8 posts tagged “design”

When I posted about lib-flickr-minimal, I noted that the newly-launched flickr.places.placesForUser method made a more interesting demo of data you could fetch when authenticated than, say, showing a user's most recent private photos. Evidently the developers at Flickr agreed it was an interesting concept, because over the last couple of months that area of the API has been extended considerably, As a result, I've expanded the demo into an AppJet application of its own.

Where? What? When? is the result. It shows you, on a map, the locations with the most photos according to a given criterion: by default, that's a tag, but it can also show your photos, or those from your friends and family, or your contacts. You can then inspect a place and see the most recent relevant photos, or the most popular tags, for that location.

How did that evolve from the initial demo app? Instead of simply printing a table based on Flickr's response into the document, I directly plotted the results on the map. I added a small form to enable the choice of criteria, and when Flickr added the placesForTags method, I added that as a choice. Belatedly, I realised that would also work for users without authentication, so I removed the requirement to authenticate, and made tags the logged-out default. (The image above shows a slight change to the initial results: it's the same tag, London, but at the neighbourhood, not locality, level. All of the locations are within the greater city's area, which probably won't be a surprise, but that's not true for Paris. Evidently, what happens in Vegas doesn't always stay there.)

The design of the application isn't quite settled, but I knew I wanted to replace the standard Google Maps pushpins with partially-transparent circles. Initially, I went with red, but when I showed it to colleagues, they said it reminded them of maps of bomb blast radii, so I spent a while looking around for the right colour, before settling on a yellow. The circles themselves are scaled according to the natural log of the number of photos for that location; I played with square roots as well, but I feel that logarithms give the right sense of scale.

The last piece of work I did was adding tag display for locations, using the tagsForPlace method. These tags can be surfed: clicking on one will load a new search for the given tag. It's noticable that the first few tags for most places are almost always place names, while common tags seem to share a familiar pattern of scattered, similarly-sized circles across the US, Europe, south-east Asia and coastal Australia.

There's still a few things I could add; tag persistence in URLs (to make it easier to share pages), better loading indicators (especially initially), options on which photos are shown, and links to view the search on Flickr itself, for example. There's also a missing question: while the API methods support maximum and minimum times, I haven't yet added options to allow you to show When? However, for now I think I've done enough (and I'll note that the site has a link to view the source of the application, if you fancy hacking on it yourself.) Enjoy.

A decade ago, when the Jubilee Line was extended from Green Park to Stratford, there were plenty of glossy books published, examining the design and architecture of the twelve stations that made up the extension. Deservedly so, too; one, Foster's Canary Wharf, has become iconic in that time. There's still plenty you can find about the philosophy of the designers, and the way they wanted a commonality but individuality for each of the stations.

By contrast, it's almost impossible to find out about the thinking behind the Victoria Line. This was only all-new Underground line in the last century¹, and it's forty years old this year. Most people, if they think of its design at all, consider it dull at best.

However, I've been using it for my commute for a year now, and as a primary line for half a decade, and I think that does it a disservice. First, consider the station layouts. This is, I'll admit, more commonly thought of as engineering, but even so, someone had to think about it. There are sixteen stations on the line; five have cross-platform interchanges with either Tube or British Rail lines, far more than any other line², while all but one station offer interchanges with either Underground or British Rail lines.

Admittedly, partly this is due to politics: during the "tube boom" from 1898 to 1908, the organisations building lines were in competition with one another, whereas the Victoria was the first line designed by London Underground, a single company responsible for all lines. Even so, it's a boon to people who use the line - ask anyone who changes to the Piccadilly at Finsbury Park, or the Bakerloo at Oxford Street.

Beyond the engineering, though, I think the stations are also designed well. Unlike the aforementioned Jubilee Line, most stations follow the same basic look, with three escalators³ down to a main hallway between the two platforms. Unlike some earlier lines (the Central Line springs to mind), these are almost always straight, and I can't think of a station with steps from the central section to either platform. As I've said before, there are also cross-platform interchanges, which complicate things, but even there, consistency leaps out in other ways.

