Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 140

Designing for the Ideal

Sometimes a designer doesn’t completely account for the reality of how a solution or product will be used, and instead designs around a set of requirements that seem to be fully representative of the problem at hand, but are actually narrower in scope. I call this designing for the ideal, because the designer typically chooses a band of requirements that play nicely with the favored solution — content that looks great or inputs that behave wonderfully within the design as it is being crafted. More often than not though, when the product is released into the real world the designer is in for a rude awakening.

There was a bit of designing for the ideal, I think, when the three major browsers — Safari, Chrome and Firefox — each started presenting a gallery of a user’s most visited Web pages within new tabs, instead of just a blank page or a user’s designated starting page. This feature has been around for a while now, but it’s remained broken for quite a long time.

Visual Thinking

The intended behavior of the feature is to visually represent the sites that the user is most likely to want to visit when faced with a blank tab. The critical benefit here is the visual representation; when the feature works, what you should see are pictures of your favorite sites in miniature, but still large enough that they’re simple to make them out at a glance and to click on quickly without requiring lots of precision mousing. This is what distinguishes them from bookmarks.

However, what happens in almost every instance is that the gallery is full of sites that cannot be rendered — blank thumbnails. I spend most of my time in Firefox and Chrome, and this is usually what I see.

The problem here, apparently, is that this feature either cannot or opts not to render thumbnails of secure sites, those whose URLs start with https. There is some sense to respecting the security of these sites by abstaining from thumbnailing them, but the result is that it essentially breaks a feature that is presented repeatedly and prominently to the user. That’s pretty high profile breakage.

Had the designers of this feature fully accounted for how it would be used instead of designing for the ideal, they could have come up with some alternative solution. Perhaps they could have generated a generic, innocuous thumbnail, maybe with large typography, to stand in for cases where no thumbnail could be created. Or they could simply omit secure sites from the gallery altogether, though that would have subverted the notion of a user’s “top sites” somewhat.

Actually, Safari has finally resolved this problem by just generating thumbnails for everything, producing a much more complete user experience.

That happened relatively recently, I believe. What surprises me is that all three browsers shipped this feature in essentially broken form, and it’s still broken in two of them. Sometimes, the lure of the ideal is too great, I guess.

To follow me on Twitter click here.

Photoshop Blend Modes Explained

Photoshop’s blend modes are incredibly powerful, but their documentation is somewhat sparse, and most people use only a fraction of their power, I would bet. Photographer Robert Thomas fills in the gaps with this incredibly detailed look at how blend modes work, explaining how to manipulate blend layers through obscure keyboard shortcuts that I had no idea were available (and I use a ton of keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop), as well as diving into the actual mathematical operations that drives each mode. It’s probably more in-depth than most users have need for, but in those cases when a deeper understanding of how these features work, this is remarkable. Read all about them here.

To follow me on Twitter click here.

Instatim Feed Sponsorship

Instatim is a more personal social network that helps you stay in touch with your closest friends, family and co-workers. Engineered for privacy, Instatim is unlike other social networks because we do not store information about our users’ past activities and locations. Your status is shared securely and only to people you have chosen.

Here’s what you can do with Instatim:

Status Updates: Keep in touch by posting status updates about what you’re doing (walking the dog, meeting a client, etc.) and reading your friends’ statuses.

Expiration Dates: Set an expiration for your status so your family knows how long you will be engaged in the activity.

Groups: Sort contacts into different groups. Share statuses with specific groups to keep the right people in the right loop.

Location: You can choose to include your location with your status so your friends and family know your whereabouts.

Download Instatim for free in the App Store.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Selfless Portraits

This Facebook-connected, random portraiture project is pretty neat. Some stranger somewhere around the world will draw your portrait for free; the catch is that before you can see how it turned out, you have to draw another stranger’s portrait. The gallery is very entertaining.

Anyone can take part over at Selflessportraits.com. The only drawback is you have to sign in with Facebook.

To follow me on Twitter click here.

Young

This small, Manchester-based illustration and animation studio has produced a wealth of beguiling work. Their short films and animations are particularly charming.

It’s worth losing yourself in their portfolio for fifteen minutes or so.

To follow me on Twitter click here.

POINT Conference

A new, UK-based conference company “…celebrating excellence in design and its influence in contemporary culture and society.” The speaker list looks terrific. Before the reality of having twins set in, their POINT 01 Authenticity event was going to be the one conference I intended to attend in 2013. Find out more at their Web site.

To follow me on Twitter click here.

Goodbye to Two Greats

The world has been mourning Roger Ebert, who passed away last week, and I join them. I learned a lot about watching movies from the man, but as I observed from afar as he struggled valiantly with disease I learned a lot more about what it means to fully become a person. His film criticism was always commendable, but the way he used it to undergird a life of great curiosity and thoughtfulness was remarkable. He’ll be greatly missed.

