“information design”
58 posts under this tag.
It’s one of those moments when my head spins, twirls, swirls, and whirls. I’ve been seriously reading JS, CSS, and UI, since yesterday but it was just a couple of hours that it all came together. Let’s begin this Bushean trail with Ashley Pond V’s mindblowing, free web-book Developing Featherweight Web Services with Javascript. Then hop on to Sergio Pereira’s excellent Developer Notes for prototype.js. (Prototype.js, if you must know, is the JS framework.) Glen Murphy (recent googler) has a lot of interesting JS projects up his sleeve (say, this clock), and if you want clarity in this muddleheaded webworld, read everything you can find from Douglas Crockford (recent Yahoo)—all he’s written on JS is gobble-up-worthy, specially recommended are Prototypal Inheritance in JavaScript (it’s so short and yet it will change completely how you write JS) and Private Members in JavaScript (a wonderfully clear and short overview of JS object-orientedness). Did you know about JSON (Javascript Object Notation)? One last word on JS coding (and learning), please don’t do it without an HTML Real-Time Editor, a Javascript Shell, and a Javascript Development Environment—just don’t.
Yahoo! has a pretty nice UI blog going on (a couple of days ago, for instance, they did a nice post on the Patterns Behind the Yahoo! Home Page Beta) and they recently released an awesome Pattern Library (Yahoo! is becoming pretty cool lately… at least for developers). UI patterns seem to be all the rage these days and deservedly so. Jenifer Tidwell recent O’reilly, Designing Interfaces, looks set to become a classic (and some very worthwhile excerpts are available online). Out in the wild web, there’s even a pattern of how to build patterns, an interesting conversation on patterns here (intro, 1, 2, 3, 4), and Nine Tips for Designing Rich Internet Applications to which I wholeheartedly agree.
Doesn’t it just floor you how smart and fast things are becoming?
OK, back to work.
Some things take time to sink in, time for time (and memory) to do its culling and for us to look at them with fresh eyes. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s email to his deceased brother was one of those things. I’ve been rereading it about once every week, for one reason or another, since I discovered it 52 days ago, and each time it has resonated ever more deeply inside me. Its call to action is ever more urgent. Its wisdom ever more piercing. Its optimism ever more evident—there’s some brutally naive optimism in this letter, one that stares at us in the face, but one that we refuse to see… because it’s so damn hard to simply entertain the thought, because the moment we accept we might be able to do something about death itself, the 150,000 human deaths every day become 150,000 murders that could be prevented.
I don’t want to forget it. I’ll paste it in my wall and create new remixes of the content, and in this spirit I spacified the whole thing into a 30k PDF. Opinions on both the text itself and the utility (or lack thereof) of the spacifying will be most appreciated.
Except for its nasty tendency to crash unexpectedly (great strides have been made, but it still does it once in a while), Azureus is pretty much the BitTorrent Client. My favorite thing about it (and this seems to be a pattern of open source projects) is its extensibility. There’s everything from a Flag plugin (to get a kick out of how international piracy is!) to a Web (HTML+JS+CSS) UI to the program.
But my favorite plugin is far and away 3D View—a dense, beautiful 3d representation of the torrent process (really, just the standard swarm graph writ 3d). Like the 12/60 clock, it comes with no instructions but it doesn’t need them. If you’ve read anything about how torrents work (and you should!), everything will fall into place after some staring. Its pure infosight—real-time infoporn of the best kind1.
1 Which reminds me: I heard somewhere today that “there is no such thing as bad porn, there’s only better porn.”
“I can’t believe THAT!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. ”Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s not use trying,” she said: “one CAN’T believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Impossible Ideas Before Breakfast
Reading processors
Trying out some information-design ideas inspired by Doug Engelbart,
I’m just so much interested in.. the kind of capabilities this perceptual machine we have in our brain. Like one thing I really, really want to try that I never had the resources, and part of it was that I didn’t understand grammar well enough, I’d like a parsing processor going that parses your sentences, and then it gives you the option of having the different parts of speech in different color or different brightness. And I’m just intuitively certain that if you started reading that way that this machinery would start adapting to it and pretty soon you’d be reading faster with more comprehension than if you had monocolored, monosized, etc. Things as they’re now. That’s the kind of thing that the computer aids can really really help you. So tell me if anybody can try it. Let me try it.
