PhotoshopDesign

Shanghai Corporate Pavilion

Atelier Feichang Jianzhu

The exterior structure is composed of hundreds of polycarbonate transparent recycled plastic tubes made from used CD cases, which will be able to be recycled again at the end of the building’s life. Multi-colored LED lights will be built into the exterior structure and be computer controlled to change the appearance of the exterior.

A 1,600 sq meter solar thermal energy system of heat collecting tubes on the roof will power the pavilion.

A misting system will also add to the structures appearance and help give it a dream like feel. It can be sprayed in various patterns under the entrance ceiling to give the building a fresh and elegant appearance. The mist will also help lower the temperature, purify the air and create a comfortable climate in pavilion.

Palettes from the COLOURlovers' group Plantlife.

When I was working on the wireframe stage of the NCsoft West web site redesign I began by sketching the main templates out on paper.

I find the whole process of paper prototyping to be extremely valuable. Here's a photo of some early prototypes attached to my bulletin board (sorry for the quality — iPhone):

Rather than sketch the whole page on a sheet of paper, I prefer to draw out the various components of the page, cut them out, and Blu-Tack them to the paper. This makes it easy to change different elements, switch them around, etc, without having to redraw the whole page each time.

Sketching out and adding individual components in this way enabled me to quickly come up with a general template layout. I then went back to particular features about which I had more concrete ideas and drew them out in more detail.

I would revise some of these components multiple times as I tried out different layouts and features.

This process also enabled me to quickly and easily try out different page layouts in order to spot potential issues, whether they were related to usability or to the goals of the page.

Plus, it made the work feel like a craft project! Unlike Visio, it's great fun to do, and when you spend the majority of your day staring at a computer screen it's nice to do something more tactile. However, I did garner a number of odd looks from passers-by who were wondering what on earth I was up to.

Creating paper prototypes in this fashion also helped the wireframe review process. I could stand in front of the cork board with my web designer while we discussed a template and unlike on a computer screen, no matter how long the page was we could see it all.

If we had new ideas or changes, it took no time to replace the areas in question with new ones.

Another really helpful feature of paper prototypes — as long as you have them visibly attached to your wall — is that you get to look at them every day. I found this to be invaluable for letting the wireframe 'sink in' so that I could view it and review it multiple times a day and make sure that I was happy with it.

This level of visibility also enabled my team to have many opportunities to view the wireframes, understand them, and provide feedback. This would never have happened to the same degree with electronic wireframes.

Paper prototypes are a terrific, low-cost way to try out design ideas, share (and test) them with your colleagues, and to spend time with your design before layout and features are committed. If you're not using paper prototyping for your early design work I highly recommend giving it a try.

This time last week I was on a United Airlines flight returning from Orange County, where m’learned colleague James Box and I were presenting at the UIE Web App Summit. We ran a workshop on Wireframing and Prototyping for Highly Interactive Web Apps in which we covered the various joys of Post-its, paper and jQuery, and presented on Using Interactive Prototyping for a Richer Web Experience in which we extolled the virtues of HTML as a design tool.

On the flight home we watched Frost/Nixon, a dramatic retelling of the post-Watergate television interviews between British talk-show host David Frost and former president Richard Nixon. As the credits rolled, we looked at each other and unanimously claimed the film to be ‘bloody brilliant’. Particularly marvellous were the superb portrayals of the protaganists by Michael Sheen and Frank Langella respectively. I heartily recommend it.

In the film, Nixon’s masterful handling of Frost’s early questioning brought to mind John F Kennedy’s famous 1962 speech at Rice University, in which he explained and defended America’s space effort, in particular landing a man on the Moon.

Kennedy manages to justify what could be viewed as an unconscionably expensive piece of paranoid Cold War propaganda – it was as much about getting there first as getting there at all – as an unprecedented exercise in engineering and exploration. His justification is beautifully simple:

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

I’m not making any point at all here, other than to be reminded of one of the great speeches of the 20th century. By the way, I challenge you to listen to the audio and not have a mental picture of Mayor Joe Quimby.

