My Twenty Primary iPod/iPhone Apps

As people do seem to be asking me about iPhone/iPod apps quite a lot these days, I am posting this here so that in future I shall have something I can link to. Borrowing the format established by the excellent First and 20 website I have listed the twenty apps that are most useful to me and thus have earned a spot on my home screen. I am forever adding and subtracting apps off my iPod, but this core set remains consistent and any new app needs to really make an impression on me to knock one of these twenty off my first screen in SpringBoard.

Ticking the Boxes

The Apple App Store has launched. With midnight having passed in New Zealand and customers in the southern hemisphere now able to purchase their second generation iPhones, Apple have pushed the necessary iTunes upgrade. This gives us a preview of the applications that we are going to be able to buy here in Ireland from midnight onwards.

My initial thoughts are how important the usage-generated lists of Top Apps and Top Free Apps are going to prove to be in helping users to decide which applications to install. At least in the iTunes Music Store the design of the album covers afford more visual cues about the nature of what you are buying. Browsing the Productivity section, it looks like this may not be the case with some categories of icons in the AppStore. Good luck with deciding between ‘To Do’ and ‘Todo’.


Disclaimer: Before anyone comes back to me on it, I do need to acknowledge my role in overseeing the rebranding of the Topline chain of hardware stores last year. Said rebranding giving them a new check-mark symbol on a purple octagon. Perhaps I ought to sell them on the idea of their own custom iPhone application...

Error Message Screens

Error messages are one of the minor inconveniences of our online navigation experience. They are never welcome on our screens. But, when something does go wrong, we do need to know probable causes and remedial actions. How well an organisation presents information when everything goes pear-shaped speaks volumes for its approach to its customers.

Steve Job’s keynote for Macworld on 15 January 2008 began at nine in the morning, San Francisco time. That is five in the evening here in Dublin; still within my working hours. I was able to keep a weather eye on the proceedings with a Twitter browser window open in the corner of my screen. At least four of the people in my Twitter feed were live-blogging the keynote event.


Obviously they were not alone, as the level of Twitter activity (twittering? tweeting? twoottering?) coming from Macworld quickly began to put a serious load on the Twitter infrastructure. Very quickly the updating of posts began slowing down noticeably and after acting erratically just stopped completely about five minutes before the keynote started.


Reloading brought up this nicely crafted error screen. The little bird reminds me of that ironic smiling puppy with the electrical cord in his mouth that is used on The Simpsons whenever an in-show TV station experiences ‘technical difficulties’ or a presenter’s on-air meltdown. The little Twitter bird may be just as cute, but he does not make me feel any better.


Further reloads and the cutesy illustrated error message was replaced by this far less sugar-coated version. Obviously the problem was escalating. Devoid of all decoration, at least this screen presented me with some potential options. Although, given the scale of the meltdown going on, none of those three links actually worked

There is a definite argument that a disappointing customer experience can be mitigated (somewhat) by considered, thoughtful error screens that inform the user. But all of that is absolutely no substitute for getting the product delivery right in the first place. In this case engineering the server-side to take the expected load.

Update, June 2008


Twitter has learned some lessons and put measures in place to take the strain for Steve' Job’s next keynote at WWDC 08. The Twitter infrastructure made it through that keynote without falling over.

Speak To Me/The Emotional Type

Dalton Maag Exhibition 03
Originally uploaded by Aiden Kenny.

“How many flavours of vanilla do you want?” — Bruno Maag.

I brought the studio over to the Image Now Gallery for a look at the Dalton Maag typography exhibition ‘Speak To Me’. It was very interesting to see the complete typeface creation process from initial rough sketches on A3 marker pads all the way through to detailed technical film tests.

We also attended Bruno Maag’s lecture ‘The Emotional Type’ at DIT in Mountjoy Squrae. The talk was well titled, as he is an emotional and animated speaker. It is always good to see someone so passionate about what they do. I also think that we always need to have such monomaniacal characters around who obsess about details like the inconsistencies of the diagonal strokes in the light-weight characters of the headline font for The Guardian newspaper, and where the pixels fall in the lowercase O when they are displayed in our interactive television guides. Admittedly I am probably more interested in type and typography than most, but I don’t ever think I would have the mindset to grind my way through the creation process involved in producing the 700-odd characters he was talking about for the standard four-weight Latin A font package he produces for most of his clients.

