discussion
multiple authors and author information
add documents for download
formatting help
direct RSS reader access
customizable footer
By default, the featured post (usually the latest one) is fully displayed, but you may choose your featured post. Below that, the user finds an overview of all the articles published with a small hero graphic and a teaser. If you have more than ten articles in your overview, pagination kicks in.
Headlines for posts and H1.s are set in "Museo", the rest is "Ubuntu" — clean, future-oriented, democratic, appealing.
Opoloo orange and shades of grey
Our Android background clearly shows in the completely flat design approach. No drop shadows, no gloss, no distractions.
Nearly everything about this blog template can be customized to your personal needs and preferences. If you're only the tiniest bit tech-savvy, you have almost all the possibilities in the world with this blog.
Just to be clear: frontend is the visual representation of the backend — everything you actually see when you're editing, curating, and managing your blog posts.
The frontend has received considerable Opoloo love and is designed to work simply and beautifully, from action bar to usability issues, so you can use your time thinking about your content, instead of puzzling where to click next.
You'll be able to find everything you need on GitHub.
But before we do this: would you (or your clients) be interested in another blog template?
Let us know on G+.
How do you provide a soundtrack for a new medium? The composer of the music for The Last Website shares some insights into his creative process.
The first sounds I hear are floating debris.
Reading Günther’s original short story feels like I found a journal with all but the last pages torn out. All the sounds I hear are the tail end of destruction.
Things are still moving. Machines, still grinding away, are slowing down, but not quite halted. Like giant metal whales.
Floating debris and dying whale machines set the soundscape for The Gateway.
Starting with a soundscape is similar to starting with simple sketches or html. It doesn't have to be very formal. You don't have to worry about it being "correct" musically. You just want to know how something feels.
With a base aural layer, feeling out the rest of the form becomes easier.
After doing the first rendition of The Last Website I really have to start the hard work. Soundtracking for written word, delivered via web, is quite a challenge.
With film, everything can be matched to frame. In video games you have powerful engines you can use to create dynamic looping and sequences based on input from the player.
Here, we must try to keep it as simple as possible: adapting the tracks to an average reading-time, then add the very atmospheric elements of the track "The Last Website" to the end of each song. This simple-as-possible solution led to a nice transitional motif.
"What does war sound like in the future?" Jared asks me.
"The Gateway" and "Alibi" are very slow moving pieces — I am ready to speed up the tempo. I go crazy with this one. My first version is way over the top. It is important to go there and see how far I can push the boundaries, though I know I have to be true to the story. I go back, delete several bars, tone it down.
At the end I recapitulate this more romantic theme introduced at the beginning, further developing the fidelity of what became the theme of The Last Website.
A strong metaphor in the prose of "Constellation" is the Narrator and Alibi as Dancers. Approaching the song as a dance I need a very upbeat rhythm.
Starting early in the morning with creating that 3-note motif, Jared arrives. Coffee, collaborate, separate, return, repeat. Painful. I’m ready to stop so many times. Jared keeps beating me over the head getting me to keep moving until 10+ hours later, "Constellation" is complete.
Much of the prose reflects our particular conflicts while creating this composition.
Ultimately, all the other tracks were derived from the inner life of the Narrator (major bonus points to the few, extra-savvy readers that have figured out his name).
Taking into account Jared’s fleshed out rendition, the environment is fairly static. The story is ending. I can’t pull much inspiration from the Narrator’s surroundings, but inside — inside is a rich, moving story.
What becomes the theme for The Last Website is originally just a resolving progression at the end of “Memories of the Future” that moves both Jared and I such that we feel it needs to be explored more.
We grab the progression and start messing around with different instruments and effects, until we stumble on something we like. Tweak it a little, add more dynamics, and settle in the mix.
Appropriately, the soundtrack has a constant interplay (or “dance”) between the digital and acoustic. Alibi and Narrator, Ethen and Narrator. Composer and coder and code, love and war, man and machinekind.
It’s always hard making music for something specific. You often find yourself conflicted between what you want to make, and what is appropriate for to the story. The only way to go about this is parsing the conflicts and reflect them in the final soundtrack.
Android design has come a long way, although for the longest time it felt like it wasn't necessarily a priority for the platform. Let's dive into the new elements of the Gmail design pointing out where the polish is and where it is missing.
We find some official new patterns in the Android Design Guidelines and one of those is in the new Gmail app: the drawer pattern. I've never been a fan of it.
In most cases of its implementation, this pattern was simple used without further consideration instead of trying to solve the real UX problem that presumably made the pattern necessary.
My opinion doesn't apply to the Gmail app. The drawer gives you a high level navigation to the various ways to view a list of messages. Before the drawer concept, a dropdown was used in this scenario to provide ways to filter or change the messages visible in the list. Having the drawer slide out over the content and provide a very clean list of accounts, inbox and labels becomes significantly uncluttered compared to the previous implementation that was using the ActionBar dropdown.
This is not to say that anyone using an ActionBar dropdown should halt all development and quickly switch to the drawer pattern. Gmail's list is variable and could get fairly complicated. This is not something that works very well in a dropdown. The pattern employed really depends on the application and what you are trying to solve. This is why we have many different options. Not every element makes sense for every problem.
Gmail's new pull to refresh functionality is hands down one of the coolest interactions I've ever seen on Android. I am thoroughly impressed with how well it works. If your application has a concept of refreshing, I think this is absolutely the implementation to use. I love how the list doesn't actually move, all the feedback sits in the action bar and you see a horizontal progress indicator that neatly fits right at the top of the list. I've never been a fan of the lists jumping around and taking up space to show a circular progress indicator: a waste of space to show something so trivial. I'm very excited to see more applications taking Gmail's approach to refresh list content.
A subtle detail when you launch Gmail is the unread emails count underneath the 'Inbox' title. After a few moments this switches to show you the account you are looking at. This is perfect for me as I don't really need to constantly see the unread count. When I open the list I can glimpse to see it and focus on reading the actual messages in the list.
One pattern Gmail has used for a few versions now is the undo concept. Instead of bothering the user with a popup to confirm, it performs the action and then lets the user undo it if the action was unintended. I love the interface for this. I noticed when trying to refresh offline that the same popup UI is used for retry.
There's one place they still aren't using this and it is definitely annoying: when you want to discard a draft, you still get a confirmation dialog. It would be great to see this move to the undo experience that Gmail is using throughout the rest of the app.
Removing the split ActionBar was also a great decision. I found myself not using all those items frequently. The three options shown now when a message is open ("archive", "mark unread", "move") are really the ones I use the most. Even "delete" was great for the overflow. Adding avatars to the message list also gives a nice touch, breaking up the large amounts of text that was in the list in prior versions.
Overall, I'm very impressed with the new version of Gmail, and application developers definitely can learn plenty of items from it. I'm looking forward to more Google apps that follow with improved designs as well as third party developers. We are at a point now where polish and good design should be an absolute must for all applications.
Contrary to popular belief, there is no sorcery involved in logo design. What matters most is the personality of your client. If the logo designer is able to grasp its essence, the magic happens (almost) by itself.
We have heard the stories of big brands spending millions and millions on their logo designs, signets and colors. Then again, there are the stories of very popular companies, well known and with global recognition, that have never spent a dime on their logos. There seems to be some kind of magic involved in logo design: Why does one logo work well and another, similar one does not? What makes it appeal to us? Why are some logos worth a ton of money? Are the others worthless? What kind of logo is adequate for me and my company? Can my clients relate to it? How can I create that perfect logo that’s been haunting me in my mind?
All those questions don't have a definite answer and they cannot all be addressed here. But what matters is this: a logo needs to work for the company or client and their audience on many levels, including the cognitive and emotional one. Recently I had the opportunity and pleasure to help out my friends, The Brothers Chapman, with a new logodesign. After some years of loose collaboration, the three brothers decided to combine their beautiful storytelling skills under a unified brand. Unfortunately we were right in the middle of the production of The Last Website, so time was scarce. Luckily, by that time, I knew the three well enough to grasp the notion of who they are and what made them move — a good logo is always the visual, economic or cultural representation of an individual or group. It therefore, somehow, needs to align with their values.
Frankly speaking, the brothers appear like a bunch of chaotic nerds, their heads in the clouds and their distinctive humor the color of a black hole. But they are not. Each is a master of multiple skills, well educated, polite, with a deep sense of communication and a hunger for individual expression. Everything they do is open and clear, yet with a dark edge of character that many storytellers and writers are lacking these days (by now you can tell that I'm a fan). The logo obviously needed to reflect this as a conflation of clarity, sophistication, and a drop of chaos.
Since the brothers are storytellers, their logo needed to tell a story as well. With that in mind, I started sketching random ideas, trying to find a solid hook I could hang my ideas on and have the logo evolve from there. It certainly helps when you have some fitting fonts as a reference for what might and might not work. I recognized an interesting pattern by sticking their initial letters together (Jared, Nathan & Joseph): JNJ. By twisting and bending those letter shapes, I got to the point where they started to resemble a storyline with a strange cuspid contortion at the center: a perfect match.
That storyline signet felt like a solid start. Time to add in some letters. I had picked some random fonts earlier, so I simply went with Fjord (which you can get here), because it felt classic and contemporary at the same time. As a side note: arranging the typography around a signet and thus forming a decent logo takes time and some practice. Eventually you get to a point where everything starts falling together.
Although this was a clean and solid logo already, something was still missing: the drop of chaos that made The Brothers Chapman so unique. Looking at the rough outline of the whole composition, the logo seemed to move into many different directions at the same time. By switching out some lower case letters with capitals, the whole appearance became streamlined while introducing a certain, chaotic rhythm that you might not recognize at first sight.
At that point I was pleased with the process and sent it off to the brothers for review — not just the final logo, but the whole step by step process displayed here. The feedback came rather fast: "Such a beautiful story behind a beautiful logo. We could see this hanging on a wooden sign outside a workshop."
What I would love you to take home from this logo design process is that there is no magic involved. Rather a little experience, a solid understanding of the values of the client, and a fitting story that supports a connection with the visuals on an emotional level.
Some delightful insights into the creative process of the artwork for The Last Website. On emotional arcs, killing rabbits, and illuminative illustration.
Message log, Jan 2013
I figured it out! 2 am I figured out Gunther's piece! God it is awesome
What?
here, I wrote this:
"Ethin was a pianist. A composer really.
Undeniably his playing affected my work,
his rhythm my pace, his piano-key smashing my code..."
...damntastic!
Soon after that revelatory conversation, Jared pushed out the first draft of The Last Website, sucker-punching my brain and soul.
Evenings became blurry, caffeine-injected bouts of brainstorming online with my brothers: sketch/upload/discuss/rinse — repeat.
Ideas spawned like jackrabbits, no sooner born than murdered for their ineptitude.
A lot of bunnies died those first few days.
Then, eyes gluey with art-drenaline, palsied hands drawing something (I wasn't sure then, nor am I now), and too inundated within the throes of flow to halt or verge course, she came out.
Alibi was this powerful lynchpin that we kept coming back to, an obscure cusp that we never needed or wanted to define. Every medium was lured toward her, tentatively rising then arcing over, never touching.
Illustrating became a bizarre, frankenstein-esque conglomeration of what I learned drawing the last piece, and an exploration of stuff I never tried before.
By visualizing the text I was navigating the story's emotional arcs: mine, my brothers', the chaps' at Opoloo, and the audience's.
Imagery is such a vital force, and yet in storytelling, it somehow tells the least. Three great movements, trysting in violent harmony to move pen and paint.
It shows one viewpoint, generally slanted; one window into a story that, in showing, hides.
Why design guidelines matter and where they might cease to do so. On fanatic holoists, Android design culture, and individuality.