All of the Victoria Line platforms are tiled in a light, almost blue-tinted, grey, with simple wooden benches. Each also has a mural; there's a lovely set on Flickr by Chutney Bannister collecting them all. Recently, the southbound Oxford Street tiling was refurbished as part of the station's PPP makeover, and I was impressed by the lovely, modern design that replaced the snakes-and-ladders mural you can still see on the northbound platform. It turns out that this was the original design, removed in the 1980s after the Oxford Circus fire, but now re-instated, and it doesn't look at all dated - in fact, it's positively modern.

For now, the original 1967 tube stock is still used on the line. However, next year should see the introduction of the new 2009 stock, which, to be honest, I'm somewhat dreading. As with the stations, these are nicely consistent and minimal, with a quirky use of circular glass panels dividing vestibules from seating areas, and standard seating. The new stock will introduce more fold-up seats, and more room to stand, at the cost of fixed seats. I suppose I should wait and see how it turns out, but my gut feeling is that I'll dislike them.

That's not to say the line is without problems. As part of the engineering work to get the line ready for the new trains, its previously solid reliability seems to have taken a knock. More seriously, the above-ground buildings are generally appalling, with far too many of the stations lumbered with unpleasant subway complexes or buildings that look like glorified portakabins. This is particularly shameful at Highbury and Islington, where a damaged but glorious old station was demolished in favour of the current single-storey shed.

Despite this, I think the effort going into the line has been unfairly neglected. The design work for the Victoria line seems to be largely lost, on the Internet at least. Mischa Black was in charge of the overall design effort, leading the Design Research Unit, but I can easily imagine how the utilitarian style leant itself to concealing the identities of the others who contributed. I think it's a shame; the line, while perhaps understated, deserves more attention than it gets. I can't imagine my London without it.

¹ Parts of the Jubilee line were inherited from the Metropolitan line in 1977, and of course the extension in 1999, while needing new tracks, was not a new line end-to-end. Amazingly, the Central London tube network we know today - with the exception of the Victoria and Jubilee lines - was completed by 1907.

² I believe the Central, District and Piccadilly each have two, excluding Victoria Line interchanges, but none are within zone 1 (I'm thinking of Stratford, Mile End, and Hammersmith).

³ Annoyingly, cost-cutting sometimes (as at my home station, Blackhorse Road) led to the central escalator being replaced by a fixed staircase, which means that any failure results in people having to walk or, in extreme cases, station closures.

The subject of attribution on the "image bookmarking" site ffffound has been getting a bit more attention recently. For example, it's a key point in Alexander Bohm's reconsideration of the site. With the site's slow but relentless increase in popularity, I've come to notice duplicate images on the front page more and more often. (One that particularly bugs me is this early sketch of the Underground roundel, which I posted from the IHT, but which was later posted without the annoying black border via fontblog.de.)

Personally, right back to the early days of blogging (a whole five years ago now), I've tried to remember to chase back attribution as far as I can, and I do this with images on ffffound, too. Today I saw this house on the front page (linked, annoyingly, to the blog's home page, rather than the post's permalink- the sort of thing that makes it impossible to trace attribution once the page's cycled, which can be as quickly as a few days, but never mind that now), and so I read down the page looking for other posts* of interest.

Rapidly I found this Moleskinerie hack, which, unusually for such things, I quite liked. I followed the attribution change back through designboom (again, having to find the permanent link myself - are all designers incapable of doing this?) to the original artist's site (once more a link to the top level, which is more excusable this time, since the post was about his entire body of work). At each step I posted the same item to ffffound, generating three links, each addded by different people. It turns out that the least popular (two links, at the time of writing) was the artist's site; the two blogs had three links each.

ffffound doesn't really try to tie these images together, or to do anything to limit the duplication. Admittedly, sites like del.icio.us don't either, and variant URLs on the same site can lead to as much duplication as the quoting (and reuploading) of images can. Nevertheless, it's a source of annoyance to me, and, I assume, even more vexing to those whose work is never recognised, because it's referred to but never seen in the context they'd prefer, or attached meaningfully to its creator.

* I've got a rant brewing about the use of "blog" to mean "blog post" as opposed to "site", but never mind that now either. Anyway, I fear that the battle's already lost, despite me only noticing the trend a month or three ago.