I won’t try to write any more than this about Ebert, since so much has already been written about him just in the past two days. Not as much will probably be written about the passing of longtime comics great Carmine Infantino, though, but that doesn’t take anything away from his own remarkable life.

The Modern Comics Man

Infantino passed away Thursday at age 87. He started working in comics during their so-called golden age, endured the fallow period that followed, and then helped to rebirth them in the silver age, effectively transforming comics from a fad of the 1940s into an enduring kind of American (and now global) mythology.

He was a creative force, having served as editor at DC Comics in the 1960s and its publisher in the 1970s, but he will be best remembered as a singular draughtsman. He had a strong, expressive line that bordered on the abstract, especially the way he rendered perspective — nothing stood straight up in Infantino’s world; everything leaned aggressively forward, as if thrusting itself into the future. Very much reflecting his time, Infantino drew a world that was distinctly Modernist in many ways; his skewed, lithe figures would look more at home in an Eero Saarinen airport terminal than many real world humans ever would.

Infantino was a hero to me as a kid. I used to pore over his drawings, fascinated by the liberties he took with the human form, and the alien-like environments he drew around his people. In 2006 I got to meet him very briefly and took this photograph. I find it incredibly sad that he’s gone now. May he rest in peace.

To follow me on Twitter click here.

Facebook Home at First Glance

Somehow last year I ended up owning an HTC One X in addition to my iPhone. It’s never been particularly useful (AT&T has stranded it with an older version of Android) but now it has a purpose in life: the One X is among a few of the first phones that will run Facebook Home, just announced yesterday with much fanfare. I will definitely be installing Home on my One X when it launches on April 12.

I have decidedly mixed feelings about Facebook, most of them negative. But I do respect what they’ve done. You’ve got to; awful as it is in so many ways, it’s too massive, and too difficult to ignore.

Facebook Home, at least at first blush, only gives me more reason to respect them. I see at least two reasons to believe that the company may have pulled off things that other, similarly massive companies have tried and failed at.

First, Facebook Home seems to be a genuinely fresh approach to what a phone operating system can be (whether it really qualifies as an OS or not is debatable). Its conceit is that it eschews the ‘app-centric’ approach that almost every other smartphone OS takes, preferring instead a ‘people-centric’ approach. If it works, it will be a meaningful differentiator in the market, and more or less exactly what I criticized Blackberry for failing to do with their newest phone products.

Second, Facebook Home aims to wholly subvert the resident operating system on the Android phones on which it runs with Facebook’s own ecosystem. I think mostly of Adobe in this regard; for years, they’ve taken an insurrectionist approach with their Creative Suite software, piggybacking what amounts to an entire, largely unwanted operating system’s worth of code (if not features) along with Adobe’s otherwise useful applications. It’s always been a bear for end users, and it has hardly succeeded in establishing CS as a beachhead for doing anything other than what you would have turned to Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator for without it.

If Facebook Home sees wide adoption among both users and developers, it will achieve exactly what Adobe strove for: supplanting the OS that came preinstalled on your hardware (unless of course you buy the HTC First) with something entirely different, effectively stealing customers away from Google. That’s incredibly bold, and if they pull it off, wow. I won’t like them any more for it, but I will respect them more.

One more begrudging note of appreciation, offered again with the caveat “if Facebook Home succeeds”: this could be the definitive contribution to the argument that Mark Zuckerberg is the most talented product designer since Steve Jobs.

To follow me on Twitter click here.

Andrew B. Myers

This “friendly Canadian photographer” produces wonderfully graphical compositions, which is naturally very appealing to me. But I think what I like best are his works that seem to blur the line between image capture and painting; Myers’ palettes are so uniform and so rich — particularly in the shadows cast by the few spare objects in each shot — that his photos seem as if they were rendered in oil paint. 

See more of his work on his Web site.

To follow me on Twitter click here.

Shopster Feed Sponsorship

Shopster is a new kind of groceries list app that learns what you purchase and where, so it can remind you later on.

Whenever you check an item as purchased, Shopster learns the location where you got it. The next time you look for the same thing, a geofenced alarm will be triggered when you are near the location.

Features:

Autolearning of locations when checking items as purchased.
Geofenced reminders for your products, based on your prior buying history.
In-place editing table, for quick corrections and editions.
Unique ruler to quickly enter the number of items you need to buy.
Smart autocomplete, to assist you entering frequently purchased products, based on your previous history. 
Reorder items with a simple tap and hold.

Check out Shopster on the AppStore, it’s only $0.99

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.