I randomly happened upon this little technology demo from Last.fm. It’s called Boffin, and, using Last.fm’s metadata, it generates a tag cloud out of your music collection. You click a couple of tags, click play and it provides yet another way to slice and dice one’s sprawling music archives. Here’s what mine looks like:
The top half of the cloud is more accurate than the bottom half. I’m not sure how much of my music is “hair metal approved”, and I’m pretty sure it’s over-representing the fraction of my collection that is Norwegian.
But that’s not really what I want to talk about. When you install and first run Boffin, it needs to scan your music collection. I have about 10,000 songs, so that took quite a while. During this process, however, Boffin displayed this lovely visualization of my music:
The YouTube-hosted screencast video is a bit sketchy, but you get the idea. It’s a totally unnecessary feature–actually useless, as it happens. But I found the cascading images of bands kind of hypnotizing. I really appreciated that the app designer when that extra step to make a very ordinary process–scanning your hard drive for music–a little remarkable.
There’s a lot of nice graphic design work here in Malta, even for village events. This is one example which, with one glaring exception, looks pretty good:
What’s with all that fruit? It doesn’t remotely match the aesthetic of the rest of the poster, and seems laughably tacked on. They’re not even particularly good photos of fruit.
Julie postulated, quite accurately I suspect, that they added the fruit to imply that there would be food at the event.
Via this Wired promotion, I visited LivingHomes.net. They make great looking pre-fab, eco-friendly homes. I was immediately impressed by how they’d built their site. It’s totally Flashy Flash and the Flash bunch, but it’s artfully done and reasonably easy to navigate.
When you first visit the home page, you’re presented with a wonderful time-lapse video of light passing through a living room. It’s a subtle and brilliant approach, and a really pure expression of what architecture and interior design are all about. I was immediately reminded of a lovely time-lapse film of the Waterfall Building that entranced me as part of the Arthur Erickson exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
The tour is narrated by Steve Glenn, the company owner. He takes you on a friendly tour of his own home, pointing out the home’s features, but also cracking little jokes and pointing out the Lego he still has from his childhood. There are also plenty of visual cues to click and navigate through the tour.
It helps that the product itself–the homes–are gorgeous, but I was really impressed by the elegant, functional site design.
Their pricing is pretty steep, but I guess that’s what it costs to build a reasonably guilt-free home. Like so many of these cool, modern, prefab home companies, they’re based in the States. The duty to ship a house across the border makes it financially impractical, but we already know a local architect who does a lot of this style of work with prefab elements.
Last month I was at my friend’s place in France, doing some laundry. Her washing machine lit up like a cheap stereo, which struck me as awesomely French.
There was a dial on her washing machine with big numbers like 3000, 6000 and 1200. I believe these were measures of ‘tr/min’ (as per this photo of a washing machine brand called ‘Malice’). Is that ‘tour’, the French word for ‘turn’? It doesn’t really matter–I assumed it referred to revolutions per minute.
I was baffled as to what to set the machine for, and craved some less specific settings like “linen”, “wool” or “super-wash”. I’ve been doing laundry for over 20 years, and have no idea what speed the average washer barrel revolves at.
Is Five Right for Chicken?
Fast-forward to our villa here in Gozo. We’ve got a great gas range. Here are the controls for the oven:
That’s a timer on the left, and the temperature setting on the right. As you can see, you set the oven to a temperature between 1 and 8.
Here I have the reverse problem. I want less abstraction–I just want to set the damn thing to 375° to bake some chicken.
Set It to Totally Awesome, Please
The lesson is that my (and possible other’s) preferences change from device to device. I want more abstraction in my washing machine than my stove.
This is also true of software. iTunes has this hilarious setting called ‘Sound Enhancer’. It’s on a slider, and the online help says I can use this setting to “add depth and enliven the quality of your music”.
Why would anybody set this to ‘Low’? Why even bother with something called a ’sound enhancer’? Why not just set it to ‘Totally Awesome’ under the hood and get rid of the user setting altogether?
On the other hand, I want really granular control when converting WAV to MP3–probably more control than iTunes offers out of the box.
The right approach, I think, is to organize the settings in noob-journeyman-expert groups, enabling users to remove layers of abstraction if they want. That’s easy enough in software, but far trickier in the kitchen and laundry room.
I really dig nice hotels. I’m a Taurus, and apparently that makes me a sucker for luxury. I like old school hotels, and I like nice post-modern ones, too.
We’re staying at the Novotel Budpaest Danube, a four-star hotel that’s right on the river in Buda, directly across from the Hungarian parliament. In actuality, it’s not a particularly remarkable hotel, but they’ve done it up nice. It’s a very modern, comfortable business hotel, with all the amenities you’d expect. The staff speak good English (certainly not a requirement, but handy) and have been very friendly and helpful.
At first glance, the location looks a little dubious. It’s seemingly central, but most of the cool stuff in Budapest is either up in Buda Castle or across the river in Pest. Happily, the hotel is two minutes away from both the excellent metro system and a tram line. We’re big believers in using public transport when we visit big cities–driving is usually stressful, frustrating and expensive–and so the location has worked really well for us.
I enjoy modern European hotels because they’re often full of cool, tiny design features which I haven’t seen before. I’m not one to peruse House & Home magazine, so these may seem unremarkable to everybody else.
I really dug the anti-steam mirror. I guess the hot water tubes are run behind the central portion of the glass, and it never steams up. I also liked the nifty sink, where the counter just kind of melts smoothly into the basin:
In the toilet room, I enjoyed another playful design element. In many parts of the world, they divide the toilet’s flushing mechanism into two buttons. This is a clever water conservation strategy, as you need less flushing water for, uh, number one than for number two.
