Control Shift Blog

PIXCETERA iPhone app now available...

Peter Rivera — 2009-05-08T18:27:00+00:00

Filed under: aesthetics, beautiful things, content, product design

Shameless Promotion Department:

We've just released our PIXCETERA app in the Apple iPhone store. The experience was designed and created by the Key Experiences team within MediaGlow. We kept the experience very simple, very focused, and basically ported the value proposition of the site onto the hand-held device. Users can explore hundreds of original world-class photo galleries created by the photo-editors of the site as well as galleries published from across our content network. Check it out and let us know what you think. The app is significant for us in that it solves both a technical and UI convention for delivering photo browsing experiences within our upcoming iPhone apps. Very soon look for releases for "The Unofficial Apple Weblog" (www.TUAW.com), as well as Asylum.com. In the meantime, enjoy the pictures on PIXCETERA!

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Robert Capa's Images Revealed

Rachel Been — 2009-04-30T12:36:00+00:00

The Mexican suitcase showed up at the International Center of Photography over a year ago, filled with some of famed photographers Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymours' lost rolls of film. The images have finally been developed, and the New York Times has composed a brief slideshow highlighting some of the most evocative images from the series. The inclusion of the AGFA negative contextualizes the historicity of the images-- they are photographs representing both the Spanish Civil war as well as the inception of Magnum Images, but also became the foundation for snapshot reportage. Check out the wonderful collection here.

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Future of Portals

Peter Rivera — 2009-03-29T10:40:00+00:00

Filed under: strategy

A friend and associate of mine (David Link at WonderFactory) recently twittered about the fact that all the three major content portals are basically the same and asked "what's next?" in a Web portal experience.

Here it is: http://twitter.com/WonderfactoryNY/status/1354194077

The suspects here would be Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL. I wanted to reply to the post and... (sort of) agree with David. I do think there are major differences but listing them out is too easy an answer and not where I think he is going.

Hey, twitter posts are half a calorie in terms of value and content. So I'll answer from an AOL perspective as we continue on our roadmap of super-setting the Web and giving our users more and more control.

At this point in terms of portal reinvention I think we're on the right path; but we know that "re-inventing", as in top-to-bottom, is not what the entrenched public really wants in many cases. They don't want a car with 3 wheels just so we can call it progress. When you have 50 million or a 100 million people coming to your sites, you have a tendency to listen to their needs. One of those needs is consistency and accepted formats. When you want to truly break the mold that can be an obvious inhibitor.

So I think the experience of a portal will change but not necessarily relative a Web page as we experience it today. It will be in your hands via smart-phone and projected on the living room wall and, like the wiii, you'll gesture to get what you want. This is not as far-fetched or far off as it could have sounded just three years ago. This is already upon us.

This portal will know no boundaries to data, or networking, or inter-connectedness to people. It will be ubiquitous and won't chain you to any one experience. And, though it will have a social networking component, you'll start to find shades of meaning beyond just "Friends". How many of you want all of your Facebook friends on the Living room wall and at that level of intimacy? ("Friend" possibly the most incorrectly used term of the age.)

You'll be able to filter the "news" in powers of 10, zooming outward or inward: your personal events ("I hear water outside"), your social circles ("Our neighbor's kitchen is flooded!"), your neighborhood ("Spring St. is flooded!"), your town ("Taxes just went up 10% to help fix flooding problem!"), your state ("State taxes just went up 5% on top of that local 10%"), your nation ("Obama to lower taxes!"), your entire world ("Taxes outlawed by G7 nations!"). And you'll be able to zoom in and out at these various levels of resolution and meaning and inter-connectedness. Meaning is everywhere. A good portal shoud be able to help you find it. Experiences today are so compartmentalized, dominated by the "module". We have to hammer at that one.

And all that said: personalization is the true next wave. Yes, all of us have been talking about it for years but NO ONE as done it well yet. Or at least to its full potential.

So the Portal is really you. And YOU are the portal. That is what it's going to be.

The team here will keep pushing toward this vision, whatever it is branded, and whatever device it sits on.

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A simple Sunday morning find...