His talk was wide-ranging in its scope and fairly humorous in spots: touching on some non-conventional topics as typo-porn, the joys of metal type and going to the UK National Type Library and fondling a flirty Fette Fraktur. Indeed.

We also learned why never never to use Helvetica (never) and why if everyone used the nigh-perfect, yet arid, Univers then Bruno would be out of a job. London Underground and Typhoo Tea did not fare well under his withering gaze either.

The headline quote above was his response when asked about the role of custom font creation in brand identity programmes and the observation that so much of that work today is variation around a theme of ‘warm, soft and friendly’ humanist sans-serif typefaces.

Absolutely Fav

I have become tired with the generic orange Blogger icon displayed in the URL bar and page tab for this blog. I particularly do not like the fact that this (rather unfortunately named) favicon is the only visual cue to my blog within my Bloglines reader, and presumably within other feed-readers too). I do find myself increasingly referring to the favicons when I am skimming that list as I navigate my way around my morning read. So I decided that is is now time for a custom-designed solution.



There are not to many options available when designing within a 16-pixel square grid. If you are a organisation which has a suitable symbol within your brand identity system you can use that, as shown by the Apple, Taxi Regulator and 37 Signals example favicons above. If that option is not available, the next most useful approach is some variant of monogram. In this regard the use of a favicon is similar to a publisher’s identity identity monogram at the base of the book’s spine. Take a look along your bookself, the most effective publisers' marks are often single letters such as Phiadon. One recognisably distinct character from an organisation's logotype works well, the Adobe A, the Wired W and the Amazon A below are good examples.



Individual bloggers have two choices of monogram. They can derive a monogram from the name of their blog: in the case of Thoughtport some combination of TP. BoingBoing and Plasticbag above represent that approach. The other prevalent practise is to use the initials of their name and surname, such as Tom Peters’ TP! and Neil Gaiman’s NG. If you have more than one blog the first approach seems to be the optimal strategy. If you are putting all you energy into one blog then building recognition around your own name seems the most constructive. (Whatever minimal recognition such a tiny icon could give.)



Based on that reasoning, and given that AK reads a little too much like the sound of somebody choking, the letter A is the basis for my shiney new bespoke favicon. Using the lowercase glyph felt like an affectation. Choosing an appropriate PostScript sanserif typeface and anti-aliasing looked too insubstantial for me. After that exhaustive (er, ten-minutes at lunchtime) design process I eventually settled on a retro three-colour solid-pixel A, inspired by memories of the on-screen font from my original introduction to computing on my 1984-era ZX Spectrum.

Is This Legible?

You are reading this on a screen, most likely on the CRT or LCD display of your primary computer, possibly on the small screen of your PDA, or even, at a stretch, on your smart phone.* Do you ever think about the layers of technology involved in getting this post from its origins on my PDA screen onto your screen? The last step in that sequence – the visual expression and rendering of letters and words onto your screen – is the interesting specialism of my friend Hilary Kenna. Hilary is now blogging as part of her PhD research programme. You can read her musings, cogitations and insights about on-screen (and sometimes even off-screen) typography at Type4Screen.

In a world where the amount of on-screen content is multiplying exponentially this has got to be a fruitful area of research. Admittedly, this sort of topic is appealing for design-nerds like me, but I think it can be of interest to a broader audience as well.

Having not given this topic too much thought before, I am personally most interested in the area of text on mobile screens. Most of Thoughtport is written on my Palm PDA screen in twenty minute bursts and that device’s on-screen text representation is adequate for that task. But, after reading a few novels on my PDA, I have abandoned it as a tool for long-form commuter reading. (Whether that decision was a function of the quality of the on-screen glyphs and any attendant eye-strain. Or whether my decision was driven by the allure of the insistent podcasts one wheel-click away on my iPod menu. I have not decided yet.) In my experience the PDA is far more useful as a writing tool than as a reading tool.

I am taking it that it can surely only be a matter of time until somebody solves the challenges restraining the arrival of the ‘iPod Of Reading’. Delivering on the promise of that is really going to require a serious quality bump in the legibility of handheld screen text. Even today, reading The Economist’s editorial about the twenty-fifth anniversary of the PC reminded me that the modern mobile phone is a computer in all but name, and that is how the majority of the world’s population are receiving, transmitting and managing their data. That is the current situation, not in some notional future. Where PCs are not available, mobile tech is propagating wildly. Great swathes of the world’s people are just never going to be interested in sitting in front of a PC screen. Here in Ireland I think we are still more fond of our large screens. Yes I can read my Gmail on my Nokia mobile phone, and I have tried it once just to see how it works. But I am not going to do so regularly at this stage, because the on-screen experience simply is not adequate yet.

