Like many of you, we were dismayed to learn that Google will be shutting down its much-loved, if under-appreciated, Google Reader on July 1st. Through its many incarnations, Google Reader has remained a solid and reliable tool for those who want to ensure they are getting the best from their…
“Since copywriting is interface design, you can do an awful lot of great design in a text editor. Don’t worry about where things will go, or how they will fit. Worry about explaining it clearly and then build the rest of the interface around that explanation.”
Bora Celik and Andrew Cornett created Jukely for music lovers to get hand-picked recommendations for local live music concerts and to discover new music. They used RubyMotion to create a visually stunning app that has already hit 5 stars in the app store!
We sat down with Bora to…
With so much love we received from you guys over the last year, it’s time to give something back. I’m happy to announce the first ever Offscreen Fundraiser!
Half of all profits of the month of March will be donated to Watsi to help them fund urgent, low-cost medical treatments for…
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High-res
Designing a Phenomenon: Student Designs Inspire a New Approach to Voting - by Matt Luckhurst
Our class “Designing a Phenomenon,” taught by Brian Collins and me, is an intensive fourth-year honors class at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. It is solely focused on a designers’ ability to influence and change behavior.
Inspired by the GOOD community’s Take Back Tuesday challenge, we asked our students to create a new phenomenon around the act of voting. The election of the president should be cause for a celebration around the most important act every American can do: get out and vote. Every four years we debate the reasons for the deep interest in the election on one hand, but the apathy people exhibit around voting on the other.
Featured design by student HeeSang Lee: For election day “We’re Closed”
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Apple unveiled many updates to many of it’s products and introduced one new product earlier today. Even when I looked at the current Apple Online Store webpage and speculated along with every other major news publication about an “iPad mini” I began to think about a new store layout.
Why?
To make the product fit in their current layout they would have to retire a product and was that going to be the iPod classic?
Then I started to look at the layout and wondered why some items were grouped and some weren’t. There was an inconsistency in organization of products. If the store layout was to remain unchanged it would have to be grouped with the iPad just look the new MacBook Pro 15” with Retina Display was grouped under MacBook Pro.
Then I thought well maybe everything is grouped by similar form factor and the difference between the original MacBook Pros and the ones with that Retina Display were so similar they could be grouped together. Even perhaps it was a high end computer that could be hidden, which then contradicts why the MacPro is on the front page but I suppose it is its own category.
This all got me thinking more…
The new iPad mini would have to have its own section as the iPod touch and nano have their own sections.
What had to happen is what ended up happening shortly after the special event was over. There was a new layout with simpler organization, but deeper navigation. How much deeper? Just one more level.
Now you decide whether to shop for Mac, iPad, iPhone, or iPod. That’s it.
The new design is fresh, clean and modern, and easy to navigate. The top box lets us highlight a story that we think is really important, and enables us to run big, beautiful photos and illustrations.
Creating the Designer Fund Visual Identity
A logo alone cannot communicate all these values, but we knew if we could capture one or two of the important ones we would have a mark that would resonate with the community. The first few months involved a lot of sketching and ideating. We worked with Matt Stevens, a talented designer out of North Carolina, to visualize many of the concepts we had in our sketchbooks and to produce a few new ideas. He also really helped us think through tone/voice by producing various mood boards. Though many concepts came close, none of the marks quite nailed it and we decided to push further.