Peter Rivera — 2009-03-15T10:11:00+00:00

Filed under: advertising and promotion, beautiful things, identity design, inspiration

I love how the designers of this IBM micro-site interpreted their subjects (along the bottom) into stark and simple iconography while staying true to a consistent visual language. Very often we're tasked with taking cliches and making them fresh and invigorated. I think this team has done that well here across these 14 concepts.

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The Internet Visualized

Peter Rivera — 2009-02-26T21:54:00+00:00

Filed under: aesthetics, advertising and promotion, beautiful things, culture of design, information design, inspiration, technologies, "wish I had done that"

I was stuck for a couple of extra hours at the airport in Dulles and I noticed this amazing visualization of the Internet from AT&T Labs and a company called "Lumeta". Yes, I know these have been done before, but rarely with any sense of aesthetics in mind. Alas, some extensive searching revealed no aditional information on this monstrosity (it is rather large). It is one of those things you'd really like to get a copy of, but for some reason, a company smart enough to map the Internet is not smart enough to put an URL on the poster to follow up on their creation. Something this cool deserved a "How We Did It" type of explanation somewhere. Oh well. If you are in Dulles or Reagan airports, be sure to check it out. It color codes major nodes and networks, and that faint gray "haze" is actually thousands of labels for major servers in the network. A great marriage of science and design.

And apologies for the quality of the picture. It was taken with my phone.

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Panoramic Obamania

Alison Hines — 2009-01-28T11:38:00+00:00

Filed under: beautiful things, identity design, inspiration, photography

No, that's not the name of the latest band featured to be featured on Spinner this week.

Just yesterday, I was sent a link to an amazing photograph of President Barack Obama's inaugural address. I've come to find out that the photo has practically gone viral, with over 2 million views in the first 5 days it was posted, so I'm potentially not the first person to share this with you.

I had a rather strong reaction to the image itself, the story if its creation, as well as the interactive element, and the combination inspired me to go out on a declarative limb: This is THE image that depicts everything historical about Barack Obama's election. A grand statement, I know, but read on and I'll attempt to explain.

New York photographer David Bergman blogged about covering Barack Obama's inauguration on January 20th, 2009. "I covered my first inauguration and what an inauguration it was," he writes. "Before Tuesday, I had photographed five presidents and covered big events including the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and concerts like Live 8 and Live Earth. But this one was the biggest. It deserved a big photo."

When he says big, he means big.
Using a Gigapan Imager that took over 200 hi-res images, Bergman stitched these images together and uploaded the resulting panoramic view to his blog. The file's specs are staggering.

"It took more than six and a half hours for the Gigapan software to put together all of the images on my Macbook Pro and the completed TIF file is almost 2 gigabytes," said Bergman. The file is 59,783 X 24,658 pixels or 1,474 megapixels. At this resolution, he is selling prints up to eight feet long and four feet tall.

The complete image can be viewed here. Use the zoom and pan tools in the upper left hand corner to zoom in on any portion of the photograph for more detail. Double click to zoom, double click again to zoom more.

So why is this THE photograph?

From a purely aesthetic perspective, this image is breathtaking in scope. Hundreds of thousands of bundled bystanders create a patchwork of colors and textures, all lifting their eyes to the podium in rapt attention. It took 220 separate photographs to capture this singular moment: Now that's poetic. The metaphors abound in the meaning we can make of this fact alone.

When you see the image in full, the first thing you notice is not the man standing at the podium. You notice the HUGE crowd of spectators, the soaring spire of the capital building. A government of the people, by the people, for the people. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama often said that this election was not about him , it was about "us". What a beautiful and accurate portrait of the spirit of this inauguration -- This is what can happen when millions of people join with unity of purpose. And in this portrait, the thousands of change-makers are captured along side the representative they have chosen to carry their banner. (I mean, come on. Someone needs to burst into patriotic song here or something.)

The interactivity element is what really sells this as THE Obama image. There are few events in the history of a generation that warrant us to ask one another "Where were you when...?" January 20th, 2009 will be one of those days. Through this image, you can bear witness to hundreds of "Where were you when Barack Obama was inaugurated?" stories. By using the zoom feature, you can see so many different emotions in the crowd. Applause, laughter, prayer, love, hope -- You can even see Yo Yo Ma taking a picture of Obama at the podium with his iPhone:

Yo Yo Ma is rendered profoundly human by the power of zoom!