Users and even developers seem to be still uneasy with design guidelines when it comes to building mobile software, especially with the Android platform. The design guidelines published by Google give an amazing perspective into the thought process behind the system user experience design. However, there’s definitely some confusion around what to do with these guidelines.
I hear this one frequently. It’s at the heart of many design arguments among different companies’ teams and even members of the community. Users and developers are sticking to the term “Holo” in a very passionate way. I would even argue that the term has taken on more than it actually is.
A personal example: Opoloo has an application on the Play Store called “Timer”: a very simple countdown timer that closely follows Holo design. We released a dark theme for the application after having received a significant amount of requests from our users. In this dark theme we decided we would go with an orange color instead of the blue we used in our light theme. The amount of emails we received asking for a dark theme that contains the Holo Blue were overwhelming. The main reason for them requesting the blue color (as explicitly stated in the requests) was that they thought only blue could really be considered Holo. This was my first experience with the very passionate Holo fan. And yes: there’s a lot of them.
I don’t agree with the argument that our decision to use orange instead of blue was against the design guidelines. Here’s an excerpt from the design guidelines — it is the first paragraph on the ‘Color’ page.
“Use color primarily for emphasis. Choose colors that fit with your brand and provide good contrast between visual components. Note that red and green may be indistinguishable to color blind users.”
My idea during the building process was that, in the dark theme, the orange provided a good contrast against the darker background. The feedback we received was not what I expected. Users were shocked we could make such a mistake.
It was not a mistake. The use of color is extremely important in UI design and this is not dictated by Google. There are no constraints for colors to be used in applications. Especially with a strong branding, color is absolutely something to get right.
This is a very tricky question. After all, they are design guidelines, not strict rules. On the other hand, straying too far from the design guidelines could alienate your users on the platform they use everyday. This could have a very negative impact on your product, especially in a competitive mobile environment. Among the most important areas of the design guidelines that should only be ignored at your own peril are navigation, selections, notifications and app structure. Interestingly enough, most of these do not necessarily dictate UI design. The most important concepts center around user experience. You want your app to behave like it belongs on the platform.
How you design the different elements to fit your brand is where you can help set your app apart from others. Just because every app has an action bar does not mean every app looks the same. There’s a lot of freedom within the structures provided, so spending time on polishing content presentation is sure to make your app unique. One particular design pattern seen more recently in applications is the fly-out menu (the one that slides out from the left or right of the screen). Personally, I have never felt this works in the context of all the other navigation structures on Android. Even certain teams inside Google have tried to implement this pattern. It feels very foreign to me, mostly because each implementation does something different and users are left guessing. Before you dive into using this method, spend some time thinking to see if you can work navigation differently. Challenging, yes, but it could be very rewarding.
The entire “Getting Started” section focuses on creative vision, design principles, and the UI overview. None of these sections tell you what colors to use, how tall to make your content items, or what type of navigation controls to use. They simply provide you with an understanding of Android as a platform. In further sections they give recommendations on sizing items, typography and iconography, especially in places where your application will display items in the context of the System UI. It won’t look very appealing if you decide to have a red notification icon when the rest of the icons on the user’s phone show in white. In your application you have the freedom to choose even the color of the actionbar icons you use. Fitting the style in the guidelines is the way to go, but nothing says they have to be white or gray. This is great for your users because the feel of the application is like the others on their phone and you are able to use branding and content to make it different. The idea is to be consistent with what you do. Changing how users access settings, contextual menus and so on, could impact the their ability to find those features in your app. The most important take-away from the design guidelines is not how to design your app, it is how to design the user experience.
The best way to work with the design guidelines is to spend time with them. Take something like a book journal application. An application where users can keep track of the books they have read. Think of this application in terms of Android navigation and get creative with the content side of the application. Feel free to mock screens up and share them on the Google+ link for this post. I think you’ll be surprised with the different designs and styles people come up with, even when thinking in terms of the same design guidelines.
For all you wallpaper aficionados: here are some of spring's latest antics.
Now that an extremely cold & dark winter is finally over, nature is about to shine in its most beautiful shape. After a day of work I took my camera and walked through town to capture some nice images, representing spring. Enclosed are four selected wallpapers. Feel free to download and share!
In the spring of joy,
when even the mud chuckles,
my soul runs rabid,
snaps at its own bleeding heels,
and barks: “What is happiness?”
—Philip Appleman
This is the story of the text of The Last Website, about how an idea was transferred into a verbal message and into a piece of literature.
“What idiot updates a website while the world is ending?" I'm sitting at a wooden table across from brother Jo. Jo, recognizing a characteristic Chapman rant, just listens. "Of all the dumb things to do!”
We're holed up in a little coffee shop, coffee cups are drained and so am I. It's my last cold January day in Port Townsend, Washington. I'd spent two weeks living on a bike, out of a bag, bashing my brain with this question.
Weeks earlier, Günther Beyer of Opoloo had sent me an innocent looking short story asking for input. I read it quickly, loved its potential and told Günther I'd work on some feedback during my trip.
Weeks later I had nothing. Jo had been patiently waiting for me to get him a few decent bits of writing to start illustrating, but all the coffee, tea, chai-tea, chai-tea latte, yes-please-I-would-like-three-shots-in-that-dirty-chai got me nothing more than a few piss-poor paragraphs of piss-poor ideas, and a piss-poor attitude to suit. And whole lot of aromatic, organic, locally roasted, fair-trade piss.
Worse, I had threads of my life competing for attention: I wasn't in Port Townsend on vacation. I was here to find work and a home for my little family and two weeks later I had no answers for anyone.
Worse still, I had become obsessed with the aforementioned question at the expense of the others.
"I can't do it. I can't fuckin' do it."
(A different essay is required to confess the quantity and variety of "f"-words that went into the making of The Last Website.)
I closed my laptop and my piss-poor paragraphs with it. "Don't worry about trying to draw anything for this, I'll let Günther know I can't get anywhere."
I spend the rest of the morning watching the drizzle in Port Townsend Bay.
To say the least: I was pissed.
To be clear, I wasn't frustrated with the question: Who would update the final website amidst the collapse of humanity and life-as-we-know-it? I was frustrated I couldn't find a good enough answer.
To understand exactly what was frustrating, it helps to know a particular writing technique: The Suspension of Disbelief (originally Coleridge’s concept).
You're familiar with the feeling, if not the name. It's the moment when consuming fiction (or propaganda) that you stop questioning the plausibility of the setting or circumstances of the story and just enjoy the story. In effect your belief is suspended like a bridge between actual and imagined.
Any writer worth salt has a few techniques to help this process: world building, sub-plots, variety of characters and interactions, motivations, rich backstory, and on…
But early on I had set myself a strong constraint: The reading time of the story couldn't be longer than 10 or 15 minutes. Günther's original had power in the speed of delivery and that would get lost in a longer piece.
This meant I couldn't introduce the standard white noise that helps fill the gaps left by pure narrative. I had no leisure of dawdling in a drawing room, sipping tea and describing the intricacy of the drapes down to its dust motes; no meandering down memory lane, no stroll in slow-poke park. I had to cut to the center of the story… yet make it believable.
Every day I'd make my way to the coffee shop and attack my keyboard, every approach felt contrived or cliché.
The question became a specter of unfinished business lurking just below the surface of the dark coffee and mudpuddled bike paths of PT Washington. My mood souring; seriously, what idiot updates a website…?
I left the coffee shop a last time. The tail end of rainstorm — boarding a bus away from Port Townsend and toward the ferry to Seattle. From there it would be a quick flight back to Utah the next day.
Getting on the bus I thought I had left the question to lurk unanswered in Port Townsend.
Boarding the bus I was faced with immediate concerns: finding my way around Seattle, a place to stay, and a way to the airport early the next morning.
Turns out I had a cousin in Seattle. One I hadn't seen in around fifteen years, but we had recently reconnected with on a social network. Yes, you can stay at my place in upper Seattle.
It took the entire day on two busses + a ferry + two more buses to make it to upper Seattle with me running from one to the next. This, in addition to the walking/biking and mental/emotional drain, proved exhausting.
In the moments of rest during the rush of transportation I had much to reflect on. One layer of me was invigorated and exhausted from an amazing trip; two weeks of raw living is paradigm-shifting.
Another layer of me was homesick for my best friend and companion and our four-month old son who grew so much in those fourteen days.
Yet, another layer of me dreaded delivering unhappy news to hopeful people. I had to tell my companion I had no idea if our dreams of a simpler, healthier life in PT were possible; I had to tell Günther he'd posed a challenge beyond the storytelling abilities of The Brothers Chapman. As people that live and die by our word, this feels nothing short of failure.
All this made for a bittersweet parallax of emotions.
I meet my cousin. Odd sidenote: turns out she works at Valve. Turns out I got an impromptu tour of Valve, complete with a glimpse of Gabe's office plaque. We take a bus to her home and for the first time I hear her family's side of an old story. A story that happened around fifteen years ago.
3 a.m. – I'm almost asleep.
I was placed on the floor of my cousin's son's room, he has glowing toys everywhere and I am in that funky spelunky space between awake, asleep and dead.
And it happens.
I realize I'd been asking the wrong question.
It wasn't What or Who, it was Why.
Why would someone place such a high importance on updating a website in the midst of human collapse?
And I knew my answer.
Write it down.
No.
No. No. No.
Not now dammit not now.
I just want to sleep. Need sleep.
It's now or never.
One truth I've learned in years of writing hundreds-of-thousands of words, one lesson I can share with writers: it doesn't matter when you find your answer, you write it down in that moment or risk losing it forever.
Oh, I just want to sleep goddamit.
Dots connect; my experience-addled, sleep-deprived brain draws imaginary lines connecting all the glowy things into a constellation.
Fuck. I roll over, flip open my laptop, and the story of The Last Website spills out of me in it's entirety. I can't tell you how. I don't know how. I shouldn't have been able to handle a keyboard, let alone a sequence of thought.
I can only say I was there, I was ready.
With less than a couple hours of sleep I board my plane.
And the solution? The simple, elegant solution I had been chasing through all of Port Townsend finally arriving when I had truly given up. What do I call it? What do I call her?
Alibi.
It's mid-May.
The Last Website launched a few weeks ago to much positive review. We couldn't ask for more supportive and excited fans.
The journey from my initial draft to the magical portrayal of LastWebsite.io is it's own story, filled with epic rants, bouts and bursts of inspiration between The Brothers Chapman and Opoloo. One I won't be telling here.
The bulk of writing is fundamentally unchanged from my sleepless Seattle spillage. Though it has trappings of major themes like love, life, humanism, death and meaning I wouldn't say it's a story about any of these themes. It's an exploration of why we do what we do.
The end result is a story of resolve and reflection told at a restless pace, making for a beautiful parallax.
And what about that old story of my cousin’s family?
It's a small, but significant telling of my uncle and his children being ostracized from friends and family for being open about his homosexuality. The blind embrace of dogma led to an unnecessary division of over fifteen years; my parents were paranoid. As kids, I and my siblings didn’t understand why we couldn’t go see our cousins and close friends. As for influencing in my writing, read into that what you will.
The rain in May is splashing in Port Townsend Bay. I put final lines to this essay, watching through the same coffee shop panes. Here to stay.
I’ve many new chapters beginning in life. If you’ve yet to read The Last Website, it’s worth a read, and now you know why.
A short attempt on the state of reading and the story, of digital publishing and invention.
I've been reading The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel. Apart from the fact that this book is brimming with knowledge and wisdom and stylistic smoothness, one passage struck me in regard to all the commotion going on in the discourse of digital publishing and modern storytelling.
