Only Dead Fish

Infinite and Parallax Scrolling

Thanks to Rubbishcorp for pointing at this wonderful Oakley site for their new Airbrake MX Google. It's a great piece of merchandising. HTML5 and CSS3 are enabling all kinds of design-rich in-browser experiences using infinite and parallax scrolling (where an illusion of depth is created by background images moving slower than foreground images). One of my absolute favourites is the fabulous Life of Pi site which is quite incredible. 

Here's a few others I really liked. Von Dutch used parallax scrolling to tell the story of its original founder in a rather charming way.

This site makes a great use of it to talk about the dangers of fracking. Peugeot created a rather cool autoplaying comic to promote its hybrid technology. Olympic and World champion cyclist Jason Kenny's site is about as nice a personal site as you'll see, and here's a great ad agency example. It's all rather lovely. There's even a rather nice one from a tatoo business. 

More here and here.

When Every Page Is Your Homepage

"Instead of adding new flooring and fixtures, they've taken the house down to the foundation"

Reuters are redesigning their site from the ground up and the approach that they're taking with it is fascinating. Most websites (news services included) put a lot of focus on the homepage to draw people into the site in the same way that contents pages of magazines are there to aggregate, highlight, and help people navigate. It's a model that is shackled to a print-based world. Yet whilst a proportion of readers may still enter the site via the home page, an increasing number come in from search queries or content shared on social media which are deep linked into the site ("The days when you could drive a big portion of your audience to any single page? That's pretty much done"). 

So what happens when every page is your homepage? The concept of a continuously updated stream of news is central to Reuter's DNA, so it makes sense that they should adapt this into creating a digital 'river of news' where stories are contextualised within the stream, and moving from one to another is as seamless as possible.

Take a look at the site preview and you see a heads-up display of market data across the top, the roster of Reuter's opinion writers (like the usually excellent Felix Salmon) down the side, and a news stream featuring a rolling feed of news, commentary, video, photography and even editorially curated links to relevant third party articles and content. Articles feature as part of a stream of related information with background pieces, data and commentary, and are positioned in the middle of a larger stream of content ("scroll up or down and you’ll find your story’s text actually lives in a bifurcated version of the Reuters front page"). And if you're interested in following a particular issue, topic streams combine multi-format content along with the latest breaking news around specific subjects.

The whole thing is far more reflective of how content works now on the web: living as streams, dynamic not static, effortlessly multimedia, surrounded by contextually relevant information, flowing seamlessly from one piece to the next, reflective of the increasing atomisation of content. A site where every page is the homepage.

Shifting to a content model such as this isn't easy. It requires a wholly different design approach, different workflows, and an in depth and ongoing understanding of user need and behaviour. The idea of context for example, is multi-dimensional, so serving up relevant associated content requires a sophisticated and intelligent tagging system, and staff with the know-how to use it in the right way.

But this kind of approach is a far more 'digitally-native' approach to news and content that reminded me a lot of the work done by MadeByMany in redesigning the ITV News site a year ago. That too featured a continously updated multimedia feed of news that draws on multiple sources, enables filtering by story, and is largely unshackled from legacy approaches. And it's not lost on me that this approach is fantastically suited not just to social and SEO, but also to mobile and tablet. Small wonder then, that unique views on the ITV news site have risen by over 500% since that resdesign.

Once again the value has come from unshackling approaches to content and design from legacy thinking and rebuilding a modern news service from the ground up. There are one or two similar examples of other media owners following suit (the WSJ's World Stream, and Canada's Global News) but the examples are surprisingly few. It strikes me that not only will we see more news services adopting the approach, but that there are lessons here for all content producers. 

Longplayer, and the Long-term View

Longplayer is Jem Finer's intriguing project to write and perform a one thousand year long musical composition: "It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again". As part of it, he has launched Longplayer letters and invited thinkers and writers to engage in an ongoing chain of correspondence on the subject of long-term thinking. The first is a provocative letter from Brian Eno who writes of how, inspite of the fact that our geographical ‘circle of empathy’ is expanding, our view of time, and our future horizon and backwards view, are not:

“In terms of time, however, the picture seems to be narrowing. Public attention is increasingly focused on very near futures: businesses live in terror of the bottom line and the quarterly results, while politicians quake at tomorrow’s opinion polls and formulate policy in terms of them. We’ve heard tales of farmers planting olive trees or vineyards for their grandchildren to harvest, or of foresters cultivating groves of oaks to replace a chapel roof hundreds of years in the future, but by and large, we don’t do that anymore. We have less active engagement with our future than our ancestors did.”