If I was researching and thinking about text on-screen in 2006 and after, I would be looking beyond the traditional canvas of the PC screen, I would be interested in how we are going to best read, say, locations on our in-car GPRS screens, or geo-tags on my mobile, or always-on realtime Bloglines feeds on my iRead and so forth. More seriously, beyond tech-nerd frivolity, mission-critical applications like air-traffic control screens, or bedside patient monitoring screens in hospitals do come to mind...

Whatever the technological platform, we are all soon going to be reading far more text on small screens, in daylight and in poor light and on the move. Of course type design will have to play a pivotal role in adding value to that experience. Exciting times lie ahead.

—
* I am excluding the myriad possible non-screen eventualities such as that you are either reading this on paper in the handsome leather-bound edition of ‘The Complete Thoughtport: Volume One 2004–2021’ (as published in 2058) or that you are having it wired directly from ‘The Twenty-First Century Internet Archives’ into your brain via wetware implant in some far-flung future.

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Time For A New Template

Thoughtport is about as low-tech as a blog can be these days. I am using one of the default Blogger CSS templates. I compose most of my posts by hand on my Palm PDA and I have to manually edit the code of all the outbound tag links. Ouch! Did anybody say labour intensive?

The benefit of this set-up is low maintainance: write it; post it; forget it. However, the designer in me (or more realistically the incessant tinkerer in me) keeps nagging at me to take the plunge with some grown-up blogging software and create a bespoke structure and layout for Thoughtport. Now the very thought of the time commitment involved in learning how to hack WordPress to some level of competence is usually enough to send me back into the comfort zone of Blogspot. But every now and then do I see a site that makes me say “if only...”

I was looking at Ben Hammersley’s blog yesterday. His primary blog posting page looks great. It incorporates the better aspects of web 2.0 design tropes: using large, legible, 37-Signally, sans-serif post headings and the like. But there is more. If you click on the photos you see each post presented with its text superimposed over its photograph. Nice. He is appropriating the editorial design conventions of magazines to create a very unique blog design here. Admittedly, this structure implies short post lengths, but that is the metier he has chosen to write in, and his photographs tell half the story anyhow.

My Bloglines feed-reader cannot currently present those posts in that visually rich format. Does anyone know a feed-reader which can? Or maybe I should just migrate from Firefox to Opera 9?

Delicious Tags: Hammersley | Blog design
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My Corporate Web-Fu (BFK Site Redesign 2005)

My redesign of the BFK home page and news page has now gone live, as they say in web parlance. I made no major stylistic alterations, but directed a change of emphasis on what we are presenting to our readers.

I finally got to retire the ghostly-looking ‘BFK face’ image, which has been a prominent visual element in all of the company’s marketing communications since I joined in 1999. I replaced that static image on our home page with a randomly-served image from a selection of our recent work. My reasoning was that potential clients reading the site get more benefit from seeing some or any of our creative work on the home page, rather than having to drill down into the site to find it. Similarly, I downplayed the two statements of intent within the layout. No doubt they are important for positioning purposes, but they needed to move down the page hierarchy. So, if you have the time, and the thought of refreshing the home page thirty times is your kind of thing, then you can go and review our currently highlighted work. Knock yourself out.

My primary design improvement was to reduce the number of dynamic case study link panels to one and add two dynamic panels linking to our most recent news articles. This was done for a few practical reasons. Carving out the time to write longer case studies has proved problematic within the normal pressures of a busy design studio. So linking to our case study archive meant that our home page was remaining static for too long (we were only writing one or two of those a year). However, we were generating a healthy amount of concise news stories; at the rate of one a week or so. Therefore linking to those now means our home page should vary a lot more often and present our readers with more timely content.

The changes in the News section were mostly housekeeping. The ever-lengthening news archive list has been trimmed and now groups all articles by year. The thumbnail images are now larger, as the previous postage-stamp-sized versions did not display packaging or literature design work all that well.

Morgan in Strata3 did all of the heavy-lifting and coding in the back-office for me. At present my corporate web-fu does not stretch much beyond hand-coding tags into Blogger posts and moblogging camera phone images directly into my Flickr site.

As I do not generally get to do much web design interface thinking, this was an interesting exercise. I suppose that the official BFK Blog will just have to wait for the next iteration.