The following is a lengthy quote, but it's worth considering:
In our time, bereft of epic dreams — which we've replaced with dreams of pillage — the illusion of immortality is created by technology. The Web, and its promise of a voice and a site for all, is our equivalent of the mare incognitum, the unknown sea that lured ancient travelers with the temptation of discovery. Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web's outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal. Like the sea, the Web is volatile […]. Its virtue (its virtuality) entails a constant present — which for medieval scholars was one of the definitions of hell. Alexandria and its scholars, by contrast, never mistook the true nature of the past; they knew it to be the source of an ever-shifting present in which new reader engaged with old books which became new in the reading process. Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
—Alberto Manguel: The Library at Night, p. 28.
Which takes us to the rebirth of the story. We should not try to reinvent the book. What it does and can do has been proven through centuries. It does what it's supposed to do — sometimes crappily (like some cheap editions with two slabs of paper as a cover, disintegrating pages after the first reading, ugly typography and smeary ink), sometimes in an incredibly beautiful way that electronic/digital media cannot hope to equal (the smell and texture of the page, the physically different volume and weight in your bag, the type and pictures in graspable three-dimensional presence).
There are other ways to tell a story, though. And really: those unexplored, uncharted paths are the mare incognitum that keeps luring us into doing what we started with The Last Website. Slowly exploring these paths is indeed giving birth to the story over and over again. It is not so much reinventing it (we wouldn't be so insolent or presumptuous to believe that). It's more like the Darwinian origin of the species: with the structure of The Last Website we represent a tiny branch of the story tree. But, as we believe, a particularly beautiful branch — flexible, transformable, with leaves and buds, with the breeze drawing across it, making a marvelous sound to the accustomed ear.
What should furthermore not be neglected: this is still reading. True, it is not exclusively text, but rather letters, colors, and sinus waves in interaction. The experience we draw from this, however, still remains a reading experience. With all the problems — conceptual, intellectual, and technical — there still remains the most hopeful prospect of Manguel's proclamation: constant renewal throughout (dis)solution.
Two wallpapers that represent the project and the experience of The Last Website. Just take them. They're free.
In the process of working on The Last Website, we created, tuned, and polished graphics until our eyes started bleeding and we thought: "What the hell – let's make some wallpapers."
So this is to thank everyone who has participated in creating, but also in experiencing this project, especially those who sent on their valuable feedback.
Download them, enjoy them, share them at your own peril and pleasure.
How does newness enter the world of publishing and storytelling? How do we find an adequate form to publish a combination of media? How does magic happen by collaboration? Here, we share some of the thoughts that came flying along and into the project.
There's quite a fair chance, that you read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. It's a great story over three books, with very emotional writing that you can relate to easily. If you haven't already, I can deeply recommend it to anybody who's into science fiction, dystopias, or strong storytelling in general.
I remember being home, quite late at night, reading the third book. I couldn't put it down. The protagonists were just trying to escape through a tunnel system, chased by monsters and explosions, and climax was slowly but surely approaching. The whole setting and especially this scene was very immersive; I was excited and felt chased and stressed myself, all at the same time.
But suddenly I stopped reading. Something seemed to be missing. Music!
I was sitting there with a modern, affordable tablet PC with long battery life, full colored display and strong audio capabilities, and all I was doing was literally turning white pages with black text – on a touchscreen.
Did we miss something here? Despite all the advancements in technology, we're still reading books like we have done for hundreds of years. Even worse. Books tend to have colorful covers, illustrations, sometimes little sketches or vignettes with every chapter, and detailed twirls with on letters here and there. Now everything the Amazons, Apples and Googles of today are shipping with their digital stores are boring white pages with black letters.
I can understand the argument that the nature of books is meant to create fantastic, beautiful paintings in your head. But there's no arguing that music is the strongest carrier or emotions, while images, illustrations and photos can be grasped most easily and quickly by the human mind.
Sure, there are many forms of art and entertainment bringing together different types of content. There are videos or movies. There are childrens’ books disguised as apps or vice versa. There are comics, physical or digitally animated. And there are video games, melting together the best of all worlds. But all of those have one thing in common – they are very cumbersome to create and even harder to publish.
Now think about this: Our advancements in technology have made it almost stupidly easy to create two kinds of media – text and images. And for a couple of years, it has gotten so much easier to create decent music without huge budgets and crazy amounts of work.
Today almost everybody can tell stories, capture images and create music. Almost everybody is able to create amazing, multimedia content and distribute it over the web quite easily, let alone saving it for all times on a hard drive somewhere.
So far the content.
Now tell me – why are we still turning white pages with black text on a touch screen?
--
Remember the short story we published just a week ago – The Last Website? I wrote this over Christmas without any further intention. Totally unexpected, this short story turned into a seed.
Jared Chapman, a friend in Salt Lake City, read the story shortly after I wrote it. He came back to me, letting me know that this simple piece really inspired him and if I would be ok with him diving a little bit deeper into it. Of course I was.
What happened then was pure magic. The kind of magic, that just happens when people across the world collaborate and build something together, far greater then the work of an individual: As it turned out, Jared had two brothers. One was a visual artist, the other a musician. Together, they used the initial short story as a baseline and built something much greater. At the end of January I got an email from them about a quick demo as they called it. The demo consisted of 7 well-written chapters, outlining a dark, science-fiction story about an artificial intelligence called "Alibi". It came with beautiful artwork and 7 amazing audio tracks by his brothers, Jo and Nathan.
I certainly didn't expect that. While everything was very rough around the edges, this new take on my initial story was so much stronger, so much more emotional. The additional artwork and music took everything to a completely new level and everybody who experienced it was extremely moved after reading, seeing and listening to it. I realized: this was something special.
Now dealing with today's state of media and publishing for quite some time, I felt that we had to make something more from this. This was exactly the kind of humanly handmade storytelling with a modern, digital combination of different media that I had been looking for.
Suddenly, it was not just an idea anymore. It had become an ideology: the pursuit of an idea with a defined aim. That aim was to build the framework for the elements provided by the brothers, to create an experience of an immersive story that was not based on old metaphors as the turning of virtual pages. It was to bring together artists as well, to collaborate in projects. It was to provide a structure for modern storytelling. And since it is not exclusively at home that we want to experience a story, most of all not on an inconvenient, large computer screen, part of the idea was to make it work for mobile devices. The Last Website is our first humble attempt to revolutionize the way stories are told.
The rest is history, as they say. With the content available, we “only” had to build the framework and publish the experience. How that happened, the thoughts that went into it, the problems we encountered, and what we learned is another story, soon to be told. Stay tuned.
It’s new and exciting for us, but still: we seem to have trouble defining the new medium that The Last Website confronts us with. The labels “book”, “ebook” or “web app” seem too restrictive. Here’s a first attempt of a definition.
About four-thousand individuals from all over the world have experienced our latest project – The Last Website – in the two weeks that it's been online. We got some nice feedback and it's been approved as an official Chrome Experiment.
So all is well, one should believe. But as it is the case with most new things, people seem to either hate it or love it. Whatever your feelings about it, the one issue people seem to have trouble with is the question: What is this thing?
So here is an attempt to define this, in all regards, new thing. Let's start by stating what it is NOT.
It's not a book. Quite physically it isn't.
It's not even an ebook. It goes far beyond of what is considered an ebook these days. (Hopefully, our conception of ebooks is about to change soon as well.)
It's neither a website in the common sense, nor is it an article of any sort.
It certainly is not a video, although it is very visual and it has a soundtrack.
It's also not a web application as commonly referred to, although we're getting closer here. But it's not a program either.
Then what the hell is it? It exceeds the limitations of these labels. We'll have to find a new name for it, and we're all in for suggestions.
Let's make this perfectly clear: I'm not talking about the specific text, nor the images, or the music. I'm talking about structure.
In this regard, it most certainly is literature, a "thing made from letters", something you read. Only that it exceeds that latter part also: the text, the visual artwork, and the sound in constant interaction. None of its parts is more important than another. They supplement each other, the sum of them becoming more than its parts combined. It is a new and hitherto unexplored form of literature. This will sound pretentious, but I will go as far as saying that it is a small step into the future of literature. It is a challenge to our synapses, to our innate sensitivity, to emotion.
The structure of it – and I am still speaking regardless of the specific story told in The Last Website – is the nucleus of the story; not a sequence of events in time, but rather the story in itself. A narrative that appeals to us by way of us being able to connect to it, of being able to relate to it on an emotional level. Something that is told, aesthetically. It is the frame and the core of the story at the same time. It is constant interaction without the strict parameters that, for example, a video provides. Its elements that are structured rather in the fashion of a game. Text, music, and graphics interact in the smallest space, but you may enjoy every one of them separately for as long as you like, or experience them as a conflation, at interplay. This, for me, is a representation of the elementary-ness of a story.
You may carry this as far as you like. I (as a person who has spent the greater part of his life with literature and the way it works) believe it is the heart of the story stripped bare and infused with mescaline by a radioactive robot from another dimension (which, as I just noticed, doesn't speak much for my literary education, I guess).
Anyway, to attempt an answer to the initial question: It has become a system. The system of the modern story. It is a system that is already inherent in most of us: when we read, we tend to visualize and everything that surrounds us (our environment at that time, as well as emotions and memories) will be part of the story we read. Now, we will able to have this but more: by way of the pictures and the music specifically designed to connect with the text, a new way of immersiveness is born.
The Last Website is, among other things, an immersive story system.
Collaborating with real artist is always something special. There is so much emotion and personality going on in every step of the way. We teamed up with three unique artists from the east coast to create a unique story. Don't hesitate and jump right in - you can enjoy it right on your smartphone or tablet.
My worn ioboard recognizes the path of this pattern. Faceless keys, pads and dials dip, bend and arc under the press, stroke and stab of their fondest friends: my fingers.
When you're working in the field of cutting edge technology, big or small, you probably will have many moments of pride. For example when you just created something special. Some of those moments are bigger then others. Today is one of those bigger moments of pride for me.
In early February Opoloo teamed up with the mighty Brothers Chapman. We set out to create a unique storytelling experience, melting together text, illustrations and music in the most immersive experience possible. The catch was - this should run nicely in a mobile browser.
To make this short: Grab yourself a good coffee, your favorite mobile device (Nexus 4, Nexus 10 or iPhone 5 work great) and some headphones and find a calm place to sit down. Now head over to http://lastwebsite.io/ and enjoy about 15 minutes of modern literature.
Don't forget to come back and let us know what you think of the story and share it, if you like it. Also expect plenty of making-ofs in the upcoming days and weeks.
It probably won't be so bad, after all, if Google doesn't release Key Lime Pie in the very near future. Innovation is great – but it should still serve the people, not a handful of hype-horny journalists drooling over the next overblown headline. A more sanguine look at conjectural disappointment.
So Google will be introducing Android 5.0, also called Key Lime Pie at Google I/O on May 15. Are you excited? Can't wait for all the new features, apps, a complete new UI, and whatnot?
Oh, hold on... Some rumors just surfaced that there might be no Android 5.0 as of yet. Maybe Google will just introduce another version of Jelly Bean. Maybe 4.3 or 4.5? How dare you, Google! Now all the excitement is gone and I don't want to hear anything about Android ever again.
Come on, people. Android is an operating system. It is meant to power any kind of electronic device, bringing hardware and software together. And an operating system that is changing fundamentally every couple of months is just extremely hard to sell and maintain. Users are complaining because they have to learn new patterns all the time, OEMs are complaining because they can't keep up with all the changes, and developers are complaining because they can't keep their apps up to date, tools and support lag behind, and all their users are running older versions of the OS.