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I was recently interviewed by the Independent on Sunday to get a design perspective on why Friends Reunited ultimately failed. However rather than the design of the site, I think the design of the system was ultimately to blame.

Friends Reunited was one of the first “Social Networks” in the UK, long before the term had even been coined. Like all good web applications it made something that was difficult to do in the real world, incredibly easy. You could now re-connect with people from your past and spark up new friendships. It also tapped into two basic human traits; curiosity and gloating. Whether this was through design or by pure accident, the desire to see what had become of your childhood sweetheart or your school bully proved impossible to resist.

Like all social sites, Friends Reunited relied on the network affect, so when membership reached its tipping point the whole site went viral. However a lot of viruses burn through their fuel so quickly they die almost as fast as they grow, stifled by their own success. So with Friends Reunited once you’d registered, seen what your old friends were doing, connected with the ones you’d wanted to and had a laugh at the (hopefully) tragic lives of your childhood tormentors, there was very little reason to stick around.

The design of the site was delightfully amateurish, which was no surprise considering the background of the creators. However it had a low-fi aesthetic that made it feel genuine; something it shares with it’s later contemporaries like MySpace. The truth is, while a better design would almost certainly helped its fortunes, people are willing to ignore bad design and usability if the perceived value is great. With Friends Reunited there were no credible alternatives or competition so people were happy to make do.

I think one big problem was the business model itself. With so many users, Friends Reunited wanted to capitalise on this by charging a membership fee. Now this was during a time when Internet business models were still being tested, so it’s impressive that they managed to charge for the service at all. However charging for a service changes the whole dynamic of a site and causes people to game the system in order to get the maximum return on their investment. So it becomes less of a community and more of a commercial relationship. Like a lot of commercial relationships, once the value runs out, people will stop paying and leave.

Modern social networks do a much better job at keeping their members engaged than Friends Reunited. So Facebook quickly expanded from a way of getting to know people on campus into a way of connecting with old friend and managing new ones. In fact you can now use Facebook in numerous ways, be that chatting with friends, playing games, managing your social life, flirting or micro blogging. Facebook has managed to create a whole ecosystem and become an essential part of peoples social lives. What’s more, rather than charging for this privilege, they give it away for free and make their money from additional services.

Conversely LinkedIn started life as a generic social networking site but quickly specialised in the field of professional reputation management and recruitment. This model has much more longevity than simply “getting in touch with friends from school” and allows LinkedIn to charge for professional services that help their users solve a real world problem.

Product design and business model speculations aside, I think there is also a big element of timeliness and zeitgeist. Friends Reunited managed to capture the attention of millions of people and was very successful in it’s day. However human attention is fleeting and you can only maintain this until the next cool meme comes along. Because of this I’m unsure if any of the big social networks have much longevity and if we’ll be having the same conversation in 10 years time. Is social networking here to stay or is it just a blip on the evolutionary path of the Internet?

In his new work James Marshall, also known as Dalek, has pushed beyond his familiar 'Space Monkey' into a world of flat linear geometry and chaotic color. His familiar icon, which was a central point for much of his early work, was developed around the time he graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At the time he said that he had no particular direction in his painting and after seeing the work of Takashi Murakami at a gallery in Boston realized what he was looking for was "that sort of apprenticeship." After working as Murakami's assistant in 2001 it is clear that James has stepped from behind his earlier work and set off on a new path of creativity.

His work can be seen alongside Delta in the exhibition DALEK & DELTA at Elms Lesters Painting Rooms in London until September 26, 2009.

Boris Tellegan (aka Delta) first displayed his artistic touch upon public streets in 1984. Since then, the Amsterdam based artist has taken inspiration, presumably, from the sharp angles and textured walls of the city, familiar from his years as a street artist, and worked them into a unique "architectural" style of paintings, collages and sculptural wall pieces.

