Information design
Dollar Rede$ign Project
I came across the Dollar Rede$ign Project today which is an interesting exercise by a number of artists to look at how to redesign the US Dollar. I especially liked the work of San Francisco based design studio Dowling | Duncan who made a number of interesting changes including using different colors for different bills, keeping the width of the bills the same but varying the height to make it easier to identify how much money you have and changing the orientation to a vertical format which the way the majority of people hand over their money. They also chose imagery for each note that directly related to it’s value so the $1 is the first African American president, the $5 is the five biggest native American tribes and the $10 is the bill of rights. They then overprinted the imagery with infographics and pattens relating to that particular subject matter. You can vote for your favorite between now and September 30th when the poll closes and a winner and two runners up will be named.
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The visual resume
I have continued to tinker with my idea of creating a new format for designer’s resume that leaves boring Word files behind for more color and visual layout. I recently updated the visual version of my resume with a new more compact and informative layout that lays out my whole career on one page. If you have any thoughts let me hear then and if your have your own version I would love to see it.
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MapQuest finally gets some direction
Mapquest was one of the early originators of online mapping but the brand and it’s site have been dormant for a very long time. They are trying to change all of that and close the gap on Google by making a comeback with a new site and some new branding.
New branding – It’s a logo, it’s an equation, it’s a character?
Let’s start by taking a look at their new logo / icon which is a departure from the old color palette and design with the addition to a new logo mark. When I saw the new logo for the first time I honestly thought it looked like M to the power of Q. I know other people either simply see the letters M and Q or get far more creative and see the letters forming a dog or elephant like character with the Q as the head of the animal. I can see how you could all of those interpretations but I keep debating with myself how I feel about the logo. On the one hand it is unique and I can’t think of another logo where you are able to see it so many different ways but I’m not convinced all that interpretation leads to a lasting or positive brand impression. MapQuest is trying to embrace all as these different forms as they acknowledge and explain them all in their new brand video but I think their explanations go too far into overreaching marketing speak trying to give every form meaning that relates to the site. If the three it would seem that the brand may be favoring the creature interpretation because on the new site the logo can be seen tapping its feet while content loads.
MapQuest.com – Differentiated or redecorated?
Google Maps
For me a new logo is nice but the real question is what are they doing on the new MapQuest.com that is going to differentiate the site and pull it ahead of Google Maps? I started in the obvious place by pulling up both sites and searching for the same address to do a side-by-side comparison. It was a bit of a disappointment when after all the build up I couldn’t really find any significant differences. I went down the list of features on both sites. Zoomable map – check. Street views – check. Live traffic – check. Search nearby – check. While MapQuest had a slightly cleaner design with more modern interface buttons the only real difference I could find took a page from a few popular iPhone apps and added an icon bar where you can quickly display restaurants, parks, movie theaters, etc. near your chosen location. They have also gone those basic markers to ass time sensitive content like ‘July 4th events’ and paid branded content from companies like Holiday Inn so you can find the nearest hotel.
It was only after I did some digging that I did find one interesting feature on the site. You can plan your trip online and save the results to the My Maps section and then either customize the map with your own information or pull up the route you want to take on your iPhone through their application. It’s a useful feature I would probably use when I travel because I don’t always 100% trust my car’s navigation system. The problem is that I NEVER saw one mention of this feature anywhere on the site outside of an extremely short mention of it in their new brand video. This is a huge miss for a brand trying to create some differentiation from a competitors who has a huge market share over them.
So when I look at this re-launch as whole I don’t see how they are going to gain any ground on Google. Using language like ‘started designing with a blank canvas’ sound promising but then you need to deliver something that is truly breakthrough and takes advantage of an opportunity like that and doesn’t have that canvas look more like a xerox than an a new original work of art.
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web.without.words
Found an interesting site today called web.without.words which was developed by Paul Armstrong to visually represent the idea that hierarchy, grid systems and uniformity ultimately leads to a more natural user experience. He takes the overall structure of any website, strips it naked of the distractions of text and ads and images and showing a site for what the eye unconsciously perceives – pattern, consistency, unformity, predictability and balance. Each site has this visual breakdown and some analysis of the structure. There aren’t as many examples as you would hope for but it is an interesting approach to analyzing popular sites.
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Facebook Redesign circa 2006, sort of…
First, sorry for no posts lately. The new year brought a reorganization at work that has ben buried in new work and responsibilities but the posts will start flowing again soon and I have a lot of good stuff on deck.
