A transmission from the deep south.
Sebastiaan de With’s beautiful UI design for the doubleTwist app, running on Android. De With says he “sure as hell wasn’t going to use an entirely new platform … just to ape another”, however there’s surely a small debt of gratitude due here, particularly in the player interface itself, to Apple’s recent work on the QuickTime player. Regardless, I dig it.
I’m not usually a fan of sites that take over your mouse cursor, but I have to say the Salt Films site really made me smile.
![Production artwork from Spaces of Play’s forthcoming iPhone game Spirits. Team member Andreas Zecher:
The game [borrows] some basic gameplay mechanics from Lemmings-style games, but has a very different graphical style and atmosphere. Players can manipulate the wind in the game world and guide the spirits towards the exit of each level using four different actions: Blow wind, suck in wind, dig tunnels and build bridges.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l0soj5VJ2V1qz6jndo1_400.jpg)
Production artwork from Spaces of Play’s forthcoming iPhone game Spirits. Team member Andreas Zecher:
The game [borrows] some basic gameplay mechanics from Lemmings-style games, but has a very different graphical style and atmosphere. Players can manipulate the wind in the game world and guide the spirits towards the exit of each level using four different actions: Blow wind, suck in wind, dig tunnels and build bridges.
Apple has made some puzzling decisions over the last few years that leave one wondering if they really care about typography as much as they did in the 1980s when the Mac launched the desktop publishing revolution.
— From Stephen Coles’ detailed analysis of the iPad’s typographic failings, in which he provides a short history of Apple’s achievements in the field, and a list of eight areas in need of improvement (from justification and hyphenation woes to the absence of support for embeddable typefaces and @font-face). A key observation: where Helvetica was a smart UI choice on the iPhone with its high PPI count, Stephen finds it “muddy” and borderline illegible at smaller sizes on the iPad’s much lower-resolution display.
A discourse on the process of designing for real people, from Joshua Porter and Joshua Brewer. I love seeing this sort of project built on Tumblr, and Brewer has included some sweet design details, including the 1–52 navigation in the header, linking to articles tagged for each week.
A conceptual video for collaborative research project Mag+, initiated by Bonnier R&D, into the experience of reading magazines on handheld digital devices. Rather than introducing any sort of radical new UI paradigm, the concept relies on a minimalist yet typographically rich approach that mixes the best of print and screen interaction on a tablet-sized device.
iA has made available its entire 17-page (paid) pitch document for the redesign of Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger in a detailed article discussing the proposed solution. The UX-led approach, while conceptually and aesthetically strong, ultimately failed to win over the client. Some beautiful typography (Frutiger New and Frutiger Serif) and bold ideas in there though: I quite like the concept of article keywords highlighted in blue for easy scanning of the paper’s title page. (via Inky)
Following extensive testing, Joe Leech and Fiz Yazdi conclude that users do scroll beyond the fold in the vast majority of cases, and that cramming all of the content above this imaginary line might actually have the opposite effect:
The surprising thing we learnt was that actually having less above the fold (one large content block as opposed to 2 smaller ones) encouraged exploration below the fold.
I’m hearing HTC in response to Geoff Teehan’s iPhone Home Screen Concept but I’m seeing a more refined and Apple-esque take on that interface. I’d much prefer to see this prior to unlocking the phone rather than the wasted space we have now. (via Andrew Wilkinson)
Interface design evolution of TapTapTap’s Convert app for iPhone. Incredible the number of iterations that were tried before settling on a final approach. (via the app’s designer, Wolfgang Bartelme)
Written and designed by Matthew Buchanan. Colophon. Please give credit. Email
