2 posts tagged “graphic 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.

Somewhat to my surprise, I've found myself still using ffffound quite heavily over the past couple of months. There seems to be something relaxing about bouncing down the page scanning the nice design and pretty pictures.

However, early on, I (and others (look at Michal Migurski’s comment)) noted that as well as all the posters held up by headless designers, photos from the 1960s and bits of Helvetica, there were a fair few pictures of people, primarily women, occasionally not wearing very much. Personally I just bounced past most of them, and on the odd occasion they cropped up in my recommendations and were particularly irksome, marked them as inappropriate. Somewhat to my surprise, the last few months haven't really seen a big change in the ratio of such images to the more design-led ones, which is a good thing; the tight rein on invites probably has a lot to do with it.

Today, however, the front page turned up this image, which reads

helloworld. I am using ffffounddotcom. I am a graphic designer. therefore I love design. I would like to tell you something.
the pussy, the boobs, the whatever of your girlfriend has nothing to do with design.
design ≠ sex. pictures: yes. your sister anatomy: no thanks.

Of course, if there are gynaecological pictures, I don't want to see them either. As I said, though, they're pretty rare and tend not to escape onto the front page, and if they do, users have a "not appropriate" button, which seems to work (albeit slowly; I think there's a human in the loop somewhere.)

Anyway, this is what ffffound itself says it's about:

FFFFOUND! is a web service [which allows people] to post and share their favorite images found on the web

I note this doesn't say anything about "design", only about inspirational images. Looking at the history of art, one can hardly deny that beautiful women have often been muses. In fact, I'm surprised quite how dry and literary ffffound is, considering it's dominated by the image at the expense of text. Nonetheless, there are a lot of people's collections (mine included) that are dominated by monochrome images and a surfeit of typography. Perhaps thousands of years of cultural indoctrination that the word is better than the image is hard to shake off, especially for a programmer who dabbles in design. From that point of view, the surprise isn't that there's porn - or stuff approaching it - on the site, but that there's not more of it.

Anyway, I think the point is that, from an initial sniffiness about the images of people on the site, I've come to realise that there's more to life than black, white, red, and Helvetica, even if I don't add it to my stream.

(There's another category of image that you see rarely on ffffound, although it is getting slightly more common; the Fark / Worth 1000 / somethingawful / b3ta joke. I can only recall seeing one or two in the last few hundred images that have graced the front page, and I think that, in the long run, I'm more worried they'll take over than that the artsy nudes will.)