Today I saw an interesting article that from December 2006 to February 2007 the agency IA were in touch with the product manager at Facebook trying to redesign their site. The contract was never signed and they kept their designs in the drawer until now. I always find this proposed redesign exercise to be interesting but the problem with all of this is that the designs they posted aren’t from 2006. Saying that “The web is not the same anymore and neither are we.” they took their “sketches” and created these comps “to contemporary design standards”. For me this makes the quality of the work really hard to judge because without the original wireframes you can’t tell really get a sense of how pure the designs are or how much they were effected by the adaptation. None the less it is interesting to read the thinking behind the work.
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Peeking Into Netflix Queues
There is an interesting article in the New York Times today that uses Google Maps based data visualizations to show neighborhood by neighborhood Netflix rental patterns in 12 major U.S. cities. For the selected city you can roll around the map to see the most rented movie by zip code or sort them by most rented, alphabetical or meta score and then use the slider to go through the 50 movies listed. In looking at New York you see interesting trends on some movies like Mad Men that is almost exclusively concentrated in Manhattan, Obsessed that was concentrated in Brooklyn and New Jersey and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was seen by everyone everywhere.
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Vacation assignment – Help design Firefox 4
Mozilla’s Firefox continues to chip away at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer’s market share and recently they been showing off new user interface mockups of the next major release – Firefox 4. Staying true to its long-standing focus on openness, Mozilla has launched the Firefox 4 Design Challenge this is a series of events meant to encourage innovation and experimentation in user interface design. The first challenge asks you to concentrate on ideas for switching Firefox’s Home button to a Home tab that will facilitate start pages in the browser similar to MyYahoo and iGoogle start pages. They have supplied the following mockup of how the browser might keep the new start page concept available up top via the Home icon at left:
If you want to participate in the Design Challenge you have to submit a short video explaining your concept and presenting a mockup that clearly shows how a new start page might work. Wireframes and polished comps are also welcome. Mozilla has a submission form available here and example templates are available here. How often can you use your time off to influence how millions of users will interact with the web.
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Personas – see how the Internet sees you
I came across another interesting data visualization site today called Personas that was part of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. The site creates an aggregate display of your online identity by scouring the web for information based on nothing but your name and attempts to put you into a predetermined set of categories. It runs through a few different stages of analysis before it presents you with a colored, segmented line that shows what you are made of according to the internet.
I like this not only as an information design exercise but that it a great illustration of how the vast amount of data on the internet can be filled with near perfect insights as well as huge errors and mischaracterizations. I think that this ying and yang of good and bad is a natural result of pulling data from a one dimensional search, in this case only your name, and the inclusion of any other metrics would obviously greatly improve the results. That being said I think it is also a good reminder that all the data in the world is useless without the skill to be able to analyze and mine the data to separate the gems from the trash.
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Facebook facelift
I was cruising through Behance today and came across Barton Smith’s self initiated re-design of Facebook. The comps and video are a little small but can you see his design is a really nice, streamlined and organized take on their site. Things like the publisher toolbar that let’s you post content from any page, the streams’ 2 tiered filter and bottom ticker are smart changes that Facebook would do well to consider for their re-design. This type of thinking would move the site forward by keeping and enhancing functionality and stop their trend of stripping their site further and further down into a more and more generic mediocrity.
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New search tools – AppBoy & Addict-o-matic
I came across two interesting new web search portals today for mobile applications and traditional search I thought I would share to see what you think of them.
AppBoy
Appboy is a new online platform that was created with two purposes. FIrst it is a search engine or sorts that will help you weed through the thousands os applications to find the best iPhone, Android and Blackberry apps out there. You can also post application ideas that the community can vote on in order to get a develop to create it. I can’t find any real examples that this has actaully happened but if it does you get $250 which does really small given the potential upside and profit a great application could generate. I am curious to see if we will starting seeing more and more sites like this to help you get to the quality application out because when it is left to popularity we are left with fart generators and moron tests.
Addict-o-matic
Addict-o-matic starts out looking like your average search engine that happens to have a large Dyson-esque mascot. You plug in what you are searching for and the site returns the results in 19 separate content boxes that show you results from sources like Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Yahoo Web Search, Flickr and 13 more. You can dig into any one data source if you want to but I found it interesting to try different terms to see the data grouped and displayed in this new way because it gives you a different feel for the results.
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