The NYTimes.com’s recently announced article skimmer prototype (yet-unnamed) is described by its developer as “an attempt to provide the Sunday Times experience anytime”.
The keyboard browsing feature is simply a wonderful idea. Another proof of less is more.
A fun, easy-to-digest visual representation of User Centered Design (UCD) process and its deliverables.
Created by Jeffery Callender and Peter Morvilled. PDF download available on the author’s website.
Leave politics aside, the Obama campaign logo was a popular topic among design blogs during the election time. The interview with the design lead Sol Sender was just out on YouTube a few days ago (from the design agency VSA Partners). It’s great to hear the creative process and see the various design options being laid out in one page.
I really like the one in the final list (at 6:15). It is surprisingly inspiring.
Video Part 2: Sol Sender - Obama Logo Design Part 2 of 2
Related Article on NYT: The ‘O’ in Obama
Related Article on LogoDesignLove: Obama logo ideas that weren’t chosen
Think Facebook’s recent profile / app platform changes.
“If you go from light to dark by flipping a switch, your eyes may hurt for a minute or two, you may end up being able to see faster if you use the dimmer.” - Tapan Bhat, Yahoo!
Link: Changing That Home Page? Take Baby Steps (NYT Oct. 17, 2008)
Good data visualization should convey simple messages to viewers. Quite often I see examples of information design that are overly complex or focus too much on presentation than communication goals. I think the mistake is that these designs fail to tell a comprehensible story, or to say, lack of a central idea that explains the purpose of the data.
This is probably why Map is such a unique and compelling form of communication. Not only it visualizes the relationships between elements, but also it represents one’s mind. It is the journey behind the lines and numbers that fascinates people who love to explore.
Link: Strange Maps
IDEO’s new site is a little tricky to navigate, but the magazine-style layout really shines here with powerful shots of the wonderfully designed products. Hands down one of the most visually intelligent web designs I have seen in a long time.
Link: Ideo.com
I read an interesting article on Read Write Web yesterday about the gradual transformation of the blogging landscape through concepts such as micro-blogging, lifestreaming or widgetization.
I don’t think what’s been described in the article necessarily represents the “future” per se (well, at least not yet), but this one-small-piece-at-a-time, or the bite-sized approach for content generation seems to be a common character and a trend that is hard to ignore.
Yongfook.com (above), one of the websites mentioned, is an new type of blogging format that combines custom widgets and the Twitter-ish, chronologically-ordered content structure. I find this communication style has scary similarities to the Facebook Walls.
Link: The Future of Blogging Revealed
-via Read Write Web
Vi.sualize.us is a social bookmarking site for images. Developed in 5 months by Victor Espigares, “a Spanish software engineer who loves photography (as described on the site)”.
I like the simple look and the tone of the early content. Features like Safe Browsing and Tag Cloud are well suited for its purpose. Firefox Addon is also provided allowing users to summit the image in one click via the (right click) contextual menu.
Link: vi.sualize.us
I attended a WebGuild event few months ago on the topic of Social Search and saw some interesting demos from sites like Mahalo (human power search engine) and Eurekster (search meets wiki). My instant reaction was mixed: how would the result-refining task ever work on a large scale? how to measure the quality of a search query? Is collaborative filtering a good or bad thing for the users?
I am not an SEO expert, so purely speaking from a user’s perspective, I would choose variety over accuracy since I believe “diversified definitions” is exactly what makes the Web so attractive compared to other media. That being said, I am pretty happy with the way search works today, and I think tagging as opposed to ranking, is where improvement is needed.
I goggled “better search algorithm”and this article ranks second on the first page. Here is a direct quote:
What if we had an “open source” search engine that everyone working in and around the area of search could plug into? The companies working in tagging, shared searching, audio and video search could offer their results/indexes to the open source search engine so that their meta data could be considered in preparing the best results?
With the above being said, this post was a result of what came into my mind after seeing the video demonstrating Google’s Digg-like search interface on TechCrunch this morning.
Evernote provides the tool to capture and save your browser’s clipboard data and post it online in one click. This is one of the best online services I have seen this year.
Link: EverNote.com