His work can be seen alongside Dalek in the exhibition DALEK & DELTA at Elms Lesters Painting Rooms in London until September 26, 2009.

Paintings & Collages

As you’re no doubts aware I’m an unabashed conference junky, so it will come as no surprise to you that I’ve spent the last couple of weeks in the States attending three such events.

First up was ETech, the emerging technology conference from O’Reily. Moved from it’s spiritual home in San Diego, this year it was help in the Chino wearing capitol of Silicon Valley, San Jose. The event was much smaller than last year and the tone was somewhat downbeat. However I don’t think this was necessarily down to the economy as a lot of people were speculating. ETech is an amazing place to showcase new technologies and is where start-ups like Flickr made their debut. However if there are no new breakthroughs on the horizon, the events obviously lacks its reason d’etra. I think that was the case this year.

As with the previous year, there was a lot of green technology being discussed, which led one attendee to suggest that it be renamed GreenTech. There was also a lot of ubicomp stuff like the lovingly realised siftables which made a big splash at TED. I definitely have to get hold of when they launch. O’Reily bought along their Maker Shed and I was tempted to buy a whole stack of tech to take back to Clearleft with me. Home assemble robot kits and botalicals arduino kits that will Twitter when your plants need watering. Sadly the weak pound put a stop to that.

One of my favourite talks was a session from Nick Bilton of the New York Times innovation labs. Nick showed some really interesting examples of the thinking going on behind the scenes at the NYTimes, including a lovely demo of a digital newspaper format that completely changed layout, image style and content density depending on the size of the device being used.

However the stand-out talk for me had to be a session on the info you can learn from monitoring GPS data, which turns out to be a lot. By mapping users GPS date onto census and commercial activity data, Sense Networks were able to deduce exactly what type of person a particular subject was and the percentage chance where they would be at any given time. By using a sort of Geo Page Rank algorithm they could look at the kind of place you had arrived from, the kind of place you had let to and by that deduce the kind of place you were at. They would then use cluster analysis to match you with similar types of people, thus defining you as a member of a particular type of tribe.

Sadly the current use was rather pedestrian, taking GPS data from marketing companies to deduce the type of people going to different types of bars to enable more accurate targeting. However the business opportunities were huge, and I could easily see the creation of some kind of Geo Google. On a very prosaic level you could create an amazing, geo-aware dating app that would let you know if you were in the same location as other people like you, and then facilitate you hooking up. A mundane use, but one that could prove popular and make a mint.

Apart from those two sessions I thought the rest of the presentations were rather weak, like an edition of Wired magazine in a month where nothing much had happened. My feeling that ETech was in a holding pattern this year, waiting on the next big thing to emerge. When it does, ETech will no doubt be at the front of the queue. However I’m not sure Ill be rushing back next year as it’s all somewhat out of my domain. One for the Friends of O’Reily I think.

Like many online games, Warrior Epic has a landing page to which we direct traffic from our web marketing campaigns. Luckily for us, our first landing page actually turned out to have a surprisingly good conversion rate.

Using Google's website optimizer, we recently tried out a couple of new landing pages to see if we could improve upon it.

I've been pretty happy with our initial landing page. Although it's quite long, it showcases the game well and I feel does a good job of selling it to a new visitor.

Like I said, we were getting conversion rates above what is usual for banner traffic so I didn't feel a strong need to do a lot of tweaking.

However, marketing wanted to try out some new concepts and so we tested out version 2 which was a variation of the original landing page.

The goal of the second landing page was to brighten the page up a little, move more content up above the fold, and remove any non-conversion-related links from the main content area.

I thought we achieved this pretty well; however, the landing page performed very slightly worse than the original.

The third landing page featured a completely new design.

I'll be honest; I wasn't a fan of this design at all. The white background felt too stark to me and it removed the content which highlighted the key features of the game.