Barack Obama has, in my opinion, achieved a remarkable level of accessibility and engagement with voters and constituents by using the internet, through portals like barackobama.com, change.gov, and now through whitehouse.gov, all while displaying an unprecedented level of attention to graphic design, branding, and a uniformity of image. Is there a soul left out there who wouldn't recognize this logo?

By using interactive Web 2.0 tools, Barack Obama's campaign changed the way politicians organize, advertise, and communicate. Real-time internet contact (and Obama's awesome battle to save his BlackBerry) will change the face of the presidency.

"Just like Kennedy brought in the television presidency, I think we're about to see the first wired, connected, networked presidency," Joe Trippi said to the New York Times.

In that vein of interactivity and engagement, Bergman's photograph is much more in line with capturing Obamania in the context of the moment we live in -- This isn't your grandmother's newspaper headline. Sure, I saved the the cover of the New York Times declaring 'OBAMA' on November 5th, but this interactive photograph is something different than a framed 5x7 image. This image captures the enormity and excitement of this moment in a much more poignant and satisfying way. It reacts to me and I react to it. I see something new each time I explore the image in close-up.

It's an image that's about all of us, and it is shared with us in a way that we can feel participatory in the experience, regardless of whether we were among those huddled masses on the Mall or sitting in a New York office on Inauguration Day.

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Collection of Color Scheme Generators

Allison Bucchere — 2009-01-18T12:12:00+00:00

Filed under: CSS design, inspiration

Thought you'd enjoy this thorough collection of color scheme generators on Web Squeeze: http://tr.im/9kaj

I spent a lot of time exploring the ColorJack visualizer: http://www.colorjack.com/sphere -- it's quite powerful:

Beautiful Web Typography

Allison Bucchere — 2009-01-09T10:31:00+00:00

Filed under: beautiful things, CSS design, inspiration

Over the holidays, I started following several prolific design tweeters (via Twitter). Here are some inspiring links a couple of them shared that I thought you'd enjoy as much as I did.

Beautiful web typography
http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/20-websites-with-beautiful-typography

Logo design inspiration
http://www.logospire.com

10 - 9 - 8 - 7 - 6 - 5

Michael Costantino — 2009-01-06T22:15:00+00:00

Filed under: information design, product design, UI IA, usability

I'm in the NASA generation... meaning I grew up when space exploration was THE most thrilling news covered in our solar system. It also means that I'm probably a bunch older than you... but we'll proceed anyway.

I recall gathering with my family in the living room, watching our single TV set:

10 - 9 - 8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 - 0 - BLAST OFF!!!!!
ROAR of unbelievably powerful rocket engines. HUGE Saturn V rocket engulfed in smoke and flames. INCOMPREHENSIBLE forces inching untold tonnage slowly upward, breaking away from gantry tubes, somehow going straight upward, hurtling its miniscule human cargo toward exciting exploration and discovery missions in outer space.

Not coincidentally, we all just got past the most famous recurring example of this type of cultural artifact:

10 - 9 - 8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 - HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!
Woooo Hooooo! Yelling. Noise-making. Kisses. Champagne. Affection. Reminiscing. Resolutions.

Countdowns are Cool!
Read on and learn how to Rock Your UI! >>Countdowns are humanizers.
Countdowns translate data into anticipation and emotion... and often enough, stress.
How many days until "still-President" Bush leaves office?
How many days until Xmas?
(here's a picture of my virtual Chumby... the real one is nicer)

Last spring, we at AOL launched some redesigned movie pages on Moviefone. Granted, we didn't get everything we all wanted into the product, but we did manage to get in the UI for countdowns. By happenstance we captured some unsolicited sound bytes of user feedback about this feature during some usability testing sessions last fall. Just play the video to see for yourself.

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Countdowns make perfect sense for Moviefone. Sure, we all want to know that Star Trek is coming out on May 8th (05/08/2009), but what stokes up the trekkie in me is the fact that it is 123 days away and counting down... creeping toward me, slowly, but inevitably... day by day... 122, 121... building anticipation... pestering me to scratch that itch and find out how close it is today!