Eno goes on to talk about how our appetite for robust solutions and quantifiable activity ("it’s very natural to think that the best way to defend any system is by hardening it so it becomes unassailable") can reduce our capability to evolve, adapt and improvise to deal with unpredictable events. Fascinating.

Photo Credit: RíPO via Compfight cc

HT @paul_armstrong for the link

On The Future Of Feature Writing

Multi-chapter, multimedia, highly immersive digital features from publishers seem to be becoming quite the thing. The latest is the rather lovely ESPN Grantland story of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, which follows on from their similar feature on The Long, Strange Trip of Dock Ellis. Then there was the beautiful Pitchfork cover story on Natasha Khan which wonderfully integrated text, imagery and audio.

And this example from Outside magazine, which graphically tells the story of an early ascent on Everest, is notable for incorporating third party commercial sponsorship (albeit in a pretty clunky way).

The best known example is the New York Times' Snowfall of-course, which integrated video, images and graphics in a seamless, flowing narrative. And as The Atlantic described it, did it in a way "that makes multimedia feel natural and useful, not just tacked on".

Inevitably some have lauded Snowfall and its ilk as the 'future of journalism', but others have pointed out (mostly on Twitter at the time) just how time and resource intensive such projects can be. How can Snowfall be the future of journalism, they say, when it took six months and the involvement of 16 people to produce?

I think that kind of misses the point. To paraphrase The Atlantic, Snowfall (and others like it) are not the future of journalism, but that's OK. Snowfall recently won the Pulitzer for feature writing. This kind of reader experience where one element flows seamlessly into the next is uniquely suited to longform feature content (and to creating immersive feature experiences on tablet devices), and I'd argue far less suited to punchier, news driven content. Snowfall was produced as as the result of an off-and-on project, and an almost documentary-style approach outside of the realms of that which was possible with the normal CMS.

As the skills of journalists develop, as the shape of the skillset in media organisations expands to encompass new design, video, and graphics skills, as commissioning proceedures change, as integration with third party tools improves, as CMS's develop to enable a greater, more intuitive use of multimedia content, this kind of immersive experience will only get quicker and easier to do.

In the meantime, it's a good time to experiment and learn. Andrew Kueneman, Deputy Director of Digital Design at the NYT said of Snowfall: "In the long term, we also walk away from an effort like this with many valuable lessons in design, development, team collaboration, editing, promotion, etc.—lessons we can apply going forward, and ones we could only learn while working on deadline."

So whilst this kind of thing might not be the future of journalism, it is surely at least part of the future of journalism, and a potentially quite significant one at that. This kind of mixing of traditional writing skills with techniques that are more akin to filmaking enable a far richer pallette for features writers. Given that, I'm really surprised that we haven't seen more magazine publishers experimenting with this type of approach.

HT @Mrjamescarson for the Outside link

The 3D Printed Building

I've written a couple of times about Enrico Dini, the Italian who has developed a 3D printing machine that is big enough to print houses. At Next Berlin I saw a talk from architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars (from Universe Architecture) whose vision is to take this technology and 3D print not just a small dwelling, but a large, architecturally innovative building. The Landscape House is designed as a continuous structure that has no beginning or end, and one where the ceiling flows into the floor of the next level and vice versa. It's a design that is enabled by the radical way in which it is to be built, utilising Enrico Dini's huge D-Shape printer that uses ground-up rock or sand which is put into the printer and hardened by adding a binding agent.

What particularly interests me about this is that most of the focus on 3D printing is (understandably I guess) on the distributed manufacture of small, fun, practical or useful objects. But this is totally different. And the end result will be something quite beautiful.

