March 14, 2008
Welsh's First Corollary to Weakliem
Weakliem’s First Rule of Application Development states, roughly, that design is less important than functionality. While I agree in principle I think his proof is lacking in a number of places. Specifically, he states: “Recall that when Google first appeared, most search engines embraced the design philosophy still in evidence at MSN.com: bright and noisy, yet roughly equivalent in functionality. Google was positively audacious in both its austerity and its function. ... Similarly, My employer’s website is frequently ridiculed for being amateurishly designed” What I think he forgets is all design, however amateurish, still conveys something. Google's (to my eyes incredibly ugly) logo said “hey, we're a bunch of geeks having some fun” which exactly matches the company culture and helps attract all those PhDs that Google employs. Similarly Gordon's employer's website looks like it was designed by someone's cousin, but that is the right look for its clients. It gives the website credibility with the consumers who put down a large chunk of change for a holiday they can only afford once a year. Good design is design that is right for the target audience, which can be something very different to aesthetically pleasing design.
Posted by Noel at 03:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 26, 2007
Visual Manipulation
This post is about two different forms of visual manipulation for artistic effect. Start by looking at these pseudo-3D chalk drawings. The monocular vision of the camera enhances the effect but I believe they would work in life if seen from the right angle. There was an exhibition of pseudo-3D paintings at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and they worked very well — arguably better than in photographs are you could actually walk around the works and the effect was maintained for quite a wide viewing angle.
Now you're warmed up, we're going to go into a time machine here and here. I find the lack of colour in early photographs presents a barrier that makes it difficult to imagine myself in the scene. These colour photographs from the period 1909-1915 (reconstructed from red, green, and blue images using an ingenious process) remove that barrier and the results are striking. Some of the scenes — railways, forests, grand buildings — could be contemporary, but note how few roads there are, how few possessions are visible. I can relate to the pictures and yet they still feel like another world. Fantastic stuff.
Posted by Noel at 01:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 19, 2007
Font Rendering Fun
I've always wondered why fonts looked different on OS X and Windows and thanks to this blog post I now know why. The summary is that Windows favours aligning the fonts with the pixel grid, which leads to clearer type but thinner blockier text. Follow the link to see examples of the difference.
More interesting are the various font rendering techniques in use. Microsoft's ClearType takes advantage of the known arrangement of pixels in LCD monitors which effectively triples horizontal resolution at the expensive of distorting colour. FontFocus takes a different approach to get a better result. It again focuses on aligning fonts with the pixel grid. Here's an explanation from the white paper linked above:
Previous grid-fitting techniques ... improve contrast by aligning stems to pixel boundaries, but in doing so distort individual letterforms. FontFocus leaves the shapes of the glyphs completely unchanged. Instead, it shifts each character left or right by a tiny subpixel amount, and also subtly expands or condenses individual glyphs to align all stems, if there are more than one. ...
While the idea of subtly shifting and stretching glyphs to enhance contrast is simple, the core of the of FontFocus technology is how it chooses these tweaks. Most existing font rendering techniques work with a single glyph at a time. FontFocus optimizes the entire word at a time. The results are similar to what you'd get from trying each combination of subpixel offset and width stretch for each glyph in the word, and picking the combination with the best overall score. FontFocus uses an intelligent divide-and-conquer algorithm to avoid the combinatorial explosion of this brute-force method.
This immediately suggests a further improvement: try to align a whole line of text optimally. Of course the search space gets much larger so a better search method is needed. If anyone is looking for a PhD this could be fun.
Posted by Noel at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)
May 03, 2007
Get It Right (or Left)!
Next time you're walking down the street and have to step aside to avoid a fellow pedestrian, note which way you move. The chances are you'll step over to the side people drive on in your country. Normally this is unconscious and the two of you will smoothly avoid one another as if the process had been choreographed. Go to a country where people drive on the other side of the road and it will become immediately noticeable as you play the hilarious game of stepping-in-front-of-one-another. Why do I bring this up? The local branch of Aldi has undergone redevelopment, including a new front door. You enter on the right and leave on the left. I ambled up not really paying attention and of course went to the wrong side. So did the next three people after me. The difference between a great design and a bad design is made in the little details like this.
Posted by Noel at 12:57 PM | Comments (0)
February 06, 2007
iWant one of those!
For your amusement: The Worst of Tech: 10 From the Cult of iPod. I kinda like the belt, but the headphones and the remote... Wow.
Posted by Noel at 01:28 PM | Comments (0)
November 04, 2006
Network West Midlands: Go In, Stay In, Tune In
draws design inspiration from HM Government.
Posted by Noel at 08:22 PM | Comments (0)
July 21, 2006
The Case for Whitespace
It's how you say it that counts.
Posted by Noel at 08:18 PM | Comments (1)
July 20, 2006
Hiding Complexity and the Expert User
37signals are developing a calendar application. Watch the demo and you'll see appointments are entered as natural language (for example “3pm Dentist”). Compared to Yahoo's calendar it looks pretty simple.
Think about it a bit more and you'll realise the complexity is still there, just hidden behind a different interface. The GUI represents all the options graphically. The text box hides the options in the murky workings of the parser. 37signal's example never shows what happens if you enter text the application doesn't understand. For example, what happens if I write “Appointment with Dentist at 3pm”? Done badly it will be like those early Sierra games where half the challenge was discovering the words the program understood. Not a lot of fun, at least when you're trying to enter your Dentist appointment rather than save a princess.
Now if the grammar is quite restricted it should be relatively easy to code up a bit of Javascript to prompt the user with correct words, like most IDEs do for programmers. Get this to work well and I think it will be a very nice interface. GUI interfaces have a shallow learning curve, but are slow to use. Textual interfaces are the reverse: they favour the expert over the beginner, by being fast to use but difficult to learn. Add prompting to the textual interface and perhaps the end result will be the best of both worlds.
Note that there are other ways to solve this problem. Circle menus are a relatively unknown GUI device that allow faster input than traditional pull-down menus. I'm sure there are other innovative ideas out there. It is possible to create interfaces for complex tasks that suit both the beginner and expert alike.
Posted by Noel at 01:10 PM | Comments (1)
March 10, 2006
Got Game?
Those of us who build software — we all want to build great software, right? Software that people love, not just software they tolerate? I sure do.
This is why Putting the Fun in Functional, a presentation from Etech'06 by Amy Jo Kim, is important. The central point is that the techniques that game designers use to make their games enjoyable and engaging can be applied to other software with the same result. Check it out.
Posted by Noel at 04:11 PM | Comments (0)
September 12, 2005
New Apple Products
While I was away on holiday Apple released two new products, the iPod Nano, and a iTunes equipped phone in collaboration with Motorola. Apple is currently the biggest innovator in hardware design so it is worth looking at what they come up with.
In the case of the iPod Nano this is one sleek device. It takes the existing iPod design and makes it smaller and sexier. I suspect this product is driven more by improvements in storage technology allowing a smaller device than any plan to evolve the iPod design, but it sure looks nice.
The iTunes phone though disappoints me. iPods have smooth surfaces, with a minimum of visual noise. This phone is a brick, with all sorts of unnecessary fuss such as the two-tone colour scheme and the raised M on the front. It doesn't look anything like an iPod, and so dilutes, rather than strengthens, the iconic iPod brand. I'd like to know the inside story of the design of the phone; I suspect it has a lot more involvement from Motorola than Apple.
Posted by Noel at 01:48 PM | Comments (0)