For the last week or so, I've been using a site called ffffound a great deal. In its own words,

FFFFOUND! is a web service that not only allows the users to post and share their favorite images found on the web, but also dynamically recommends each user's tastes and interests for an inspirational image-bookmarking experience!!

There's a great writeup by Michal Migurski which, if you've not seen it, you should read. He covers the bookmarklet, the lack of tags. It's interesting that its tight invite policy - although it's gone up from one to three per user - has kept the site's quality high, despite the growth of the site. (A mention from Kottke and wide linking to an animated gif of Paris Hilton don't seem to have caused problems.)

There are a couple of things mentioned in that post I'd like to reiterate. Firstly, the automatic creation of the fan/follower network (based on who posted images first, I believe) is lovely. Compared to its two obvious reference points, Flickr and del.icio.us, this really feels like magic, and it seems to largely work. (Migurski himself noted that your network is no longer invisible, but it is still autogenerated.) Secondly, the site has a really nice string of image connections; it's very easy to surf. I still run a narrow browser, so I almost missed the three thumbnails to the right of every main image; beyond that, when you click through to an image's page, there's usually a good half dozen candidates for further exploration.

A feature that wasn't mentioned (maybe it came along later?) is the use of vi keys for paging. Usually the standard paging in a browser works fine, but for a screen of images, you'll usually end up with an image stranded half in the viewport, half out. ffffound allows you to use 'j' to bounce between anchor tags for each image, fixing it toward the top of the page and allowing you to see it in full. There are also keys to scroll upwards, and to go back and forth between pages. It's really easy to scan. Another nice touch - this one only noticable once you've joined - is the distinction between "posted" and "found" images. The former are those you've added with the bookmarklet, whereas the latter include those you saw on the site. Both have RSS feeds, too, which is nice.

There are very few issues I have with the site. I suppose an API would be nice, but to be honest for what I want to do - possibly include my found images on my site - the RSS is perfectly sufficient. However, I do worry that a single big list of found images will make it hard for me to get images I like back out of ffffound when I want them. An API would fix this, if it exposed the date and title metadata already on the image. I've also had trouble with the bookmarklet on Safari 3 on Windows, but that browser is so crashy I'm reluctant to blame ffffound for it.

Browsing, and then using, ffffound also prompted me to think about Flickr's favourites. Unsurprisingly, a lot of images are from Flickr, but there's no real integration at either end. Personally, I'm making a bit of a distinction; if it's on Flickr and obviously a photo (as opposed to artwork), I'm still adding it as a favourite there; otherwise, it'll be on ffffound. Most other ffffound users don't seem as picky, though. I wonder what the "API users are stealing my images" crowd will do when they find out?

Anyway, I'm very happy to be on ffffound, which has some great touches, and hope that some of its lessons can be taken over to Flickr.

I ran across the first (proper) post on the new A Brief Message site yesterday about the death of print, and since then it's done the rounds, as has the post describing the thinking behind the site. A good summary is this quote, which has been picked up by other people:

online publications don’t necessarily need to be decorated databases

As the comments on the brief message say, there's a difference between newspapers dying and magazines dying. Newspapers feel a lot like print's equivalent of a decorated database; the content (data) is king, and presentation takes second place to the demands of the story. Magazines, on the other hand, have a longer lead time, and while this makes them less useful for timely information, they still have a lot more flexibility with layout and pictures, something Khoi Vinh himself talked about in his post about the graphic design of US highway signage and the NY Times story about the same.

To return to the quote, though, currently CMSes really don't help with this process, meaning that most online publications are more like newspapers. What's needed is a way of attaching design, as well as just images (and other assets), to an article. Currently the only way I can think of to do this is by editing the raw HTML of your posts, but storing that in your database is a bad idea. (Just ask anyone who's ever implemented a redesign on such a site.) At least, that's how I assume A Brief Message is built.

Much better - although also much harder for CMS designers - would be a way of attaching a style sheet (and the associated style IDs) as a structured part of the storage. The per-post CSS file could be a seperate asset, but the style declarations might be harder to manage. However, I'm sure there's a way, even though it looks like nobody's really tried yet. I wonder if the new plugin architecture of the new version of Movable Type is rich enough to do so?