Kowloon Walled City, Podcasts and Sabbaticals

After a hiatus I've suddenly (and somewhat randomly) started listening to podcasts again. The end of this intermission was marked with this episode from Roman Mars' 99% Invisible series on the subject of the Kowloon Walled City, a 6.5 acre enclave in Hong Kong that became home for 300 interconnected high rise buildings that grew organically over time without input from a single architect, and untroubled by local planning or health and safety regulations, on the site of an old Chinese military fort. At its peak in the early 1990s, the city was home to 33,000 people, which made it the most densely populated place on earth (equivalent to 3.2million people per square mile).

Roman interviews photographer Greg Girard who spent five years in the city before it was demolished in the early 90s and took an amazing series of images (including the one above) to document it. I lived and worked in Hong Kong for a short time in 1994 with my now wife. It must have been just after the city came down, so I missed seeing it in person but we did live for a few months in the infamous Chungking Mansions, which might have been approaching an approximation of what living in the walled city could have been like, so it was fascinating.

Since then, I've listened to a few of Debbie Millman's excellent Design Matters podcasts including this interview with Stefan Sagmeister (famed graphic designer and author of the wonderful Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far).

Amongst other things Sagmeister talks about the sabbaticals that he has taken - in his case quite lengthy time away from his successful practice:

"I learned in the first sabbatical that it's maybe the best strategy that I ever came up with - to make sure that what I do remains a calling and doesn't deteriorate into a job or a career."

Debbie Millman introduces the interview with her own story of the guilt and worry she felt in taking a longer than usual hiatus from work whilst in the midst of applying for a new job:

"All I can remember about that trip now was the amazing food, the wailing wall, and how thoroughly stressed out I was for nearly the entire time I was there. Perhaps I needed to worry. Perhaps I felt guilty not working. Perhaps this behaviour was simply how I reconciled my shame. But looking back on it now my fear of being infinitely unemployed was palpable. I never once considered that I was worthy of getting a new job. I only realised now that in the grand scheme of things the time between gainful employment was very brief. Had I given myself the freedom of discovery of a foreign culture. Had I even the slightest confidence in my abilities, I might have come back capable of bigger, better opportunities."

The irony is of-course, that when she got the new job, she quickly found that it wasn't everything she'd expected and it was only after leaving that she discovered her real calling. Sagmeister's sabbaticals were upto a year long, albeit with a long gap between them. That might not be realistic for all of us, but it's that thought about giving yourself permission to take time out, however brief, which is the important one. 

The Kowloon enclave seems like metaphor. It's very easy to allow irrational concerns to pile on top of one another until we have our own densely populated, walled city of doubt. Sagmeister talks about how much of the work that he has completed in the years since his first sabbatical has been anchored in experiences or inspiration from that sabbatical year. We're very good at being hard on ourselves. Sometimes we need to remember to give ourselves the freedom to the build space into our lives.

Where Traditional Design Thinking Meets Startups

So many mobile apps deliver relatively poor user experiences, or else are skeuomorphically trying to take traditional formats, assumptions or models and reapply them to a mobile experience (like Apple's newstand). Craig Mod talks about this in this wonderful post on 'Subcompact publishing' in which he deals with the inadequacies of many existing publishing apps and sets out a manifesto for dumping traditional publishing technologies and techniques, and building new approaches with a more 'digitally-native' editorial and design ethos built around simplicity. The temptation, he says, is to add layers of compexity to interfaces:

"In product design, the simplest thought exercise is to make additions. It’s the easiest way to make an Old Thing feel like a New Thing. The more difficult exercise is to reconsider the product in the context of now. A now which may be very different from the then in which the product was originally conceived."

Craig says this is like when Homer Simpson was asked to design his ideal car and made 'The Homer'. In an additive process he supplementing the existing design with new features like a sound-proof bubble for the children and lots of horns and accesories.

Instead, Craig puts forward some simple principles as a starting point:

• Small issue sizes (3-7 articles / issue)
• Small file sizes
• Digital-aware subscription prices
• Fluid publishing schedule
• Scroll (don’t paginate)
• Clear navigation
• HTML(ish) based
• Touching the open web

Much of Craig's thinking was inspired by using The Magazine, a new publishing app on the subject of technology, created by Marco Arment who also created Instapaper. I'd already subscribed to The Magazine, have been using it for a while, and can recommend it. Marco says in his 'Foreword' to the app that many iPad magazines are carrying unnecessary and expensive baggage from their print days, and so the app itself is gloriously simple, clean, reader-friendly, and totally focused on delivering a great user exeprience. You pay a small subscription each month, and get four or five high quality articles every two weeks.The Magazine does not seek to do news, reviews, or comparisons but instead, as Arment describes, "...takes a measured approach to the big picture: rather than telling readers everything that happens in technology, The Magazine delivers meaningful editoial and big-picture articles...rather than be limited to technology, it's topics appeal to people who love technology'.

