More about Serious Play, the conference put on last week by the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, USA.
It’s a gathering of 600+ creative professionals in a vast former wind tunnel in sunny California. However if that suggests hot air on several levels, don’t be mislead. It was a highly inspiring event.
Personal highlights?
George Smoot (Nobel physicist) and Charles Elachi (Director of the Jet Propulsion Lab) talking about the problems of driving on Mars and especially of landing the latest Mars rover on May 25th.
John Maeda (next President of Rhode Island School of Design) describing his experiment in building a computer out of human beings.
Stuart Brown (Director of the National Institute for Play) explaining how even a ravenous male polar bear will not eat you if you can persuade it to play a game with you first. “The opposite of play is not work; it is depression”. (Or being eaten).
Paula Scher (Artist) describing her personal development cycle from serious to solemn to dead - and her fight against it.
Oh and the guy that spent much of his life so far building slot machines for crows - if they pick up a coin from the street and drop it in the machine they get a nut.
Also key to enjoyment - the whole event was organised like clockwork so that you never felt the absence of professionalism or just enough discipline, absences that can make ‘play’ tedious.
The moral of the whole thing. Work less, play more - and everything will be all right.
May 11th, 2008
The Independent launched their long-awaited website redesign last night and, on first glance, I found it underwhelming. I applaud the attempt at catching up after years of digital foot dragging (and I’ll be damned if they dont do a half-decent job of it too…the new pages are jammed packed with every modern web feature you could imagine, most popular, comments, RSS, sharing, even a music store). It’s too bad though, that the pages feel so cluttered and disorganized, like an obsession to prove their web credentials has clouded any thoughts about the end user experience.
Most disappointing for me is that the site doesn’t feel like the newspaper. It has none of the trademark panache or the design and editorial consistency that has made The Independent print product so admirable. But, this is no surprise since, as the always spot-on Martin Stabe notes, they are using basically the same templates as their northern cousin, The Irish Independent. In any case, to my eye, it seems like a unsuccessful stew of the biggest news sites in the market–the menu from the Times, the blue headline color from the NY Times, the beige lines from the Guardian and so on and so on.
But I hate when people talk bad about work and don’t offer any concrete suggestions. There is nothing more annoying than a whining good-for-nothing. Well, I am good for something–see below for my take on independent.co.uk…I think its quite good, what do you think? Click here to see the design full size.
Websites aren’t all about features and bells and whistles, they need the same sort of analytical design and editorial thinking as newspapers. The page needs to be abundantly clear, completely decipherable in one glance. The new Independent site design is a jumble.
I attempted in my little demo design to clear a path for users. I used colors more strategically so they mean something and so the site feels cleaner in general. I made a bigger deal of the editor’s choice feature, its a good idea and in large part the basis of The Independent brand–who else has enough confidence in their editorial prowess to put a single story on the front page. The newspaper tells you every day what the most important story in the world is and their website should too.
The most important change is a sense of consistency. Each feature is demarcated with the same device, additional stories are marked with the same icon, main stories use the same font for their headlines, and there is a single color palette that is stuck to religiously.
I was careful to be realistic about the design too, you will note my page contains the same basic features (minus a few extraneous things like the weather and front page photo) and the same number and size of ads.
Anyway, now at least no one can say I didn’t do my bit towards making the web a better place. Let me know what you think….
January 24th, 2008