The great thing about using an A/B testing tool to optimize your designs is that you get a definitive answer as to which works better. The only thing you have to invest is the time spent developing the variations.

It took less than a day of A/B testing against the original design to show that this new version dramatically outperformed it. It's a good job I didn't listen to myself.

We plan to run a few more variants of the winning design to see if changing the call-to-action wording has much of an effect.

We also have a version in the works which has the account sign up form embedded in it. I'm really keen to see how that performs, as I simply have no idea.

Further Reading

• A/B Split Testing
• Optimize It blog
• How To A/B Test Landing Pages

Every year SXSW takes on a slightly new dimension so it’s never the same experience twice. Change is inevitable and I always have a good time at the event. However I always find myself harking back to years gone by. I guess that’s age for you.

This year attendance had grown by around 30%, and numbers fluctuated between 6,000 and 12,000 depending on who you spoke to. One things was certain thoughâ€"it was big. With 20 tracks spread over three floors of the conference centre and expanding into the Hilton, SXSW obviously hasn’t been affected by the current economic climate. In fact I’d say that it’s probably benefited from it. After all, it’s pretty cheap for a 5 day event.

This year over 300 Brits attended, which was a big increase from the dozen or so who made it over in 2005. At times it was like a Friday down the pub in Brighton, being surrounded by so many UK friends. I’m not complaining, but I did find myself hanging out with the Brits far too much. I can now see why the San Franciscans always end up moving around in tribes. It’s not through cliqueness. It’s just very difficult not to, especially if you’re showing people the ropes for the first time.

The sessions themselves were predictably average, bar a few notable exceptions. Author and previous dConstruct keynoter, Steven Johnson, gave an impassioned speech about the state of the newspaper industry, mirroring my thoughts a lot more eloquently. The session from the Obama design team was excellent, not least because they mentioned using Silverback during the campaign. I also really enjoyed Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel’s talk on sexual interfaces in science fiction, aptly named make it so. The Zappos keynote was predictably good, as was Chris Anderson on the price of free. However the surprise stand-out this year seems to have been our very own Paul Annett, who gave a talk on design delighters called Ooh, that’s clever.

The Great British Booze-up was back for a third year, this time sponsored by Boagworld, NakLab and ourselves. It’s always an honour to see so many of our friends in one place so I’m just sorry I didn’t get a chance to speak to you all. As with previous years, the value of SXSW was more about the socialising that it was with the sessions. Speaking to the UK Trade and Industry digital mission the day before things kicked off I spelled this out, explaining that SXSW was a place to meet people and make long term connections rather than sign deals. That being said, SXSW was a lot more businessy than previous years and was awash with social media consultants peddling their wares.

Cogaoki was my favourite party, followed closely by the closing shindig from the guys at Media Temple. I also had a fun evening out on the RVIP Bus which was strangely sponsored by by fellow panel members. Definitely a novel way of driving people to our session, although I’m not sure how much affect it actually had.

SXSW for me is always about seeing old friends and making new ones. It really is the Glastonbury of Geek. Big, noisy and overwhelming, but nevertheless fun. Each year I say I probably won;t go back the next year, yet 6 months later I can’t wait for March to come round. Let’s see what happens in 2010.

"Visual fireworks from today's most prestigious Finnish colourist." Those words were used to describe one of Mari Rantanen's solo exhibitions, and for any color lover fireworks is exactly the type of excitement felt when seeing her architecturally inspired forms with layers upon layers of bright color.

The paintings are quite large and were made especially with a view to putting them on show... Rantanen's works evince and evoke the artist's passion for architecture and man-made landscapes, but also for strong colours and visual cultures. The relationship between painting and architecture is important for Rantanen â€" the paintings are almost like installations the viewer can "enter into". Rantanen says that she paints her own states of emotion and experience â€" the works are pictures of how places, towns, buildings or situations feel like. "I want to make life visible, also that part of it which is invisible â€" to create places for emotions." - absolutearts.com