Which brings me to Mike Kreiger, designer, engineer and co-founder of Instagram, and his thoughts (captured in the simple deck below) on where the principles of Design Thinking meet the reality of woking on a startup. Mike outlines eight principles that draw heavily from the design thinking process (which he says is still not observed in many companies) of understanding, observing, synthesizing, ideating, prototyping, and iterating, but then incorporate the context of the 'startup craziness' that was Instagram:

1. Draw on Previous Experience and Understanding
2. Have a Hypothesis About How You’re Different
3. Never Code Before Sketching
4. Learn in weeklong increments
5. Validate in Social Situations
6. Quick Wizard-of-Oz Techniques for Social Prototyping
7. Know When It’s Time To Move On
8. Build and Ship

You can read more about each one in the deck, and in this write up of his talk, but Mike talks about the importance of getting the design right, and not just getting the right design, which I think is very similar to what Craig Mod is saying. It's interesting that his principles talk about not just approaches to insight and design work, but also fundamental stuff about how you work, such as the work cycles that are required. At the end of the deck, Mike uses that apocryphal Henry Ford quote "If I'd have asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" . And then he appends it: 'but sometimes your users are building cars out of old horse buggy wheels'. Brilliant.

Mike Krieger of Instagram at Warm Gun 2012 from 500 Startups

Stamen's Watercolour Maps

Thanks to a tweet from Tom Uglow, I happened across these wonderful watercolour maps from Stamen design. I've long been a fan of Stamen's visualisation work. They were one of FastCompany's 50 most innovative companies last year and have done some great work with MTV, MSNBC, BMW, Digg and LOCOG which I'm a fan of. But their work exploring cartography is particularly special (checkout the rather lovely Pretty Maps project as well). The watercolor maps "apply raster effect area washes and organic edges over a paper texture" in a process that reads like an artist describing how they created an original work of art. No surprise then, that the result is artful, organic and beautiful and has brought a very human warmth to something that is commonly treated in such a functional way. Truly exceptional.

Organised Complexity

This is an image from the Blue Brain project, showing a network of 30 million connections between the 10,000 neurons that make up just one neocortical column. Our brains contain around ten million times this many neurons in total. Manuel Lima (a senior UX design lead at Microsoft Bing) uses this as illustration in this wonderful RSA lecture in which he explores the idea of network visualisation as a way of navigating the complexity of our modern world. The RSA have done another lovely Animate film of it below which is worth watching.

One of the ideas that I found most fascinating is how the structures we use for classifying knowledge and mapping our increasingly complex world are shifting away from hierarchical 'tree-like' representations that reflect our desire for control, symmetry, simplicity and balance, towards potentially far more accurate and convincing network representations. Networks are, and perhaps always have been, a fundamentally better way of understanding the 'organised complexity' of the ecosystems which surround us and of which we are a part. Fascinating.

Image courtesy

The Man Who Prints Houses

I wrote about Enrico Dini a couple of years ago. Enrico has developed a 3D printing technology large enough to print buildings. Yes, buildings. It uses sand combined with an inorganic binder to print structures in stone with no human intervention. Constructions which are strong, cheap, environmentally-friendly, and rather amazing.

The technology allows the design of structures that are architecturally complex and so opens up a whole new range of potentiality. There's something very Gaudi-esque about the structures which have been built so far, which is no bad thing at all. Enrico believes that his technology will 'revolutionise the way architectural design is planned, and building constructions are executed', and it's difficult not to see the possibilities. The current focus is on building a version of the printer that can be used on building sites everywhere. 

I love the scale of his vision. No mucking about with printing small plastic objects here. Judging from what I've read of his story, it seems to have been an ambition that he has pursued at much cost. And I've read now that a documentary film is being made about his journey. Definitely one to watch out for.