Did I cook it into the UI of Moviefone for iPhone? You better believe it. And there are plenty of other ways we'll be exploiting this technique throughout Moviefone and upcoming messaging architectures.

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I'm anxious to ensure you fully understand the concept.
EVERY DAY the page gets better and better because EVERY DAY the number gets smaller and smaller.
You don't even have to lift a finger... the technique just works upon us automatically... autonomically?
It's such a little thing, and such a big thing at the same time.

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Of course, there's also the reverse countdown... what I call the "countback."
Facebook has pioneered a system of posting time/date... 20 seconds ago, 20 minutes ago, about 2 hours ago, yesterday, etc. This is quite nice, albeit backward-looking, but still latching craftily onto some trigger in basic human nature... compelling me to be the first wise-acre to add a sarcastic comment onto my friend's carefully worded status update... HAH! Ain't I a gas?

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Lotteries typically broadcast the date countdown alongside the more important rising number of winnings. Both are critical to drive a purchase. Hey, you gotta play to win. Those old New York Lottery commercials really bring back memories.

=============================================================
Does it make sense to execute countdowns on AOL channels?
What about other data humanizations?
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Full Screen; Angelo Guarracino

Rachel Been — 2008-12-01T11:50:00+00:00

If you haven't already noticed, Pixcetera launched a full-screen template last week, allowing photos embedded in the everyday pixcetera galleries to expand full screen...

One of the most visual examples is the disturbing "Congo in Conflict" gallery. Not for the weak of heart, but the gallery definitely showcases the powerful experience of larger images.

Also, check out the first audiotrack integration on Pixcetera-- Angelo Guarracino, Italian photographer extraordinaire, documented Dia de los Muertos in Oaxaca. His somber black and white images capture the mysticism of the Oaxacan landscape in the days leading up to the Day of the Dead.

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Give Me Results!

Bill Knight — 2008-11-03T19:08:00+00:00

Filed under: information design

Immerse yourself in the web's best elections coverage at AOL News - Elections '08!

This election will go down in history as the most highly contested and publicized presidential race in our country's history. And to bring our users the best, we at AOL News have launched the most comprehensive coverage, delivering you real-time national, state and local results.

So, as you prepare for the long wait at the polls, do your candidate research for your presidential choices (I hope you've figured that out by now) all the way down to your local county seats and ballot measures.

Candidate News: John McCain | Barack Obama

Get the latest Election '08 Results: Presidential | Senate | House | Governor

State Results: Virginia | New York | California | select your state.

Be sure to also read the latest political commentary at political machine and live blogging from Mo Rocca on his newly designed web-site -- Mo Rocca 180 -- it's only half as tedious as the regular news.

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Dimensions of Relevance

Grant Cerny — 2008-10-03T08:26:00+00:00

Filed under: inspiration

I've been thinking about how our online experience increasingly correlates to some dimensions of our human experience.

Semantic

The search engines, and predominantly Google, "organized the world's information" through smart robots that find and sort and rank content continuously and tirelessly, according to smart and ever-smarter algorithms. The world reorganized itself around search engines as the fastest and easiest method for finding relevant content.

Social

The searchers soon found that a supplemental index of relevance, the social graph, could be laid over this index of knowledge and, uniquely to every individual person, allow all to additionally consider whatever their friends considered relevant. With personal relationships as a keystone to the psychology of trust, the social graph became a new critical dimension to the relevance of available content.

Geospatial

In the years to come, algorithmic and social relevance of content will be supplemented by another human dimension: geography. Already we enjoy many geo-relevant applications (e.g. google maps), but in the future all content should be filterable with reference to a user's expressed location (I am here), a user's intention location (I will be or want to say that I am here), and the assigned or determined location value of a piece of content.

--

Applications will be able to cross-reference algorithmic, social, and geospatial relevance. In fact they already can and do. But I suggest that in less than two years this will be ubiquitous. Our product designs and innovations should correspondingly begin embracing and bulilding upon this concept.

What other dimensions of relevance can we add to our searching and finding? How closely does this in fact map to the dimensions of human experience?

Meaning, People, World.... what else? Time, perhaps, could next be more comprehensively organized, as all of history becomes indexed...