Don't get me wrong here: Innovation is great. Staying a little ahead of the competition is also great. Learning something new every day is even greater. But forcing everybody in the ecosystem to tag along at increasing speed is just not great for anybody. The only people really raving about major version jumps are tech journalist. Bigger headlines and hypes make more money, right?
Well, I really enjoyed the jumps from Android 4.0 to 4.1 and 4.2. Not only did Google introduce a couple of new, exciting features, but they made Android faster, more responsive and stable. And that is exactly, what I want from an operating system.
How about you? Also excited for Android 4.3?
Why discussions about Flat vs. Ornamental design suffer from the myth of Digital vs. Physical.
The rising wave of "Flat vs. Ornamental Design" discussions crested, beaching a bloated, skeuomorphic whale. Scavengers rushed in and cleaned the carcass, leaving us with a massive, white skeleton {border: 2px; color:gray}.
In all these discussions swims a fundamental misconception: the Digital vs. Physical metaphor – the belief that the realms of digital and physical are separate and opposed.
A quick google of "Flat Design" articles returns phrases like:
Digital vs. Physical is an easy way to frame discussions about our binary frontier. It's also misleading.
To understand this, take another fundamental misconception: The Body vs. The Mind. A developing realization in various cognitive and linguistic communities is that the mind (thought, ideas, reason) is embodied. Stated by Lakoff and Johnson:
This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment.
–Philosophy in the Flesh (p. 4)
This premise challenges many embedded Western philosophies.
Just like the common misconception that the mind is separate from the body, I posit that the metaphor of Digital vs. Physical incorrectly separates digital from the physical components that are it's makeup.
In keeping with Lucas Rocha’s admonition to shift the discussion back to fundamentals, let’s establish our first premise: “Digital is Physical” as a jump off point.
To borrow from Lakoff and Johnson: this is not just the obvious claim that digital needs physical cables, access points and people to transist, but that the very structure of digital derives from these components.
Based on this premise, how now do we approach the topic of digital design (flat or otherwise)?
How now do we approach other digital topics: the internet, hyperboria, social networking, remote work, AI, IA, Bitcoin, patents, distribution, cyber-warfare, cellphones, drones... and on?
What a camera producing pictures instantly is worth – in times of anything digital, in terms of emotion, memory, and beauty.
Today, people are used to view their digital pictures right after a shooting. In times of analog cameras you had to wait a few days, trusting that the photo is correctly focused. You got – among other things – surprising effects like light leaks and under-/overexposed images by incorrect & unwanted settings or damaged hardware.
The Polaroid Camera has achieved cult status. Since Edwin Land brought the first polaroid camera (called „The Land Camera“) to the market in November 1948, there have been dozens of variations of the instant camera. The most well-known camera with more than 6 million sales is the “Polaroid SX-70”: a fully automatic, motorized, folding, single lens reflex, which ejects self-developing, self-timing color prints. In 2008, Polaroid discontinued the production of instant films completely. Florian Kaps founded a little company called “Impossible” and snatched one of the last factory for instant pictures in Enschede, Netherlands in 2010. They still produce cameras & films, so the term "Polaroid" continues to exist.
I always wanted to have a Polaroid camera. Ebay and other sites are providing a ton of old cameras for little money. But the "problem" is much more related to the cost of films. Here in Germany you have to pay about 20€ for 8 pictures. Having done some research I found out that Fujifilm also offer instant cameras. My eyes fell directly on the Instax 210 which has sparked my interest with its new wide format. With around 70€ it is an inexpensive camera. The costs for 20 pictures are priced about 15€ and the results speak for themselves:
If you don't want to miss the enjoyment of an instant camera, have a look at the cheaper alternative from Fujifilm.
By the way: there are a few nice photo apps including Polaroid effects in the Android market:
Hero image taken by Michael Raso - Film Photography
Polaroids by Emily Tebbetts and jimperuta
A good sandwich is not just a sandwich. It is also a conceptional masterpiece, with content strategy, UX, execution, and testing brought to perfection. It'll also make your life a little better. Bacon included.
Every serious recipe repertoire should include one damn good sandwich. This one.
Peel and slice the avocados, sprinkle with lemon juice, add salt and pepper. Pick some splendid lettuce leaves, wash them with cold water and dry with a towel. Mix half of the mayonnaise with basil pesto in a small bowl, the other half with tomato pesto in another bowl. For each sandwich, toast three slices of bread lightly in the toaster, then set them aside.
Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil. Lay bacon strips flat on the sheet. Put the sheet in the oven (not preheated you amateur, don't you know that wastes energy?!) at 200°C/390°F for 15-20 minutes. Keep an eye on it during the final countdown (dee-doo-dee doo) and make sure it doesn't burn. Remove bacon from oven, put it on some paper towels to absorb the fat. Do not eat bacon. Do you hear me? I'm serious. Stop eating that bacon right now.
Heat up your steel pan of choice well, add some sunflower oil. Roast the chicken gently – both sides – each about 2 minutes to get a nice brown crackling. Add salt, pepper and red pepper if you like. Put it in the oven for about 10-15 minutes at 200°C/390°F. Find a really sharp knife. Don't screw around, use the sharpest knife you can find and cut the chicken into super thin slices. Stop eating that bacon.
Spread two slices of bread on one side with basil-pesto & mayo. These will be your bottom and top parts. Spread another piece of bread with tomato-pesto & mayo on both sides. Obviously, this will be the center. Start with the bottom. Place some avocado, one leaf of lettuce, and a couple of bacon strips on it. Apply center piece. Carefully arrange the chicken, top it with cheese. If the chicken is still warm, the cheese will begin to melt slightly. Add the final piece of bread.
Cut the sandwich diagonally into triangles and stick a toothpick in the center of each one. Share with a good friend.
Work
A picture of a graffito made its way around the web a week ago:
And when your job sucks you have the choice between two sensible decisions: make it suck less, or quit.
It's nice when you like going to work for the reason that you enjoy what you do and care about it. At Opoloo, we …
A picture of a graffito made its way around the web a week ago:
And when your job sucks you have the choice between two sensible decisions: make it suck less, or quit.
It's nice when you like going to work for the reason that you enjoy what you do and care about it. At Opoloo, we don't feel that we have a job. We work. There's a crucial difference: a job is institutionalized occupation. You do something while sticking to the rules and eventually get paid for it.
Work is the actual creation of things, growing with tasks, improving, being creative, communicating and producing together. We try to do work.
Configuring and setting up your OS can be a painful process. It doesn't matter whether you bought a new laptop, did a fresh install, or are just starting with Rails or Ubuntu – getting your system up and running for your specific takes time. To make it as simple as possible, just try this easy copy & paste solution to set up a grown up Rails development environment for your beloved Ubuntu.
Ubuntu has cleared the way for Linux onto the desktop – not even for the nerds vegetating in dark basements, but especially for the regular everyday user. With a well balanced bundling of packages and preconfiguration, the Ubuntu developers provide a simple “fire and forget” solution: Just insert the installation medium, walk through a few simple wizard-steps, and reboot into a full-fledged productive system providing everything you need – from browser and email-clients to office, multimedia and image manipulation. Just enough to fulfill your everyday tasks without having to worry about downloading and installing 1.000 different applications by hand.
But these presets have their limits when it comes to the everyday needs for developers. Don’t get me wrong, the apt package management makes it easy to install all your required packages. On the other hand, researching and installing all these requirements can be a very time-consuming task.
When we're talking about a development environment for Ruby on Rails, these requirements can quickly become overwhelming: databases and corresponding management tools, source and header packages for a wide variety of gems including dependencies, rvm/rbenv, version control system, IDE and dependencies, and a lot more. Installing all that stuff with a GUI powered application like synaptic or the Ubuntu Software Center will definitely be a pain in the ass. But don't despair: as developers, we have our beloved console coming to our rescue.
To get the core up and running with all necessary libraries and development headers, just copy and paste the following lines into your terminal:
sudo apt-get install synaptic curl zlib1g-dev libyaml-dev nodejs \
build-essential sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev openssl libssl-dev autoconf \
vim git git-core git-gui gitk gitg libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libyaml-dev \
libtool mongodb libreadline6 libreadline6-dev libxslt-dev libc6-dev \
ncurses-dev automake libtool bison pkg-config libffi-dev \
libgdbm-dev imagemagick libmagickcore-dev libmagickwand-dev
You may require some other database systems in addition to SQLite, depending on what suits you best. Just use one of the following lines to install the libraries and servers for alternative database systems:
#MongoDB for all the NoSQL lovers ;)
sudo apt-get install mongodb
#MySQL
sudo apt-get install mysql-client mysql-server \
libmysqlclient-dev libmysqld-dev
#PostgreSQL
sudo apt-get install postgresql libpq-dev
Now let's jump over to our beloved Ruby core. Below you can grab the lines to setup a Ruby environment with RVM:
curl -L get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --auto
source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm
. ~/.bash_profile
rvm requirements
rvm list known # to list all known rubies
rvm install 2.0.0 #Install the latest ruby
rvm use 2.0.0 --default #Set 2.0.0 as the default ruby
gem install bundler rails #Install bundler, rails to get startet
The lines above leave you with the 2.0.0 version of Ruby. You can also install multiple versions in peaceful coexistence, e.g. rvm install 1.9.3 and switch between installed Rubies with rvm use 1.9.3.
Next, we definitely want some version control magic with git and the Heroku toolbelt for easy deployment.
#Git/Github configuration
git config --global color.ui true
git config --global user.name "Git Hubert"
git config --global user.email "git.hubert@example.com"
wget -qO- https://toolbelt.heroku.com/install-ubuntu.sh | sh
After playing around with a lot of different editors and IDEs for Ruby/Rails, I ended up with Sublime Text 2. It's lightweight, blazing fast, highly and easily customizable, and it comes with built-in Rails support. Give it a try (if you haven't already):
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-2
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sublime-text
Yay, we're done. Wasn't that hard, was it? Now grab yourself a cup of tee, an oversized pizza, shut the doors and start coding.
Facebook isn't the first company to think about the home screen experience on Android, but they are certainly the biggest. Some thoughts on what's been done before and what we might expect in the future?
On the week of Facebook’s Home launch I find myself thinking about the home screen I have on my phone. My home screen is actually quite simple and boring. I have four rows of icons on the center screen with four apps I anchor at the bottom. I’m not a heavy user of widgets, although I absolutely see why people enjoy their widgets.
My home screen wasn’t always like this. A few years ago I used an application, Slidescreen*. This was an information oriented home screen replacement for Android with an extremely intuitive interface. It provided a nice overview of phone calls, text messages, calendar events, e-mail, twitter, reader and more. Simply swiping the center bar allowed you to expand on any one of the sections. When I look at my phone throughout the day this is the information I care about. I don’t need to see a large grid of icons taking up my whole screen.
Since Slidescreen* there have been other applications working on similar concepts. With the introduction of lock screen widgets in Android 4.2 DashClock has been amazing to use. Just by flipping my screen on I can get an overview of unread counts, weather, upcoming events and a bunch of third party plugins. There’s even the Chameleon launcher, which aims to be a home screen aware of what context you are in throughout your day. I backed the kickstarter project, but I haven’t been excited by the latest versions. For me, it is too crowded and doesn’t take advantage of the screen to display data in a clean and simple way.
Facebook’s latest Android offerings are extremely interesting. I am not a happy Facebook user, I try to use the network as little as possible. I’m probably not going to be a Facebook Home user because I don't care enough about my feed content to have it there all the time, but I love the fact that companies are thinking about this type of experience. Currently, this is something you’ll only find on Android. There isn’t another platform that enables a developer to provide such an immersive experience. I personally would like to see more offerings like this. The ability to see timely information on my home screen is what I would love to see the most. I think the latest from Facebook will inspire developers to create immersive experiences that stretch outside the bounds of the “app”.