There have been a couple of posts since Apple's press event on Tuesday, which saw the launch of the new .Mac Galleries - an online, read-only version of iPhoto, kind of - that state that "Apple doesn't get the web". Jeremy Keith says

in the fast-moving, messy world of online services I don’t think the genius-led design of Apple can compete with the truckloads of nimble young upstarts making snazzily addictive products on the Web

and Chris Heathcote writes

Whenever Apple strays towards software and the web recently, there’s a lot of flashy interfaces, and little substance.

I think there's a slight qualification to be made here. I think Apple are great at web publishing. Their site is one of the best product sites I've seen (despite the fact I dislike the new bigger-than-800-pixel width). I've been going on about the elegance of URLs - it's possible to guess that there's something at apple.com/keyboard, for example - since 2001 or something, and even when they drop in AJAX their pages still have usable permanent links.

When designing for consumers, Apple takes the same approach. They produce tools for publishing, using a one-to-many, one-direction mode of thinking. As James Duncan Davidson notes as he writes about the .Mac galleries, "It’s not Flickr, and comparing it to Flickr is probably pointless." Well, no. Flickr is the archetypal Web 2.0 application, being almost as much about community as about photographs themselves. The .Mac gallery, on the other hand, is all about putting your work online. There's no comments, no notes, no tags, but the people who it's aimed at don't want that. They're about publishing, not interaction, and while they pages are undoubtedly heavy, and probably scale badly, they're also slick enough that a lot of people will like them.

Similarly, iWeb-generated blogs have no comments, but well-designed templates (from which it's hard to stray.)* Again, it's designed for publishing. The problem for Apple is that it's not 1999 any more. People expect more from their sites now, and thankfully more and more of the sites I use are applications, not brochureware. So perhaps the statement needs to be refined, because despite the JavaScript libraries and slick visuals, Apple doesn't get Web 2.0.

* One point where iWeb fails is that it doesn't preserve Apple's nice URLs; the ones it generates are distinctly ugly. At least, they were in the first version.

This is almost as nitpicking as John Gruber's observations on iTunes source list shading, but I've just noticed a tiny change as part of Twitter's midweek redesign, which saw alternating background table rows replaced with rules separating each entry.

Now, on the page describing what you and your friends are doing, any entries from people whose tweets aren't public have a title attribute: "[Friend's] updates are protected! Please don't share." In most browsers, this means you get a tooltip with that message.

This addresses a minor, but serious, complaint I had about that page, namely that there was no indication that a user wanted (or didn't want) his updates shared. It's not quite as obvious as Flickr's privacy "traffic lights", but it's a lot better than nothing, so I thought I'd mention it, even if it is a very small change.

There's a discussion going on over at Flickr's Guess Where London? group about London books, which prompted me to look through my collection and pick out some of my favourites.

So, here's the six (well, eight really, but I'll pair some of them) I'd recommend most. Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory is difficult to slog through, but worth dipping into, and unlike London Orbital, is actually set largely in the centre (albeit with an East End bias). His collaboration with Marc Atkins, Liquid City, has more pictures to break up the flow. For members of london-alt and Humming Giants.

Chris Robert's Cross River Traffic is an eccentrically-organised look at London's river crossings; the obvious group is London Bridges. Similarly, London Tube members should seek out Ken Garland's book, Mr Beck's Underground Map, covering the history of the diagram from 1933 to 1964 and beyond (although those deeply interested in the modern map are recommended to seek out the sequel, Underground Maps After Beck.)

For a snapshot in time, Stephen Inwood's City of Cities documents one of London's periods of most rapid change, 1880-1914; as the subtitle says, it is "The Birth Of Modern London". Recommended for aspiring Edwardians- and I'll have to think about the Flickr group. For the architecture specific choice, and showing my own predelicitions, Kenneth Powell's 30 St Mary Axe documents the building of that now-iconic tower. London - The Square Mile, perhaps?

Finally, the cover-all book is Ed Glinert's The London Compendium, which covers the centre of the city in bite-sized chunks. For Guess Where London, perhaps?