I just came across the work of Stefanie Posavec (via Feltron), and love these images of first chapters of books based on the number of words in the sentences, drawn in a single image.
First chapter of The Great Gatsby
I don’t know if there is a term for these kind of visualizations, but for lack of a better word I think of them as “collapsing time”. They take something linear, that happens over time, and compress it into a single image, so you get an entirely different representation of the work.
Another example are these “movie barcodes” from http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/. There isn’t a lot of information about the process, but seems condense each frame of a movie into a single pixel wide, and all the frames are then combined it into a single image. It gives a really interesting view of the overall tone of the movie, and acts like a finger print.
The Darjeeling Limited movie barcode
Here’s another that takes a song, analyzes the audio spectrum, and plots it in a cicular waveform. It actually does it in real-time while the song plays, so you get a single image representation, and see how it evolved.
The Great Discontent is one of the best sites I’ve come across recently. It features weekly interviews with creative people, about “understanding the human side of creativity and our innate drive to create that keeps pulling us forward.” The interviews dive into the background of the interviewee and how they came to be where they are. Focusing more on questions like “are you satisfied creatively?” than “which tools do you use?”. The interviews are great, and the site is beautifully designed. It also has one of best responsive design implementations I’ve seen.
But the thing I like the most about The Great Discontent is that the site is the content. You go there and you’re immediately immersed in the interview. There is no blog-like list of recent interviews with a read more link, no carousel of “featured interviews”. There is just the interview with some minimal navigational elements. I love that. When I visit the site, I know if it’s a new interview, or one I’ve already read. It’s a deliberate decision to put the content first, and above all else. I think too many sites are afraid to be so bold.
I just submitted Flint 1.0 to the Mac App Store this morning. My goal was to finish it and submit by September 1st, 2011, and it took about 6 more weeks, which isn’t too bad all things considered. It was time well spent. I got more beta testers, added a few more nice features, and fixed a lot of bugs. But still, I had more that I wanted to do. I just kept thinking about adding one more little thing, one more tweak.
Whenever I’m at that stage of a product, I think of two quotes. The first is the famous quote by Steve Jobs, which conveys so much for being so succinct. In light of Steve’s recent passing, it takes on a new urgency for me to build and create and put things out there.
“Real artists ship.”
– Steve Jobs
The other that I always come back to is this tweet:
If I knew Rands personally, I would have thought he wrote it about me, as I’m particularly prone to that behavior. It’s never good enough for me, there is always more to do, more features to add, more bugs to fix, it will never be finished. So it’s a question I always have to ask myself while at the end of a product, am I improving or just tinkering? If I’m tinkering, it’s time to ship.
I think I should get posters of both of those quotes and hang them above my desk.
It’s easy to do too much with your app. Much easier than doing too little. It takes restraint and focus to pare down the features to just what the user needs to achieve their goal. If you’re not constantly mindful of this, you just starting throwing every feature you think a user might want, and the user experience suffers.
Here’s an example. There is a nice social network for reading called Goodreads. You can add books to read, see what your friends are reading, keep a history of books you’ve read, etc. I haven’t used it all that much, so I recently wanted to turn off my email notifications, and this is what I saw:
Good lord. I don’t know where to start on that, and that’s not even all of it. I’ve left out about 300 pixels at the bottom, and every settings tab has just about as much info. I just want to disable email alerts, I don’t want to spend all afternoon in there. The very least this screen could do would be a single checkbox that said “I’d like to receive email notifications”. That would have been fine with me. Maybe I would think I want some more options, but in reality, I’d much rather not have the choice. So many apps make things more complex than they need to be, because they think it’s what users want or need, but you can always get away with doing less.
For the last couple of apps I’ve made, I’ve been creating a sort of mind map to help me come up with the name. Finding a good name for an app is hard, but having a somewhat formal and repeatable process has made it much easier for me.
I say “sort of” mind map, because there aren’t really any strict rules I follow about organization/hierachy/line length/color/etc. It is more of a free association with a bit of structure. I write any words that come to mind, and connect them in whatever way makes sense. I try not to filter myself at all, because while I know I won’t use it as part of the app name, it may lead to something that will.
Here is an example of the map I created to name my most recent app, Flint, a Campfire client:
Excuse my sloppy writing, I usually create these fairly fast, and I’m the only one that ever needs to read them.
In this case, the words were anything related to camping, fire, or chatting. I could have taken it much further, but I found a few names I liked, and settled on Flint. Note, this is designed to create the kind of names I like for apps. Short, preferably one word, that has some connection to what the app does, however thin that connection is.
