Been thinking quite a bit about contextual UI recently. Googling the subject brings up a scant bit of community thought on the topic.
Can’t wait until the Adobe XD Inspire site is up an running (it’s coming very soon!). There are a lot of smart minds in my group focused on thinking about and designing some of the best examples of contextual UI around.
This is rather old news - but IDEO relaunched their website. It’s completely different than the old. I appreciate the functionality and the amount of content, but the new site is a mess. Very little visual hierarchy, a mix mash of rather irritating typographic and graphic styles, and seemingly endless navigational pathways.
In a nutshell, why so complicated? I expect IDEO to deeply understand the beauty and utility in design simplicity.
Just heard about a new Discovery show by the team that brings you MythBusters. The show is called Prototype This! and according to this CNET article http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10016485-52.html, the show should verily rock.
The four hosts have what is in my opinion close to the ideal day job: playing around all day with software, hardware, machinery, and industrial design process all with the goal of developing cool prototypes in a timely fashion.
Interesting difference between the job on Prototype This! and working at IDEO: the client for the TV show is the audience instead of industry.
Photoshop Mobile Beta was released yesterday. Wonderfully, it syncs with Photoshop.com, one of my favorite examples of near pixel perfect Flex design - and a not-bad workflow to boot.
Some good friends worked on the design of Photoshop Mobile Beta and they did a very good job indeed, porting some of the core Photoshop.com interaction patterns and visual design into a smaller screen and 5-way navigation.
From the NYtimes.com:
The problem isn’t doubts about the hardware, once costs drop. Instead, says John Jacobs, director of notebook market research at DisplaySearch, it’s a lack of software designed to work well with touch. For instance, few applications are written to support multitouch, he says.
Perhaps Adobe should get out in front of this with Flash multi-touch APIs. Anyone know of existing libraries of such type, created by the community?
A few posts back I provided some feedback on Adaptive Path’s Aurora concept. Short version: few innovative concepts presented in a muddy manner.
One of the problems I have with Aurora’s presentation is that there are far too many visual cues packed into the screen. Part of the problem is the online news page featured in the first part of the demo, which adds to the visual noise. Turns out that the news page was intentionally designed by Unit, a design firm out of Texas. Andy Rutledge writes about the ideas behind the design.
Here’s a large version of the news page.
I agree with the spirit of the redesign, but the page layout leaves a bit to be desired; at first glance it has little rhythm, and is way to dense. However, after spending some time engaging with the page, the rhythm matters less then the content chunks, which are smartly designed. The design also nicely integrates diverse content into a page primarily comprised of text and images; videos and charts feel close than a click away. And the strange little nav-bar to the right of the baseball image is intriguing. Does it offer various ways to visualize the news?
Another main beef with the page is the decision to use a slab-serif font. Is its use a purposeful deviation from the NYTime’s bespoke Cheltenham, the heart of the Time’s visual brand?
Right sexy website from Sony Picture Imageworks. Give it a view if you want to see an example of a job immaculately done.
A few aspects to note:
- The transitions between primary states of the experience. I haven’t seen transitions like this before. Unique stuff to be riffed upon.
- The sequences of text animations. Notice the smooth timing of the characters progressively fading into view, across all the text elements.
- The work. Imageworks does some damn fine sport.
One more note on text animation: I’m asking the Flex SDK team to bake methods for character sequencing into the Flex 4 text components. However, considering the sheer amount of components the SDK team must build for the new Flex 4 architecture, it’s unlikely character sequencing will actually make it in. This seems like the perfect thing for someone in the community to build into a custom text component (hint, hint).
So here’s a quick useful drop of PSD goodness from Teehan+Lax, a design firm from Toronto:
Over the past few months we’ve had to create a few iPhone mock ups for presentations. The problem we’ve encountered is the lack of resources to help us design something efficiently. Up until now we’ve used a nice PSD from 320480.com but we still found ourselves having to build out additional assets or heavily modifying bitmap based buttons and widgets.
Since we know we’ll be doing more of this, we created our own Photoshop file that has a fairly comprehensive library of assets – all fully editable.
Grab the PSD here.
Hopefully somebody will refactor this into Fireworks PNG.
Gever Tully’s name has come up in the past on this blog, and well, the man deserves good credit. He is featured again, along with a number of other progressive designer/builders, in this recent NYTimes article about digital designers rediscovering their hands.
Note - the article also gives a little insight into life on the Adobe XD team. Over here, it’s not all about the screen.