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Objective measures of User Experience

Milissa Tarquini — 2008-10-02T14:28:00+00:00

Filed under: information design, product design, reviews, web standards, UI IA, usability, AOL design standards

Objectively measuring design is critical to a product's success. Usability testing and tracking are powerful tools to evaluate your design with data from real users, and now AOL Designers have another tool at our disposal. With the help of Forrester Research we have created the AOL User Experience Checklist. Building upon the great work of Forrester's original Web Site Review Scorecard, we've added evaluation criteria specific to AOL and our design standards .

Best practices evaluated in the list include messaging to users, navigation and way-finding, visual and architectural hierarchy, and task efficiency.

I am recommending that every product be evaluated once a year at a minimum for a baseline. Then teams may revisit their report and score as improvements are launched.

Please note that a perfect score is exceedingly rare and the goal should be to always be improving the score. If the score is always moving in the right direction then we know our experiences are always improving as well.

AOL folks can find the checklist on our design guide here:
AOL UX Checklist

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Women in Photography at Aperture

Rachel Been — 2008-10-02T10:16:00+00:00

Filed under: photography

I haven't blogged in quite a while, but I'm proud to have a comeback tour featuring the site Women in Photography..

I went to Aperture on Monday for the kickoff of a new series of educational lectures curated by Laurel Ptak of I Heart Photograph. This particular event featured the creators Amy Elkins and Cara Phillips of the female-centric online gallery, Women in Photography, and two of the featured artists on the site, Elinor Carucci and Robin Schwartz.

After an introduction explaining the reasons behind WIP's conception, Elinor Carruci discussed her personal work while flipping through never seen images. If you're familiar with Elinor's style, the work is painstakingly intimate, revealing beautiful yet embarrassingly tender moments.. The portfolio transitioned into images of her children enraged and delicate; the vulnerability once unraveled in herself tenfold within her children.

Robin also touched on the odd vulnerability of her child, Amelia. Her series, Amelia's World, is a surreal portfolio of her crystalline-eyed child interacting with animals. The scenes aren't hesitant dog pettings in the park, but are of feeding deer sandwiches, or sitting alongside a wild elk in the woods. One of the first things often seen in a portrait is the portrait taker... but within the images of Amelia, the quiet and intricate relationship between mother and daughter struck me even more so than Amelia's complete acceptance of her animal kingdom.

Many women photograph familiar relationships, and are subtly criticized by the greater world as being 'complacent' in their role as a woman photographer. Amy Elkins presented a myriad of statistics showing the small percentage of female photographers within museums and galleries, regardless of the percentage of females within the field. There are undercurrents defining niche subjects as traditionally female verse male, and these unfair delineations have perpetuated a severe sexism within photography. Women in Photography is devoted to undercutting these designations by showing that quality work by women, is quality work regardless.

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V. Nina Westervelt

Rachel Been — 2008-09-15T18:22:00+00:00

Filed under: content, photography

The hullabaloo of fashion week has dissipated leaving a lovely collection of delights.

Stylelist.com hired V. Nina Westervelt to shoot backstage and front row during the Spring 2009 presentations, and she came back with quite an impressive portfolio of portraits. Nina's shots, caught on a medium format camera using a spotlight flash, leave the celebrities unpolished. It's as you found snapshots of your best friend's high-school party...with some familiar faces standing next to the keg... There is a disassociation from the perceived reality of Fashion Week, and a candidness usually not attributed to the likes of Kanye West, Nicole Richie, or pretty models...

Click here to see the works.

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Skip Intro... er... Skip Donate

Michael Costantino — 2008-09-15T09:39:00+00:00

Filed under: advertising and promotion, content, reviews, usability

Well, it's been a few years since the book "Skip Intro" by Duncan McAlester and Michelangelo Capraro. I'm guessing that its lessons weren't quite absorbed by the web strategists for each of the presidential campaigns.

A thorough analysis of each site would be a worthwhile effort for several articles, but for now let's just take a look at how each site employs the splash screen.Obama (http://www.barackobama.com/)

Well... this one smacked of Buy BUY BUYYYYY. The big, red "CONTINUE" button marches you right into the donate process... was that what you expected? There are form fields that trigger JavaScript errors... doh! Okay, there is a "SKIP SIGNUP" button... with text that fades nicely back into the button background. Lovely. Annoying. At least the site cookies you so you won't get that splash screen again... until you visit the website from work. Youch.