*Slidescreen is an application that is no longer actively maintained.
Marie Schweiz, one of the most renowned Android designers is today's guest blogger. She is almost famous for the documentation of her workflow, a resource that is of incredible worth to the community and aspiring Android designers. Here, she shares some very detailed insights with us.
Anyone who isn't familiar with Topgear (at least in the English speaking part of the world) may deserve a smack on the back of his/her head for ignoring popular culture.
Just in case, here's the short version: Topgear is a terribly popular television show broadcasted by the BBC. It's about cars – fast and awesome cars of any kind. And about the three guys hosting it who are as funny and witty as it gets.
I redesigned their Android app, because, well… it was awful. This is a showcase of what I did and how I pulled it off.
You can see clearly that this was ported straight from the iOS and just doesn't work for Android.
In scribbled wireframes I have laid out what is to become a solid, nicely working Android app. You get the notion: it is pretty complex at first, but that's exactly what a good UI design should do: break apart complex structures and make them accessible for the user. Here you get some insight on the information architecture and the thoughts I put into it, featuring the overall purpose of the app, the structure of the presentation, and the proposals for individual screens.
From the scribbled layouts of the app screens, the content structure and the navigation, I dove into Illustrator to really take everything apart and build it anew.
So now, to the individual screens of the app: I stuck very closely to the Android guidelines, as you will see. No gradients or skeuomorphisms – everything's flat now. You really start focusing on the content instead of the UI, which is even more important for such a feature rich, complex app as this one. One more aspect that shouldn't be forgotten is staying true to the branding as much as possible.
Oh yeah, and don't forget about the rich notifications:
Initially, I laid out a hierarchy of the app. With this in mind I designed the screens to make them match:
Now think way, way back: remember the original material? The result has little in common with it anymore. Man, that was easy. I wonder what took me so long.
Guest blogger Lucas Rocha discusses the shift from iOS' skeuomorphic approach to flat design, as followed by Android and the new Windows. It's on: A battle between...well, read it yourself.
There has been a lot of discussion about the recent trend towards flat design as opposed to the skeuomorphic approach that became so popular with iOS. Although the existing commentary on the topic has many valid points, I haven’t seen anyone discuss the more fundamental shift behind the visual flatness.
In practice, skeuomorphism is about thinking visual and interaction design in terms of metaphors. Skeuomorphic UIs have, almost by definition, a strong focus on the UI chrome. The focus on the chrome is not exclusive to skeuomorphism though. For instance, UI realism is on the same boat with the imitation of real-world textures and materials. So, how does flat design differ from that?
Windows Phone and Android are the most prominent mobile platforms currently adopting flat design. Here are some words by Mike Kruzeniski, former design lead for Windows Phone, from an interview published in The Mobile Frontier book:
One of the main concepts we focused on with both the Kin and Windows Mobile 7 was to create a truly content-driven interface. While the iPhone is beautiful, its UI and the UI of many other devices is built on the desktop metaphor. Most of the mobile interfaces we see in the market today are built upon entrenched metaphors inherited from the PC—folders, icons, desktop spaces, and chrome elements that are rendered to represent real materials.
On the Android side, here’s what their official design guidelines say under the Put Content Forward section:
Many apps focus on the content display. Avoid navigation-only screens and instead let people get to the meat of your app right away by making content the centerpiece of your start screen. Choose layouts that are visually engaging and appropriate for the data type and screen size.
Beyond the visual flatness, what both Windows Phone and Android have in common is their focus on content. The visual simplicity of flat design is an effective way of moving the focus from the UI chrome to the content.
In other words, the real deal about flat design—in my opinion anyway—is really about moving away from the traditional embellishing of UI metaphors torwards an all-digital content-driven approach to product design.
"Are you still gonna eat that?" Why we should and should not forget, change, innovate, and keep stuff digitally. And a proposal of how to deal with the conservatism and innovativeness of the internet.
One of the great things about the trade of creating stuff for the web is that, perhaps more than any other business, it reflects the society we live in and different positions in that society. Even if – or especially because – it is a superfast, almost ephemeral medium that we change with light speed, there are two predominant positions always waging war with one another, although we hardly notice it anymore: Innovation and Conservatism.
The internet is a very conservative medium. This statement may strike you as odd if you consider what I just said in the paragraph above. But if there's something like an Ur-conservative (in the literal, truest sense of the word) claim, it would probably be: "If it isn't broken, why fix it?" Or even: "It might be broken, but I might still need it and I will continue to use it. Or just keep it." The internet is conservative because it is concerned with keeping things, conserving them.
Conservatism may be defined as disposition and tendency to preserve what is established, the opposition to change or making something new. We are so tempted to be digitally conservative, because computers and the web are, to some extent, designed to keep things: hard drives and externals, the cloud, Dropbox, servers, … – they all help us do exactly that. We don't need to get rid of anything anymore. There is nothing like a digital River Lethe that beckons us, with its pure and sparkling water, to drink – and forget. Don't get me wrong: in its own right, this is something great. But there is always this connotation of stagnation and outdatedness. How terrible is it when you can't let go of things that don't do anyone any good? It is the hoarding, even digital hoarding that makes us feel a burden of "too much", of things that should be forgotten. Because there is a physical and psychological limit to capacity, maybe not digitally, but personally. Computers and the internet are still about the people that use them.
The innovator holds against the conservator: "Even if it worked perfectly – which it possibly cannot – I will make a new one anyway. A completely new one. It's gonna blow your fuckin' mind."
It's easy to be tempted to give way purely to the holy grail of innovation. It just feels right: that air of revolution, pushing the limits, making use of creativity, creating something that wasn't there before, breaking all the rules established by someone we probably wouldn't like anyway.
Innovation is profusely pouring out change. But this excessive desire for change can also easily lead to pushing the constraining limits into boundless nonsensicalness, changing things only for change's sake, making the actual change obsolete.
Maybe we should take the conservatism that is probably at least embryonically inherent in everyone and replace it with consistency.
Think of it as something like a traditional craft. Take carpentry, or Japanese pottery. In their best form, the products created here are timeless, precisely because they have been consistently developed over time, always adapting to technological possibilities and customers' needs. What you do is: you pick something, you practice, refine, improve, polish, make it great, but you don't ignore the room for innovation. You use the benefits of variety but don't let the sheer immenseness of possibilities blind and shield you from your actual project or your general craft. In Aristotelian logic, something is consistent if it does not contain a contradiction; if all the interpretations of it are coherent, they are true. Innovation, like a piece of marquetry, can be fit perfectly into your consistent model. Let's innovate consistently, let's conserve the good things, but let's also consistently forget a little.
If you know how to use your graphics tool, icon design is – contrary to popular belief – not the Magnum Opus, the search for the Philosopher's Stone. Here's how to create some basic, individual icons very fast.
Icondesign still seems like the highest form of art within the field of interface design. While this is definitely true for large Play- and Appstore logos, visual cues and navigation icons have become much simpler to create and style with the rise of mobile design.
In this article, I quickly want to give you a rundown on how to create a nice set of icons very fast, and the pitfalls to look out for – I'm assuming you can handle your graphics tool, be it Photoshop, Illustrator, Inkscape or anything else that makes working with simple shapes easy.
Let's always start with some sketches. You want to make sure, that your client deals with the metaphor and only the metaphor, instead of focusing on all the colors and details in the first place. Maybe this is a good point to offer some alternatives, if you're not 100% sure about a certain item.
After all the sketches are signed off on, jump straight to the basic shapes with your preferred editor. Depending on the size of the icons, I would suggest caring for pixel-perfection already, since this will be much harder to get right later on in the process, especially if you're recycling single elements throughout the set. Try to stay within the grid for all horizontal and vertical shapes and strokes. Still, stay away from the color.
Now let's throw in some color. Most iconsets are related to a certain branding, so you might want to take a good look at the styleguides or try to stay as close to the brand as possible. Remember: Most icons are used together with others, so try to not have every icon scream for the same attention. Use color wisely to balance out importance and differentiation across the set and the UI. Also, this might be a good time to test your icons against different background colors and shades of grey.
This might be the step most young designers skip in the beginning. Your icons will probably never show up on their own. This is even more important if you're working on the same set with other artists, or tying into an existing set. While all icons are based on the same square frame most of the time, you have to carefully balance the weight of the icons across the set. Plane shapes with a filled body need to be much smaller within the artboard, while complex shapes with fine elements should use as much space as possible.
At this point, all icons should work nicely without any additional effects. If that is the case, why not add a little for extra appeal? How about just giving the bottom pixels a slightly darker tone for each color and highlighting the top ones equally? Try out some gradients, drop shadows or bevels if it matches nicely with the brand. Just don't overdo it. Icons are meant to emphasize certain elements of the UI, not distract from them.
Hopefully, this short tutorial made icondesign a little less frightening. While you should leave the core icons of a set or product to the professionals, creating a quick favorite-star or bookmark-ribbon might make the difference in your app's UI, without the need to hire an expensive designer.
A man. Despair. A website. The last ever. Hope?
"This is perhaps the most killing story ever to have dripped out of someone's fingers" –Fito de Patata
Illustration by Jo Chapman
The man was already a little tired. Although he wasn't really that old, he already felt the weight of time on his shoulders. Though he wasn't sure how many days and years had passed exactly since he had been sitting there, waiting, it might have been more than 10 already.
The man typed some cryptic commands on his keyboard. He had been doing this for a long time. The server didn't respond. Not for a long time. Finally, he thought, power has run out in here as well. So it had in most parts of the world.
The man took a deep breath. To be honest, he didn't expect any other reaction. He launched the browser, again, with a couple of quick hits to the old keys in front of him. There it was. A black page with white letters. Big fonts in the upper left corner simply said IM ALONE. Nothing more.
The man tried to smile, but his face didn't move. Not even a little. He remembered previous iterations of his site with detailed descriptions of his location and well-being, with long paragraphs of what had happened and how to move on, with links to other people and sites, offering more rich advice of what to do and where to go next.
The man remembered how he changed the site, according to his mood and abilities. From a colorful, dramatic presentation, with interactive elements, trying to reach out, his site became more and more a reflection of himself. Colors faded, as did visitors and the news. In the end, the only thing that remained was a short message in black and white.
The man scratched his head. What an irony. The web was built decades ago to establish communications, to withstand war and other catastrophes. And a war they had.
The man wasn't sure who had started it and what really had happened along the way. The only thing he knew was that he had been building websites all his life. Vivid and rich, interactive and large, emotional and perfect. An that's what he did.
The man opened his tool for the last time and wrote:
DEAR WEBSITE. YOU'VE BEEN MY BEST FRIEND OVER THESE LAST YEARS. YOU'VE BEEN A CONSTANT SUPPORTER, ALWAYS UNDERSTANDING AND BEING THERE FOR ME. NOW TIME IS RUNNING LOW. SOON, THERE WON'T BE ANY ENERGY LEFT TO POWER YOUR SERVER, LIKE EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD.
GOOD-BYE, FAREWELL, YOURS TRULY
The man hit send and got up, left the small cabinet close to the power station, and started to walk down the street, away from the place where he had spent more than the last 10 years of the end of the world, doing what he had done his whole life. Building websites.
The sky was grey, and light rain started to fall. And someone else, somewhere else wrote on an old, worn out keyboard on his own little site: IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE.
You do great work. You want people to see it so you can do more great work. Here's one way to go about creating a good portfolio.
It's so common sensical: if you do great work and you want others to know – so they can give you more great work to do – you need a portfolio. This regardless, if you are focused on code or design, on copywriting or app development. So the first step for creating a great portfolio is obtaining good references of projects you did (duh!).