, (and the koan “what is to reading what a word-processor is to writing?”) I came up with two text-transformations: parts-of-speech coloring,
and spacing (pdf),
What do you think about them? Did they help you? Did they confuse you? Assuming that a “reading-processor” could apply such transformations instantly and perfectly (there’s a leap of faith) to whatever you read, would you use them?
I found this curious typographical layout in Ambient Findability and since then I’ve been trying to imitate it wherever I’ve been able to get away with it.
I know it seems like nothing special but I’ve come to find it strikingly elegant—specially when compared with what it might have looked had it been done in today’s more prevalent dummy bulletpoints. The laziness that such bulletpoints encourage would have probably led us to this:
But let’s forget Al, for a time, and delve instead into the depths of human irrationality, beginning with some well-documented decision-making traps.
- When considering a decision, our minds are unduly influenced by the first information we find. Initial impressions and data anchor subsequent judgments.
- Through selective search and perception, we subconsciously seek data that supports our existing point of view, and avoid contradictory evidence.
Had we been lucky, there would be labels to each bulleted paragraph but they would still be obscured within the text and the typejunk bulletpoints:
But let’s forget Al, for a time, and delve instead into the depths of human irrationality, beginning with some well-documented decision-making traps.
- Anchoring: When considering a decision, our minds are unduly influenced by the first information we find. Initial impressions and data anchor subsequent judgments.
- Confirmation: Through selective search and perception, we subconsciously seek data that supports our existing point of view, and avoid contradictory evidence.
And that’s why I like this layout so much: it lets you do without meaningless bulletpoints and it forces you, as a writer, to create a meaningful headline for each paragraph that greatly enhances reading speed and comprehension. I don’t know if it has a name yet but meaningful bulletpoints sounds good to me.
I just finished re-installing Google Desktop for the fifth time (I always find it annoying after a while) and was surprised with this new gadgets thing. It may not be terribly useful, granted, but cool it is (specially with the Shift hotkey). Right now I have a virtual flower, a calculator, and a clock, 12/60, that just might be the coolest time interface ever. It needs no explanation, just install it and stare at it—the epiphany will hit you in bare seconds.
Oh, this is in fact so pretty that it has got me excited once more with my color clock of yore. Maybe I’ll port it to Javascript this week, you know, just as some Javascript back-to-shape calisthenics.
No es mi estilo escribir diatribas (habiendo ya gente que ha llevado el genero a alturas insospechadas) y esta no lo sera, pero si estuviera muerto, me revolcaria en mi tumba por lo que Publico ha hecho de su portada. No es la pesima combinacion de colores. No es el nuevo tipo de fuente para los titulos, ralo y demasiado grande. No es el texto enorme de libro infantil ni la consecuente disminucion brutal de contenido real (Para hacerle espacio a una opinion? Son ya las opiniones noticias de primera plana?). No, lo que me mata son esas lineas —ridiculamente gruesas, dolorasamente innecesarias. Tufte habla de chart junk, propongo un nuevo concepto: newspaper junk. Ya mencione lo ridiculo que es poner un articulo de opinion en 1era plana, hace falta volver injuria el insulto con ese marco gris gruesisimo y esos cuadritos de colores?
Y ni siquiera hablemos de los ultrajes que le hicieron a la contraportada…
La primera impresion de mi primo al ver el nuevo diseño fue pensar que Publico se habia vuelto un periodico gratuito. Comparto su opinion. Publico se ha depreciado.
This is fantastic: a cool website that specializes in selling royalty-free stock photos, iStockPhoto, has created a new way to search through their whole catalog: by arrangement. They call it ColorSpace, and is wonderfully simple, yet powerful. It consists of a 3×3 grid of squares. You change the color of each square to indicate what you want in that area: green, if you want it clear; red, if you want it occupied; grey, if it’s the same to you.
It works. If, for instance, you search for “flower” with this colorspace,  , you get:
Or if you search for “sky” with this colorspace,  , you get:
The star here is not only the algorithm but the clever, information-design interface.
Overall, it’s a very impressive site, its web developers really do care about it, and that’s always refreshing. The weirdest thing is that they’ve convinced me that selling royalty-free stock photos on the web makes perfect sense…
|
RSS
email
Recent Favorites