McCain (http://www.johnmccain.com/)

Okay... quite a bit different. Video and then four Big Bucket choices. The Join the Team area's "SIGN UP" button doesn't stump the user with JavaScript errors. In fact, all links take you to pages inside the site's chrome and navigation. There's even a "Click Here to Continue" link which could be designed better but is still pretty clear. Better content plan and better engineering... but still a splash screen.

Recap
Obama splash screen very problematic though very pretty.
McCain splash screen better in content and engineering though not as nicely designed.

Makes you wonder about what each campaign is trying to achieve... money or message? Sigh.

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AOL.com redesign announced...

Peter Rivera — 2008-09-09T09:26:00+00:00

Filed under: culture of design, information design, inspiration, product design, UI IA, web development, AOL design standards

Our team of designers and engineers has been steadily working on a re-launch of our portal in October that really pushes AOL into some new places. And this is just the beginning! Here is a link to the info on TechCrunch. More details coming soon but the new page has features such as RSS, mail, and soc|net aggregation, customizable navigation, and some other surprises. Stay tuned.

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Free your ideas through sketching

Allison Bucchere — 2008-08-19T10:42:00+00:00

Filed under: aesthetics, beautiful things, inspiration, strategy

Our interactive design team came together for several hours of inspiration and sketching over the past couple days. It was great to get our NY and VA offices together via video to take a big picture break. Several designers led the inspiration discussions (which I'll blog about later this week) and our UI Directors led our sketching exercise. They planned an interactive group exercise for us, freeing our ideas by eliminating the limitations of the computer while focusing on broad strokes without the noise and clutter of details.

Our exercise reminded me of this Core77 video of a design director at Converse sketching a summer sneaker concept in under five minutes -- it's pretty cool:

Core77 also recently launched this interesting sketching site. Check it out for more inspiration on varied techniques and conversations. How does sketching improve your creative process? What tools do you swear by?

Squareamerica snapshots

Rachel Been — 2008-08-18T16:07:00+00:00

Filed under: photography

A friend of mine sent me a link to squareamerica.com, a website that collects amateur snapshots from the past one-hundred and thirty years. The images are what you would expect to see in any household-- banal images of dance lessons and summer BBQs, blurry beach shots and plump pinups in their backyards.

The combination of anachronism and 'found image' is attractive. For those of us who weren't around in the 1920's, we perceive this decade as a patchwork of images from history text books, Hollywood movies and grandma's yellowing portrait. There is something voyeuristic but also oddly educational about looking at images from a bi-racial bi-sexual house party in the 50's; these snaps are less refined than the puritanical suzie-homemaker ads associated with the decade. Alternative grassroot histories portray the manifestations of trends and historical events in a way that we can relate...

I feel like no other medium besides photography has regarded the amateur to such an extent. We are seeing a proliferation with the rise of citizen cell-phone journalism. There will always be a differentiation between professional and non, but I think the overabundance of peaks into people's lives plays into the modern idea of ultimate transparency. Its interesting to note that just fairly recently these voyeuristic looks been main-stream heralded. Check out Found Magazine and FFFFOUND online for a digital version of found images...

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A TGIF Special Report: Positive Feedback from My Beer!

Peter Rivera — 2008-08-15T11:12:00+00:00

Filed under: advertising and promotion, product design

This is the best interactive idea of the year (ok, for beer drinkers) and I am sure many of you may already have seen it: the labels on some beer bottles change color to blue when the beer is the right chilly temperature. All this is the magic of temperature sensitive inks.

One of the keys to designing great interactive is that the system provides feedback to the user. Questions are answered consistently such as "where am I in the system?", and "Why am I waiting and for how long?", and "What just happened and how do I fix it?". There are many other examples.

I was surprised to see a beer bottle do a better job at this than most websites. Considering that the mass market beer bottle label or can has not changed in any meaningful way for decades, this is a pretty significant innovation. Hmmm... getting thirsty.

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