Then, once you have accumulated a pool of awesome products for reference, you need to figure out how you're going to present them. You'll want to ask yourself: What do I want to present? Obviously, you want to only select the projects you're most happy with. This includes a certain uniqueness of either the project, your realization of it, or ideally both.
Consequently, your next question is how you want to present your projects. One way would be a link to an external reference, such as a website you designed or an app store where your product is presented. This is a reasonably good way a portfolio can work, because it shows your work in context. However, it might not give the attention to detail you desire your portfolio-viewer to see. Maybe you spent a lot of effort trying to get the interaction or navigation just right. Maybe there's a story behind the project that might be of interest. Maybe you reworked some illustrations several times and you want to show the progress you made incorporating the feedback of a customer or reviews of your colleagues. The way to go about, then, would be to have a special sort of reference where you have all the freedom in the world, presenting everything you want just the way you want it. A case study. There, it doesn't hurt to link to the finished product and you have everything all at once.
Additionally, and this goes almost without saying: spend time on typography, selecting and cutting the right assets, widespace, importance and presentation of elements, etc.
It's not a crime to get inspired by other portfolios. Use structures that you like and that make sense for your own portfolio. Use everything you can but make something unique out of it. No one like copycats. For reference and inspiration, check out the following links to portfolios we think are especially worth noting because somebody did an excellent job on them.
...think about the following things concerning your product:
– What does it do?
– What is it for?
– What did you do? (Code, Design, Concept, Realization, UI, UX, …)
– How did you do it?
– Why did you do it the way you did it?
Focus on the special features of your product, your favorite parts of it, the story of the genesis of the project. At the same time, don't write a novel that nobody wants to read. Put the most weight on the visual representation, let it do most of the talking.
As far as presentation and strategy are concerned: this is not advertising. It is a showcase that works as a presentation of your skill. Like a piece in a museum, but structured in the way that the visitor can relate to the construction process or whatever you focus on. By this it automatically serves as an advertisement of your skill.
As a finishing, more pragmatical note: It might be very sensible to create solid, flexible templates, so your portfolio is a coherent experience in itself. Also, this comes in handy when you create new case studies because you don't have to start over again every time.
Put on your fur mittens and grab these beautiful winter wallpapers for your desktop, phone, or tablet.
Every once in a while I get kicked out of doors, just so you can profit from that. It was a grim and grey day, the view was all in lines, but my little Canon 60D and I were happy as a lark.
Right around the corner from our office, I shot some nice wallpapers for your desktop, phone, or tablet.
For those techies interested in some specs:
I used a Canon 60mm/2.8 macro lens. Exposure: 1/400 - 1/1,250. In the finishing process I adapted intensity and contrast slightly and carefully added some grunge-bokehish texture, as well as touching up on the gradients. When shooting pictures like this, take care that your background is far enough back, so it doesn't distract you from the actual object.
Enough said. You can download a .zip file with those Winter Wonder Wallpapers right here.
You're welcome.
Why in the world do we still use an outdated metaphor for a process so fundamental as “saving”? We should not grow accustomed to things so much that we become unable to question them. It makes progress and imagination harder to achieve. Here is a proposal, a case for change.
Designing a good icon is an art form in itself. For decades now, we're trying to craft a perfect language that has no global barriers and lives on our large and small screens.
But there is a holy grail for icon designers which I've come across many times in the last 10 years. In fact, it's the most requested icon on Androidicons, that I still refuse to deliver – the 'Save' icon, a small floppy disk that came up in the 80s and has been loitering about ever since.
The problem is pretty obvious: Still, one of the most used functions in digital processing is represented by a visual metaphor that is already outdated by many years and will probably never come back.
While we tried to find alternatives like the hard drive or most recently a cloud to move the idea along, the metaphor for 'save' always gets stuck at some point, due to the rapid change of the technology it refers to. It's about time we break out of that cycle.
Every time I get asked about that particular icon, I suggest to skip the floppy icon and better go for an auto-save function. But to be honest, this does not solve the problem at all. Some apps do need a clear indicator of saving things at a certain point in time. Maybe there's a fundamental flaw in our expectation when it comes to data manipulation and conservation?
In the real world 'saving something' is to physically put an object to a place where it is protected from any kind of manipulation or distribution. But saving something in the digital world means conserving a document at a certain state of production, at a certain point in time. You definitely want to pick up where you left it, rather sooner than later, sometimes even in the middle of production. Think of this as opening or importing a document, working on it and saving it in regular steps, and finally exporting it. Here, saving is not the final state of your document – exporting is. Saving is rather the process of fixing the state of the document at a point in time.
Pretty complicated, right? But read on. As long as we agree that saving is not necessarily the final state of a document, we're good. Let's also agree that saving as we're using it in digital production refers to a state in time. Now time can easily be represented as a circle – compare our visual representation of a clock, or even a backup. Besides, the universe expands and collapses all the time, starting from the beginning again and again ... I'm driving you nuts, right? We're almost there.
So: starting a project or a document would mean to open or import your file into a certain frame of time – your workflow – a simple arrow into the circle representing time will do.
Now while you're working on the document, you might want to fix its progress from time to time within the workflow – you want to fix its state in time. Would two arrows pointing inside the circle work nicely?
Finally, once you've finished the project and want to save it permanently, you're going to export the document. Maybe you even want to continue working on it with another tool? Again: import, save progress a couple of times, and export eventually. How about simply an arrow pointing out of the circle?
Pretty easy, right?
To wrap this up, I crafted those three icon proposals as Android actionbar icons in Holo Light and Holo Dark. Grab them for free below, if you're feeling brave enough to leave the floppy disk behind, once and for all.
There are not nearly enough proficient Ruby on Rails developers in Germany. This is sad, but not all hope is lost, it's slowly changing. We created a platform for Rails developers to motivate an exchange of ideas, philosophy, practice, projects, helping hands. Join us!
It's no secret that Germany seems to be behind in some IT aspects. Maybe because so many Germans still think in the classic Bavarian paradigm:
1. We've always done it this way.
2. We've never done it that way.
3. Any Hooray Harry could come along and change things …
Consequently, we're fairly slow in adapting new technologies, simplifying bureaucratic procedures and applying the stuff that's already working much more efficiently in other countries. Just like Ruby on Rails.
But we at Opoloo have a long history of looking at the world askew, so our coder Jochen used Rails right from the beginning. And slowly but surely, although there are still not enough Rails developers in Germany to meet the demand for them, people over here are coming to their senses.
Remember the Rails Hype back in 2005 when Twitter used Ruby? Quite untypical for a hype, however, it was well-founded, substantiated by a strong backbone. It was persistent. It was elegant. After working with Rails for 2 years, we quickly hit the walls; we were on our capacity limit. Here in Germany, this was a problem. Xing was looking for a Rails developer for 2 years! We wanted to work together, share our knowledge with other local Rails developers, but there weren't any. So we thought.
Funnily enough, almost as if by accident (or by special providence, we are almost inclined to believe), there were people close to us who had quite some experience with Rails as well. We were glad to have found other Railiens and decided to get together to enjoy each others' company and talk nerd, to use synergies, to work together and be able to tackle larger projects.
So we founded The Rails Society as a platform, as a reference institution. It now consists of eight experts with regard to everything relevant for project realization. Here's a short introduction (I'm dead serious about this):
Jochen: Code Cookie Monster & Super Programmer Extraordinaire
Christian: Medical and Code Doctor, E-Commerce Entrepeneur
Josh: Code (and Word) Acrobat & Mr. Nice Guy
Hannes: Frontend and UI/UX Aestheticist & Checked Shirt Expert
Guenther: Presiding Chief of Design & meticulous UI/UX Advocate
Matze: Content Sunnyboy, Game Development and Code Hero
Sandra: Professor of Light Catching & Tough Template Lady
Nino: Wordworker & Content Choirmaster
What we did so far, surprisingly even to us, reads like a pretty good overview of what's possible with Ruby on Rails. Configuration tools, Android & iOS apps, e-commerce, multiplayer online game backend, communication tools, a photography service, frontend development. We don't get tired.
It's not as dangerous to play on the railroad tracks as most people think. Besides, we love to be challenged by those big passenger trains, Transsiberian Railways, overnighters, freightliners – in short: We're always happy to take on impossible projects. Also, if you're affiliated with Rails in any way, let's have a coffee and a talk (even if only virtually). We’re definitely interested in collaboration. That’s why created this Railiens platform in the first place. We’d like to motivate an exchange of ideas, philosophy, practice, projects, helping hands. Do say hello!
What is in a name? It is more than a label, a name is context: a searchable, shareable mental #tag representing the experience and information behind it.
Illustration by Jo Chapman
All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.
- André Breton
Towel around waist, feet slapping kitchen tiles, I got to my notebook, scratched down a particularly pressing idea and titled it: “On Naming Things”.
Ideas tend to slide on stage when I'm doing my best to ignore them: showering, sleeping, sexing and such. Naturally I continue ignoring, while they make obscene gestures and threaten to run off. This continues ’til I roll my eyes, and capture it in my nearest notebook (either analog or digital).
Water still dripping I quickly scribbled out “Things”. I despise all-encompassing uses of the word “Things” as much as I despise most uses of “They”*.
Left with “On Naming” I evaluated.
I didn't want to focus on the method. I wanted to focus on the act. “On Naming” comes across formal, possibly pretentious, and wrong. I scribbled out “On”.
“Naming” fit the idea that ousted me from an otherwise relaxing shower:
Naming is the emotional human act of experiencing something significant enough to take existing mental structures (metaphors and morphemes), and link them to the experience. Creating a contextual tag to easily recall and share.
- Refined from my original scratching.
That’s a mouthful, so I swilled then distilled to:
Naming: repurposing the known to define the new.
We find the name for an idea through the relationships of other ideas. Representing and expressing it with just a word or few.
A name is more than a label. It is context. A searchable, shareable linguistic #tag representing the experience and information that goes with it.
I hope this thought helps the next time you make a name.
I'd like to explore the act of Naming more.
For now we have the name.
Designing a widget for your Android application should not be the last thing you quickly slap on your app before taking it to the market. Widgets are a core element to Android's experience, and there are a couple of things to take into consideration, before going for the next player controls or boring list views.
Just to make this clear from the start: This article will not help you with coding up your Android app's widget. It’s about getting the right pieces of information across. Lars Vogel might have some tips here for you, though.
But read on anyway.
Right from the start when Google released Android 1.0 in 2008, widgets were a defining element of the OS's desktop and experience. In fact, it was one of the few distinguishing pieces competing against Apple's mighty iPhone and iOS and it still is today. Widgets became even more important when Android spread out to the large screen on tablets and most recently with Jelly Bean 4.2 on the lock screen.
To make this short, if you want to build a solid application for Android, you definitely want to provide a decent widget with it. And let's not forget that the first paid app that crossed one million downloads was a set of standalone widgets called, you guessed it, Beautiful Widgets.
Let's think about this for a moment: A widget is more or less a flexible, quickly accessible subset of information or features of your application. Depending on the complexity of your app, you might even go as far as implementing all of its functionality within the widget.
There are three core purposes of an Android widget:
Launching an application and getting to the data you're looking for sometimes takes forever. You have to find the right icon, select it, wait for the app to launch, wait for the data to be pulled and finally navigate to the essential piece of information. You don't want your users to go down this route all the time, right?
Figure out which are the most frequently used functions of your app and provide those within a widget. A good example is the playback control of most music players, giving quick access to play/pause and next.
Your users might spend a lot of time with your application, especially if it's a reading or media app, giving access to vast libraries of content. But since we're talking about mobile devices, there's a good chance that your user has to break up doing whatever your app is providing rather frequently. Maybe if the bus reaches his destination or the meeting is finally starting.