In this bathroom, they’ve kind of exploded the scale of the button (which is usually the size of a loonie and embedded in the top of the basin), rendering them as two stainless steel bubbles on the wall. Cool, eh?
This is a great example of how clever designers rethink ordinary things and show them to us in a new way.
Via Derek, I read Jeff Croft’s a lengthy, fretful post about how ‘professional designers’ are being shafted by $30/hour amateurs. He wants to charge a lot more than $30/hour, apparently, but is disgusted by all the clients going to the ‘hacks’.
And yet they succeed. They continue to get jobs and they continue to roll out tag soup, tabled-based layouts with amateurish graphics full of Photoshop filters and all-Flash sites full of unnecessary and cheesy animation. They rip off well-made sites, stealing graphics and layouts and pawning them off as their own work to unsuspecting clients.
He subsequently makes the foolish suggestion of ’some kind of professional body for our industry’. Right, because professional bodies in other industries tend to defend high standards and offer reliable service?
He’s written this post as if he’s the first professional in the world to suffer downward pressure on rates because of technological advancement and increased competition. He’s not, and he ought to go read about what, well, nearly every other industry has had to face at one time or another. Whinging isn’t going to help, and neither is a professional association or, Lord help me, web designers’ union.
Personally, sometimes I hire the $150/hour designer and sometimes I hire the $30/hour guy. Why? Because I know what differentiates the two, and I know when I need the hotshot and when I can make do with the hack.
This is hardly worth writing about, but you know, bear with me. I’ve written before about the shocking lameness of so many musician’s websites. It’s improving (though I don’t think MySpace is helping anybody–see also the immortal ZeFrank), but I’m still often presented with Nightmares of Poppy Flashness.
I visited her website, and was encouraged by the second link off the navigation bar:
Maybe it’s just the world I’m steeping in these days, but that second link sure looks like ‘Blog’ to me. As it turns out, it’s actually ‘Biog’.
I guess it’s a cultural difference (Rae is from Leeds), but over on this side of the Atlantic, I never see the term ‘biography’ abbreviated to ‘biog’. It’s always ‘bio’. ‘Biog’ is something you have to put up with in first year university.
Is ‘biog’ a common usage in the UK? I didn’t recognize it as such when I lived in Dublin for a couple of years (I know, not the UK, but close enough to get plenty of UK culture). Can any Brits comment?
Over at the day job, we finally got around to revising our website. We’d had the previous design for a couple of years, but our focus has changed and the messaging was out of date. Here’s what the old design looked like and here’s the new one.
There’s still a few bugs to squash and some SEO to finish (page titles, for example, aren’t done). In my experience, if you wait for a site to be absolutely 100% complete, it never gets launched.
Our goals with the redesign were:
Express that we’re a (gulp) Web 2.0 marketing company while not intimidating our potential clients, most of whom are still in a Web 1.0 world.
Feature ourselves prominently throughout the site. I’m a big subscriber to the theory espoused in One-Minute Site: “Decide who the Ambassador of your company will be, take a photo of him or her, and put it on the front page of your site to welcome each new visitor personally.”
Emphasize that we now work more or less exclusively with software companies.
Reduce our services offering to the work which we want to do and are good at.
Take a few more risks with the site’s attitude.
I think we more or less achieved those aims. The lovely and talented Mark Yuasa designed the site, using Kris Krug’s excellent photographs (as you’ll see, we went with the second-most popular choice for the front page portrait). We’re extremely happy with the result. And, yes, it’s a Bryght site.
If you want to keep track of the goings-on at Capulet, you can of course subscribe to our blog feed. If you prefer your information in SMTP-sized chunks, you can always sign up for our newsletter:
There is something really weird going on with the DNS. If you enter only http://capulet.com (no www) into your browser, you’re likely to get this weird framed version of www.darrenbarefoot.com with a Google search bar. I have no explanation for this, but we’re working on it. If anybody has any theories, I’m all ears.
UPDATE: We’ve got a theory (that it’s a demon?), and we’re modifying some settings to see if that helps.
I’m a big believer in the importance of eye tracking in web design. I know how fast I skim a page. It’s obvious that a page’s structure and core messages must be positioned and emphasized to grab the site visitor’s attention.
It’s interesting to note that Amazon’s search feature attracted more attention than those found on the other homepages we tested. Indeed 15% of users performed a search query on Amazon.co.uk. This may have reflected the fact that users were more familiar with this company and its product line.
I’m tangentially aware of how much time and energy Amazon puts into its page layouts. They’re not necessarily pretty, but they get results. If you’re building a web store, just copy the layout of Amazon or Ebay–they’ve done the work for you.
Last Saturday night, I went to the opening of Swell - Future Friendly Design, an exhibit which runs all this week in the old skating rink at UBC Robson Square. It’s part of 30 Days of Sustainability, “annual celebration and affirmation of sustainability and its natural role in the world”. Raincity Studios designed the site, and I’m pretty sure Sarah Pullman’s involved in some way or other.
The exhibit itself was pretty cool, and an effective use of some underused downtown space. Here were some of the niftier items I spotted:
A non-ugly electric scooter that runs for 30 or 40 km on a charge from a regular 110/220v outlet (caution: the site has a bunch of stupid, loud Flash bits).
The exhibit was on the small side. I’m sure it’s all volunteer organization, but it could easily have been two or three times as big. My other complain involves the ‘Do Not Touch’ signs everywhere. Most of the items weren’t art–they were commodities that you could buy. Yet I wasn’t allowed to shake the flashlight or pick up a bamboo plate. This is foolish, because the event is as much marketplace as it is exhibit. Apparently the future isn’t friendly to interactivity.
I also spotted what must be one of the more obscure periodicals on the planet: Solar Cooker Review. The exhibit is open until March 20, so if you’re downtown, it’s worth checking out.
