You’re reading Signal v. Noise, a publication about the web by Basecamp since 1999. Happy !
Gazprom
Daniel Libeskind’s design for Gazprom City, the future St. Petersburg headquarters for Russian energy giant Gazprom.
Gorillapod
The flexible Gorillapod is a tripod that can attach anywhere.
Acquarium
This crazy home aquarium gives fish somewhere to go.
Understanding Comics (Amazon link) is a 215-page comic book about comics that explains the inner workings of the medium. We recently chatted about it and how the concepts relate to online visual communication too (e.g. choosing what to include and what to leave out, guiding the reader’s eye, combining text and images for maximum impact, etc.).
Some excerpts we discussed:
Creating meaningful differences with “sequential art.” McCloud writes, “Taken individually the pictures [above] are merely that—pictures. However when part of a sequence, even a sequence of only two, the art of the images is transformed into something more: the art of comics!”
The first letter in each sentence is bolded to help separate statements.
It’s interesting how the placement of the “True Lighting” headline is unconventional yet works like a charm.
There’s a related thread on cartoons, comics, and information design at Edward Tufte’s site. Some of the interesting links mentioned there:
Related:
Making Comics (McCloud’s new book)
“Forget the detail” and other animation-inspired lessons [SvN]
I just registered Writeroom, a great “forced focus” writing tool for the Mac. Writeroom basically hides the rest of the screen so you can focus on the words.
What I wanted to write about was the interesting registration process. Registration processes have always interested me.
When you register Writeroom you get an email.
No serial numbers, no codes, just a file. You can either click the file or just drop it on top of the Writeroom app you’ve already downloaded.
Then you see:
All done. The smoothest way to register a product is by paying for the upgrade inside the product. Aside from that method, which Writeroom and most products don’t offer, this is the smoothest and simplest process I’ve experienced in a long time.
Well done. Just like Writeroom.
about a year ago I did some drawings based on the phrase “in the future”
I have been invited to do more drawings. I will do the drawings based on titles that you submit, but I do not have a theme this time, so feel free to suggest one. or just suggest a title.
Pioneer Theatre
Rich Corbridge writes, “The Pioneer Theatre in Salt Lake City provides not only a seating chart of the theater but an interactive ‘here’s what the view would be like from the seat you’ve chosen’ feature — very useful to a customer who has never been there before (follow the ‘Seating Chart’ link in the body of the page).”
There’s an interesting tradeoff presented by the iPhone. While the phone can do more, and it’s interface is fluid, in some ways it widens the gulf between human and computer.
When you touch it it doesn’t touch you back.
That may prove to be a good thing. It may prove that what we think we need we don’t really need. The tradeoffs may payoff. But we’ve certainly lost the tactile feedback humans are used to when dealing with things that are right in front of us. Now the connection is simulated. Rich textures have been replaced with androgynous glass.
How can you dial the iPhone without looking at it? How can you reach in your pocket and press “1” for voicemail? How can you orient yourself with the interface without seeing it? With a traditional phone or device with buttons you can feel your way around it. You can find the bumps, the humps, the cut lines, the shapes, the sizes. You can find your way around in the dark. Not with the iPhone.
I don’t know if this is better or worse. We won’t know until we try it (and oh man I can’t wait to try it). I just think its really interesting. It’s a pretty big deal. The implications are far reaching. The iPhone demands your attention, it forces you to look at it. We’re lucky it’s beautiful.
The consensus is that today Apple is going to announce a phone.
Some are calling it a personal communicator or a convergent device or a pocket computer or a “4th screen.” I’m not so sure.
Apple makes history not by leapfrogging everyone in terms of functionality and bells and whistles, they do it through elegance, simplification, clarity, and practicality.
I see no reason why they won’t follow that strategy with their phone. It will change the game, but not because it does more than everyone else’s phone. I think we’ll see just the opposite.
Apple will execute on the basics beautifully. Just like they did with the original Mac. Just like they did with the iMac. Just like they did with the iPod.
The mobile phone world is littered with crap. The interfaces are tragic. The materials are cheap. The build quality is marginal. And of course the sound sucks.
These are the things people complain about. They don’t complain that they can’t video conference with their friends. They don’t complain that they don’t have advanced voice recognition. They don’t complain that their phone doesn’t open an Excel spreadsheet and sync with Quickbooks. They complain because the sound sucks, the interface is miserable, and the phone is falling apart.
Apple can change this because that’s what Apple does. They can look at the crisis points of a typical experience and erase them one by one. Not by adding a lot of new things things, but by removing the crap and paying attention to the basics.
The basics are the secrets of business. Execute on the basics beautifully and you’ll have a lot of customers knocking at your door. Cool wears off, usefulness never does.
Most people just want things that work well and, unfortunately, the mobile phone business is littered with things that don’t work. That’s Apple’s opportunity. Build something small, light, beautiful, and useful that works and they’ll win.
That’s not to say it won’t have the usual twists and surprises that we’ve come to expect from Apple, but they’ll be modest in implementation and bold in impact. And, like the iPod, it will play especially nice with Macs to start.
I’m so looking forward to 9am PST.
I tried to tell LinkedIn back in October that the relationship was over. That I wanted out. I was originally more than a little miffed when that turned out to require writing customer service, but only took a day or so to get a personal response from Michele at Customer Service telling me they got the message and I was gone.
Only I wasn’t. I kept getting those annoying invitations to join networks of people whom I’ve never met. After the third or fourth such invitation, I tried to login again and realized that indeed I hadn’t been deleted, despite the personal note from Michele.
So about a week ago, I tried to write customer service again and request that I be deleted from the system. This time there was no snappy reply and I’m still an active profile on LinkedIn.
Please guys, just lemme out. I’m not even interested in making a new big stink about how bad it is to have leaving the system be a customer service issue. I just really don’t want to get any more emails and I don’t want my profile in your system. Deal?