If that is the case, the first thing someone might want to do is continue where she left off, the last time using your app. A well crafted widget might be the perfect place to do so. Every reading app should have a widget showing recent articles, as every browser needs a list of your latest bookmarks or sites in general.
The last purpose of a widget might be the one most developers underestimate, especially the ones not familiar with Android's strengths. How often do you just unlock your screen to waste some time, spend some minutes with your device or just fool around, with nothing particular in mind? This is the time, where we might be looking for some inspiration. There might be no better place to get some inspiration than a small widget somewhere on one of your homescreens.
How about a new app to download from the market or a song to check out, based on your recent interests? Maybe show the face of a friend your user hasn't texted to in a while? Try to find cases, how your users can get more out of your app than meets the eye.
To wrap this up you might want to spend some time thinking about the three purposes of your app's widget: Quick access, continuation and inspiration. There's nothing more annoying than having too many widgets on your device you just don't care about.
Make sure that your app supports a decent widget with a purpose. If it scales, even better.
Playing games is a key element of the mobile industry. Some analysts estimate it makes up for even more than 50% of mobile usage time and revenue. But something went wrong along the way. Most games just aren't fun to play anymore. But don't give up yet - There are still some worth your time and money.
So, I bet you're ready for the holidays. A couple of free days to relax, eat, enjoy some family-time, and well, get some gaming done. Let's grab that new Android tablet, maybe you got a Nexus 7 or even a 10 and fire up some games. There are plenty of free ones, that ... well ... err ... charge you for actually ... making progress or ... experiencing the core part of the game.
Let's get this straight - In-App purchased have messed up the vast landscape of mobile gaming tremendously. Many games are build around concepts of charging players and revenue. Think about this for a while. You have been playing games for years now, because it's a part of our culture. And you've done so, because you we're looking for a challenge, or an experience, you weren't able to get somewhere else.
Many mobile games don't care about the experience after the initial presentation, and many most certainly don't care about the challenge - you pay for upgrades and max out your character before even starting to play? So the rich kid will win against the poor kid, again. There was something magical about video games, when I was young. Everybody behind the TV was equal. Everybody could battle it out with each other, no matter where he came from or what his background was. And this tied us kids together.
The good news is, that there are still some great game developers out there, who care about who's plays their games and how. And you can easily find a lot of them by just skipping all those free to play games, and go straight for the payed ones. To round this out, here are a couple of beautiful, yet hidden gems on the Play Store, that are yet below the 5000 downloads mark. Those games all deserve your money and time over the holidays.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ninjacoders.hninja
An one-button run & jump game, with a pixel ninja going after his coffee. Exceptional level design, even with boss-fights.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.noodlecake.velocispider
A retro shooter with tilt controls, that is just executed perfectly. Don't underestimate the colorful graphics - this one is hard.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yoyogames.droidkaroshi
While it appears to be a jump & run in the first place, Karoshi is a mind bending puzzle game. If you enjoy thinking outside the box, as crazy as possible, this one's for you.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bigbluebubble.darkincfull
Metroidvania on a smartphone? Yes, indeed, and it's great. You're navigating a beautifully pixelated steampunk world, jumping and slashing you way though robots, soldiers and big bosses.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bentspoongames.gwh
Girl With A Hear Of is a beautiful, dark story, wrapped in a text heavy adventure game. While it has its lengths, I recommend this strongly to everybody who isn't scarred of some reading in a game.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.org.draknek.hearts
A little rotation game, where every level is connected by a well written story. You definitely want to beat every puzzle just to read on.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.omnilabs.eufloria
Make sure to play this on a powerful tablet, because Eufloria is rich, challenging, with gorgeous graphics and a great soundtrack. Mixing space domination with plants and seeds, growing your own universe.
There you go, 7 rather unknown games for your Android devices, that will set you back just a couple of bucks. You won't need anything else over Christmas.
So, which games would you add to the list?
We wanted to share with you a small update to our Timer app. It's about time.
We are actively working on creating a new version of our beautiful Timer app. We are working hard to optimize our backend as well as add the Stopwatch feature we designed a few months back. We also didn't want our users to wait around for the theme enhancements we implemented either.
Today, we published version 1.3 of Timer to the Play Store with support for a dark theme using blue and a light theme using orange. We received a lot of feedback from our users who wanted other colors, but we decided to support a dark and light theme for both our orange and blue.
In addition to adding theme support to the application we also added translations for Korea. We are excited about adding more language support to the application, and our next version will include even more languages.
You can download the update from the Play Store: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.opoloo.holotimer]
Merry Christmas from Team Opoloo!
Ever since all these (more or less) great photography apps have come around, it has become terribly easy to create pictures with insane effects. But: If you want to actually do the real thing and do it yourself, here’s how to get your hands dirty.
Digital SLR cameras are trendy like never before: quality gets better and better, prices for decent cameras are tumbling, and apps like Instagram or Vignette have had incredible numbers of downloads for mobile phones.
Especially those young hipsters love the retro effect to add more character to a photo, so the group of film camera lovers is on the rise again.
But how can I get this "super-fancy" effect? Although a cool photo may be composed of different effects, the most popular one is achieved by way of light leaks. This happens when the film of the camera receives light it is not supposed to get because of a hole or gap in the body of the camera. In most cases the seal of the camera body is broken or scrappy. You also can open the cover of the camera for a short time in a darker environment.
Characteristic for the light leaks are red & yellow light stripes:
Photo by wrenswood
Photo by that annoying tourist
Using an expired film can also be fun. Retro feeling guaranteed and every photo will definitely be unique. You never know what you will get. The photos often get that sweet damaged-and-dirty-effect.
By the way: an expired film is a film that has outlived its best-before-date, like milk or other food.
If you're wondering what kind of film you should use: the film types Color Print Film (processed in C-41), Color Slide Film (processed in E-6) and Black & White film (traditional BW processing) are the most common auctions.
Photo by Jon Jordan Willetts
Photo by Nick Villagrana
Photo by Andrea Buzzichelli
If you don't want to get the effects with an analog camera, take a look at the following links. They describe the editing on the basis of a digital photo:
Creating Light Leaks in Photoshop
Lomo Light Leaks by Danny Tang
How to Make Your Photos Look Hipster
*Title image by JeneaWhat
What you should think about when you think about thinking about a blog. Obviously, there's some serious thinking going down when you’re planning to set things up the right way. There are steps and thoughts you should not omit when it comes to evolving blog concepts. Here are some of the most important ones.
There comes a time in the life of a company when you start thinking about a blog. Go right on! Do it! But take a minute and consider some important issues. We just went through this whole process and want to share our thoughts with you.
The obvious starting point (that is often neglected, however) is that you kick back with your team and evaluate your company. Although everyone should have a pretty good idea what the company does, what its strengths and weaknesses are, it might be helpful just to talk about it in your team. See where you stand, what has changed in the recent past, and where you're headed. This should include everybody and it should help you assess what kind of blog you need. Try to outline or re-think the philosophy of your company. Listen to your colleagues to find out what's in their heads when talking about principles like democratic structures, innovativeness, flexibility, serving customers – you name it. If you're a relatively small company, everybody should get involved. As Darwin knew: diversity and variety is supreme to homogeneity.
Now it's time to decide where you want to go with your blog. You should ask questions like:
Do you want more traffic for your website? Is sharing knowledge your primary aim? Do you want your blog to be a blunderbuss, blasting out bits and pieces every other hour? Chances are, a social network might be a more suitable place to do this. Or do you want articles in long form, giving the reader extensive and well-researched background on your blog post topic?
A blog is – at least in some respects – a service you're offering. Then whom do want to serve? The primary audience might even be your company itself. Or a small but active expert community. Or everybody?
This is the most obvious part, but it's also slightly tricky. The better question would be:
What kind of content do we want to indite? What kind of content are we actually able to create?
Rely on the individual skills, strengths, and interests of your team. Make suggestions: Be aware that you can learn a lot from your co-workers. Be curious. Tell them you'd like to know about a special part of their work. Think about your own skills and projects you did – then write about them.
It might be a good idea to have a set of style guidelines. Think about the tone of your future blog articles. Is it to be totally technical and dead serious or will it be porcupined with puns? Think about the choice of words. Think about sources. Think about how you want to be perceived: as authoritarian or democratic? As the nice guys from around the corner, as hardcore nerds, as trolls, as a solid reference? As somewhere in between?
It's an order: produce! You might have specialists in your company who don't do anything but read and write all day. You might be one of them. But there's this other great guy, too, who may think in codes, or the pixel-pusher. Go motivate yourself and others to write. It takes practice. It takes time. It takes considerable effort, especially if you're not used to writing all the time. But what it ultimately comes down to is: no content – no blog. So you need to start producing right away.
Do you want a blog without limitations, presets or defaults? Then custom-building your blog would be the right choice for you. If you feel you want your own Frankenstein's monster or R2D2, read up on how to custom-build your blog in Jochen Greif's article "Setting up a Blog: The Technical Side" which will be available soon.
Fear not, there are many options for those that don't have the capacity to build a custom blog. Blogging services like Wordpress offer extremely flexible templates and plug-ins that will serve your needs adequately. It's not a question of right or wrong, good or bad: it's a decision according to what you want, are able to handle, and need.
Another question that we felt we should address was: How do you let people participate and interact with you and the content you created? We eventually decided to take the discussion to where the community dwells, not take the community to the discussion. So, as you may have noticed, we didn't enable comments in this blog. We'd like for the discussion to take place in a social network.
Of course, this is not where it ends – this is where it starts. Read up on "Appearance – A Blog's Content Strategy & UI", a sequel that will be following shortly.
Last but not least: shake it, don't break it. You should be terribly excited and motivated to make your blog, not feel the obligation to do it. This also means holding ideas dear and spending time with them. And your team.
Knowing and caring about how language works can make you a better writer. You don’t have to be a poet, you don’t have to be a nobel-prized romancier, but you should think about what you read and write. Analyzing the features of language will show you how to become a more efficient writer and improve your strategy skills.
Here's one of the safest way to weird people out: Go to any public place (let's say a bar, a club, a bus stop, the cafeteria) and announce that you like poetry. Then enjoy the reactions.
Most people think poetry is terribly obscure, even opaque, and they don't know what to do with it. Consequently, they say they hate it. But, as with many things, they hate something they don't understand. Not because they're too dumb to understand it (it's quite easy, actually), but because they haven't tried.
This is a shame, frankly. The basic elements of poetics are so frequently employed in political, social, and business rhetoric that we don't even notice it anymore. And the poetic principles can teach us many things about how language and information is structured and may be presented. I'll try to be lucid.
But why may this article be relevant to content strategists, information architects and copywriters alike? Because we essentially do very similar things and oftentimes take care of work not primarily affiliated with our field. Also, there's no harm in being firm in all disciplines concerning communication. That does not mean you should write Petrarchan sonnets or include a limerick in every paragraph you write. It just means you should know a little more about how language and communication works in order to use this knowledge to your advantage.
Anyway, if you're working in a web environment, chances are you have been in need to write some copy. And even the ones who feel they haven't, either have done so unnoticed, or at least should have done. (On a side note, I'd like to refer you to the great article by Jason Fried: "Why most copywriting on the web sucks")
No matter if it's your G+ or Facebook profile or a CV, an app you want to present, information on a website you're designing, or email contact with a customer: All of these writing activities (and a lot more) contain some elements of copywriting. And, as I will argue, poetry.
The first important thing is that the form should always, to a certain extent, refer to content – in regard to theme, style, and representation. So, when organizing content, you should (and maybe you do intuitively) match your content to your form. This refers to aspects like the length of your lines as well as the "genre" of the text: is it an abstract, an introduction, a comment, a description, a reference? Then make it so.
