In a recent post titled Ubiquitous Service Design, Peter Morville raised some interesting questions about how we might design for a world where everything is, or potentially can be — smart. A world where your refrigerator knows what you had for lunch and when the lettuce will be out of date. A world where your car gives you suggestions for getting better gas mileage or tells you a better way to get where you’re going.
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Last year XPLANE started experimenting with something some call “Ballroom presentations.” We like to call them “Did You Know?” videos. They’re short videos that use simple motion, graphics, illustrations, text and photography to explain something or make a point.
The popularity of our “Did You Know? 2.0” video got us a lot of attention (4 million views worth of attention, and counting). With its release, more and more organizations started asking for something similar.
So we decided to put some more muscle into these videos by requiring less muscle. Instead of using Flash to build DYK videos we started to experiment with Apple’s Keynote presentation software. Which meant that people who had never touched Flash or Final Cut Pro could easily try their hand at motion graphics.
Now, you may think of Keynote as the designer’s version of PowerPoint — which it certainly is — but I think of it as low-end video software.
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Well, this looks quite nice.
The Touch Gesture Reference Guide is a unique set of resources for software designers and developers working on touch-based user interfaces.
The guide contains: 1) an overview of the core gestures used for most touch commands 2) how to utilize these gestures to support major user actions 3) visual representations of each gesture to use in design documentation and deliverables 4) an outline of how popular software platforms support core touch gestures.
Social Media Governance is a book that helps organizations find the right balance of empowerment and accountability in their social media efforts. It will be released in September 2009.
They’ve created a database of social media policies from dozens of companies, governments, non-profits.
XPLANE is happy to present Did You Know? 4.0 — another official update to the original “Shift Happens” video. This completely new Fall 2009 version includes facts and stats focusing on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology, and was developed in partnership with The Economist.
As Garr Reynolds mentions over at Presentation Zen this morning, yes, this project was created with “off-the-shelf slideware” (Keynote and GarageBand, actually, along with Photoshop and Illustrator). Content by XPLANE, The Economist, Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and Laura Bestler. Design and development by XPLANE.
For more information, or to join the conversation, please visit The Economist’s Media Convergence conference site at mediaconvergence.economist.com, or stop by shifthappens.wikispaces.com for all things Did You Know.
Here’s some good perspective from Chris Brogan:
Where do you start? That’s the question I get often when I’m asked how to help a company market using social media tools. The people who contact me are smart. They tell me things like, “Yeah, they said we should start with a blog, and we said, ‘like the blog we already have?’” But what comes next is rarely a simple choice. I wanted to take you through some thoughts on what the basic building blocks of social media might be for a business (in the context of marketing, but then stretching a bit further out).
Remember, roadmaps don’t work really well until you have a solid goal or destination in mind. None of this matters unless it feels right to you, regardless of my advice. You know your company’s boundaries. You know what your comfort levels are. Proceed at your organizational pace.
ISO50 lays down the knowledge on color management:
Whether you are designing for print or for the web, making the leap from what you see on your computer screen to the outside world can be a tricky process, fraught with unpredictable changes and unexpected results. The web is full of information regarding color management and sifting through it can be very overwhelming. Contradictory opinions abound and it can be difficult to find reliable sources of information.
Over the last few months, Scott and I have been researching this topic extensively [and] we have implemented a color management system that works for us. Below we have tried to aggregate this knowledge into a simple and useful guide, designed to help you ensure your studio is set up correctly. It is not intended to be the end-all article on color management by any means — but it’s a good place to start if color management isn’t something you have previously implemented or considered.
(Thanks Quipsologies!)
Personas is pretty fun to watch. Wish you could do something with it, like click through to the sources.
Personas is an art installation by Aaron Zinman that is a component of Metropath(ologies), an interactive exhibit by the Sociable Media Group, MIT Media Lab… It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person — to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.
Nice roundup of lightweight content management systems and web page editors:
CMSs are beautiful things. Just as CSS allows us to abstract the design away from the markup, a CMS allows us to use a database to abstract the content away from the markup. There are a zillion of them, each with different backend UI’s and different ways to doing things.
But CMSs are for web people. Even my beloved WordPress can be challenging to train/explain to someone who has no experience working with websites. Perhaps this is the motivation toward a new trend in CMSs I’m calling “light” CMSs. Each of them attempt to make the task of updating content on a website easier and more intuitive. This is largely at the cost of features. These are for simple, otherwise static websites where updating content is the name of the game.
As someone notes in the comments: “As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Somehow seeing things with a picture adds a whole new dimension.”
Infographics can be a great way to quickly reference information.
Instead of pouring over figures and long reports to decipher data, an infographic can immediately make apparent exactly what a dataset actually means…
Some are incredibly practical, some provide information that might be of interest to designers and some just present data that might be interesting to those who design websites all day.
Check out this video we made for Kronos to help celebrate International Women's Day, 2011. Learn more in this xBlog post or jump over to YouTube and watch it there.
XPLANE | Dachis Group developed a A vibrant, engaging poster showing how Microsoft Azure enables developers to run applications and store data on Microsoft servers. The poster recently took top honors in the American Business Awards.
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