Even more clear or relevant may be the point of conciseness. We should try, as any good verse will, to be as brief as possible without omitting information relevant to the reader. That premise should be held dear, not only in reference to the actual text we create, but also concerning the information we want to display. Leaving out any kind of information that is not absolutely necessary is crucial for communication. This, however, should not neglect important issues of style (maxims such as politeness and coolness included).
I will focus on meter primarily because of its attention to detail. Obviously, especially copywriters should be well acquainted with meter, since it is one of the ways to create a successful claim, slogan, tagline or catchy description. Research in cognitive studies and brain development has shown that, as infants, we learn the rhythms and meter structure of language first, even before having an understanding of what words may actually mean. This is a universalism, no matter which of the approximately 3.500 languages you learn as your mother tongue. Meter therefore is, and this is my point, the aspect of language most deeply rooted in the brain, which is why we need to make use of it.
The English language is, for the most part, structured in iambo-trochaic meter, meaning that most phrases follow varieties of this syllable pattern: unstressed-stressed, or stressed-unstressed, respectively. No great matter, but what I in turn would like to stress is that you need to pay attention to the details, which is why it isn't so easy to write good copy and why it usually takes a while to get everything just right. A slogan like "Watch it, hear it, know about it." works better than "Look at this, listen to it, and you'll understand.", although they essentially say the same thing.
The way that metaphors work in our brain has only recently begun to be explored by neuroscientists. However, as with rhymes, they directly relate to the part in the brain that is concerned with the processing of emotion. This makes them ever more memorable and appealing. So when you're employing the metaphor of, say, seafaring for a business website, there is an infinite number of images to choose from: from sails to waves, from fishing to mission, from whales to gales, from navigation to harbor station. When you get a metaphor to work for itself, which would be the ideal case, the reader will not only think: "Of course, that's obvious. It could be my idea." It also gives readers a context in which they can embed abstract concepts. So you have something you want to say (A) but you express it via a different word or phrase (B), which however clearly refers back to (A). It seems like an unnecessary detour, but it actually works, paradoxically, because a shortcut is created. A good metaphor makes an explanation (not an interpretation) obsolete.
Pragmatics are concerned with all that goes beyond that what is actually said. So: not the literal expression, but what you want to get across. Look at FedEx's slogan, for example: "When there is no tomorrow." What is said is that there might be a case in which the day following today is not going to exist. What it means is that if you have something urgent to ship to someone who cannot wait another day, you had better trustfully place the important freight in the hands of this company and they will get it there faster than anyone else. A lot of this works by the deduction of context. As a copywriter you have to walk that thin line between saying what you actually need to, but making it interesting at the same time.
This concept, coined by Henri Bergson, basically says that a great part of language is self-referential. This can be seen in the way that we perceive rhymes, assonances, alliterations, analogous sentence structures. Somehow we seem to need this and other structures to make sense of the world which is why you should employ it in your copy.
For illustration purposes and because it works so well, I will pick just one well-known slogan to briefly show just a fraction of how much poetics is in it and how it wouldn't work without. This is going to show you that you probably know more about poetics than you think. You just need to access this knowledge.
It's easy to spot the analogous structure here. The two sentences are perfect equals regarding their syntactic elements. The great thing about it that through the analogy, the "break" (i.e. a "pause") is transformed into the actual product in the second phrase. Not to mention that you actually break the chocolate bars. There's no rhyme in there, but the assonances are elaborate in their simplicity: the ae and e sounds are recurrent and the vowel sounds of "break" [aei] are torn apart, reversed, but reappear in "kitkat" creating another analogy. The meter is broken in the word "kitkat", but only by adding a final syllable, stressing the word, without destroying the rhythm. Finally, the imperative form which actually is a violation to the maxims of politeness (which says you shouldn't tell anyone frankly what to do) is associated with something positive: a time-out, recovery and relaxation, pleasure.
To stay within the product category, I also like the Reese's Cups' slogan.
"Two great tastes that taste great together." Go ahead and take it apart.
While it certainly doesn't make sense to go through a procedure of analysis for every sentence you dribble out, you should keep the aspects mentioned above in mind as you write. Know about them and – with practice, re-working, and extensive reading included – your writing but also your conceptional skills will improve. On a side note, I think it was the legendary D. Ogilvy who once said: "Delete the best thing you've written and you start to get good."
Consider adding these books (or excerpts of them) for your reading list. I promise they'll be worth your while.
Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Malden: Blackwell, 2008.
Holland, Norman. Literature and the Brain. Gainesville: PsyArt, 2009.
Jakobson, Roman. Selected Writings: Word & Language. 2nd vol. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971. 8 vols.
Schrott, Raoul & Arthur Jacobs. Gehirn und Gedicht: wie wir unsere Wirklichkeiten konstruieren. München: Hanser, 2011.
Why you should be a sensible human being, living in the 21st century and actually apply your high moral standards instead of just always talking about them. And why the internet gives you a huge amount of simple opportunities to do so.
Why do we get the impression that much of business in general – and web business in particular – is so awfully concerned with making loads of money in no time? This seems to be the ideal case for many people. And they seem to be ready to sell their grandmothers for it.
But shouldn't we question this way of thinking? Wouldn't it be better to just have enough money to live comfortably and having earned it by doing something well? Shouldn't we then invest the money we made into something substantial, supporting people who do the same? It seems that over the last couple of years, we have somehow lost touch with the soil: we have no idea anymore where the immense amount of products we consume comes from.
But this is about to change: Thanks, not least, to the internet, we can make a difference again and have more possibilities to do the right thing. While this requires you to think (and I highly recommend David Foster Wallace's guide to thinking: "This is Water"), to inform yourself, and to make conscious decisions, you hopefully simply won't be able to avoid doing the right thing: Taking from the big, bloated, monstrous companies by supporting the small, friendly, innovative ones.
The benefits, as well as the disadvantages of the latter ones are quite easy to delineate. While they don't have tons of money or manpower at their free disposal, they can afford to have relatively level hierarchies, constant team interaction, quick decisions, and the crazy motivation to keep their hearts beating and be productive. This is the environment where true innovation can spark up.
What's more: it just feels better to support small bands, local farmers, the tiny fashion label, or your trusted bookstore at the end of your street. Or, for that matter, awesome indie games, great apps, or web services – produced lovingly, without the desire to get rich; instead with a will to create something beautiful and make a living with what you love. If this is combined with customer and community interaction, we should make an effort to support it. It strengthens the small companies and the big ones will eventually realize that they, too, have to produce great quality and listen to the people.
Which brings me to my last point: the democratic principle. There are ways to finance your projects – all the crowd-funding platforms are so great, precisely because they follow a direct democratic idea. Present an idea and have people support it. Or not. Let's be honest: the coolest and most innovative stuff in recent times that required not only skills but also money has come from these platforms.
And finally, we should not forget that the internet is a tremendously powerful tool. Why not use it for sharing, for helping, for redistributing resources more justly and equally?
Although this article should be read as advocating the change of a mindset and incorporate it into a daily base for thinking about what you do, you can of course also always donate or use web services that are specifically devoted to helping. Now, if you still have absolutely no idea how to do good things with the web, check out these links as something like a stopgap:
12 ways to do good on the web by Jennifer Horton
7 Easy Ways to Do Good Online Beyond Donations by Kelley Fernbacher
So you just put the final touch on your beautiful app. Now you want to release this beast and share it with the world. Here are the most important steps you need to take in order to publish your app successfully in the Google Play Store. It’s not as hard as it looks – when you do it right.
It seems that while the Google Play Store has been running for a couple of years already, many developers still struggle to publish their apps properly and in style. Missing assets, bad screenshots and horribly translated copy is all over the place. Think about this: There are over 700,000 apps on the Play Store right now. Do you really think that your app will succeed against all those competitors, fighting for attention? You've got some issues to take care of to make it stand out.
Obviously, you have build a great app. You don't want it to be part of all those countless apps out there that nobody ever installs, right? So take these last couple of hours of polishing and get everything together for a solid launch.
I've put together a simple checklist with everything you need for a solid launch. Let’s get started.
Obviously, you want to publish the most awesome app ever, but try think one step further. Have you tested your app properly across all the devices you plan to support? Have you thought about tablet layouts and how you’ll handle them? Would your app make sense on Google TV? Just make sure that your users are not disappointed after installing your app with simple device support issues. This is a great starting point.
Of course your app has a great icon. Or does it? If not, head over to Roman Nurik's nice asset studio and build a clean one, or commission a designer. But that's not all, also supply your icon in high resolution. 512 by 512 pixels, to be exact. That one can be used all over the Play Store and make your app shine.
If you want your app to be featured eventually, this is a must have. Add a 1024 by 500 pixel graphic, clearly showcasing your app, but don't overdo it. This graphic should carry your app's name while also getting its purpose across. If you squeeze in too much information, it might blur at smaller sizes. Natascha Bock has put together some great guidelines for the feature graphic.
This asset feels a little obsolete. The smaller version of the feature graphic measures 180 by 120 px, and was heavily used in older versions of the store, called Android Market. You should create one anyway, since there are still many devices out there that don't run the latest version of Google's Play Store. Just keep it simple - your app's icon and its name should work fine.
Thanks to Kirill Grouchnikov for clarification.
Sometimes all those beautiful pictures don't convince a potential user right away. Don't forget to describe your app with a couple of words. Establish some trust by outlining your software's features and benefits. Let people know why it's special. Structure this copy with a quick abstract, point out some highlights or maybe awards - things one can look forward to after a download - then flesh out all the details that might be interesting for your target group, but always keep it short and simple.
Then there’s the option to publish your app’s description in different languages. Surely, it’s a lot of work to translate your copy multiple times, but don't underestimate how many Android users out there enjoy their native language. A decent approach would be to publish with just two or three languages and then keep a hawk-eye at your stats to determine where your users come from. There might be many more people who would like to install and use the app if it is easier for them to understand, but please try to avoid using automatic translation. Having a completely wrong translation with twisted spelling and grammatical errors means running the risk of frustrating users before they even give your app a shot.
Don't forget to translate all the new stuff once you update the app to make sure you don’t end up with mixed languages.
A decent set of screenshots might be the most important part of your app's promotion. Oftentimes, you only have this one opportunity to convince a viewer that your app is any good – with those first screens. Offer a plain view of the most important hero-screens of your app. Those should be quite self-explanatory. If this just isn't possible with the interface of your app, add a couple of carefully chosen words to those shots. You definitely should not crowd those important screens by placing multiple shots or waste huge amounts of text on them. Your users want a clear and concise representation of the app before installing it.
Also, remove the navigation bar at the bottom of your screenshots. It's great that you're supporting Android 4.x, but there are still plenty of devices out there on older versions of the OS. Besides, the navigation bar is just not a part of your great app.
Can you tell the whole story with just your screenshots alone? If not, consider adding a short video to your assets. Maybe show a special pattern or the fluid animations of your game, but be aware that a video production might be the most expensive or time consuming part of your whole Play Store appearance, except for the application itself. It has to be worth it. Maybe a simple, personal walk-through of your application is enough to convince potential users.
While a simple landing page is definitely optional, I highly recommend it to every app developer that cares deeply about his work. It's your opportunity to showcase your work perfectly according to your intentions, with no constraints from Google's Play Store. It's also a great place to inform users about updates and new features as well as a hub for your support and community.
So there you have it. Eight suggestions you should consider perfectly crafted, before taking your app to the Play Store. Skip one of these and you might be fine. Skip more than one and you will definitely lose some new users. The better you can round out your Play Store's presentation, the more professional your app will appear, which should directly result in plenty of more downloads.